A teenage boy who used a sledgehammer and a lump hammer to bludgeon 51-year-old woman to death before posting a video on Snapchat has been sentenced to life in detention with a review after 15 years.
The accused, now aged 17, had pleaded guilty to murdering Lorna Woodnutt at a property in a rural area outside Tullamore, Co Offaly on September 29th, 2023 and was sentenced on Thursday.
The laboratory technician suffered fatal blunt force injuries to the head, face and chest during the attack, which happened while she was sitting at a kitchen table working on her computer.
The Central Criminal Court heard at a sentencing hearing last July that the boy, who cannot be named under the Children’s Act, that the defendant told detectives he recorded the incident and shared the video on Snapchat with “everyone in his contacts”.
‘I’m hoping at least one girl who is on the fence about reporting her violent boyfriend ... will read about my case’
What Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Greens promised in 2020 - and how much they delivered
Ciara Mageean: ‘I just felt numb. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just emptiness’
Restaurateur Gráinne O’Keefe: I cut out sugar from my diet and here’s how it went
The court heard the number of people who received the video ran to three figures and he had done this so gardaí “would come”. Those individuals had access to the video for 30 minutes but the teenager took it down when gardaí arrived.
Passing sentence on Thursday, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said Ms Woodnutt had suffered a sustained assault, which the teenager had carried out with an “extraordinary level of brutality and viciousness”. He said the attack, which had “an element of planning”, was not “a spontaneous eruption of violence” but “conceived and executed with deliberate intent”.
He said the posting of the “sickening” video afterwards showed complete disrespect to the victim.
Referring to the boy’s probation report, Ms Justice McDermott noted that he had an “unhealthy interest” in well-known male role models who “peddle extreme beliefs” and said this had shaped his thinking and encouraged a negative attitude towards women.
The court previously heard during the defendant 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.
A psychiatrist had diagnosed the teenager with an adjustment disorder but pointed out that the defendant was too young to be diagnosed with other mental disorders. Referring to the diagnosis, Mr Justice McDermott said that the exact connection between the defendant’s conditions and the attack was not clear.
Mr Justice McDermott stressed that the boy’s release after his review would depend on his progress and the level of danger he posed to others by that time.
Ms Woodnutt’s family had previously described the attack as a “public execution, hosted on social media by her murderer”.
“Evil entered the sanctity of our family that day,” they told the court. “Lorna loved life, she loved people and was loved by people. Let Lorna not be defined by the grotesque way she was murdered.”
The victim’s niece, Jessica Woodnutt, previously told the court how she discovered her aunt had been brutally murdered when she received content that she described “as something a terrorist would create”.
A probation report submitted to the court indicated that the boy had taken responsibility for the killing but showed little emotion. It said he was at a high risk of reoffending because of the extreme violence he used, his inability to regulate emotions and to articulate accountability or responsibility.
James Dwyer SC, for the boy, had told the court that this was due to the boy’s condition rather than a “callous lack of victim awareness”.
In his interviews with gardaí, the teenager said he got angry and had “lost the head” when he had an argument with Ms Woodnutt. He said he got a hammer from a shed and began “whacking” Ms Woodnutt with it and then used a larger hammer when she had fallen to the ground.
He also said he had tried to use a knife to stab his victim in the chest but it was too blunt and gave up when it would not work.
An analysis of the boy’s phone revealed Google searches about hammer attacks, the Garda’s ability to track phones and “how long is life imprisonment in prison”.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis