In April 2000 and I was working the Easter weekend when we were alerted that a body had been found near Whitley Bay. It turned out that the naked body of a woman had been found just yards from her home.

It turned out that she was killed the night before she was due to take up her dream job at the Sydney Olympics.

As I recall it was a particularly brutal murder and I headed to the police press call and copied the collect pic of the victim who was 23-year-old student Sara Cameron.

The photo was used by the following day’s Sunday People, as well as Easter Monday’s Daily Telegraph, the Northern Echo and The Scotsman in a bid to get witnesses to come forward.

While the investigation was still ongoing the press coverage quietened down for a bit but three months later in July a police press conference was called where Sara’s father Roy made a public appeal for information and officers rolled out a mass DNA testing programme of men in the area.

And in January 2001 it was hoped that new laws on the storing of genetic fingerprints may help provide the key to tracing the killer. I am fairly sure that this was my photo because I would not have kept the cutting for just the collect pic and I was at the original press conference.

I left the north east a year later to go to college to retrain as a reporter and the investigation was still ongoing with no suspect identified.

However by October 2004 they had a defendant, bus driver Michael Robinson who was then aged 30, who was successfully convicted of the murder and was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years behind bars for the murder and attempted rape at Newcastle Crown Court.

Apparently he had been cautioned by police officers in North Shields in early 2003 over his part in a neighbour dispute and they took a routine DNA swab from his mouth.

And, almost a year later, it showed up on the national database as a match with semen found on Sara’s body.

I think this is a typical illustration of how a police investigation will progress into a serious crime of this nature.