My mother (61f) keeps threatening my sister’s (41f) life… how can I (33f) help her leave this toxic situation?

This is a long one, please read it all because I am struggling to work out what I can do with this clusterfuck of toxicity.

For context, I left home over a decade ago to live my own life, moved to another continent and never went back. I’m doing okay for myself, but I’m not wealthy. Part of this included going no contact with my mother several years ago. My siblings (41f and 38m), on the other hand, still live at home and are not financially independent. My family is not well off and relies mostly on a couple of rental properties as income to support all three (mom and siblings… father passed away a few years ago, he had been the breadwinner all my childhood). I occasionally help out with money and gifts (new clothes, electronics, etc) and have done so consistently over the years even after going no contact.

The main reason I went no contact is because my mother has been psychologically abusive my whole life. She has never missed an opportunity to denigrate, insult, belittle, shame and otherwise tear down her children. Anything can trigger her, not smiling back in the way she wants you to smile, wearing the wrong colour clothes, not answering her fast enough, etc. Yet, she just as quickly flips around to acting normal, trying to hug you or pretend she didn’t just crush your soul and if you don’t play along as a happy dutiful child you will quickly suffer even more abuse. The disproportionate amount of this abuse has landed on my older sister whom she always says “ruined her life”. I’ve been called everything from stupid to a worthless waste of space since I was a child. She once told me during a party that she wished I wasn’t her daughter because I’m an ugly stain that shouldn’t be seen in public (I was 12). Despite my excellent grades, great sociability, cooking, cleaning and being obedient I was still just a waste of oxygen and a burden and never as good as other people’s children. I spent my youth walking on eggshells, scared to death to trigger an outburst of insults and be reminded that I was fed and sheltered so I should be grateful because if I stepped out of line I would be put out onto the street. Last time I was sick as a teenager, I told my mother I felt unwell and her response was “good, I hope it gets worse. if you die you’ll learn to not leave the house and wander around like a cheap, stupid w***e” (I had spent the afternoon at a friend’s house). To this day these memories bring me to tears and have terrified me of even having my own children in case even the tiniest percentage of me is like her.

My sister got it worse for sure. My mother has this insane idea of my sister as competition or something. She would, for example, tell her to cook dinner and then walk into the kitchen and ask her if she thought she was better than her or the woman of the house, then remind her she’s nothing and then walk out. My brother, her favourite, while also a target of insults for his general poor hygiene and lack of ambition has never ever received the amount of ill will that my sister and I have. He is a messed up person in his own right (if I was told he’s a serial killer I wouldn’t be surprised). My father, while he was alive, wasn’t the greatest guy. He was extremely controlling and a narcissist, but he never terrified me as my mother did. You could actually go to him with a problem, and he rarely said anything soul withering to your face (he’d save that for behind your back haha). Nevertheless, his controlling ways, coupled with a lifetime poor decisions left nothing behind but debt and codependant people when he died.

I was more strongwilled than both my siblings and took the first opportunity to escape this… my risks panned out and all these years later I’m independent and free, completely unafraid of that woman. The same cannot be said of my siblings… their lives kind of stalled. They live at home and don’t have jobs (my sister has been looking for years, but unemployment is a huge problem in my home country). So effectively they are still in the same emotional wasteland they grew up in without the financial means to leave.

Over the past years my sister has told me that my mother’s abuse has escalated to the point that every so often she literally threatens her life. Just today my sister called me in tears, telling me my mother said that she would “cut her into pieces and dump her body” and that my brother would help. Why? She didn’t do something fast enough so my mother said she was testing her and looking for a fight. This is not the first time this has happened. It was so disturbing that I called my brother to ask him why such escalations are happening, if our mother was having some sort of mental heath issue that had made her prone to fits of violence and if he could intervene to protect our sister (he is mom’s favourite after all). He told me “not my problem, let her go to the police if she wants. I don’t care.” Then he hung up on me.

I’m so terrified for my older sister. I called her and begged her to go stay with a friend, pack her shit and never go back to that house. If I lived on the same continent I would take her in without hesitation. But I’m half way across the world. She doesn’t have a job or any money of her own and so she feels tied to the family home, like she has no choice but to go back until she gets a job or something. I certainly don’t have enough money to support an adult (rent, utilities, food, etc), and I don’t know what I can do to convince her to find a way, any way to leave this insanely toxic environment. How can I help her? What can I do? I feel so powerless and scared for her.

**TL;DR: my abusive mother has been threatening my sister’s life, I live too far away to take her in and don’t know what I can do to help or convince her to leave before these threats turn real because she’s not financially independent.**