The eerie triple-0 call Paul Thijssen made in the hours after he murdered Lilie James in a high school gymnasium bathroom has been released.
The 24-year-old, who worked with Ms James, struck the popular water polo coach in the head with a hammer at least 25 times inside the bathroom at St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney on October 25, 2023.
Ms James, 21, had ended her casual two-month relationship with Thijssen five days before he killed her. It has since been revealed he had been stalking her by driving hire cars to her house and a train station she used.
In new material released by the NSW Coroner’s Court on Thursday, an audio recording of Thijssen’s triple-0 call was released to the public.
‘I would like to report a body, um in St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney’s CBD,’ he calmly told the operator.
Thijssen claimed he did not know who’s body it was and declined to provide his name or location before he abruptly ended the call.
‘I think someone should just go in there before people arrive in the morning,’ he said.
During the inquest into her death, Ms James’ devastated mother, Peta, apologised for failing to protect her her ‘sweet pea’.
Ms James’ mother told the court she had been struggling with the question of whether she could have done anything to prevent her death.
‘We sent Lilie to a school that had similar values to ours, which played a major part in creating the woman she later became. These choices made me question whether we did the right thing,’ she said.
‘Lilie, sweet pea, I am so sorry that we couldn’t protect you from what happened that night. The guilt will stay with us forever.’
Outside the court Peta and Lilie’s father also pleaded with other parents to teach their sons how to handle rejection in order to prevent similar tragedies from happening in the future.
‘As parents, if we’re not teaching our sons to believe in and respect a woman’s opinion and learn how to accept rejection, then we could be setting our daughters up for failure – in our case, a moment in time we will never recover from,’ she said.
Previously the court was shown CCTV footage of Thijssen on a practice run outside the bathroom at 1.30pm on October 25 – about six hours before he murdered Ms James.
The previously unreleased CCTV also shows Thijssen waiting outside the bathroom just before killing Ms James that evening, and buying a hammer and duct tape from a Mitre 10 hardware store near the school two days before the murder.
Before the chilling attack, Thijssen was also captured practising holding a hammer in his left and right hand and going over how he would ambush her.
CCTV inside the school showed Thijssen repeatedly going to two different bathrooms – ‘bathroom one and bathroom three’ – near the school gym and on three occasions rehearsing his entry by forcing the door open.
He did that twice with his right hand and on the third occasion with his left hand – to practise as if he had a hammer in his right.
In the most calculated of all his moves, just before 5pm and only about two hours before he committed the murder, Thijssen went to the bathrooms carrying a yellow ‘cleaning in progress’ sign.
This was because by then, Thijssen had chosen the larger, disabled bathroom, called ‘bathroom one’ as the place he would murder Ms James.
By placing the ‘cleaning’ sign outside ‘bathroom three’, Ms James was forced to use bathroom one later that evening.
Domestic violence expert Anna Butler told an inquest on Wednesday that patterns of coercive control were evident throughout their short relationship.
When Ms James had previously tried to break up with Thijssen, he used abusive, derogatory and gaslighting language to negate her autonomy.
He escalated his emotionally abusive behaviour when he shared an intimate image of her with friends and stalked her after she expressed doubts about their relationship.
Ms Butler said Thijssen felt growing anger and resentment that he no longer controlled their status so he used a cache of well-honed manipulative tactics to try to regain control.
Noting that some of the behaviour around jealousy and location-sharing in relationships has been normalised, Ms Butler said it was an opportunity for his friends to call out his increasingly problematic behaviour.
Yet forensic psychologist Katie Seidler noted Thijssen had no history of aggression and there was probably nothing that could have been done to prevent the gender-based violence.
Although the 24-year-old wielded coercive control in his relationships, she found there were no obvious warning signs or indicators of violence to predict the tragic outcome.
Dr Seidler theorised Thijssen killed his ex-girlfriend because he was terrified the break-up would unravel his facade of perfection.
She believed he had a fragile sense of self and saw himself as inadequate and unworthy, which led him to lie to create a flawless public image.
Issues of coercive control and unacceptable behaviour in relationships are being examined by the inquest into the deaths of Ms James and Thijssen, who died hours after his ex-girlfriend.
Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan is assessing whether his death was self-inflicted.