An interview with the woman who admitted to killing her 10-year-old.

By MAMAMIA TEAM

Six years ago, an Australian man named Adam Baker met an American woman online.

After talking for a period of time, Adam married the woman, named Elisa Fairchild, who was nine years his senior.

He packed up his life in Australia – including his 10-year-old daughter Zahra – and moved to the US state of North Carolina to be with his new wife.

Adam’s daughter Zhara was no ordinary kid. In the years before she moved to the US from Queensland with her dad, Zahra had fought and beaten bone cancer; although the disease did cause her to lose her hearing, a leg and some lung function.

What Adam didn’t know when he married Elisa, was that the then 40-year-old and new stepmother to his beloved daughter, had actually been married six times before. He didn’t know that she’d been evicted from more than 40 residences in the US. And he didn’t know that Elisa had been rumored to have neglected her three biological children.

On October 9 2010, Zahra was reported missing.

The report was made by her father, Adam and stepmother, Elisa.

On the same day, a $1 million ransom note was found on the couple’s modest property in Hickory and the following day, Elisa Baker was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice when she admitted to writing it.

Weeks later, parts of Zahra’s body were found in bushland around the town where the family were living. And it was Elisa Baker who led investigators to the body parts.

Elisa Baker agreed to enter a plea bargain with police. She wanted to avoid a possible death sentence for murdering her own stepdaughter.

The details of what exactly happened to Zahra Baker are unclear. What is known is that the little girl was quite possibly abused in her own home for many months before she was brutally murdered and her body sawed into pieces.

Elisa Baker is currently serving time at North Carolina’s maximum security prison for women, after she pleaded guilty to “murdering and dismembering” the 10-year-old.

Baker lives in isolation at the prison to keep her away from other prisoners who reportedly consider her the most hated of the 1200 inmates.

Last night on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes, journalist Liz Hayes went to North Carolina to conduct the first ever public interview with Elisa Baker. (Baker never had to face questions in a courtroom because of the plea bargain she made.)

In the 60 Minutes segment, a grey-haired Elisa is led into a small room where journalist, Hayes, is waiting. She’s not wearing handcuffs or shackles but there is a guard always by her side.

Throughout the interview, Hayes asks Elisa about the events leading up to Zahra’s death, her relationship with Zahra and whether she feels any remorse for her actions.

Elisa’s answers are chilling.

On her relationship with Zahra, there’s this:

LIZ HAYES: Did you have a close bond?

ELISA: Very close. She called me Mum, and I treated her like she was my own child. She got no different treatment than my other kids did. Actually, my other kids got jealous of her.

LIZ HAYES: Really?

ELISA: They said I treated her better.

On what kind of person does what Elisa did:

LIZ HAYES: What kind of person dismembers a disabled child?

ELISA: A sick person.

LIZ HAYES: Does it take an evil person?

ELISA: Yes.

At some points, Elisa has tears in her eyes. At others, she chuckles. She talks of the bond she had with Zahra’s dad – a man she called “her Prince Charming” – and the remorse she feels at how their lives have ended up.

On what happened on the day Zahra Baker died:

STORY, LIZ HAYES: On the day Zahra died, September 24th, 2010, Elisa Baker claims says she left her stepdaughter alone in their Hickory home, to go shopping, returning in the afternoon.

ELISA: By this time it was like 3:00pm, 3:00pm, somewhere round in there. And she was laying on her bed, and I said “Zahra, are you ok?” And I walked over to bed and I said “Zahra!” And she still didn’t move, so I put my hand on her, and I could tell she wasn’t breathing.

And my first thought was CPR. And so I immediately started CPR. I worked on her for probably about 30 minutes, and couldn’t get her back – begging the whole time for God not to take her, you know. Right then, I should have called 911, but I got scared.

LIZ HAYES: Of what?

ELISA: I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never been faced with anything like that. I’ve never –

LIZ HAYES: If you’d done CPR, you’d dial 911 – wouldn’t you?

ELISA: Some – most people would have, yes.

Elisa Baker maintains that it was her husband Adam Baker – who is now living back in Australia – who dismembered Zahra’s body. She says she stood by him – and didn’t say anything to police – in an effort to protect the man she loved.

But that’s a claim Adam staunchly denies. “There’s no way I could do that to my child. For her to sit there and say that I dismembered my child – there’s no way on earth that I could do that,” he told Liz Hayes.

But she says the evidence is against her – and that’s why she never fought to prove her own innocence.

That evidence she speak of shows that on the day Zahra’s body was discarded, Elisa Baker made a series of phone calls to Adam Baker.

Evidence shows those calls were made from the area where Zahra’s body was found and that Adam received the calls from more than 33 kilometres away.

Evidence suggests that Zahra Baker was being abused before she was murdered – at one point, she had turned up at school with a black eye – and that staff at the school had reached out to help her.

And the evidence is starkly apparent on a piece of paper Elisa Baker signed as part of the plea bargain in which she admitted to a history of physical and psychological abuse of Zahra.

Liz Hayes concludes the interview by asking Elisa whether she feels any remorse.

ELISA: I wish things would have been different.

LIZ HAYES: Well, you have a long time to consider it.

ELISA: Yes ma’am, I do.

Elisa Baker won’t be released from prison until she is at least 70 years old.

You can find out more from 60 Minutes here.