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The body in the boot killer breaks her silence

The body in the boot killer breaks her silence

Joe and Maria Korp.

Tania Herman, the woman serving at least nine years in jail for trying to kill Maria Korp, her lover Joe’s wife, has spoken for the first time from prison.

In an interview published exclusively in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Herman — who shares a unit with Herman Rockefeller killer Bernadette Denny — says she was “a bloody idiot” who was “brainwashed” by Joe.

True crime: Two wives, two murders, one killer

“I am still amazed myself and think how the hell could I ever have gotten in so deep?” she says. “My biggest regret is taking a mother away from her children because I would hate that to happen to me.”

Herman says she knew what she was doing was wrong when she waited in Maria’s garage that fateful morning, but Joe Korp’s words — “don’t let the bitch get out of the garage alive” — were ringing in her ears.

She says she was in “a set frame of mind, but as soon as I saw the blood, something snapped. I panicked. I put her in the boot of her car and just drove. As I was driving, I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong’.”

Herman is counting down the days until her release, and says she longs for privacy and “normal conversation”. Reports she punched Judy Moran were “totally inaccurate”. She has sporadic contact with her daughters, and saw the eldest for the first time only recently.

True crime: I’m haunted by my daughter’s murder

“I’ve done his crime and now I’m doing his time. The past is the past and I can’t undo it — I just have to move on.”

Read more of this story in the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.

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