On a Monday night in March 1992, a 29-year-old mother in Geelong, Australia, let a man into her home because he told her it was his birthday and he had no one to spend it with. They'd met for the first time that same afternoon. She offered him a drink and let him sleep on her couch — and an hour after she went to bed, he walked into her room and killed her.

Detectives collected everything he left behind that night: cigarette butts, bedding, hair from her body. For 15 years, the case sat unsolved. Then a coroner publicly named a man as her killer — a man who had nothing to do with it, and who would carry that suspicion for over a decade.

The real killer wasn't caught until 2020, after he murdered another woman 3,000 kilometres away in Perth — a woman who had shown him the exact same kindness. This is the case of Annette Steward, and the DNA evidence that sat in storage for 28 years, waiting for a name to finally match against it.

Check out more solved Australian cold cases here: Australia Cold Cases

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