A man will spend at least 26 years behind bars for the cold case murder of an Adelaide shop assistant, after a disposable coffee cup linked him to the crime decades later.
Suzanne Poll, 36, was stabbed to death in a "ferocious manner" while she worked alone in a stationery shop in Salisbury, in Adelaide's northern suburbs, in April 1993.
It was Ms Poll's husband, Darryl, who found his wife's body in the store after she failed to return home from work.
She had been stabbed with a "significant amount of force" at least 40 times with a large knife.
In 2019, Matthew Donald Tilley, 49, was charged with Ms Poll's murder and extradited to Adelaide after detectives found he had a DNA match to blood splatters at the crime scene.
A technology breakthrough two years earlier found a family link to Tilley's brother — who today turned on the media outside court, smashing a reporter's microphone — and the blood splatters.
Detectives then travelled to Daylesford in western Victoria to obtain a DNA sample from Tilley, who tossed a disposable coffee cup into a bin on the street that was retrieved and brought back to South Australia for analysis.
The DNA showed Tilley was "100 billion times" likely to be the matching person than any other human, prosecutor Carmen Matteo told the jury during the trial.
A jury found Tilley guilty of Ms Poll's murder last December and he was sentenced to life in prison.
On Wednesday, Justice David Peek set a non-parole period of 26 years, finding that Tilley — who maintains he is innocent — intended to "kill Ms Poll rather than just inflict grievous bodily harm" on her.
"There is no suggestion, let alone evidence, that since committing that crime you have somehow forgotten about it or excluded it from your consciousness at some time during the last 29 years," he said.
"You have exhibited no contrition, you fled the scene and have been successful in evading police detection for many years.
"You continue even now to falsely deny your guilt and you decline to offer any explanation as to how the conduct came about.
"The killing of a female shop employee alone on duty at night followed by a successful escape and consequent non-detection inevitably led to great publicity in South Australia and concern and fear in the community.
"Not least in the minds of females performing duties similar to those being performed by Mrs Poll."
Prosecutors had told the jury Ms Poll was murdered in what was believed to be an intended robbery of the store, but Justice Peek did not find that to be the case.
At the time of the murder, Tilley was aged 20 and his mother lived just streets away from the crime scene.
The court heard he worked at a service station around that time, but records no longer existed to determine whether he was working the night Ms Poll was murdered.
For nearly 30 years, Ms Poll's husband and two children had struggled to understand who killed their "heart and soul" and why, telling the Supreme Court Tilley would forever be "a monster".
Tilley maintains his innocence and is appealing against his conviction.
Outside court, Ms Poll's sister Barbara Taylor said she was pleased with the sentence.
"Twenty-six years, that's how long we did without Suzy before he was caught," she said.
"... We can now move on and his family can go through 26 years of asking why," she said.
Ms Taylor described her sister as a caring person and a "wonderful mum, wife, sister".
