Woman beheads friend to inherit £700,000 estate, bags life sentence (PHOTO)

A woman has been sentenced to life in prison for beheading her friend in order to inherit her estate.

Metro UK reported that the osteopath decapitated her friend she had met at a church group.

She has been jailed for life in the first televised murder sentencing.

Jemma Mitchell, 38, carried out the ‘truly despicable crime’ against Mee Kuen Chong when the 67-year-old refused to hand over £200,000 to pay for repairs to her £4 million dilapidated family home.

The self-styled healer, who boasted of her award-winning skill in human dissection, murdered the devout Christian to inherit the bulk of her estate – worth more than £700,000 – by faking her will.

Jurors were told she hit Ms Chong over the head with a weapon at her London home in June last year. Two weeks later, she drove more than 200 miles to the seaside town of Salcombe in Devon where she left the vulnerable divorcee’s decapitated and badly decomposed body in woods.

Mitchell lived with her mother and had persuaded her that they could make a fortune on their home if they built another storey on top.

But the first builder went bust with £135,000 of their money and they were living in squalor with a tarpaulin for a roof.

Judge Richard Marks KC said Ms Chong was a woman of ‘significant means’ who was ‘extremely generous’ and ‘proactively attempted to help’ Mitchell.

He went on: ‘This culminated in her offering to give you £200,000 to spend on the house, an offer however which she withdrew a few days before you killed her, which I am sure is what led you to do what you did.’

Jailing Mitchell for life wih a minimum term of 34 years, he told her: ‘The enormity of your crime is profoundly shocking, even more so given your apparent religious devotion as well as the fact that Deborah Chong was a good friend to you and had shown you great kindness.’

During the trial, jurors viewed CCTV footage of Mitchell arriving at Ms Chong’s home carrying a large blue suitcase on the morning of June 11 last year.

More than four hours later, she emerged from the property in Wembley, north-west London, with the suitcase appearing bulkier and heavier.

She also had with her a smaller bag full of Ms Chong’s financial documents, which were later recovered from Mitchell’s home.

After Ms Chong was reported missing, Mitchell claimed she had gone to visit family friends ‘somewhere close to the ocean’ as she was feeling ‘depressed’.

In reality, Mitchell had decapitated Ms Chong and stored her remains in the garden of the house she shared with her retired mother in Willesden, north-west London.

On June 26 last year, she stowed the body inside the suitcase in the boot of a hire car and drove to Devon.

Ms Chong’s headless body was found by holidaymakers beside a woodland footpath near the picturesque town of Salcombe the next day.

Following a police search of the area, Ms Chong’s skull was recovered a few metres away from the body.

A post-mortem examination found skull fractures which could have been from a blow to the head and broken ribs, said to have been caused by the body being stuffed into the suitcase.

Detectives who searched Mitchell’s home uncovered Ms Chong’s fake will and personal papers.

The blue suitcase had been stored on the roof of a neighbour’s shed.

Although no forensic evidence was recovered from the suitcase, Ms Chong’s DNA was identified on a bloodstained tea towel in a pocket.

Jurors heard that Ms Chong had suffered from schizophrenia and was referred for help after writing letters to the then-Prince of Wales and prime minister Boris Johnson.

She met Mitchell through a church group and initially agreed to help her, but days before the murder backed out of bankrolling Mitchell’s building work urging her to sell up instead.

Mitchell had grown up in Australia, where her mother worked for the British Foreign Office and had set up an osteopathy business there before returning to the UK in 2015.

On her website, she had claimed she was ‘attuned to subjects in neuroanatomy, genetics and dissection of human cadavers’.

Following her conviction, Detective Chief Inspector Jim Eastwood, who led the investigation, said: ‘The cold facts of this case are shocking.

‘Deborah Chong was a vulnerable lady – in the weeks before her murder, she was seeking help for her declining mental health.

‘However, Mitchell – so desperate to obtain the money she needed to complete the renovations on her house – sought to take advantage of Deborah’s good will.

‘But when Deborah changed her mind, she callously murdered her and embarked upon an attempt to fraudulently obtain her estate.

‘Over the course of two weeks following Deborah’s murder we can only speculate as to what Mitchell did with the body and what her wider plan was.

‘The decomposition when the body was found was at such an advanced state that Mitchell may have begun to fear Deborah’s body would be discovered – whether this forced her into moving the body and why she chose Salcombe in Devon, we may never know.

‘However, what is clear is that Mitchell – seeing her chance to obtain the funds she so desperately desired disappear – decided to attack and murder a vulnerable lady for her own gain in a truly despicable crime.’