✝️ Pia Navida, age 27, philipinian – January 31 1992, Brisbane, New South Wales, Australia 🇦🇺💔
Pia first came to Melbourne from the Philippines in the early 1980s after marrying an Australian as a teenage bride, possibly a mail-order bride. When the marriage failed and the couple separated, Pia moved to different cities across Australia. In the early 90s Pia was known to be involved with drugs, addicted to heroin and to frequent seedy drug-dealing café „Greasies“ outside Central Station.
„She lived basically a nomadic lifestyle. She moved to different areas around Australia including Perth and Adelaide and the Newcastle area before she finally moved to Sydney in the early 1990s and lived around Surry Hills and Central [Station].“
Pia had no steady work and thus ended up in prostitution, soliciating at Greasies or a hotel at Pitt streets. She also was in a abusive and violent relationship.
Pia’s naked body was discovered on a remote track with a bloodied rock nearby and her belongings strewn about the ground. From the beginning, police knew there was no need for Pia to travel so far away for paid-for sex and confronting evidence, which included the DNA of three separate males being discovered under her fingernails, was consistent with non-consensual sex. In 2009 a routine check of „cold cases“ had uncovered new DNA evidence at the crime scene and they appealed for information about the case. Advances in DNA technology allowed police to match semen found on and inside Pia`s body to Steve Isaac Matthews and another man, Rodney James Paterson, in 2011. Steve Isac Matthews, then 21 years old, was one of three males who targeted Pia. He was a regular client at Greasys. Police determined Pia had been raped anally and vaginally and then bludgeoned to death with a large rock, completely crushing her face, her body then dragged a small distance and dumped.
One of his former girlfriends told police that during their relationship, they had regularly had picnics in the Bundeena National Park, where his family had often camped when he was young. She recalled him telling her he had once „killed a person…in a bush area by bashing the person with a large rock“ and had demonstrated wielding the rock with both hands. She also described an occasion where Matthew’s had encouraged her to participate in group sex and other sexual deviant behaviour which was consistent with evidence found on Pia’s body.
Mathews was convicted to 21 years in jail, a minimum of 16 years and 3 months before being eligible for parole. Paterson was acquitted by the court after upholding Paterson’s application that the evidence was incapable of convincing a jury of his guilt.