A Canberra woman accused of trying to kill her mother with a knife told police the elderly woman had confessed to stabbing herself, a court has heard.
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When officers interviewed the accused Mary Ivanisevic, 45, later that afternoon on December 6, 2015, she said her mother had been feeling suicidal.
"Because mum was saying, you know, 'Nobody loves me. Everyone hates me but you. Only you're here with me, Mary, caring for me'," Ms Ivanisevic said.
In the police interview, which was played to the ACT Supreme Court at her trial on Friday, she described how she looked after her mother, then aged 74, who used an oxygen machine to help her breathe.
They had slept on the same couch the night before, Ms Ivanisevic said, and she fixed her mum's breakfast and dressed her before leaving the house to get a dose of methadone and go to the Curtin shops.
Ms Ivanisevic said she went on a third outing, to fill up her car with petrol. She had sped to the petrol station and back because she didn't want to leave her alone.
Prosecutors will contend Ms Ivanisevic's trip to the petrol station was an effort to capture her movements on surveillance video and construct an alibi.
Ms Ivanisevic denies stabbing her mother.
She said when she returned, her mother wasn't where she had left her on the balcony. She had run into the loungeroom and found her on the floor.
Ms Ivanisevic told police that she got on her knees and begged her mother to tell her what had happened.
"... and I looked and there's a f---ing knife, the biggest one that we've got in the house, sitting on the carpet right next to the wall unit and there's blood all over it.
"I picked it up out of shock, I picked it up and I went 'Oh God, mum, what the f--- have you done?'.
"And she's saying to me in Croatian, 'Marijana, Marijana, I haven't got a life anyway, you know it's better for me to die. I killed myself, you know, so that you don't have any more problems with me, I'm too much of a burden on you guys'.
"'I killed myself, I stabbed myself Mary'."
She described how she tried to figure out where her mother had been stabbed and the wound's depth.
"Well maybe it's gone all the way. I don't know because the whole knife was f---ing full of blood. Right, right it had blood all over it ... blood was as long as the knife was, the silver bit," she told police.
She said she pulled out her phone and started recording her mother. Prosecutors will try to show this was an attempt to record a false confession.
"I'm taping my mum I'm like, mumma, tell me who did this to you? Did Ujo come? Was my uncle here - my brother here?" she told police.
"And she can't talk. She's not talking."
Ms Ivanisevic explained to police why even though a neighbour had come round and claimed she'd heard the woman yell 'die, die', she hadn't kicked her out.
"I felt like telling her to get the f--- out of my house, but I didn't because I needed help, right.
"I don't care if she disrespected me."
A police officer told the court on Friday that in the hours after the elderly woman was stabbed Ms Ivanisevic had, "unsolicited", handed him a docket.
"I've got a receipt showing I was at Coles Express," the officer said were her exact words that afternoon.
The officer also agreed, under questioning from defence barrister Kylie Weston-Scheuber, that he overheard the accused on the phone telling her sister their mother had stabbed herself and that "I picked up the knife and now it looks f---ed."
The trial continues before Justice Michael Elkaim.
