- In March 2015, Lara Paige Conley, 36, called emergency services claiming an intruder had attacked her 69-year-old mother, Carlene, who was found dead with 77 stab wounds
- As investigators examined the crime scene, Paige’s changing stories, suspicious injuries and evidence of previous family violence raised serious questions about what had really happened
- Paige was initially sentenced to 27 years in prison, but her conviction was overturned in 2019. She later accepted a plea agreement carrying a 20-year prison sentence
The call sounded like a nightmare unfolding in real time.
‘Someone just rushed into my house and hurt my mum. I’m afraid she’s almost dead.’
The woman on the line to emergency service was Lara ‘Paige’ Conley, 36, and inside the family home, her 69-year-old mother, Carlene, lay gravely wounded.
It was March 2015 and Paige said an intruder had attacked her mum.
She said she was frightened and desperately needed help.
But when responders arrived, the scene raised questions for authorities.
Carlene had suffered 77 stab wounds and was dead. There were cuts across her body as well as bite marks.
Knives lay scattered around her, some bent from the force of the attack.
Paige was dishevelled and also injured, with a horrifying amount of blood on her.
‘This was one of the bloodiest crime scenes that I had ever seen,’ Detective Jim Moore later told Oxygen.
It was a shocking situation for Carlene’s youngest child. The pair had been through so much, after Paige had undergone surgery for scoliosis – curvature of the spine – as a child.
When her parents divorced, her difficulties multiplied. School became a struggle, and Paige was eventually expelled.
Carlene, meanwhile, doted on her daughter. Even when Paige was an adult, she made room for her and her boyfriend, Christopher, converting the basement of her home into living quarters for them.
Now, as this tragedy rocked the family, police wondered who could do this to kind Carlene?
Paige claimed that, after Christopher had left for work earlier that night, two children knocked on the door, saying ‘trick or treat’. She said that they’d threatened her with a knife.
But Paige’s story kept changing.
At first, she claimed she’d come home and found her mother dead, the result of a home invasion perpetrated by the trick or treaters.
But during police interviews, she changed her story, claiming she’d been asleep at home, and woke to find her mother bleeding in the kitchen.
But investigators found no signs of forced entry to the home. No fingerprints were left behind and nothing had been taken.
Alarmingly, Paige had injuries on her arms, face and head.
Digging deeper, police discovered that, although close, Paige and Carlene’s relationship had become increasingly volatile.
Arguments could turn physical. Just months before Carlene’s death, authorities had been called to the home after two separate confrontations involving Paige, Christopher and her mother.
In one incident, Paige cut Christopher with a knife.
During another altercation, she reportedly bit him as he tried to intervene in a fight between her and Carlene.
READ MORE TRUE CRIME: ‘How a neighbour’s home-cooked meals helped two brothers heal from tragedy’
Paige was sent to hospital for a mental health evaluation, but Carlene and Christopher chose not to press charges.
The people closest to the family were increasingly alarmed.
But despite this troubling behaviour, Carlene wouldn’t abandon her child. Paige was her daughter, after all, and she needed her mum.
And with Paige’s 37th birthday fast approaching, just days away from her nephew’s, the family were preparing to celebrate the special occasions together, as was tradition.
This year, however, Paige remained undecided on how she wanted to spend her day.
So Carlene shifted her focus onto her grandson, making a lasagne – his favourite dish – for the family gathering.
It was a seemingly harmless decision. But according to Paige’s sister Ginger, Paige resented the choice.
She was angry that her mother was making something her grandson would enjoy, rather than something she wanted.
Could Paige really have killed her own mother over something as trivial as a baked pasta dish?
Just hours after she placed her frantic call to emergency services, police arrested Paige, charging her with murder.
When her trial began two years later, in Kenton County, US, Paige, who’d pleaded not guilty, said that, on the day of her mum’s death, her mother had hit her in the head with a heavy object, but Paige couldn’t recall anything beyond that.
READ MORE TRUE CRIME: ‘Stabbed by my son: ‘The knife missed my brain by millimetres’’
Investigators, however, were able to determine that Paige was responsible for the bite marks found on her mother’s body, after comparing them with a mould taken of Paige’s teeth.
It took the jury just three hours to find Lara Paige Conley guilty of murder.
Paige’s sister Virginia asked the judge to impose a long sentence.
‘I miss being normal, not the daughter of a murdered woman, the sister of a killer,’ she said, calling Paige ‘sick to the marrow of her bones’.
In May 2017 Lara Paige Conley, 38, was sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Two years later, Kentucky’s highest court overturned the conviction due to errors involving access to independent mental-health expertise, due to Paige’s bipolar diagnosis.
The ruling ordered a new trial. Paige subsequently accepted a plea agreement carrying a 20-year prison sentence.
In 2026, Carlene’s family took part in a doco, Evil Lives Here, where they spoke about the tragedy of losing beloved Carlene.
‘My mum always says that my gran’s presence was kind of like a hug,’ Carlene’s granddaughter Taylor said in the documentary.
‘You just felt so loved the second she laid eyes on you. And that’s how I want her to be remembered.’
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