New DNA evidence has given hope the 1980 murder of six-year-old Alicia O’Reilly may finally be solved. Video / Mike Scott
Police have received more than 100 tips about the cold case rape and murder of Alicia O'Reilly since revealing this week her killer's DNA had been extracted from long-lost evidence.
Alicia O'Reilly, 6, was found dead in her bed in the Auckland suburb of Avondale in August 1980, while her sister Juliet, 8, slept just metres away in the same room.
The horrendous crime shocked the country and hundreds of suspects were questioned in the homicide investigation as every home and business in the neighbouring suburbs was visited by police officers.
This week the Herald revealed that ESR scientists were able to obtain a full DNA profile from samples of the killer's hair and semen previously believed to have been destroyed. The startling discovery also featured on the Cold Case television show.
However, no DNA match has been found. This is despite the genetic code being compared to hundreds of thousands of profiles, collected from criminals or crime scenes, held in databanks in New Zealand and Australia.
The police and ESR are also working their way through a list of 800 suspects. More than 140 "persons of interest" have been ruled out so far after giving voluntary DNA samples.
One of those eliminated was the prime suspect favoured by the original inquiry team, a 23-year-old man who lived near Alicia's home on Canal Rd. He had suffered permanent brain damage in an accident and as a result, had the mental age of an 8-year-boy.
In light of the DNA breakthrough, police officers working on Operation Sturbridge urged anyone with even the smallest piece of information about Alicia's death, or even just their suspicion, to contact the inquiry team.
Detective Senior Sergeant Ngahiraka Latimer said the police had received more than 100 phone calls or messages since the news about the killer's DNA profile became public on Tuesday night.
"The Operation Sturbridge team will now be working through this information and assessing it for any appropriate follow-up," Latimer said.
While the public response was encouraging so far, she urged anyone else with information to come forward.
"Police remain committed to bringing about justice for Alicia no matter how much time has passed."
Alicia O'Reilly was just 6 when she was raped and murdered in her own bed in August 1980. Photo / Supplied
It was Latimer who found some of the crucial swabs taken from the post-mortem examination in 1980, which she discovered in an unmarked envelope in the bottom of a cardboard box in police archives when the cold case was re-opened in 2020.
The important evidence had been recorded as destroyed during the original investigation, an inexplicable decision despite forensic science being rudimentary in the 1980s.
The re-investigation unearthed in storage rooms of the Auckland DHB pathology department; glass slides preserving samples from the post-mortem examination of Alicia following her death.
The long-lost evidence was tested by scientists at ESR, the Crown research institute, which was able to extract a full DNA profile for analysis.
Despite not having immediate success with a DNA match, detectives working on the case believe they are closer than ever to identifying Alicia's killer.
This is because, prior to the discovery of the genetic profile, any person nominated as a suspect could only be eliminated from the inquiry by old-fashioned detective work to confirm their whereabouts on the night Alicia was killed.
In the 1980s, there were no digital footprints - smartphone GPS, credit card or Eftpos transactions, social media posts and security cameras - to track someone's movements.
Someone's alibi often relied solely on the word of a family member, friend or colleague and the memory of well-intentioned witnesses can be notoriously mistaken within a few days, let alone decades.
Now armed with the killer's DNA profile, a suspect can be ruled out - or the culprit identified at last - with nothing more than swabbing the inside of someone's mouth.
DNA has been routinely collected from serious criminals since the mid-1990s. So the lack of a hit suggests either Alicia's killer did not commit another offence, which police consider to be unlikely given the sexual nature of her death, or died before his DNA could be collected.
Another possibility is he no longer lives in New Zealand or Australia.
Anna Lemalu is one of the forensic scientists at ESR who analysed the DNA profile of Alicia O'Reilly's killer.
If a suspect's DNA did match the profile of Alicia's murderer, Lemalu said it was possible the likelihood of finding the DNA left at the crime scene could be more than 100,000 million times greater if it had come from the suspect, rather than from another person selected at random from the general New Zealand population.
• Anyone with information for the police can call 105 and quote either Operation Sturbridge or the case file number 800816/3613. This can also be done anonymously by calling Crime Stoppers on 0800 555 111.
