As Hanny Papanicolaou ran from Marjorie Welsh’s home in Sydney’s inner west three years ago, with her bloodied hand she gripped a knife and cordless telephone wrapped in a white cloth.
After perpetrating a savage beating, she left her 92-year-old client for dead with stab wounds, broken bones, cuts and abrasions and a collapsed lung.
Ms Welsh, who was described as frail and walked with the aid of a walking stick, was found in a pool of her own blood by a neighbour but died six weeks later.
Papanicolaou has told several differing versions of what happened inside the Holden Street home on the morning of January 2, 2019.
But her tangled web came down around her in the Supreme Court over the last three weeks and she was on Wednesday found guilty murder by a jury.
It took just five hours for them to return their verdict.
The gambler
Papanicolaou met her husband Nick, who was 20 years her senior, in her native Indonesia before they eventually moved to Australia in 2006.
She established her own clearing business and had an arrangement to clean Ms Welsh’s Ashbury home once a week.
Papanicolaou told the jury during her trial that the two shared a warm friendship – they exchanged Christmas presents and described her as “like a mother”.
She had no history of violence and in the witness box said claimed she experienced a “blackout” during the attack.
At the time, the court heard, she was feeling stressed because of problems with her marriage.
She went to the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL where she played the pokies for several hours and lost $430, leaving her with just $11 in her bank account.
Peace Park
In a desperate state, she made the short three-minute drive to Ms Welsh’s house, despite the fact she was not scheduled to be there.
Papanicolaou parked her vehicle at Peace Park which backed onto Ms Welsh’s property.
She entered the property by jumping the back fence and she initially told officers that she was greeted warmly by Ms Welsh.
During her arrest interview, she said the visit turned violent when Ms Welsh accused her of stealing $50 and attacked her with a walking stick.xjmtzyw
The attack
“Excuse me are you real?” Papanicolaou claimed that she told Ms Welsh after being attacked.
“You say it like that again. And then said ‘I’m real honey, I’m real’.”
She told officers that Ms Welsh had also struck her with a magnifying glass and had pulled a knife.
She claimed that in the struggle Ms Welsh fell on the knife.
During the altercations, pieces of fine china – which had sat neatly and proudly on a shelf – had been broken over Ms Welsh’s head.
Papanicolaou claimed they fell onto Ms Welsh during the scuffle after she knocked a sideboard.
She ran out through the back door, jumping the fence to get to her car.
She took the knife, which she wrapped in a white cloth, along with a cordless telephone.
“Can you explain why you took the phone?” a senior constable asked Papanicolaou.
“I wanted to seek help,” she said.
“The blood is on my hands”
At trial, she told a completely different story – claiming that she travelled to Ashbury in a state of crisis.
She claimed she remembered driving to Peace Park but her mind went blank and awoke a short time later with a bloodied knife in her hands and Ms Welsh on the floor.
“So your mind goes blank when you got out of the car at Peace Park, is that fair to say?” crown prosecutor Christopher Taylor asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
On the witness stand, Papanicolaou repeatedly said “I don’t know” what happened inside the house.
Though she accepted that she had perpetrated a sickening attack.
She pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but not guilty to murder, arguing she had suffered an abnormality of the mind.
She told the jury that she was shocked from her “blackout” when Ms Welsh activated an emergency alert pendant which hung around her neck.
“The blood is on my hands. I was holding the knife,” she said.
“I want to try to grab the telephone but that sound was so loud.
“I wake up I was like ‘oh f***, what’s happened to me’.”
She briefly returned to her townhouse, where she told her husband Nick Papanicolaou that Ms Welsh had attacked her.
“Why Hanny, why?”
Ms Welsh managed to give a version of events to police before she was wheeled into surgery, pointing the finger at “Hanny the cleaner”.
She said that as she was savagely beaten she pleaded: “why Hanny, why?”
After a two-and-a-half week Supreme Court trial she was on Wednesday found guilty.
The crown prosecution said the crucial piece of evidence was that Ms Welsh had disclosed to her cleaner that she had sold her Box Hill home for $8 million.
Her final chance to explain what happened will come when she faces a sentence hearing in April.
