A woman in a suburban Woolworths had a chilling encounter with trans axe attacker Evie Amati when the violent offender was allowed to roam outside prison walls wearing an ankle monitor.
The startled shopper, who lives near a female transition centre for women offenders, was at Lennox Village shopping centre at Emu Plains in far western Sydney in December, when she saw ‘a hulking tattooed man in a dress’ wearing a satellite tracking anklet in Woolies.
The sighting was several weeks before Amati’s release from prison where she was serving time for three attempted murders.
The woman said when she saw Amati, she thought she was ‘male’ and ‘had a really bad energy’. The woman said she made eye contact with the axe attacker, ‘and her blood ran cold’.
But it was only after Daily Mail Australia pictured Amati on her parole release on January 6, that the woman realised the person she had seen ‘was an axe wielding psycho’.
Amati walked from Bolwara Women’s Transition Centre to a friend who was waiting in a car, looking noticeably heavier since her offending, and sporting macabre tattoos such as one depicting a zombie eating ‘Brain Soup’.
Amati, who laughed in delight as she tasted freedom, had an amateur jail tattoo spelling ‘DEAD’ on her left hand and questioned Daily Mail Australia’s right to photograph her release.
Now aged 32, Amati was paroled after serving eight years for the attempted axe murders of three people at Enmore 7-Eleven, including a man buying a pie and a woman buying milk at 2.20am in Sydney’s inner-western suburbs.
A woman saw ‘a hulking tattooed man in a dress’ and a satellite tracking anklet in a suburban Woolies in December. It was ‘axe wielding psycho’ Evie Amati (above) out shopping while still serving her sentence for attempted murder

The woman said when she saw Amati, she thought she was ‘male’ and ‘had a really bad energy’

It was only when the woman read Daily Mail Australia’s coverage of Amati’s release that she realised the person in Woolies was the axe attacker who randomly attacked people with an axe (pictured doing so) in Sydney’s Inner West in 2017
On a cocktail of anti-depressants, cannabis, ‘love drug’ MDA and hormone drugs from gender reassignment surgery, Amati fell into a rage after a failed Tinder date with a woman and took a 2kg axe and an 18cm knife to the servo nearest her home.
The terrifying attacks by Amati on January 7, 2017 were recorded on the shop’s CCTV. She was convicted at trial and incarcerated in a series of female jails before entering the transition centre just over a year before her release.
Inmates at Bolwara are permitted to leave the facility wearing satellite trackers and walk to the Lennox Village shops 30 minutes away.
The woman who saw Amati at Lennox Village Woolies alerted women’s rights activist Angie Jones who campaigns to defend female-only spaces, including women’s jails and correctional facilities.
Ms Jones said on X that the woman was now ‘anxious about running into’ Amati in the community.
‘She’s quite distressed to find out it was actually Amati, because she was intimidated enough seeing a trans identifying male who was obviously a criminal at the shops, let alone one of his notoriety.
‘Imagine having to share a prison cell or transitional housing with him?’
Bolwara, which has five group houses on its premises at Emu Plains Correctional Centre 57km west of Sydney, ‘focuses on Aboriginal women and provides support for women who have histories of alcohol and other drugs use’.

The woman at Emu Plains Woolworths says she had a chilling encounter with trans axe attacker Evie Amati just weeks before the violent offender was released from Bolwara Women’s Transition Centre on January 6 (above)

Amati displayed her macabre tattoos while shopping at Woolies, including this amateur jail-inked ‘DEAD’ on the fingers of her left hand

The woman said she saw Amati at Lennox Village Woolworths (above)

Evie enters Enmore 7-Eleven around 2.20am with a 2kg axe, a 18cm knife in her back pocket. One of her victims, Sharon Hacker, is at the cash register, right, buying milk

Amati strolls casually towards the servo with her axe, ready to start her rampage
Daily Mail Australia learned from trade union contacts that prior to offending, Amati was considered by colleagues at the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU)in Sydney as having ‘a huge sense of entitlement’.
Amati grew up in a comfortable central Perth suburb, and was the child of West Australian trade union royalty. She topped the state in English and the highest achiever of WA’s top public school in English literature, ancient history and political science.
Aged 17, Amati moved to Sydney and via her WA trade union official parents scored a job as an organiser at the CPSU, where she was notably ‘arrogant and lazy’ at work.
Amati had a gender reassignment operation in Thailand in 2016. Post surgical pain and readjustment was a major plank in her mental health defence, which was rejected by a NSW District Court jury in 2018.
Two months before the attacks, Amati bought the axe with which she tried to kill senior project co-ordinator Ben Rimmer, social worker Sharon Hacker and itinerant British tourist, Shayne Redwood, and practised her swing on an old couch.
In 2019 as she fought back against the extension of her minimum sentence to eight years, Mr Rimmer said: ‘If I hadn’t turned my head at the last minute, she would have cut my head in half’.
It was a ‘bad vibe’ that he had also caught off Amati as she casually chatted to him at the Enmore servo cash register – he thought her axe was a stage prop – that saved his life.

Evie Amati (above)

Ben Rimmer – whose head Amati ‘nearly cut in two’
Mr Rimmer has an incomplete memory of the axe blow, but knows by watching the CCTV footage of the encounter that he had a sudden bad feeling about Amati.
‘My expression changes to kind of ‘here we go’. I turned away to pay because Sharon had moved off.
‘I remember being struck. But I turned at the last minute, otherwise she would have chopped through my head straight through the front of my face.
‘I think I must have seen it coming.’
He turned, and Amati missed inflicting death or brain damage and blindness by one or two millimetres.
‘She went there to kill. It’s only pure luck that I’m alive and she’s not remorseful. She’s intelligent … calculating,’ he said.
‘She had a knife in her back pocket. I think the knife could have done more harm than the axe … could have finished us off.
‘We haven’t heard the last of her.’
Amati is on parole until January 6, 2031 and until then is banned from consuming alcohol, illicit drugs, and from entering Sydney’s CBD or inner western suburbs.
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk