A TEENAGE boy used a sledgehammer and a lump hammer to bludgeon 51-year-old Lorna Woodnutt to death before posting a video on Snapchat and sending a blood-splattered selfie with the victim's faceless body, the Central Criminal Court has heard. The victim's niece told how she discovered her aunt had been brutally murdered when she received content that she described "as something a terrorist would create". The boy told detectives he recorded and shared the 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 30 minutes but the teenager took it down when gardai arrived, the court was told. The court also heard during the 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. 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.
A post-mortem report revealed that Ms Woodnutt's facial features were absent, with a defect in the face exposing the skull "without any extracranial content present". There was a loss of the anterior facial skin and soft tissue from the fo.