Australia 1993 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

It’s a disturbing cold case that has frustrated police for two decades. Mother of two, Suzanne Paul was working inside a Ssbury news agency when she was stabbed to death in a suspected robbery gone wrong. In 2019, two detectives from the South Australian major crime squad flew across a state border and drove to a country town in Victoria.

 They sat in a car and watched a man they had never met buy a cup of coffee. They did not approach him. They did not speak to him. They had been on him for days by then, and they were not there for the coffee. They were waiting to see what he did with the cup. 26 years earlier, a 36-year-old woman was stabbed to death in an Adelaide stationary shop while she counted the day’s takings.

 She was hit at least 18 times. [music] Her husband found her. The man who did it had bled at the scene, and that blood matched nobody. What put those detectives in that car was not his DNA. It was his brothers. This is how they finally nicked the monster. Salsbury sits on the northern edge of Adelaide on the flat ground between the city and the market gardens.

 On Thursday the 29th of April 1993, the Parabanks Shopping Center was open late. Late night shopping brought people onto John Street in the evening past the shopfronts on the strip beside the center. And one of those shopfronts was a Sans and McDougall stationary shop. Suzanne Pole was working there alone.

 That was normal and nothing about it would have struck anybody as a risk. At about 9:00 closing time, she was at the register counting the day’s takings when a man came into the shop. Counting the till is the last thing anybody does in a shop. It means the doors are about to be locked, the lights are about to go off, and the person doing it is thinking about the drive home.

 Suzanne Paul had a husband and two kids waiting about 10 minutes away. What happened after that took very little time. He attacked her at the front of the store and she ran for the back room behind the counter away from the door and away from the street. There was no other way out. The only exit from that shop was the one the man had come in through and he was between her and it.

 He caught her in the store room and stabbed her there. She was struck at least 18 separate times. Some of the wounds went right through her body. The prosecutor who put the case to a jury 28 years later used one word for it. Ferocious. A robbery that goes wrong is one or two blows and a man running. 18 is not a man trying to get out of a shop. 18 is a man who stayed.

 Suzanne Paul was 36 years old. She was married to Daryl who was 31 and they had two children. A daughter Melissa, a son Adam who was six. Her sister described her later as generous and caring. What comes through more strongly in the record is the ordinariness of her life. A woman in her 30s with two kids at home working the counter of a stationary shop on a suburban high street.

 Pens, folders, printer cartridges sold to the schools and small businesses of the northern suburbs. She closed up on her own. Plenty [clears throat] of people did and still do. Suzanne’s sisters Barbara Taylor and Janice Schultz would both eventually stand up in a courtroom and read statements about her. Barbara put the whole thing in one line talking about Daryl.

 He was a 31-year-old happily married man with two small children. She said he didn’t have a care in the world. Then she told him what he had done with it. On the 29th of April, 1993, you chose to take that away from him. Daryl Pole waited at home for his wife. She didn’t come back. She didn’t ring. At some point, the waiting turned into something else.

 And he got in the car and drove to John Street. He went into the shop through the front. He found her in the back room. There’s no version of that moment that gets easier with time. A man drives to his wife’s work at night because she has not come home, walks into a shop he has probably been in a hundred times and finds her on the floor of the storeroom.

 Almost 29 years later, his sister-in-law would tell a court that it took everything he had to sit through the evidence at the trial and that Daryl was a broken man. She said the struggle over the years had been devastating to watch. She asked the man in the dock a question that she said she’d never worked out how to answer herself.

 How do you explain to your children that mommy is not coming back? Melissa was old enough to remember her mother. Adam was six. Everything he knows about her, somebody had to tell him. Something happened in that shop that saved the case decades before anybody could use it. The attack was so violent that the man doing it cut himself in a struggle involving a knife and that many blows.

 The blade moves, hands slip, and the person holding it opens his own skin. He bled at the scene. That meant there was blood in that shop that didn’t belong to Suzanne Pole. It was mixed in with hers on the floor and on the things in the store. and separating the two was the single most important piece of work anybody did on this case.

 South Australia police collected it and the care taken over that one decision in 1993 is the only reason there was ever a case. In 1993, DNA profiling was new, but it existed and it worked. A male profile was extracted from that blood and entered into the system. From that night, police had the killer. Not his name, not his face, not his address, his code.

 A string of markers that belonged to exactly one man on Earth sitting in a laboratory in Adelaide waiting for that man to do something that would put him in the same system. He never did. No photograph, no description anybody could use, no fingerprint that matched, no witness, no motive, no name. In 1993, a DNA profile was only ever as good as the list it could be compared against.

 And that list was short. A DNA database is not a search of the population. It is a search of the people who have already been caught. Profiles go in when somebody is convicted of a qualifying offense or arrested on certain charges. If the man from the shop had ever been through that process anywhere in Australia, the match would have come up.

Every time the national database grew, the cold case profiles were run against it again. Every time the answer for Suzanne Paul’s file was the same. Nothing. That’s the part of forensic science that television never explains properly. DNA does not identify people. It matches samples.

 If a crime scene sample hasn’t got a counterpart in a database, the most powerful evidence in the file is a locked door with no key cut for it. Nothing. He’d never been arrested [music] for anything that took a sample. For 26 years, the most complete piece of evidence in the case pointed at a man who, as far as any database in the country was concerned, didn’t exist.

There is an uncomfortable implication in that, and it applies to every case like this one. A DNA database is extremely good at catching people who have offended before. It’s close to useless against somebody whose first serious crime is also his only one. Subscribe so you don’t miss how a coffee cup in Victoria finally closed a murder in Adelaide.

Meanwhile, the file got thicker. Detectives canvased John Street and the blocks around it. They spoke to people who were in the area that evening, checked names, verified alibis, and took DNA from men who came up in the inquiry. None of it matched. Every man they cleared was a man they could cross off and there was no satisfaction in any of it because the list they were working from was never going to contain him.

 The whole exercise was a search of the wrong population and there was no motive to work backwards from. Suzanne hadn’t been threatened. There was no ex, no dispute, no history with anybody. The crown’s case when it finally got to court was that he had gone in there to rob the till. He was in the file the entire time.

 Every detective who picked it up was holding him. They could describe him down to the molecule and they [music] could not put a name to him because the only way to name a profile is to find its owner somewhere else. And he had never been anywhere else. A man walked into a shop at closing time, killed the woman behind the counter, and walked out into 26 years of other people’s lives.

In 2015, South Australia police put a name and a structure on something that most forces do quietly and slowly. Operation Persist was a cold case campaign run by the major crime investigation branch. At the point it was announced, major crime was carrying 111 unsolved cases relating to 124 people. The tactics are worth listing because they say something about how these cases actually break.

 Full reviews of old files, rewards both for convictions and for the recovery of remains. A deliberate media campaign circulating information about unsolved matters inside prison populations, identifying new forensic opportunities in old evidence, and the back capture of DNA, which means going and taking samples from people who should already have been on the database and weren’t.

None of those are laboratory tricks. They are administrative. They are the state going back over its own paperwork and finding the gaps it left. That’s the unglamorous truth about most cold case breaks. The evidence was already there. Somebody had to be paid to go and look at it again with a budget, a mandate, and a list.

 That last one is worth sitting with. Back capture exists because there are people walking around who were convicted of qualifying offenses and never had a sample taken through error or oversight or a gap in the paperwork of an earlier era. Every one of those is a potential match that the system simply never made. Suzanne Paul’s file was one of the ones that got pulled.

 It had been sitting in that building since before some of the detectives now reading it had joined the force. and the one thing it still had going for it was a vial of somebody else’s blood. In late 2017, scientists at Forensic Science South Australia ran the profile from the shop floor a different way. An ordinary database search asks a single question.

 Is this exact person in here? It’s a yes or a no. And for 24 years, the answer was no. A familial search asks something else. It lowers the bar and looks for profiles that share a large proportion of markers with the sample. Not enough to be the same person, enough to be a parent, a child, or a sibling. The search came back with a hit.

 24 years of exact searches had produced nothing. The first time anybody asked the database a slightly different question, it answered. There was a man in the database whose DNA was close enough to the blood on that shop floor to make him a close blood relative of whoever had left it. This man was not the [music] killer and had never been anywhere near that shop.

 What he had was a brother. After 24 years of a machine saying no, what it finally said was that somebody in this family did it and the man on file isn’t him. Familial searching is not a small step and it’s regulated for a reason. An ordinary match is a statement about one person. A familial hit reaches into a family that has done nothing wrong and asks the state to go through it one member at a time.

 Plenty of jurisdictions won’t allow it at all. What it does when it works is convert an unidentifiable profile into a family surname. For the first time since 1993, detectives had somewhere to go that was not a laboratory. And somewhere in South Australia, there was a man who had been convicted of something years earlier and had given a sample because the law required it.

 He had no idea that the swab taken from his mouth was about to identify his own brother as a murderer. That’s where a familial match stops being science and starts being ordinary police work. A brother’s DNA isn’t evidence against a brother. It narrows a country of 25 million people down to one family and then somebody has to work out which member of that family was in Salsbury on the 29th of April 1993 and then prove it.

 That is not a laboratory job. That is birth records, addresses, employment, and old paperwork done by people knocking on doors. Detectives built the family out. Parents, siblings, anybody male and the right age who could have been in Adelaide in April 1993. One name fitted. He had been in South Australia at the time.

 By 2019, he was living in regional Victoria near Berat, a bit over 100 km from Melbourne and a long way from a stationary shop in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. There was no criminal record. He’d never given a sample to anybody. Nothing about him had ever come to the attention of Victoria police. And nobody around him had any reason to think he was anything other than what he appeared to be.

 And that was the problem. Detectives couldn’t compel a sample from him on the strength of his brother’s profile. And the moment they asked him for one, he would know exactly what they had and exactly why they were there. There is a particular kind of pressure in that position. Detectives were at that point as certain as anybody had ever been about this case.

 They had a family, a name inside it, and a man who had been in the right city at the right time. What they didn’t have was one thing they could put in front of a jury. and they had one chance to get it because a suspect who knows he is being watched behaves differently for the rest of his life.

 So in 2019 they flew to Victoria and started watching him instead. Subscribe so you don’t miss what they pulled out of a public bin that ended it. [music] The technique is called covert DNA collection and it works on a simple principle. Anything a person throws away in a public place, they have abandoned. Police can pick it up.

 [music] Whatever is on it, they can test. In practice, that means waiting. A detective can’t ask a man to touch something. He has to drink or smoke or chew or spit, and then he has to discard it somewhere the police can reach before anybody else does. So, they watched him move around a country town in central Victoria.

 And at some point he bought a coffee, drank it, and dropped the empty cup in a public bin. They took it out of the bin, gloved, bagged, sealed, and logged on the spot because a defense barrista was always going to ask what had happened to that cup between the footpath and the laboratory. Everything about this case had come down to whether physical evidence could be trusted across time, and they knew it.

The cup went to the forensic laboratory in Adelaide and the DNA on that cup was compared against the blood taken off the floor of the Sans and McDougall stationary shop in 1993. That blood had been kept in a sealed exhibit through decades of changing storage systems and changing staff by an organization that had no idea whether it would ever be worth anything.

 It was the same man. Not a partial, not a likelihood, not a family. Him may cup out of a public bin in one state had just closed a murder in another. He had gone more than two decades without leaving anything the police could use, and it ended with a coffee. Detectives arrested a 49-year-old man in Victoria that year and charged him with the murder of Suzanne Pole.

 Matthew Donald Tilly. By then, he had been living quietly in Victoria as an ordinary man for years. He had been barely into his 20s in April 1993. A young man living within reach of that shop. He had no prior convictions of any kind. There was nothing in his history that pointed at him, which is precisely why all those years of database checks had never produced his name.

 Nobody has ever established any connection between him and the woman behind that counter. Not a friendship, not a grievance, not so much as a transaction anybody could find. Put that beside the empty criminal record and the reason this case took as long as it did comes into focus. Working outward from the victim led nowhere because there was nothing to work outward to.

 working inward from known offenders led nowhere either because he was not one. After the murder, he stayed in South Australia for a period and then he crossed the border and started again somewhere nobody knew him. The trial ran in the Supreme Court of South Australia in late 2021 before Justice David Peak and a jury.

 Carmon Matteo prosecuted the crown’s case was the DNA in two parts. the blood at the scene which identified a man, the coffee cup which named him. Defense council went at the only opening available. Their argument wasn’t that the science was wrong. It was that the samples were old. The blood had been sitting in storage for almost three decades, moved between facilities handled by people who had long since retired.

 Their question for the jury was whether anybody could really guarantee what had happened to it across 28 years. It is the question every cold case with old physical evidence has to survive. Evidence that has outlived the careers of the people who collected it has to be defended by paperwork rather than by memory. The crown’s answer was the shape of the match.

 Two samples taken 26 years apart in two different states by two sets of people who’d never met. Both coming back to the same man. For that to be wrong, two completely separate chains of evidence would have to have failed in the same direction. On the evening of the 9th of December 2021, after deliberating for more than 4 hours, the jury found Matthew Donald Tilly guilty of murder.

 Melissa and Adam were in the courtroom. They had been six and a little older when their mother went to work and never came home. They were grown adults with lives of their own by the time a foreman stood up and said the word. At the sentencing, Suzanne’s family read their statements to the court. Melissa Paul told the man in the dock that she had spent 26 years wondering who had wrecked her whole life.

 She said she had a lot of questions and that there was one she knew she would never get the answer to. Then she said this. If it was money, she would have given it to you. You could have taken it and run. You didn’t have to make the decision to slaughter her. She said he had spent two and a half decades free as a bird, knowing the whole time exactly what he had done.

 Her family told him he would forever be a monster. Melissa was a child on the 29th of April 1993. She was a grown woman with most of her life behind her before she got to say that to his face. Justice Peak sentenced him to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 26 years. One year inside for every year he had been free.

 The judge said he had fled the scene and had been successful in evading police detection for many years. He said Tilly continued, even then to falsely deny his guilt and declined to offer any explanation as to how his conduct came [music] about. Tilly appealed in 2023. He argued the DNA evidence should not have been admitted, that the judge had misdirected the jury on motive, and that the summing up had been waited against him.

 The court of appeal went through it and dismissed the appeal finding that taken as a whole the trial judges summing up was not unbalanced. He becomes eligible to apply for parole in the mid 2040s. To this day he says he didn’t do it and he has never given anybody an account of that night. The one question Melissa Paul said she would never get an answer to is the one he is still sitting on.

 A 36-year-old woman stood at a register in a stationary shop on a Thursday night in April 1993, counting the day takings so she could lock up and go home to her husband and her two children. The money was still there when police arrived. Whatever he came in for, he didn’t take it. And he has never told anybody what it was. It took a national database, a cold case unit going back through its own files, a scientist running one profile a different way, a brother who had been caught for something else, and a paper cup in a bin in a Victorian country

town. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.