A teenager who brutally slaughtered a 10-year-old girl last year was a sensitive child devoted to animals - until she was tortured by the demons in her mind.
Teachers described the young pet-lover, from Gunnedah, NSW, as 'peaceful and caring' which 'shines through when she talks about her love for animals'.
But voices in her head drove her to kill in such a gruesome manner, a judge has banned media outlets from revealing the fatal injuries for the next 20 years.
Court documents chart the child's descent from a 'relaxed, calm and collected' student with a 'strong sense of right and wrong' into a killer who struck at a Gunnedah farmhouse in northern NSW in July 2020.
Pages from her diary revealed she fantasised about butchering her family in a massacre - and had been practising daily on her pet chickens.
The teenager who brutally slaughtered a 10-year-old girl was a sensitive angelic child devoted to animals - until she was tortured by the demons in her mind (pictured, the killer being interviewed by police)
'I've only mutilated small animals so far but just imagine how nice it's gonna feel when I do it to a human,' she wrote just days before killing the 10-year-old.
In the diary, revealed in the court documents, she described in gory detail how she planned to kill her mother and father and little sister before violating their corpses.
The teenager, who can't be named for legal reasons, admitted she had been killing the family's chickens for months while pretending to her mother they had escaped.
She would take body parts of the chickens into school to show off to the other students - before bringing in an horrific video of her killing one as proof.
Voices in the teenager's head drove her to kill in such a gruesome manner at a farmhouse in Gunnedah, northern NSW, (pictured) in July 2020, a judge has banned media outlets from revealing the fatal injuries for 20 years
Revealing how she first started her savage slaughter of the chickens, she wrote in her diary: 'I wanted to do a small experiment with a nice kitchen knife I had in my possession.
'I went out to the chicken pen and went inside. They were so unsuspecting of me. I grabbed an Isa Brown and stabbed it.
'The squeak of both shock and pain that came from it was lovely so I repeated the action many times. I forgot to count.
'Somehow the sorry animal was still alive so I grabbed it and tore the creature open and began wrenching its organs out from its body though it was still alive so I then decided to finish it off by suffocating it in water.
'When it finally died, I hid its body and continued indulging the activity each day.
'Such a shame I wasn't more discreet with the number I killed because mum found out - or should I say my little sister came in when I was finishing off a chicken and was shocked s***less.
'I could see the fear in her eyes and I can't explain how much willpower it took for me to not just do the same to her. A voice was telling me to kill her as well.'
The night before she killed the 10-year-old (pictured), the teenager wrote in her diary about plan to slaughter her family and eight more people
But when she was younger, and loved her snake, three cats, three dogs and fish, there were no sign of the horrors in her tormented mind.
Teachers had nothing but praise for her in Years 3 and 4.
'[She] always amazes me with extensive knowledge of all things natural, from snakes to vegetables,' said her Year 4 teacher. 'It was a pleasure to have [her] in my class.'
Her art teacher hailed her drawing skills and said she was an 'energetic, happy child who was always smiling'.
Her grandmother said the killer-to-be was 'very sensitive and didn't want to harm or even eat animals'.
She added: '[She] was a happy, bright and fun-loving child who was artistic with a great imagination.'
A neighbour told police that she was an 'outgoing, beautiful girl'.
But once she turned 10, it all began to change.
In school, she would suddenly meow and act like a cat, sometimes licking her own leg in class and biting herself.
When the teenager was younger, and loved her snake, three cats, three dogs and fish, there were no sign of the horrors in her tormented mind (pictured, police at the scene of the killing)
Other students would tease her for being weird and by the age of 12 she started to fight back, shoving students and stabbing her friends with a pen until they bled.
After teachers saw her biting herself so hard she drew blood, and then used a stapler on her own hand, she was referred to a GP who she told of her fears about change, the future and death.
In school counselling, she admitted to a long list of concerns about not being wanted and being unable to 'handle it'.
'Nobody likes me, I'm too weird,' she told counsellors. 'I'm invisible, there's something wrong with me. I'm disgusting. I'm damaged.
'I don't want to be here any more.'
In high school, her classwork was marked by a new morbid sense of humour, joking in history about using bayonets to gouge out eyes and stab other parts of the body.
'She wasn't the same vibrant kid that I had known,' noted one teacher.
The teen began hanging out with new Goth-type friends and became obsessed with knives, building up a collection, with each one named individually and displayed in her bedroom.
She used those knives to start killing the family's chickens, confessing to her father when confronted that she had taken a skewer to one of them as she 'wanted to see what was inside'.
At one stage she proudly pulled out bits of a chicken in the middle of a science class and yelled about it until the shocked teacher told her to put them away and stop screaming.
At home, she admitted to her grandfather she
