Perth mother-of-two, 39, found guilty of murdering her 91-year-old grandma

A Perth woman, who was accused of poisoning her 91-year-old grandmother, has been found guilty of murder, ABC News reports. The court handed down the verdict Tuesday afternoon.

Dawn Baldwin was found collapsed in her Wembley Downs home in January 2012, and died in hospital a week later. According to the news outlet, a jury heard that her granddaughter, Alaine Sturniolo, 39, who’s been on trial in Western Australia’s Supreme Court for the past three weeks, tampered with the elderly woman’s medication and swapped her pills with morphine tablets prescribed for her uncle before he died of cancer in June 2011.

9News reports that seven months before the murder, the mother-of-two posted on Facebook, “What is the one thing you wish you could change about your life – debt, and my grandmother’s life status mwahahahahahaha.” A month later, she wrote, “Something I hate – Grandma.”

The pair didn’t have a close relationship, with prosecutors claiming the motive for the killing was Sturniolo’s dislike of her grandmother “because of the way she treated her mother”, ABC News reports. It was alleged that after Baldwin’s death, Sturniolo bragged about it to relatives, including her sister and former brother-in-law, who later dobbed her in to police. It was later revealed in court by Sturniolo’s former brother-in-law that she had told him she hadn’t planned to kill “Grandma Dawn”, only cause her pain and discomfort.

She has been remanded in custody and will be sentenced in July. She has been in custody since her arrest in November 2018. It’s not clear as yet what sentence Sturniolo will receive, but the maximum penalty for murder in Australia is imprisonment for life.

The news comes almost two weeks after Barbara Eckersley, who poisoned her 92-year-old mother at a Southern Highlands, NSW, aged care home in 2018, was found guilty of manslaughter.

Acclaimed scientist Dr Mary White, who was famous for writing several scientific books, including After the Greening: The Browning of Australia and Listen… Our Land is Crying, died in August 2018. At the time, she was suffering from advanced dementia, which had left her unable to speak or eat solid foods.

According to previous ABC reports, the day before her death, White’s daughter laced her food with crushed temazepam tablets and on the day of her death put ‘green dream’, a drug used to euthanise animals, in her food.

The jury found Eckersley was not guilty of murder, but the lesser charge of manslaughter, after the court heard she had been depressed about her mother’s ill health. It’s not yet known how long she will be imprisoned, but according to Australian Criminal Law Group, “the punishment for manslaughter in Australia is a maximum penalty of 25 years imprisonment in the Supreme Court”.