Murder suspect confessed to Tinder match hours after killing ex-girlfriend

Daniel Billings made a phone call at 2:02 in the morning on April 22, 2024, two hours after he had stabbed his ex-girlfriend Molly Ticehurst fifteen times in her bedroom. The woman on the other end of the line was someone he had matched with on Tinder in early 2022. "I'm sorry I murdered her," he told her. He was calling from a friend's property, still wearing bloodied clothes, having fled the scene moments after the killing. The friend would soon contact police.

Ticehurst, twenty-eight years old, had been asleep in her Forbes home when Billings broke in just before midnight on April 21. He attacked her with a knife in what the court would later describe as a frenzied assault. Billings, thirty-one and a former mine worker, has since pleaded guilty to the murder. During that early-morning phone call to the Tinder match, he offered a fragment of explanation: "In an ideal world, what I wanted to do was go over there and talk to her, but she started screaming and I did what I did."

The sequence of events that led to the killing began weeks earlier. Molly had made allegations against Billings—repeated rape and domestic violence. A local court registrar released him on bail just fourteen days before the murder, despite these charges. Once he learned of the rape allegations, Billings denied them completely and became consumed with what the court described as a twisted obsession with clearing his name. He recorded ninety minutes of video footage before and after the killing, material that would later be shown during his sentencing hearing. In these recordings, he repeatedly insisted he had been wrongly accused, even as Ticehurst lay dead in her pajamas nearby. "I can't believe I just did that," he said in one video made immediately after the stabbing. In another, he raised a bloodied hand to his face as he drove away, appearing to retch. "I don't know why she accused me of rape, I don't know what her game plan was."

The videos suggested something darker still. Forensic psychiatrist Olav Nielssen, hired by the defence, told the court that many of the recordings could be read as "goodbye videos"—that Billings was suffering from significant depression and may have intended to take his own life after killing Molly. But the crown's expert, Professor David Greenberg, offered a different interpretation. He argued that Billings's suicide threats should be understood in the context of eighteen months of domestic abuse he had inflicted on Ticehurst. "Several times he threatens the victim and her family," Greenberg testified. "The acts of domestic violence have the context of these suicide threats."

The sexual assault charges against Billings were ultimately dropped when he pleaded guilty to murder in November 2025, after eighteen months of legal negotiations. During the sentencing hearing in Orange, the court heard victim impact statements from Molly's family. Her father, Tony Ticehurst, spoke to the courtroom: "When she died, part of me died with her." Billings sat in an elevated wooden dock throughout the proceedings, often staring at the floor, occasionally shaking his head. Justice Natalie Adams indicated she would deliver her sentence later in September, bringing the case toward its legal conclusion—though for Molly's family, the loss remains absolute and irreversible.