Cleaner 'blacked out' and 'awoke to blood'

All a Sydney cleaner remembers of inflicting fatal wounds on her 92-year-old client is waking up with a knife surrounded “by blood,” she has told her murder trial.

Hanny Papanicolaou, 38, has given evidence for the second day in the NSW Supreme Court saying she can't remember killing Marjorie Welsh in her Ashbury home on January 2, 2019.

That morning she says she felt “depressed and panicked”, and tried to call her best friend many times, but she never picked up.

She then allegedly blacked out before jumping Ms Welsh's back fence, before beating her with her walking sticks, throwing heavy crockery down upon her and repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife.

Papanicolaou denies murdering her client of one year, and instead has pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the basis of substantial impairment due to abnormality of the mind.

“I see Marj … the sound of the machine makes me open my eyes and get up, I don't know what I'm doing, just looking in front of Marj in front of the fridge with a lot of blood,” she said.

“The blood is in my hands, I was holding the knife … I just grab the cloth and I just run.”

Ms Welsh died six weeks later in hospital, but not before she gave two police interviews in which she describes “Hanny the housekeeper” savagely beating her before sounding her medical alarm.

Prosecutor Christopher Taylor in cross-examination asked why Papanicolaou left her in a pool of blood, ceramics and broken cane with a stabbed abdomen and chest, never calling for help.

“I don't know,” she responded.

Mr Taylor said after the attack she then entered two bedrooms leaving a bloodied trail into a cupboard, in a frantic attempt to find cash.

“I don't remember,” she said.

Earlier that morning the regular gambler lost $430 from poker machines in under an hour and was left with just $11 in her bank account, the jury has been told.

Mr Taylor said the house cleaner jumped the back fence to avoid detection, and when confronted by Ms Welsh attempted to make it appear like a random home invasion.

After the alarm sounded Papanicolaou said all she could think about was her baby, but the Crown asked why she then switched the power off in the house.

Papanicolaou can only recall then fleeing with the knife she had wrapped in a white cloth that she later discarded in a bin.

The crown case is Papanicolaou found out Ms Welsh had received $8 million from a property sale, and thought she would be away on holiday until the end of January.

Earlier Papanicolaou told the jury she had felt increasingly isolated in an unhappy marriage, was deeply depressed and escaped her problems through gambling.

The trial continues.