A daughter found guilty of murdering her mother two decades ago has wiped away tears as she continued to deny strangling and stabbing the older woman to death.
“I don’t understand, I didn’t do it,” Isabela Carolina Camelo-Gomez said to her legal counsel in the NSW Supreme Court on Wednesday.
As the 47-year-old was taken into custody she continued her disbelief at the jury’s verdict.
“The justice system gets everything wrong.”
Camelo-Gomez, now 47, had pleaded not guilty to murdering Irene Jones in her Sydney home.
But following a week of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of guilty.
The jury had been told the woman previously known as Megan Jones killed her mother because of her infatuation and obsession with Carlos Camelo-Gomez and her belief her mother was an obstacle to the relationship.
On the evening of November 2, 2001 the pair drove home together after a belated birthday dinner for Ms Jones.
Camelo-Gomez then strangled her mother with a ligature and stabbed her in the neck before scattering various items around the house to make it look like the work of a random intruder.
That night the distraught woman was found wearing blood-stained clothing, and semen of Carlos Camelo-Gomez, who she claimed she was not in a sexual relationship with at the time.
Later she was heard saying “sorry mum, I didn’t mean for it to go this far” while standing near the coffin at the funeral.
She was not charged until September 2019 after the case was re-investigated by the Unsolved Homicide Unit.
Camelo-Gomez had a “sham marriage” with Carlos’ brother in Colombia to secure his residency in Australia.
This was an attempt to please Carlos, who she also wanted to continue financially supporting after inheriting her mother’s house.
The Crown said that by mid-2000 she was in love with him, telling a friend “she wanted to marry him and had never met anyone like him”.
She visited a bridal shop and paid a deposit and made payments on a wedding dress.
But her mother hated the man and believed he was using her daughter for money.
The jury was played two triple-zero calls made from the home of Camelo-Gomez’s neighbours, after she told them she had got out of the shower to be attacked by a man wearing a stocking over his face.
“He got me by the throat and I couldn’t breathe,” Isabela Carolina Camelo-Gomez said in her November 4, 2001 interview.
She will be sentenced at a later date.
