AS Aggie Di Mauro was deep in sleep, never in her worst nightmares could she have imagined the horror that was unfolding in her daughter’s room next door.
Celeste Manno, 23, had been stabbed 23 times in her sleep by her colleague turned stalker Luay Sako, 35, who had broken through her bedroom window, before making a swift exit just two and a half minutes later.
“There was nothing not to love about Celeste,” Aggie recalled, speaking to 60 Minutes Australia.
“She was so beautiful. Well, I think so. I spent 23 years letting her know how blessed I was.”
Celeste and Sako worked together for just a few months at a Melbourne call centre job – but it was long enough for him to become obsessed with her, something which she didn’t reciprocate.
“Never ever did it occur to me that this beast would be capable of something like this,” Aggie explained.
In June 2019, just days after Sako was fired, he reached out to Celeste on Instagram, who was kind to him after his sacking, and so his fixation began.
What started out as one message quickly turned into several more.
“Some of them almost were like poetry and there’s just heaps of these messages,” recalled Aggie.
“And so I said, ‘Oh my god!’ They’re all about how crazy in love he is with her.
“He can’t eat, sleep, he can’t function, he can’t even look for work.”
Desperate to put an end to the messages, Celeste asked Sako to stop contacting her and made it known it was making her feel “very uncomfortable,” but her words fell on deaf ears.
Despite her efforts to block him on social media, Sako continued to make new Instagram accounts so he could bombard her with relentless messages.
Celeste’s boyfriend Chris Ridsdale recalled: “Sometimes it was within a matter of minutes.
“She blocked an account, closed her phone, reopened it again half an hour later and there was a new message request from a new random username and it had come from him.
“He just wouldn’t give up. It was painful to watch Celeste go through it, the way she stressed over it.”
It was painful to watch Celeste go through it, the way she stressed over it. The way she lost sleep. The way she felt uncomfortable about the situation…that was the hardest part.
Chris Ridsdale,
“The way she lost sleep. The way she felt uncomfortable about the situation… that was the hardest part.”
While Celeste at first hoped Sako would soon get “bored,” after six long months of harassment, she and her mum reported him to the police, but their case was dismissed.
“[We were told], ‘he hasn’t committed a crime. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Shortly after, Sako was spotted parked outside her work, found out where she lived and over a 12-month period, bombarded her with increasingly “vulgar” messages.
After opening up to her mum about the continued harassment, they both went to the police again and this time, was served a Personal Safety Intervention Order, which was supposed to stop him from contacting Celeste.
But it didn’t stop Aggie’s worries – nor did it stop Sako from contacting her daughter.
“I said to Celeste, ‘this is just a piece of paper, sweetie. Let’s remember that,’” she recalled.
And she was right, because just a month later, Celeste received a three-page letter from Sako on Instagram, where he pleaded with her to withdraw the order and told her she was ruining his life.
The police charged Sako for breaching the intervention order and Aggie and Celeste thought the ordeal was finally over.
“Everything stops,” Aggie explained. “He disappears and I said ‘he got scared. Thank God please learned his lesson now.’
“We literally thought it was over.”
But in reality, Sako was planning something much more sinister, and had gone to buy a weapon – a large kitchen knife.
Chris, who Celeste had posted a photo with just hours earlier, recalled: “He’d figured out not only where she was by following her car, through stalking her through her Instagram photos he’d figured out exactly which house was hers and which room within the house was hers as well.”
It was the early hours of November 16, 2020, and while Celeste and Aggie were asleep, Sako jumped the fence to get into the garden, broke through Celeste’s bedroom window of her Melbourne home with a hammer, and proceeded to stab her 23 times as she slept.
After two minutes and 39 seconds, he made his escape – that’s when Aggie woke up.
Recalling the moment she found her daughter’s lifeless body, the heartbroken mum recalled: “It was like something I’d just never heard.
“It was like a million pieces of glass just crashing and I remember I just ran out of bed and I’m just screaming her name down the hallway going, ‘Celeste sweetie, what happened?’
“And I realise that I’m running all over glass and I’m seeing blood. I still don’t get it. I pull her out of bed and she’s not helping me at all.”
It was only after paramedics arrived and a knife was found that the area was taped off as a crime scene and Aggie realised what had happened – her daughter had been killed by her stalker.
“She was asleep in her bed in our home and he did this under my watch,” Aggie said.
“That’s something I have to live with.”
Aggie later told the court: “I desperately tried bringing my baby back.
“I slept through the last two minutes and 39 seconds of my daughter’s life. I was too late to protect her.”
Knife crime in numbers
Police in England and Wales recorded around 54,587 knife crime offences in 2024 according to The Standard.
The House of Commons Research Briefings revealed that in the year ending March 2024, there were 262 homicides involving a sharp instrument in England and Wales.
Knife-related robberies (where a knife is used in a robbery) increased from 22,189 in 2023 to 23,305 in 2024. Possession-related offences (e.g., carrying a knife) were recorded at 28,150 in 2024, higher than the pre-pandemic level.
In the London area, police recorded approximately 16,344 knife-or-sharp-instrument offences in 2024/25, making it the area with the highest volume of such incidents in the UK, Statista said.
Over the last decade, knife crime as a whole in England and Wales has risen substantially compared with a decade ago — analysis notes an 87% increase over that period, based on persistent yearly data.
Sako avoided a life sentence and was given 36 years in prison, and under the terms of his sentence, will be eligible for parole in 2050.
Speaking in a press conference, Aggie raged: “It’s outrageous, absolutely unbelievable that the court decided to grant him mercy, even though he has shown Celeste none.”
Now, Aggie, who has since been fighting for justice and change, carries a golden heart filled with her daughter’s ashes to help her feel close to her.
“All of it has been shocking and it’s just wrong,” said Aggie. “There is nothing that is about the victim.”
Chris added: “The fact that somebody can be taken out of this world so callously is just so unbelievably unfair.”
