A woman accused of murdering a man whose body was found chained inside a burning car has instead pleaded guilty to being an accessory.
Lauren Mae Batcheldor, 34, was on Monday facing a retrial over the January 2010 kidnapping and murder of Matthew Digby, after her conviction was set aside on appeal last year.
But the murder charge was dismissed at the NSW Supreme Court, and she instead pleaded guilty to taking and detaining a person in company and being an accessory after the fact.
It comes more than five years after firefighters were called to a track in Mount Murray, southwest of Wollongong, on January 25, 2010, following reports a station wagon was ablaze.
Once the fire was extinguished, Mr Digby's unrecognisable body was found chained to the front passenger seat of the car. He also had a chain around his neck.
Batcheldor and her friend Richard James Walsh were later convicted of his kidnapping and murder.
She was sentenced to at least 18 years while Walsh was given a minimum of 21.
During their trial the court heard Mr Digby was killed after Batcheldor mistakenly believed he had been involved in a burglary at her house and stolen a gold necklace valued at around $2000.
Two days before Mr Digby's body was found, Batcheldor and Walsh kidnapped him in a bid to get more information about the burglary.
Walsh drove Mr Digby into his garage in Dapto and tied him up.
According to facts tendered to court on Monday, Batcheldor and Walsh smoked `ice' before he went into the garage to "speak to Matt and try and find out what he knows".
Batcheldor left the house.
It was only when she returned later that she discovered Mr Digby had been killed.
She later organised for a backpack with Walsh's clothes in it to be burnt.
In sentencing her in 2012, Justice Geoffrey Bellew said Batcheldor could have told police about the burglary and used a "conventional, lawful and non-violent avenue of redress".
"That she chose not to take that course, and resorted instead to detaining the deceased in the manner I have described, renders the specially aggravated kidnapping offence a serious one," he found.
"The end result serves as a stark reminder what can occur when people inappropriately choose to take the law into their own hands."
Batcheldor is set to face Justice Bellew again for a sentence hearing on September 24.
