Mother-of-one jailed for murder cover-up
A MOTHER-OF-ONE has been jailed for three years for making her housemate’s murder look like a suicide to cover up for her boyfriend who strangled her.
The judge yesterday said Egita Jaunmaize’s ex-boyfriend ‘could undoubtedly be described as the murderer’, but was not charged due to a serious brain injury he sustained months later in a car crash while fleeing gardaí.
Jaunmaize, 34, of no fixed abode, was convicted by a Central Criminal Court jury earlier this month after she was found guilty of impeding the killer’s apprehension or prosecution, knowing or believing him to have murdered her Latvian housemate Antra Ozolina, 49.
She had pleaded not guilty to the offence at The Old Post, Main Street, Kilnaleck, Co. Cavan, on, or about, June 27 or June 28, 2014.
Garda James McDevitt told her sentence hearing last week she had alerted the authorities to what appeared to be a suicide. Gardaí found the deceased’s body on her bathroom floor, with a rope around her neck and an open Bible and vodka bottle nearby. The results of a post mortem by a non-forensic pathologist were also consistent with it being a tragic death.
However, the deceased’s employer told gardaí that, on his and her colleagues’ knowledge of her personality, she was unlikely to have taken her own life. This triggered a fresh look and a forensic pathologist found blunt-force trauma, along with death by asphyxiation.
The accused painted her boyfriend out of the picture in her first statements. She later said this was because he had a suspended sentence in Latvia and did not want to come to Garda attention.
She eventually admitted there had been a disagreement between the two women, she’d gone to bed, but woke to screaming. She went to her housemate’s room and found her boyfriend ‘throttling’ her.
He asked her to put a rope around her neck so the death would appear like suicide. Jaunmaize told gardaí she was in fear for her own life. Giollaíosa Ó Lideadha SC, defending, put forward a number of factors in mitigation, including the killer’s violence towards his client.
He also reminded the judge of a major trauma she had suffered as a child, which experts said had led to her remaining in the abusive relationship with the killer.
He asked the judge to take into consideration her role as a mother and that, as a foreigner, she would have difficulties in custody here.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy took into account the fact she was ‘one of life’s victims’ and in an abusive relationship with the killer. He imposed a sentence of three years, backdated to February 22, 2017.