Murderer admits to raping, killing Gold Coast woman Linda Reed

“No one could possibly know the pain and anguish I have been through over the past 38 years,” Mr Reed said in his victim impact statement.

The Reed case had gone cold before the investigation was reopened in 2009 after a tip-off to police.

A major breakthrough came when detectives discovered that a vaginal sample taken from Mrs Reed during the post-mortem remained in police storage.

It was sent to New Zealand scientists who compared it with O’Meara’s DNA and found there was a high probability that his semen was in that sample.

Advances in forensic science, such as DNA profiling and fingerprint analysis, led to the arrest of O’Meara in August 2018.

Detectives do not believe O’Meara knew Mrs Reed before their fatal meeting in 1983.

O’Meara was already serving a term of life imprisonment after pleading guilty to murdering 22-year-old Vanessa Joy O’Brien in 1985 – two years after he killed Mrs Reed.

Ms O’Brien was killed in Kippa-Ring, north of Brisbane.

O’Meara accosted her in a car park in daylight and forced her to drive 20 minutes away to a remote area.

He tied her up, raped and killed her, leaving her body naked in a similar way to that of Mrs Reed.

However, on that occasion, he dumped the victim’s car some distance away from the murder scene.

During his more than 35 years of incarceration, O’Meara assaulted several prison guards, escaped for a day, made another escape attempt and also committed wilful damage.

The killer held a series of unskilled and labour jobs before his time in prison.

His mother is now in an aged-care home, his stepfather has cancer. He told his lawyer he hoped to get out of prison one day.

O’Meara’s sentencing was delayed on Monday because he was a minor when he raped and murdered Mrs Reed and there was debate over whether he should be sentenced as a juvenile or as an adult.