The family of murder victim say the conviction of an Alfredton man after almost thirty years is a message to all families struggling with unresolved cold cases to never 'give up".
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On Thursday the Adelaide jury took about four and a half hours to find Matthew Donald Tilley unanimously guilty of the stabbing murder of Suzanne Poll, 36, at her workplace, a stationery store on the edge of Parabanks Shopping Centre in Adelaide, in April 1993.
Outside court, Mrs Poll's daughter Melissa Poll spoke to the media and thanked everyone who had helped in the long trial that had made her family's "Christmas wish come true".
"This is the best outcome we could have ever asked for," she told AdelaideNow. "It was amazing ... out of this world. It means everything to us."
"That is the biggest message I have for all of the cold cases out there - please don't give up," she said.
Tilley was arrested after a DNA match from a discarded coffee cup in Daylesford in 2019 and extradited to South Australia.
Ms Poll She had suffered at least 18 separate wounds, including some that went right through her body.
After deliberating for more than four hours, a jury returned its guilty verdict on Thursday night.
Opening the crown case last month, prosecutor Carmen Matteo said improvements in DNA techniques ultimately resulted in Tilley being charged.
She said a DNA profile originally extracted from a man's blood at the murder scene returned a familial match with Tilley's brother in late 2017.
That ultimately led detectives to travel to Victoria to question the accused and after noticing him discard a disposable coffee cup, they retrieved it and brought it back to Adelaide for testing.
That returned a match with a further test after his arrest.
Ms Matteo said an autopsy conducted on Mrs Poll's body found that she died from massive blood loss following the attack in the store.
On the prosecution case, she was killed by a man who entered close to closing time.
In Tilley's defence, his lawyer argued that a key question for the court was whether the evidence had been properly preserved over almost three decades.
After the guilty verdict, Justice David Peek imposed the mandatory head sentence of life in prison.
A future court hearing will set a non-parole-period.
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