Your web browser is no longer supported. To improve your experience update it here. News World. Aussie woman's French killer loses appeal pm Apr 12, Tweet Facebook Mail. A Frenchman has lost his appeal to overturn his year jail sentence for murdering Australian student Jeanette O'Keefe, who was beaten, strangled and dumped in a car park outside Paris.
Brazilian-born Adriano Araujo Da Silva, 37, was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison in January last year for the murder 11 years earlier of year-old. O'Keefe's body was found rolled up in a sleeping bag in a parking lot in the Paris suburb of Les Mureaux on January 2, - three days after a series of events left her alone and without a bed for the night on New Year's Eve.
Araujo Da Silva insisted that he was innocent throughout the appeal hearing in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. But after only four hours of deliberation the court late Thursday rejected his appeal and upheld the original sentence. Araujo Da Silva had confessed to the crime twice before retracting his testimony, saying he had been pressured by police. He admitted to taking the woman home and having an argument with her but insisted she left unharmed.
O'Keefe's four brothers and sisters, who were civil plaintiffs in the case, were in Paris for the appeal. French investigators found male DNA under the victim's fingernails but it was eight years before they found a match, when Araujo Da Silva's genetic profile was entered into a database after he was arrested for petty theft.
He confessed to the killing when detained by police, saying he had beaten O'Keefe and strangled her to death when she refused to have sex with him a second time and threatened to call police. An autopsy found she had been struck by at least 13 blows before being strangled to death. Auto news : Mitsubishi to sit out Nissan and Honda merger.
