'In the hospital or the cemetery?' asked the hitman when he met the slim and strikingly beautiful Swedish woman outside the Sydney Town Hall last year.

'Cemetery,' came the chilling reply.

What Lindstrom didn't realise was that the apparent assassin was, in fact, an undercover policeman. The game was up.

Faced with the prospect of spending much of the rest of her life behind bars, the 23-year-old opted to turn against her boyfriend and supply vital evidence to investigators. But it is a decision fraught with danger.

The death threats are now flying in her direction and the grim anonymity of witness protection beckons.

As Justice Stephen Rothman of the New South Wales Supreme Court noted last week, Lindstrom was well aware her former fiance was 'likely to organise, or seek to organise, her murder'.

'The rest of her life will be spent looking over her shoulder,' he said.

Sitting shocked and pale-faced in the courtroom were Lindstrom's parents, Hans and Anita, struggling to comprehend how their young daughter had become so immersed in Australia's criminal underworld.

Lindstrom was a child of privilege, having grown up in the wealthy Stockholm suburb of Sollentuna, but her background was otherwise unremarkable.

Her father was a successful businessman, her mother promoted a large dairy company and their daughter developed a love for horses and partying at Stockholm's best clubs.

'Life seemed very easy,' one school pal told The Sydney Morning Herald. 'She was a bit naive but always happy and polite.'

Her life-changing decision was made in 2003, when, at the age of 19, Lindstrom left Sweden for an extended overseas holiday with her long-time boyfriend. By the end of the year, the couple had split and the striking blonde had settled in Sydney.

The new and older man in her life was Spaliviero, an outgoing and confident property developer and prestige car dealer who police also suspected was a major manufacturer of illegal drugs.

'It was different, exciting,' Lindstrom later told a psychologist of their relationship. 'He made me feel important and special. He fascinated me, he knew so much about everything and he was manly. I felt really safe with him.'

She soon moved into his luxury harbourside apartment and drove around in the Porsche he had given her.

Lindstrom's face also became well known at the city's most exclusive parties and events, and on several occasions featured in the society pages of metropolitan newspapers. In one she was snapped alongside Snoop Dogg, the American rapper.

She also became friends with some of Sydney's best-known personalities, including playboy hotelier Justin Hemmes, who gave her a hostessing job at his upmarket restaurants and bars, and wrote a character reference after her arrest.

'She's really friendly,' an Australian pal told one reporter. 'She's quite worldly in the sense of being a people person. Like any girl, she loved shopping, she loved spending time on the harbour, and parties, races, that kind of stuff.'

Childhood friend Elin Petterson was unsurprised that Lindstrom revelled in the high life Down Under.

The ambitious teenager has always wanted to be part of the in-crowd and own the best designer clothes.

'She wanted to hang out with rich people and I wasn't like that,' Ms Petterson told Sydney's Daily Telegraph. 'I felt it was not a true friendship that she had with those people. It was fake.

'She even agreed once that she knew this. She told me: 'they're not real friends ... they just like me because I have money and I'm pretty'. She always wanted to have that rich life.'

Spaliviero, 43, was the provider of that heady lifestyle, and a diamond ring on Lindstrom's engagement finger confirmed their plans to marry. But police had long been suspicious about the source of his income. In late 2006, he was charged and jailed for his role in a multimillion-dollar amphetamine racket.

It was from inside Sydney's Silverwater jail that Spaliviero is alleged to have attempted to arrange hits on two key witnesses in the upcoming trial. One fellow prisoner testified that Spaliviero had asked if he could engage a reputed hitman known as Mad Mick.

But the inmate instead went to his solicitor, and soon police were informed and monitoring every move of Spaliviero's associates.

It wasn't long before Lindstrom agreed to act as the go-between in organising the hits.

During two meetings with the would-be killer - an undercover drugs squad officer - she handed over details of the intended victims' identities and photos of them, in which they were circled.

She confirmed she would be handing over the money - A$100,000 (HK$724,000) for each murder.

Her fiance, she said, wanted the deaths to look 'like a robbery gone wrong'.

For several weeks after her arrest, Lindstrom remained loyal. At a failed bail application hearing in June, she said they still intended to marry. But the next month brought a dramatic change of heart.

Lindstrom agreed to plead guilty to one charge of soliciting murder, while four other charges were dropped. In exchange she would testify against Spaliviero, no longer her fiance, and his associates.

The picture painted in court last week was that of a naive and previously law-abiding woman who had been 'far too loving and trusting' of others. The court heard how Lindstrom had suffered from anorexia nervosa since one of her closest friends had died at just 14.

A psychological report said her condition made her highly vulnerable to people in positions of power, and she had 'idealised' and 'romanticised' the relationship with Spaliviero, even after finding out about his criminal background.

The court was also told she had been taking prescription drugs known to impact people's ability to make 'rational judgments and decisions'.

Justice Rothman said that Spaliviero had callously manipulated the 'misplaced loyalty and devotion' of his fiancee, whom he described as 'emaciated, chronologically young and emotionally immature.'

'Ms Lindstrom did not plan the crime,' he said. 'Nor did she instigate it. Ms Lindstrom was a cog in the criminal machine, usually a reluctant - but not wholly unwilling - participant.'

The judge handed down a heavily reduced sentence which means she could be released from prison as early as May next year.

'I totally regret my actions,' she told the court. 'I am sorry for the people who have suffered for it. I wish I could get a second chance in life ... mostly, I wish I could turn back time.'

Lindstrom says she now has nightmares about Spaliviero's threats on her life and knows she is unlikely to ever be free of them. Now on the other side of the law, she may be asked to testify in up to six trials, backing up the information that has transformed cases prosecutors would otherwise have considered heavily circumstantial.

Justice Rothman described her assistance to police as 'rare, exceptional and perhaps unique, with consequences on Lindstrom which are extreme'.

For that reason she is now being kept in solitary confinement in an unnamed men's prison.

'Were this regime imposed for reasons other than her own safety, it would amount possibly to a form of torture,' said the judge.

The other inmates are said to know she is there, calling out to her each day. Justice Rothman accepted Lindstrom was now justifiably paranoid and would spend the rest of her life 'looking over her shoulder'.