Despite a privileged upbringing and a promising future ahead of her, in August 2014 Wran found herself in a jail cell facing murder charges after a $70 drug deal went wrong.
Yesterday, the daughter of former NSW premier Neville Wran has spoken for the first time about her role in the murder of drug dealer Daniel McNulty alongside her boyfriend at the time, Michael Lee, and another man, Lloyd Haines, as well as her own battle with drug addiction.
Speaking during her sentence hearing at the NSW Supreme Court, she told Justice Ian Harrison about her “regret” over the incident.
“I feel terrible. I’m ashamed to have been involved in anything like that. I can’t believe someone died. I can’t believe someone was so badly hurt,” the court heard. “I regret every step I took that night”.
The 28-year-old pleaded guilty to the charge of accessory to murder in the NSW Supreme Court last week after it was agreed the prosecutors would withdraw her murder charge.
Wran explained how she felt relief when she was arrested in 2014 over the murder because she had been on an ice binge.
“I was relieved that it was over and that Michael was going to be taken away from me,” she said.
Fighting back tears, she outlined her struggles with bullemia, her longtime use of the prescription ADHD drug Ritalin as well as her use of party drugs ecstasy and cocaine. But ice was never something she thought she would use, reports News Corp.
“It was in another league of drugs,” Wran said. “It was something I associated with, you know when you see the billboard signs of people basically rotting away from using it, that’s how I felt about it,” she said.
In August 2011, after a chance night out with a man she met in a treatment facility, she tried ice for the first time.
“There was just a chemical high that I never knew existed before that. And I knew straight away that my brain wasn’t going to forget about that.”
Days before the murder, Wran says she had left a rehab facility and fallen again into the depths of the drug, reports Nine News.
“This time I had failed everyone, I had failed myself, I had failed my mum,” she told the court.
“I just wanted to hurt myself, I just wanted to use so much so I couldn’t remember who I really was.”
Wran will return to court on July 26.
