Justice at last

By Russell Bennett
GRIEVING Ferntree Gully parents Kevin and Susan O’Keefe have hit out at reports they were offered French government money to help pay for a legal team to convict their daughter’s killer.
The couple say they’ve received no money to pay for lawyers in the trial of Brazilian-born 36-year-old Adriano Araujo Da Silva, who was found guilty on 6 January of the 2001 Paris murder of their daughter Jeanette. He was sentenced to 30 years behind bars, with a 20-year minimum term.
The O’Keefe family was told by French authorities that in order to have the best chance of convicting Da Silva, they needed their own legal counsel.
But now they fear court costs could continue to pile up if Da Silva launches an appeal.
Last Wednesday marked 11 years to the day when their hearts broke.
The couple received a knock on the door at 5.45am on 11 January 2001 from the police. They told them Jeanette had been brutally murdered half a world away in Paris. She was just 28.
For more than a decade, 78-year-old Kevin and his wife have been forced to deal with unimaginable sorrow through the search for Jeanette’s killer and the ensuing battle to bring him to justice.
That battle was won on 6 January, but the war may not yet be over.
“We had no doubts he murdered her and neither did the police,” Mrs O’Keefe said.
But a six-member jury and three judges also had to be convinced.
“A huge weight was lifted when the verdict was handed down,” she said. “We knew he was guilty but we also knew he could get off on some technicality (like pleading mental illness).”
But Mr O’Keefe warned: “It’s not over until it’s over.
“I look at it from the double victim point of view. It’s bad enough that we’ve had the death of our daughter but it would be doubly as bad if we’re charged some huge amount in legal fees that we can’t afford. We don’t know where we stand.”
Not only did the O’Keefes have to put up with television crews on their front doorstep the day they were told of their daughter’s death in 2001, they’ve recently had to deal with false media reports that they had been given $200,000 to help cover their legal fees.
They don’t know where they stand on that front. They just want the certainty of knowing Jeanette’s killer will be locked behind bars but are worried about his right to appeal the verdict.
Jeanette’s body was found on 2 January, 2001 but it took authorities nine days to tell her parents the tragic news.
Da Silva had bashed Jeanette 13 times with an iron bar, choked her, wrapped her body in a sleeping bag and threw it out a window following New Year’s Eve.
He was finally arrested more than eight years later by French authorities cross-referencing a DNA sample taken from underneath Jeanette’s fingernails with their criminal database.