For months, Rongmei Yan thought she was exchanging text messages with her beloved daughter in Australia.
She did not realise Yang Zhao was pretending to be Qiong Yan in a bid to steal money after murdering her daughter and putting her in a tool box.
Almost five years after the decomposing body of Ms Yan, 29, was found on a Brisbane unit's balcony, Zhao was on Tuesday found guilty of murder by a Supreme Court jury.
Zhao, 30, received a life sentence and will be eligible for parole after serving 22 years.
"I feel sorry that all those days that the person I've been talking to was not my daughter ... at the time she had already become a skeleton," Ms Yan's mother said in a devastating victim impact statement on Tuesday.
During the two-week trial Ms Yan's mother sat silently in court as she endured evidence that detailed her daughter's "senseless murder" and "appalling treatment" of her body.
After flying in from Shanghai, she heard Zhao had killed her daughter by striking her on the head with a metal bottle and strangling her in September 2020 at their inner-Brisbane apartment.
Zhao then put Ms Yan's body in a tool box on their balcony and unlocked her phone, impersonating her for months via text messages to her mother.
More than 2500 WeChat messages were sent with Zhao requesting bank transfers, stealing almost $500,000 from Ms Yan's mum who is now "destitute".
Ms Yan's mother broke down when the jury took just two hours to find Zhao guilty of murder before reading a heartbreaking statement translated to the court.
"When I heard the news that my daughter had been murdered I suddenly lost the capacity to walk," she said.
"After several months of acupuncture treatment I gradually recovered.
"Every day I wash my face with tears. I still cannot accept the fact my daughter is gone."
The money stolen by Zhao was compensation Ms Yan's mother had received from the Chinese government for relocating her house.
"Not only have you consigned her to a lifetime of grieving, you drained all her available money and as far as I can gauge, she's been left destitute as a result of no realistic prospect of recovering anything from you," Justice Martin Burns told Zhao during his sentencing.
Justice Burns found Ms Yan had died of strangulation before Zhao began impersonating her.
"You did this (impersonation) to keep up the pretence that Ms Yan was still alive and also to gain access to her mother's money," he said.
"Your singular motive for the murder of Ms Yan and the concealment of her body - naked greed - was thereby realised."
Zhao, a Chinese national living in Australia on a student visa, had pleaded not guilty to murder.
He instead pleaded guilty to interfering with Ms Yan's corpse, which was found by police in the tool box about 10 months after her murder.
Zhao spent three days giving evidence at the trial, claiming Ms Yan died accidentally after they had both spent up to four hours in the apartment inhaling nitrous oxide, which he referred to as "nangs" or "laughing gas".
Zhao testified Ms Yan passed out on the floor and stopped breathing while he was asleep on a nearby couch.
He claimed he hid her body because he was afraid of being charged with supplying drugs.
Zhao admitted later drinking alcohol, inhaling "nangs" and having sex in the apartment metres from where Ms Yan's body was located.
