Australian girls jailed for life for sleepover murder

Sydney - Two teenage Australian girls were sentenced to life in prison Wednesday for the murder of a 15-year-old schoolfriend during a sleepover party.

The pair, who were 16 at the time of the murder last year, had told police they knew it was wrong to kill Eliza Jane Davis but that it nonetheless "felt right" and they did not feel bad about strangling her.

After attending a party with Davis they decided to kill her as she slept in the next room on the morning of Sunday June 18, 2006.

While their lawyers said they were baffled as to what drove them to murder, it was revealed during their sentencing hearing last month that they had been chatting about how neither of them would feel bad about killing someone.

After dressing in old clothes, they strangled her with speaker wire.

During the murder the girls watched Davis' reactions change from anger, to fear, to the realisation that she was going to die, but neither gave in to her desperate pleas for help.

The girls buried Davis under her house in the West Australian coal mining town of Collie before reporting her missing and pretending to help with the search.

But, after realising the body was buried in a shallow grave and would soon be discovered, they turned themselves in to police.

Prosecutors said they displayed a chilling lack of remorse. They "planned the murder with calmness, consideration, emotional detachment and the desire to have the experience of killing someone," prosecutor Simon Stone told Perth's Children Court.

In sentencing, court president Denis Reynolds said the murder was "gruesome and merciless in the extreme."

The pair, who cannot be named because of their age, were sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 15 years.

Agence France Presse