After more than 23 long years of investigation, detectives have made a breakthrough in one of the most confounding murder cold cases in the capital's history.
They have arrested Melbourne man Steve Fabriczy over the vicious bashing murder of Canberra grandmother Irma Palasics.
Following the arrest on Wednesday morning, police were seeking extradition of the alleged offender in the Dandenong Magistrates Court. The hearing was adjourned. Once that is granted, detectives will accompany him on his handcuffed flight to Canberra, where he is expected to be formally charged with murder when he appears in court.
Police said the alleged offender has "very limited links" to the ACT.
Mrs Palasics, 72, and her husband Gregor, 73, were watching television in their Grover Crescent, McKellar home when two men wearing balaclavas broke in on the night of November 6, 1999.
The men bound the elderly couple with cable ties and viciously bashed them as they ransacked the house for two hours, stealing large amounts of cash and jewellery.
Mr Palasics freed himself and phoned for help.
His wife suffocated in her own blood and died at the scene.
ACT Policing's homicide squad had doggedly pursued a number of leads in the case down the years, including using cutting edge familial DNA testing procedures, which linked the offenders to one of five young men who broke into the former Pitch and Putt premises in Phillip on May 16, 2010.
But it was the arrival in 2020 of federal police Deputy Commissioner Neil Gaughan to the role of ACT Chief Police Officer that added fresh resources and homicide team impetus to the flagging case, with fresh leads then emerging via new familial DNA forensic procedures.
In 2012, a $500,000 reward was posted for any information that could lead to an arrest, and police subsequently released information about a type of sneaker believed to have been worn by one of the offenders.
Detective Superintendent Scott Moller described the cold case as a "mammoth investigation which spans decades" and alluded to the importance of DNA evidence as "significant" to the case.
Police are now hot on the heels of the second offender, with Inspector Moller reminding the public that the $500,000 reward from 2012 was still active.
Questioned specifically about progress in the hunt for the second offender, he said "we are working towards that in this investigation" and "we [police] still have one person outstanding that we will continue to pursue".
"This investigation has been going for a number of decades; the police that have been worked on it throughout that entire period have got us to the point we are today," he said.
"The actual intricacies of that investigation and the evidence we've used to get this person before the court I'm not going to go into ... but let me just say this has been a huge undertaking."
While the 68-year-old alleged offender has not yet been identified, it is understood he is a member of the Melbourne Hungarian community. This had been one of the leads pursued by police some three years ago when they extended their public appeal for information interstate.
There had been a number of stumbling blocks down through the years in the Palasics cold case, mostly due to stretched resources within the small ACT homicide team.
In 2019, the investigation stalled to such a point that Irma Palasic's daughter, Liz Mikita, wrote an open letter to Police Minister Mick Gentleman criticising "police inaction" in the case.
However, the Palasics' grandson, John Mikita, publicly thanked the police efforts on Wednesday in arresting an offender and bringing to an end the "pain, questions and uncertainty over so many years".
When the new Chief Police Officer provided a kickstart to the cold case in 2020, detectives were offered up new forensics techniques within the AFP laboratories at Majura and even technical assistance from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"We've had the development of DNA technology that has been significant and we've used every available advancement in technology in this matter. This has truly been a conglomerate of domestic and international law enforcement," Inspector Moller said.
