The most feared woman killer in Australia is to walk free after 25 years behind bars - but even prison guards are worried by what she will do next: 'More dangerous than Ivan Milat' | Retrui News | Retrui
The most feared woman killer in Australia is to walk free after 25 years behind bars - but even prison guards are worried by what she will do next: 'More dangerous than Ivan Milat'
SOURCE:Daily Mail
A convicted killer considered more dangerous than Ivan Milat will soon walk free from jail - and prison officers who guarded her say there's no doubt she will kill again.
Rebecca Jane Butterfield was classed as more dangerous than notorious Australian serial killer Ivan Milat during her quarter-century in jail, but now she's set to walk free.
The savage killer was designated 'Extreme High Security by Commissioner' and her prison file was ominously marked: 'Extreme caution at all times.'
The police officer's daughter was initially jailed for stabbing a neighbour but her cold-blooded manslaughter of a friend and inmate in a prison yard sealed her fate forever.
Butterfield, 50, would also unleash her ferocious anger on staff and other prisoners apparently at random and without warning, leaving several scarred for life.
Prison guards were warned she could even remove her handcuffs - and would not hesitate to launch brutal assaults or make chilling threats against prison staff.
But now she's set to be released back into the community, long after the end of her sentence, amid a series of disturbing warnings from those who now know her best.
'She will without a doubt kill again,' said one female prison guard on a Facebook discussion among officers who have encountered the killer.
'I’ve looked directly into those eyes… she is without feeling nor remorse.'
Rebecca Butterfield is considered 'more dangerous than serial killer Ivan Milat' and when she is released from jail the officers who guarded her, some still scarred, fear she will kill or maim again
Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre (above) where Rebecca Butterfield was incarcerated for many years and where she was sent back to every time she attacked prison officers
Even just exiting her cell, Butterfield had to wear handcuffs attached to a restraining belt. She has repeatedly told officers and medical staff that she will kill once more.
'Absolutely she will kill again if she's released,' one officer said.
'Having had a lot of involvement with Rebecca, it's not even a doubt that it would happen, it's a certainty.'
Another said: 'She will kill or maim.
'If not a police officer or other first responder, she will do something to a NDIS carer ... a housemate, an innocent person in the street, at a shop, or just walking around one night.
'All she needs is a knife.'
Butterfield can fashion even a small piece of plastic into a fearsome weapon, slashing one officer's face with a prison-made 'shiv', a makeshift jail knife.
Despite the dark warnings, the NSW Supreme Court has ordered the killer is made ready for integration back into the outside world, probably within a few months.
Butterfield, in the prison yard with a visitor, is the daughter of a country cop who started going off the rails aged 21 and has been in a downward spiral of violence and self-destruction
The 'high risk violent offender' is currently in custody as a forensic patient at Long Bay prison's mental health hospital, but the court has now ordered an end to her staying there.
Admittedly, Butterfield is as much a danger to herself as others. She cut her own throat four years in a row, almost bleeding out once, and severely burnt herself when she set fire to her cell in 2008.
The following year she headbutted her cell wall 105 times, fracturing her skull so badly that officers could see her brain pulsing through the crack.
Weeks later, transferred from prison to Long Bay Hospital, she reopened the wound by banging her head against the wall - and then inserted items into her scalp.
The plan now is for Butterfield to live in an NDIS-funded home where she will be allowed out to shop and mix with the local community.
She was the daughter of a country cop, Senior Constable Ray 'Dudley' Butterfield, then a 23-year NSW Police veteran.
Butterfield had allegedly been raped by one or more men, but the main man accused had his sexual assault charges dismissed at court after it was claimed 'police in charge of the case stuffed up the brief of evidence'.
In the aftermath, a furious Butterfield went to Orange Police Station and pelted it with rocks.
Orange Police Station, where it all began after Rebecca Butterfield, enraged that a man accused of raping her was found not guilty and she blamed police and threw rocks and missiles at the station
She started her life of crime at 21 in 1996, with relatively minor offences, smashing shops in her home town of Orange in the NSW Central West.
Arrested and charged, she began her career of violent acts and self-harm, slashing up in a prison truck and setting fire to the interior.
Butterfield was convicted of malicious damage, resisting arrest, assaulting police and drug offences.
A year later, she stabbed a taxi driver in an unprovoked attack and was convicted of serious assault, assaulting police and using a weapon to resist arrest.
In 2000, aged 25, she slashed her wrists and was found by a neighbour who desperately tried to help her.
But crazed Butterfield fought her off - before reaching for a kitchen knife and stabbing the neighbour five times.
She was sentenced in June 2001 to six years in jail with a non-parole period of three years.
And since then, inmate number 263293's horrific behaviour has transformed that into a near-permanent prison sentence.
At 12.30pm on May 7, 2003 in Emu Plains Correctional Centre, Rebecca Butterfield attacked her only friend in prison in the jail kitchen with a large meat knife
Nine months before she became a killer, she admitted to an inmate: ‘If I come out of my cell I have to have a restraining belt on because of the assaults I did on officers.'
She was transferred to Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre after her attacks on prison staff but dreamed of a move back to Sydney's more relaxed Emu Plains minimum security jail, at the foot of the Blue Mountains.
'Sometimes there seems to be no end to my apauling [sic] behaviour,' she admitted.
Butterfield got her dream move - but it ended in tragedy for fellow prisoner, Bluce Lim-Ward, 30.
She was just a month away from the end of her sentence for fraud when Butterfield struck around 12.30pm on May 7, 2003.
Bluce was Butterfield's only friend in jail. They lived in adjoining prison houses at Emu Plains and were 'walking partners', regularly doing laps of the jail together.
A confidential internal prison report, exclusively obtained by the Daily Mail, reveals how Butterfield can kill for no apparent reason.
A fellow prison inmate said the two women had been 'close', but just hours before the attack Bluce had gone to the jail psychologists with concerns about Butterfield.
Bluce Lim- Ward was just 30 and a month off being released from prison after a sentence for fraud when her jail 'friend' fatally stabbed her 33 times
She had been escalating in her instability, and claimed her psychiatric medication had been cut by half, and had made demands at the jail pill window for her depression.
Above Butterfield's prison bed was a cork board with messages such as 'Everyone hates me' and 'I need help'.
At lunchtime, on the pretext of making Bluce a coffee, Butterfield went to the kitchen where there were three knives - a small vegetable knife, a serrated bread knife and a large meat knife.
She grabbed the largest and returned to Bluce - and immediately began stabbing her.
According to the fellow prisoner: 'Bluce tried to get away, but couldn't.
'Bluce was lying on the ground bleeding when Lindsay Woods (another inmate) stepped in to help.
'Looking Lindsay in the eye, Butterfield bent down and stabbed Bluce once again slowly, saying, "Now someone might listen to me".'
Officers took five minutes to arrive on the scene, but Bluce was dead. She had been stabbed 33 times.
Long Bay Correctional Complex where Rebecca is currently housed in the Forensic Hospital, getting day release, and preparing for her release into the community
Directly after the attack, witnesses said Butterfield was in a trance, 'not hysterical and she didn't try to get away'.
Butterfield was sentenced to 12 years for the killing.
That year, Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham designated Butterfield an 'extreme high security' prisoner for her threats against officers.
Over the years, the attacks have been constant, kicking a nurse while being treated at Westmead Hospital for her own self-harm injuries, throwing a cup of her urine at one officer and boiling water at another.
She was sentenced to extra jail time for assaulting an officer in the execution of duty, two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and common assault.
There was an incident when she held a nurse hostage using scissors she stole from a clinic, and was also known to self-harm to lure officers into her cell to attack them.
One prison source said Butterfield showed 'calculated madness' whose long periods of calmness were shattered by moments when 'she explodes (into) severe violence'.
Butterfield remains locked up at Long Bay Hospital under regular psychiatric review, but has already been granted multiple day release trips out into the public.
Rebecca Butterfield's father, former police officer Ray 'Dudley' Butterfield, died in September, 25 years after his daughter was first locked up for stabbing their neighbour
She was held in jail past the 2015 expiry of her sentence by a series of extended supervision orders.
But in March 2024, Justice Michael Walton revoked the orders and ruled Butterfield is released into the community under a strict five-year supervision order.
It was to happen at the earliest by May that year, and last September it was reported that Butterfield was being prepared for her return to society with excursions outside and training on adjusting to a normal law-abiding life.
Her father died in September after a battle with Alzheimer's disease.
In a letter from prison, Butterfield said she had finally sent him a letter, but it is unclear if she had an ongoing relationship with her family since her manslaughter conviction.
This week Corrective Services NSW told the Daily Mail that Butterfield was still under the care of the Forensic Hospital, but not for much longer.
Even prison guards who were sympathetic to Butterfield's troubled background say she is 'a lost cause'.
One male correctional officer who dealt with her said: 'She is extremely unpredictable and dangerous, and does not cope well without being closely monitored.
'I can only imagine she has declined over those years. I feel sick in the stomach for the unsuspecting people who are going to be living near her.'