Alison O'Riordan 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 selfie with the victim’s faceless body, his trial has heard. The victim’s niece told the Central Criminal Court on Monday 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 officers “would come”.
His Snapchat friends could view the video for 30 minutes before the teen took it down when gardaí arrived, the court was told. The court also heard during Monday’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. 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 examination 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.
