Daniel Billings said ‘I did what I did’ in call from friend’s house after 2024 domestic violence murder
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Two hours after Daniel Billings murdered his ex-girlfriend Molly Ticehurst in a frenzied stabbing, he spoke to a woman he had met on Tinder.
“I’m sorry I murdered her,” Billings told the woman during a phone call at 2.02am on 22 April 2024.
The woman, who Billings met on the dating app in early 2022, told police she was shocked as he described the murder during their brief conversation.
“In an ideal world, what I wanted to do was go over there and talk to her, but she started screaming and I did what I did,” Billings said, according to her statement tendered to his New South Wales supreme court sentencing hearing.
He made the phone call from a mutual friend’s property, where Billings had fled in his bloodied clothes, according to a statement of facts.
The friend soon alerted police, the court heard.
Billings, a former mine worker, has pleaded guilty to stabbing Ticehurst 15 times after breaking into her bedroom at her Forbes home just before midnight on 21 April.
The 31-year-old is facing a two-day sentencing hearing in Orange that was expected to conclude on Friday.
Billings had been released on bail by a local court registrar a fortnight before the murder. He was charged with a series of sexual assault and domestic violence offences against 28-year-old Molly.
As soon as he learned of her allegations of repeated rapes, Billings adamantly denied the crimes and developed a twisted obsession with clearing his name, the court has been told.
Thursday’s hearing heard 90 minutes of footage that Billings recorded before and after the murder, in which he repeatedly claimed to have been wrongly accused of rape.
Even as Ticehurst lay dead in her pyjamas, he continued to claim he was a victim of injustice.
