“She was as good as anyone.”

These were the words Malcolm Naden used to explain why he had killed his cousin Lateesha Nolan.

After seven years on the run, Naden told NSW police there was “no real reason” why he strangled the 24-year-old, cut up her body and then buried it at the edge of a river.

“If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else,” he wrote in a series of responses to police.

“I can’t answer why I did what I did ... I must leave the whys up to a therapist.”

Naden, 39, has pleaded guilty to the 2005 murders of Ms Nolan and Kristy Scholes, both 24, as well as a raft of other charges, including the indecent assault of a 12-year-old girl.

In a statement of facts tendered to the NSW Supreme Court during his sentence hearing on Thursday, the details of their deaths were revealed for the first time.

On January 4, 2005, Naden had a “chance meeting” with his cousin Ms Nolan at their grandparents’ house who then offered him a lift, the facts state.

But things turned nasty when Ms Nolan brought up the allegations of indecent assault against him.

Enraged, he strangled her and then drove to Butlers Falls Reserve outside Dubbo, where he dug a hole beside the Macquarie River and dismembered her body, which has never been found.

Then, five months later in June, Naden strangled Ms Scholes in his grandparents’ bathroom.

He took her body into his bedroom and had sexual intercourse with it before fleeing the house.

During the court proceedings, Naden was described as contradictory and an “enigma”.

At one stage Naden told police that at the time of Ms Nolan’s murder he was “severely depressed” and described the murder as a “tragedy”.

But when questioned by forensic psychiatrist David Greenberg, Naden said he killed because “he can” and because he was “not a sheep”.

Professor Greenberg said Naden had claimed to have murdered three other people and described himself as a “serial killer”.

But after he was queried again months later, Naden laughed and said he’d lied.

Prof Greenberg said Naden was at “high risk” of reoffending.

While he was not a psychopath, he displayed “psychopathic tendencies”, he said.

“(He) reports that he started having fantasies of killing since he was 12 years old ... He states that he will kill again and that his killing days are not over.”

The former abattoir worker went on the run in 2005 – days after Ms Scholes’ body was discovered in his grandparents’ house at Dubbo in NSW’s central west.

The court heard Naden appeared “cheerful” after his arrest, but later displayed signs of depression, threatening harm to himself and others.

Naden’s barrister Mark Ierace  said that shortly after his arrest, Naden told prison psychologists he wished he could cry and he was glad when the police dog bit him during his capture because he felt “some pain”.

The court heard Naden had repeatedly expressed that he wanted life in jail.

The sentencing hearing before Justice Derek Price has been adjourned until next week.