After brutally killing her cellmate, Rebecca Jane Butterfield quickly developed a reputation as one of Australia’s most violent female prisoners – and now she could walk free after two decades behind bars.
Since her 12-year sentence for the manslaughter of Bluce Lim-Ward at Emu Plains Correctional Centre ended in 2015, Butterfield, 50, remained imprisoned under continuous detention orders (CDOs) until May 2024 after a judge ruled she had an unacceptable risk of committing further serious offences due to severe mental instability.
“There is little to indicate that this risk has dissipated to any significant degree in more recent years, or that it is likely to do so for the foreseeable future,” NSW Supreme Court Justice Robert Allan Hulme said during a review of her case in January 2021.
As the CDOs keeping Butterfield locked up in the mental health unit at Long Bay Correctional Complex have now expired, psychiatric experts are evaluating whether to release her under an extended supervision order. But prison staff fear Butterfield will kill again if released.
VIOLENT ATTACKS
“She’s got hundreds of incidents recorded against her name, dozens of violent attacks behind bars, and she’s already killed once,” a prison source told the Daily Telegraph.
“She’s told officer and medical staff she will kill again. The real question is how bad is the fallout going to be when she does strike again, and is it going to be an unsuspecting member of the public?”
Butterfield was first imprisoned for 12 months in 1997 after stabbing a taxi driver. In 2000, she was sentenced to six years behind bars for stabbing a neighbour.
Then, in 2003, she killed her cellmate Bluce Lim-Ward by stabbing her 33 times with scissors stolen from a prison workbench. While imprisoned, Butterfield has recorded 114 instances of violence, including a brutal attack on a pregnant nurse, throwing urine and boiling water at prison officers and cracking her own skull open after slamming her head against a wall 105 times.
“She is one of the most dangerous female prisoners in recent memory… she’s not being treated like an inmate, she’s now a patient in a hospital and there are real fears as to how she would be able to cope in the real world,” the source revealed.
BABYSITTER KILLER
Australia’s infamous Babysitter Killer, Helen Patricia Moore, only served 13 years of a life sentence for murdering three babies in the early 1980s, and now there are worrying claims she’s started over in a quiet coastal community and is even “having kids at her house for sleepovers”.
Aged 63 and going by a new surname, the convicted killer is living on the NSW Central Coast, where people are in the dark about her heinous past, according to her brother, Craig Moorley.
“She is still babysitting,” he told the Daily Mail of his sister, who was a teenager when she killed the infants and attempted to murder two others. “People don’t know what she did and they deserve to because she is evil. She is Australia’s worst female serial killer.”
EVIL CRIME
She cut off her own mother’s head in an evil crime that shocked the nation in 2019, and now Jessica Camilleri is reportedly threatening to do the same to her fellow inmates.
In disturbing new details about the notorious St Clair mother killer’s life inside a NSW prison, an unnamed prison officer has revealed how an unrepentant Camilleri, 31, “boasts” about the horror she inflicted on her mother Rita, and uses it to terrorise any inmates “if they p**s her off”.
Camilleri was sentenced to 16 years for brutally murdering her mother, but had 22 months added to her jail time after she confessed to assaulting two prison officers by ripping chunks of their hair out
in 2021.
“I just wanted to give [her] a little bit of a taste of her own medicine because of how she had been treating me,” Camilleri told police.
