Louise Bell killer Dieter Pfennig loses appeal against conviction
Updated
The convicted killer of 10-year-old Adelaide girl Louise Bell has lost an appeal against his murder conviction.
Dieter Pfennig had argued to the South Australian Court of Criminal Appeal that DNA evidence used to convict him could not prove his guilt beyond doubt.
He had been convicted of murdering the girl, whose body was never located, after her abduction from her bedroom at Hackham West in 1983.
Pfennig was given a non-parole period of 35 years for the crime.
He was already serving a non-parole term of more than three decades for murdering South Australian boy Michael Black and abducting and raping a teenager.
He was charged with the Bell murder in 2013, based on evidence gathered using DNA technology advances.
The 70-year-old abandoned his initial argument that it was not his DNA and instead asserted that his DNA could have been innocently transferred to Louise Bell's pyjama top prior to her murder through his daughter, who played basketball with Louise.
But the court found all of the evidence against Pfennig "established a cogent basis for the judge's verdict" and excluded any "innocent hypothesis" for the presence of his DNA on the top.
The appeals court found the argument was "so unlikely, given the state of scientific knowledge, that the trial judge was correct to reject the hypothesis as fanciful".
"It was open for the trial judge to be satisfied of the appellant's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, having regard to all of the evidence, including circumstantial evidence which, coupled with the DNA evidence, established a cogent basis for the judge's verdict," the court ruled.
In dismissing the appeal, Justice Tim Stanley said the last possible contact between Louise and Pfennig's daughter Petra was at a pool party in late November, or early December of 1982.
"Louise did not come into possession of the pyjama top until Christmas Day 1982. The pyjama top was machine-washed before Louise's abduction," he said.
"I am satisfied ... that the appellant's DNA was deposited on the top in circumstances which implicate him in Louise's abduction and murder."
The pyjama top was left on the front lawn of a nearby house after the resident received a phone call from a man purporting to be Louise Bell's abductor, instructing her where to find the little girl's earrings.
In order to prove he had Louise, the man told the resident to tell police to turn over a broken brick at the corner of South Road and Beach Road in Hackham West where he had placed the earrings.
Police subsequently found the earrings Louise had been wearing at the time of her abduction at the location described in the phone call.
Analysis confirmed the pyjama top had been rinsed in the Onkaparinga River where Pfennig frequently canoed.
During his trial, the court heard on two occasions in the late 1980s Pfennig told fellow canoeists that Louise's body was in the area where they were canoeing.
Topics: murder-and-manslaughter, crime, courts-and-trials, law-crime-and-justice, hackham-5163, sa, australia
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