When clearing Brittany's room after she left, Beth saw something moving in a rubbish bag that had sat there about two months. Inside was the very old mincemeat Brittany had claimed to throw out; it had been in the room for roughly four months and was crawling with maggots.

The mince was about a month and a half out of date and had turned brown. Brittany first put it on the floor next to the bin despite three cats in the house, then took it into her room, and later said she had walked to the shops and put it in a bin there.

Beth had driven Brittany to hospital, patched a wound on her back and massaged her. Her girlfriend told her Brittany was flirting, and Beth recalls Brittany sitting on her bed touching her leg, then thanking Beth in front of her girlfriend for massaging her the other night.

Besides Beth, Brittany tried to hit on Beth's best friend's wife and on one member of another couple who moved in downstairs. That made three housemates she was pursuing, and with six people living there, Beth says it became essentially six of them against Brittany.

The stench was so bad they wore masks with essential oils. Vomit had dried into the carpet, and a dresser held three drawers full of about 50 used wet cat food packets filled with meat juice, plus bags of clothes, rubbish and KFC leftovers in the wardrobe.

When Beth moved in, all the other housemates were moving out except Brittany, and Beth says it did not register as a red flag though it definitely should have. Brittany had told her the previous housemates were mean to her, but Beth concluded Brittany was the mean one.

One host says the Byron Shire gives households mini bins collected once a fortnight to discourage waste, which she likes in theory but says creates maggots. They needed a special sticker for weekly pickup, and in rainforest conditions snakes and spiders thrive in the bins.

Brittany left with little notice, leaving much of her stuff around the house. She dumped her furniture, bedding and bed on the nature strip in midwinter rain and never collected it; the council eventually picked up the mattress for free.