“I want her dead daviddd … we’ve been through this …”

Her powers of persuasion are extraordinary. Notoriously so.

Not yet 16 when she convinced her boyfriend to kill a teenage girl, a perceived rival, she’d never even met.

Without remorse at trial, offering nothing beyond a limp apology, upon conviction of first-degree murder, for “my part” in the butchery of 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel — left to bleed out in a snow bank outside her home on New Year’s Day, 2008.

Her part consisted of initiating, orchestrating, relentlessly commanding and then sexually rewarding a stooge accomplice to take Stefanie’s life.

Over nothing except adolescent jealousy.

So there should probably be no surprise — if furious revulsion — that Melissa Todorovic has coaxed a parole board panel into granting her unescorted day passes from prison.

The decision was rendered on Wednesday, after Todorovic appeared before a panel of the Parole Board of Canada in Kitchener.

We are to believe — because her parole officer does — that Todorovic, now 25, has made “significant gains” of self-awareness, empathy and responsibility.

Presumably the psychiatrists treating Todorovic at the Grand Valley Institution for Women have made better progress over the past seven years in understanding the inmate’s dark nature than professional colleagues who testified at her 2009 trial.

Or the judge who handed down a life sentence with no parole eligibility for seven years.

Said Justice Ian Norheimer Justice: “While Melissa may only pose a risk in a narrow set of circumstances, that does not mean that the risk is any less real or the consequences of its emergence any less grave.”

“I’m getting someone killed lol.”

Nordheimer described Todorovic as “the puppet master” in a plot that had simmered for eight months. For all the learned expert opinion put before him in the weeklong sentencing hearing, he could glean little about the teen’s lethal motivation and aberrant nature. “Ultimately in this case, we are left with a horrific event caused by a young person for reasons that are still unfathomable.”

Todorovic was tried as a youth but sentenced as an adult, upon the Crown’s successful application. A youth sentence would have meant six years in custody max, four in the community and then no supervision at all. The crucial factor in permitting an adult sentence was to ensure that she didn’t leave prison completely unsupervised.

Her subsequent appeal bid — automatic in first-degree murder — cut no mustard with the Ontario Court of Appeal. They upheld the conviction.

Perhaps when the two-member parole panel’s written reasons for judgment are released — they hadn’t been as of 5 p.m. on Thursday — we will have a clearer understanding of why they consider Todorovic fit for unescorted three-day absences, staying at a halfway house.

“While there’s still lots of work for you to do on yourself, you are moving in the right direction,” said Lynne Van Daylen, as reported by The Canadian Press.

Panel member Kevin Corcoran, a former homicide investigator, put a leading question to Todorovic that really was more of a statement: “The power and control was an aphrodisiac for you to accomplish your goal?”

Well yes, thanks for seeing it that way.

Because while Stefanie was slain, Todorovic had earlier brought her evil-eye to bear against yet another teenager who’d made the mistake of having a conversation with a previous boyfriend, asking him to kill her, a startling revelation made at the hearing, clearly suggestive of repeat behaviour, a pathology.

“My thinking at the time was that if (the girls) were out of the picture, I could be happy with my boyfriend,” said Todorovic.

Her accomplice in the Rengel homicide, then-17-year-old David Bagshaw — he thrust the knife into Stefanie’s stomach six times — pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, sentenced to life with no parole eligibility for 10 years.

“Ur getting blocked until u kill her.”

Prison sentences aren’t exclusively about punishment. The goal, at least in theory, is equally about rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

But sociopaths can’t be rehabilitated. Indeed — there’s mounds of literature to support this — they become ever more cunning in erecting a façade of normal behaviour, pretending empathy, pretending remorse, pretending insight.

Todorovic was never diagnosed as a sociopath. Indeed, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders eschews both “sociopath” and “psychopath” as diagnostic terms in favour of “anti-social personality disorder.”

Whatever the lexicon, they are skilled, clever liars.

At Todorovic’s trial, one of the first where social media evidence played a key evidentiary role, literally thousands of texts and messages exposed the toxic relationship between these natural born killers. How Todorovic harangued Bagshaw for months and months to do away with Stefanie, variously browbeating and cajoling, wielding sex as blackmail, leading the lumpen Bagshaw around by the his testosterone-infused gonads. When Bagshaw complained he didn’t have a mask, she snapped back via text: (italics here) “cut f---ing leotards.”

When he finally committed the act — a day after botching an earlier attempt — Todorovic rewarded him with sex, but only after she’d double-checked that Stefanie was really and truly dead by calling her cellphone and only after making Bagshaw re-enact the slaying.

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All this violence inflicted on a girl who’d been a caring friend to the combustible Bagshaw, had dated him briefly a couple of years earlier but had no sexual relations with the teen.

It was all inside Todorovic’s furiously churning brain, her manic sense of aggrievement.

Some will argue that she was sick. The record shows she was determined and high-functioning. Unlike Bagshaw, who began showing anger issues at age 2, regularly suspended from school, the produce of a chaotic family background, Todorovic grew up safe and loved, excelled in school, with a supportive environment and no criminal priors.

Yet she dispassionately, chillingly, told police about her involvement in the murder when brought in for questioning, as were many of Bagshaw’s friends, and not yet a suspect. Investigators were stunned by her self-incriminating statement.

“No sex till then lol.”

At Todorovic’s sentencing hearing, she flummoxed the shrinks.

Both the defence and prosecution psychiatrists agreed Todorovic was a “unique” offender who displayed anti-social tendencies in her intimate relationships but otherwise functioned normally.

She suffered from anxiety — who doesn’t? — and had some body image issues about weight. Two psychiatrists testified that her personality was not yet fully developed or fixed, which typically doesn’t occur until a person reaches the mid-20s. This too was a factor in weighing Nordheimer’s decision when the defence pressed for a youth sentence without supervision at conclusion. “The concept that a young person would ultimately be left free of supervision where there has yet to be an accurate diagnosis of the problem, nor any effective treatment program developed, is as contrary to the need for the public’s protection as one could imagine.”

A court-appointed psychiatrist opined that Todorovic would be dangerous only in intimate, or domestic relationships, and that any potential victims would likely be “intimate partners, third parties and possibly children.”

Not very reassuring, that.

The paid-gun defence psychiatrist argued that Todorovic appeared unremorseful because she was an immature girl who had trouble expressing her emotions — flatly contradicted by the texts, by descriptions of her behaviour at home, and dismissed as “facile” by Nordheimer.

Just about everybody agreed — was struck by — Todorovic’s lack of remorse.

On Wednesday, she told the parole hearing that she hadn’t thought she’d done anything wrong until the moment she was arrested; that it had all been a game and she never expected Bagshaw to actually carry through with murder.

“When I saw it on the news, I felt guilty then but I didn’t really understand the impact.” But now, with counselling and medication and participating in prison programs, oh, it’s so much clearer. “I feel like I’m a monster for telling someone to kill somebody.”

Does she really?

Who knows what goes on in this woman’s febrile brain and her ice cold heart.

“Is she dead?”

Correction Dec. 1, 2017- This article was updated from a previous version that misstated the surname of David Bagshaw.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.