On December 23 two days before Christmas Stephanie Ng decided to meet a boy she had been talking to for a few months on an app called Whisper. Stephanie thought the boy she was meeting was nineteen. Stephanie herself was twenty-five and over the weeks and months of them chatting the boy had managed to persuade her he was nineteen through altered photos, but what Stephanie didn't know was the fact that the boy was only fifteen. And unfortunately for Stephanie, it wasn't the only secret he was hiding from her.
Stephanie and the boy made plans to meet up on and go for a walk around Dún Laoghaire. He promised to show her a "secret spot" and she joked that it sounded like he was going to murder her. "I don't think I could murder you," the boy replied.
The two met up at the entrance to Dún Laoghaire Shopping Center before they walked to a derelict house on York Road. The boy suggested they go inside but Stephanie decided against it. He suggested another house. Again she said no. They strolled along a coastal road and the boy suggested they go to the water's edge to take a selfie. He walked her down the stone steps to the baths area out of view of anyone and where he wouldn't be disturbed.
Unbeknownst to Stephanie before meeting the boy went to a shopping center called Lidl and purchased a kitchen knife, having released during an earlier shopping trip with his father that "anyone could buy a knife."
Moments later as they stood by the shore and as Stephanie faced out to sea, the boy grabbed her from behind and held her in a choke hold. He then moved in around her and started choking her with his right hand while brandishing a knife in his left.
"I will do anything for you. I will be your friend," she pleaded with him. And In a calm and controlled voice, the boy told her to be quiet before she lost consciousness.
Stephanie Ng woke to the sound of the sea crashing against the rocks and the seagulls squawking above her.
"This dream was comfortable until I realized it was a reality and I was alive in a pool of my own blood," she later told a court.
She looked down and saw that her hand was sliced open. She tried to cry for help but nothing came out.
She knew she wasn't going to be seen where she was and needed to get to higher ground if she had any chance of being seen.
"I walked up to higher ground as I was determined not to die." Then she collapsed.
It was this action that most likely saved her life. It made her visible to a pedestrian who was passing by on the Coast Road. She tried to speak to him but again nothing came out. It was then that Stephanie put her hand to her neck and realized exactly what the boy had done.
There was a 10cm knife wound across the front of her throat, a wound which had seemingly been inflicted after she lost consciousness.
The cut on her throat was deep and cut through her windpipe and damaged her voice-box. The boy would later describe a "sawing" motion when asked how he inflicted it. One garda would later describe the wound as "if someone tried to cut her head off but got interrupted halfway through".
The pedestrian tried to stop the bleeding. He was soon joined by another passerby and then gardaí and paramedics who frantically worked to save the woman's life. While all this was going on the boy was walking home, stopping in a restaurant to wash the blood from his hands in its bathroom. He had already thrown the knife in the sea. Once home, his parents didn't suspect anything was wrong.
Stephanie regained consciousness in the hospital the next day, Christmas Eve and with great difficulty was able to speak to gardaí and indicated to them to look at the Whisper app on her phone. Stephanie showed detectives the chats between her and the boy and the photographs he had sent her. Before long they had a very good idea of who they were looking for.
By Christmas morning, detectives had an address for the boy but they faced a dilemma. The sadistic nature of the crime combined with the contents of the Whisper app indicated they were dealing with an extremely dangerous suspect.
There was a concern the boy could harm his family if given the chance. It was decided they needed to place him under arrest as quickly as possible.
They knocked on the door and when it was answered they barged in, each garda checking a different room. There was no sign of the boy. Then one of the gardaí realised they'd missed a door directly beside the front door. Inside they found the boy, with his headphones on, playing his new electric piano.
"This is about the stabbing of that girl in Dún Laoghaire, I haven't got the knife. I threw it in the ocean," he told gardaí.
The boy was placed under arrest and brought to Dún Laoghaire Garda station with his father. Gardaí also seized a top, backpack and a coat, both with blood staining, and a journal containing various writings and sketches. One of the entries, made on December 17th, was a drawing of someone being cut up with a knife.
Another entry from November referenced a therapist and stated: "Serial killer might also be self-deprecatory might also be self-praiser."
In the station, gardaí were confused and unsettled by the boy's seemingly calm attitude. He asked questions about the place "as if he was on a school tour," a garda later recalled. At one point during his five Garda interviews, he appeared to laugh inappropriately. Other than that, he mostly declined to comment.
The boy was first remanded to Oberstown on December 27th following his first appearance in the Children's Court. An application for bail was denied after Det Garda Daniel Treacy told the court he believed the teenager would "likely commit murder if released", a remarkable assertion to make about an accused, especially a 15-year-old. Treacy's opinion, which was accepted by the judge, was at least partly based on the planned and sadistic nature of the attack, as well as the contents on the boy's journal.
There was a delay in sentencing after the boy pleaded guilty in late 2018. The court had a hard time finding qualified professionals to assess him. In the end, Dr Richard Church, a forensic child psychiatrist, had to be brought over from the UK.
Today, 05/11/2019 he was finally sentenced to 11 years for attempted murder.
Posted by u/Roos85