Courts

Teenage boy killed Lorna Woodnutt in hammer attack and posted images online, court hears

Boy, whose aggressive and oppositional behavioural issues had worsened in school, shared video to Snapchat

Laboratory technician Lorna Woodnutt had suffered fatal blunt force injuries when she was sitting at a kitchen table working on her computer.
Alison O'Riordan
Mon Jul 22 2024 - 18:29

A teenage boy used a sledgehammer and a lump hammer to kill 51-year-old Lorna Woodnutt before posting images of the scene to social media, the Central Criminal Court has heard.

The victim’s niece described discovering her aunt had been brutally killed as her “worst nightmare”.

The boy told detectives he recorded and shared a video on Snapchat with “everyone in his contacts, which the court heard was “a three figure number”, so that officers “would come”. Those individuals had access to the video for thirty minutes but the teenager took it down when gardaí arrived, the court was told.

The court also heard during today’s sentence hearing that the now 17-year-old defendant, who cannot be identified because he is a minor, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 18 months old and there had been an increase in his aggressive and oppositional behavioural issues towards staff and students in his school in the weeks leading up to the killing.

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Laboratory technician Ms Woodnutt had suffered fatal blunt force injuries to the head, face and chest in the attack when she was sitting at a kitchen table working on her computer.

The boy appeared at the court today for his sentence hearing having pleaded guilty earlier this month to murdering Lorna Woodnutt, aged 51, at a property in a rural area outside Tullamore, Co Offaly on September 29th, 2023.

The defendant called 999 on two occasions after he murdered Ms Woodnutt and gardaí also received a phone call as a result of the video posted online.

In his interviews, the teenager told gardaí that he got angry and had “lost the head” when he had an argument with Ms Woodnutt. “Now I regret it as I’m stuck here, I just whacked her, I don’t know what got into me, it just built up over the years,” he added.

The defendant also told officers: “I hit her as hard as I could, 20 to 30 times, I normally wouldn’t do this kind of thing, it isn’t me”. The boy said he “came at” Ms Woodnutt with a hammer and had “overpowered” her.

An analysis of the boy’s phone revealed Google searches about hammer attacks, the garda’s ability to track phones and searches about the behaviour of psychopaths, the court was told.

In an emotional victim impact statement read to the court today, the deceased’s niece Jessica Woodnutt said she discovered her aunt had been brutally murdered when she received content that she described “as something a terrorist would create”.

“I feared this video was being mindlessly shared on social media as my auntie lay lifelessly at her home without help,” she said. “The guards could not tell me much over the phone but just said that they were looking into something at this time but could not reveal details. This was enough to confirm to me that I was in fact living in what could only be described as my worst nightmare.”

In another of five victim impact statements, Ms Woodnutt’s brother, Derek Woodnutt, said his sister had her life “snatched” from her long before she was due to go to her place of rest “by such a cold-hearted killing”. He said he had walked into a garda station that day unknown to him that his “beautiful, joyful little sister’s faceless body had been viewed on social media by hundreds of people”.

A statement on behalf of the Woodnutt family said that they had walked into a garda station on September 29 “oblivious to our sister’s public execution, which was hosted on social media by her murderer”. “Evil entered the sanctity of our family that day...it is unbearable and we cannot see beyond it”.

Mr Justice Paul McDermott said it was essential to have a probation report available to him before he could complete the sentencing process. He adjourned the case until October 3rd and directed that the boy be detained at Oberstown Children Detention Centre until then.