A notorious child killer serving multiple life sentences for raping and murdering two teenage girls in the 1990s has been hospitalised after being bashed in a Victorian prison.
Leslie Camilleri, 57, known as the Bega schoolgirl killer, was attacked on June 17 by two other inmates, who were aware of his monstrous crimes, at the medium-security Ravenhall Correctional Centre in Melbourne, where he was recently transferred from another facility.
A source told Noticer News Camilleri was found unconscious in his cell after the bashing, and was in a coma in hospital with serious head injuries for at least 11 days. It is unclear whether he has since regained consciousness.
A Department of Justice and Community Safety confirmed to The Age there was an incident involving three prisoners, and that one had been taken to hospital, but refused to comment further except to state that no others prisoners or staff were injured.
Camilleri was given two life sentences without possibility of parole in 1999 after being found guilty by a Supreme Court jury of the horrific abduction, rape and murder of Bega schoolgirls Lauren Barry, 14, and Nichole Collins, 16, in 1997.
He and co-offender Lindsay Beckett abducted the two girls at knifepoint after offering them a lift, repeatedly sexually assaulted them over the next 12 hours while injecting each other with drugs, and drove them over the border into Victoria where they stabbed them to death.
“You have forfeited your right ever to walk among us again,” a judge said while telling Camilleri that he would never be released.
In 2013 Camilleri was sentenced to another 28 years after pleading guilty to murdering Melbourne schoolgirl Prue Bird, 13, who vanished from her home in Glenroy in 1992. Her body has never been found.
Camilleri confessed to the crime in 2012, and claimed that he acted alone, but while sentencing judge Elizabeth Curtain found that he killed the schoolgirl, she rejected his account of the murder as implausible, and the case remains clouded in mystery.
Header image: Left, Camilleri entering court in 2012 (ABC TV). Inset, his arrest mugshot. Right, Lauren Barry and Nichole Collins.
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