The half-sister of a woman who faked cancer in order to entangle a well-meaning tutor in her web of lies has said she is thankful her relation has been jailed as “she’s a danger to everyone.”
Elisa Bianco’s half-sister Katie was drawn into her younger sibling’s lies when she first told her she was dying of cancer, the last of a culmination of deceptions that ruined 49-year-old Sally Rettallack’s life before Bianco was jailed for almost three years last week.
“Thank God she’s been jailed. But she’s so manipulative, she’s a danger to everyone. It worries me that when she comes out she’ll have already plotted her next life,” Katie said following her half-sister’s conviction.
The sisters, who have the same father but different mothers, became close after Bianco told Katie, who has three children, about her terminal cancer.
Bianco forbade Katie from telling their father about her illness, an order she obeyed as she thought it was her “dying wish,” but ultimately led to her father severing ties with her.
“But not telling him has ruined my relationship with him, and we’ve cut ties because of her,” she told the Sun.
Speaking about her half-sister’s behaviour, Katie said: “I can only think it was for attention seeking, but that doesn’t fit with how she was as a child.”
Last week, Bianco was jailed for two and eight months with Judge Christopher Harvey QC labelling it a “very strange” and “disturbing” case.
Bianco contacted Mrs Rettallack while at college in 2009, lying to her about her abusive mother and step-father, and in 2012 moving into the family home – and stayed for years.
Their relationship helped to cause the end of Mrs Rettallack’s marriage, and the lies continued to escalate until Bianco pretended she had cancer. She was only exposed when the lecturer’s former husband rang Bianco’s father to give his condolences.
When the lies were exposed Katie rang her sister to confront her, “she said, ‘Yeah I was lying’. She was completely normal, like it was nothing.”
