How a discarded coffee cup helped solve a 24-year murder mystery

Link copiedShareShare articleTwo houses, three break-ins, violent attacks and more than $100,000 stashed away. Those circumstances led to the brutal killing of 72-year-old grandmother Irma Palasics. It was one of Canberra's longest-running cold cases, until a DNA match brought down the attackers. In 1999, two masked men broke into this Canberra house. The couple who lived there, Irma and Gregor Palasics, were bashed, gagged, and tied up. By the time the men left, Gregor was badly injured, and Irma was dead. Gregor later told police the intruders had separated him from his wife, but he could hear her "terrible" screams from a different part of the house. Irma had so many injuries that the doctor who wrote the post-mortem report said he could not identify a specific cause of death. One theory was that she had been asphyxiated, with her nose broken and her mouth gagged with tape. Forensics officers combed the house for days, and police interviewed more than 300 suspects. Substantial rewards were offered to find the killers, but it all came to a dead end, morphing into one of Canberra's longest-running unsolved killings. Irma grew up in Hungary in a large family. Their daughter, Elizabeth Mikita, still remembers how her parents made the difficult decision to leave in 1956 when communist repression from the Soviet Union threatened Hungary. "Mum was working, cleaning for the Russians, and she got to know them quite well," Mrs Mikita told 7.30. Those Russians warned her to leave because the borders were going to be closed. "She managed to talk Dad into leaving their half-built house, his work and everything else," she said. "He took me on his bike. Mum took my sister. She was only about eight, nine months old." The family had fled with just the clothes on their backs and their passports. In 1957 their prayers for a better life in Australia were answered. They ran a successful kitchen manufacturing business in Canberra as their family grew around them. Being targeted by burglars was the last thing on their minds. The brutal attack in 1999 was their third break-in. In 1997 the Palasics lost $100,000 in cash that had been hidden under their former house, which was taken while they were at the local Hungarian club. "I just laughed. I said, 'You what? What the hell are you doing with a hundred-thousand-odd dollars down under the house?' Mrs Mikita recalled. Her mother then responded with: "I thought they wouldn't find it." Their grandson, John Mikita, said the money had been stored in Danish biscuit tins. "There would be like five, ten tins, and the first couple would be still biscuits," Mr Mikita said. "They just felt more secure having the money with them, and you can appreciate why ... when you leave a country with nothing on your back except for clothes, they didn't trust the bank." A year later Irma went to the garden at night get a lemon for her tea. She confronted an intruder and was punched to the ground, but not before she pulled the balaclava off him as he and an accomplice fled. "That was a very brave act by Irma," said Detective Sergeant Craig Marriott, who led the final investigation. "That gained us a piece of evidence that in years to come, proved to be vital to the conviction of that person." Irma went on TV to appeal for information. "I said, 'Don't kill me, don't kill me'," she said when recalling the attack. "You can imagine how unsafe she felt at that place," Mrs Mikita said. The attack spurred the couple to move across town to the suburb of McKellar, where they thought they would be safe. It was there Irma's worst nightmare unfolded, when she was attacked for a third time in 1999, as two intruders tore the house apart. They were looking for money, which they found in a concealed compartment under the oven. The robbery netted $30,000, but it cost Irma her life, before the two men melted away into the night. But they left some crucial evidence behind. Soon after Irma was killed, Gregor Palasics remembered seeing one of the men drinking from a container in the fridge. Tests on a water jug and a milk bottle yielded DNA samples from two unknown people. In 1999 the samples couldn't be matched but they could be preserved. Detective Sergeant Marriott said it was just a matter of time before the DNA could be used successfully. "The two unknown DNA profiles from the … 1999 crime scene had been placed on the national DNA database," he said. In 2019, there was a match with a man from Victoria's Hungarian community named Steve Fabriczy. His DNA matched the sample on the milk bottle. "Steve Fabriczy's DNA had been taken as a convicted offender sample by Victoria Police. He'd been convicted of conspiracy to hijack a truckload of cigarettes," Detective Sergeant Marriott said. But a single DNA match does not make a case. Detective Sergeant Eloise Bradley helped profile Fabriczy, building a picture of his personality and character. "I felt like the day we knocked on

How a discarded coffee cup helped solve a 24-year murder mystery

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How a discarded coffee cup helped solve a 24-year murder mystery

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