Leny Verbunt, holding a picture of her sister Karen Chetcuti, said the guilty plea spared the family a brutal trial. Credit:Darrian Traynor He then bound and gagged her, before fracturing her skull and using petrol to set her alight. Forensic evidence was presented to court that she was alive at the time. After she was dead, Cardamone injected her with battery acid and ran her over body with his car as part of a plot to cover up the murder. Her body, with duct tape wrapped around her neck, was eventually found in scrubland near Lake Buffalo, five days later.

Michael Cardamone is taken into Wangaratta Court on Tuesday. Credit:Mark Jesser Cardamone also pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hitman – who turned out to be a covert operative – to murder Crown witness Edward George, a man Cardamone tried to blame for the murder. Ms Chetcuti's sister said the guilty plea spared the family a brutal trial. Karen Chetcuti in a photo with her children taken about a week before her murder. "We're just relieved we don't have to go through the trial, that our 84-year-old mother doesn't have to go to trial," Leny Verbunt said.

Ms Chetcuti's former husband Tony Chetcuti welcomed the plea, but said it would not bring her back. "It hasn't changed anything really. The kids are still without their mum," he said. Cardamone had been on parole for less than six months after raping a 15-year-old girl in 2005. He moved back in with his mother – his father had died – in a house around the corner from Ms Chetcuti's in the town of just over 500 people. Their properties shared a boundary. Karen's friend Carol Roadknight said parolees should not be allowed to live in remote rural locations where there is no protection.

"Putting someone out there with such a violent history on parole, to Whorouly, where's the common sense there?" she said. It is understood Cardamone tested positive to drugs while on parole, a contravention of his parole conditions. He was also charged with producing child pornography over a photograph of a six-year-old girl in February 2015. The photograph showed the girl pulling down her pants and showing her bottom. It came to the attention of police after the girl's mother reported it to the Department of Human Services. Cardamone's parole was initially revoked, and he spent more than four months in custody, but it was again reinstated after the charges were dismissed in July 2015.

Magistrate John O'Callaghan told the Wangaratta Magistrates Court the photo was taken "in clearly a quite innocent manner. It shows what children do in their own silly, quite beautiful way", according to the Wangaratta Chronicle. Cardamone was 38 when he raped a 15-year-old girl in a caravan on the Whorouly property in 2005. The girl had been working on the then tobacco farm and lived in the caravan with her boyfriend. In a report tendered to the County Court, two psychiatrists said Cardamone viewed women as sexual objects and not human beings. "You developed an unnatural attitude towards women, largely because you never had a relationship with one, with the result that you viewed them as sex objects, not human beings," one wrote. Another concluded the likelihood of further sexual offending would probably be reduced if he stopped using illicit drugs. He was sentenced to a minimum of six years in jail.

Ms Chetcuti moved to Whorouly from Epping more than 20 years ago with her then husband Tony Chetcuti to run the local pub. The couple, who had two children together, sold the pub in 1995 and Ms Chetcuti went on to work at the Wangaratta council. Cardamone had originally pleaded not guilty to Ms Chetcuti's murder, and during the March committal hearing said police had the wrong man. Cardamone's mother Maria, 78, was also charged with incitement to commit murder after allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill Mr George.​ The case, before Justice Lex Lasry, will return to court on August 21 for a sentencing hearing.

With Border Mail, AAP