A man who killed a Sydney barmaid in 1987 and then spent the next two decades on the run in far north Queensland has been sentenced to at least 10 years jail.
The body of Nella Poli was found lying on the bed of her Zetland home on May 13, 1987, with marks around her neck indicating she had been strangled to death.
The killer was Grant David Mitchell, a New Zealand-born man who had been in a relationship with Ms Poli for eight months.
Police spent years trying to track Mitchell down but were unable to find him.
The case remained unsolved until Mitchell walked into a police station in Atherton, near Cairns, last year and gave himself up.
Today in the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Peter Hidden said that Mitchell had not intended to kill Ms Poli but had shown "a reckless indifference to human life".
When he turned himself in to police, Mitchell told them he had had an argument with Ms Poli during which she had grabbed the pendant he was wearing and placed it in her mouth.
"He [said] he grabbed her around the neck with his hands and then used a pair of pantyhose as a ligature in an attempt to make her cough the pendant up," Justice Hidden said.
"They fell to the floor in the doorway between a lounge room and a downstairs bedroom ... Shortly afterwards, she stopped struggling but [he] continued to hold [a] pillow over her face."
A photo of the couple with their faces cut out and pins placed where their eyes had been was found nearby.
After living briefly in the Blue Mountains, Mitchell fled to far north Queensland, where he spent the next two decades living an itinerant lifestyle under different names and supporting himself by doing odd jobs for cash payment.
Finally, on January 9 last year he turned himself into Queensland police, explaining that he was wanted for murder in NSW and that he had been on the run.
Justice Hidden sentenced Mitchell, now 62, to 14 years in jail with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years.