Family left to wonder what really happened

Giving evidence during the trial, Vincent Tabak wept in the witness box and apologised for putting them through hell.

But the jury decided he was telling lies, and Miss Yeates’s parents David and Teresa, and her boyfriend Greg Reardon, have been left with unanswered questions.

Miss Yeates and Tabak did not know each other by name and she was said to be wary of strangers.

Police believe she only let him in because her cat, Bernard, might have been with him, but only Tabak knows the exact sequence of events that followed.

He claimed to the jury that he strangled Miss Yeates with one hand after she spurned his advances for a kiss. But detectives believe his vague account fails to explain the 43 injuries found on her body by pathologists.

Tabak’s web of deceit in the weeks that followed the murder on December 17 last year was almost as despicable as his actions on the night itself.

After the killing, he sent a text message to his girlfriend Tanja Morson to say he was “bored”.

He drove to a supermarket with Miss Yeates’s body in the boot of his car before dumping it at the side of a country lane.

He went to Christmas parties, drank champagne and even made jokes about the police inquiry, but behind closed doors he scoured the internet to watch a video of a body decomposing, checked other unsolved murder inquiries and looked up satellite images of the spot where Miss Yeates’s body was found on Christmas Day.

Even after his arrest on January 20, he tried to avoid justice by refusing to answer police questions.

But his case was undermined by DNA evidence and he confessed to the killing in a conversation with a prison chaplain.