John Makita

And that went on for, you know, several hours for each of us.

essentially trying to rule out the family because in these instances, you know, family is always the first suspect.

And then from there, yeah, a lot of those early years just became a bit of a blur, but I'll never forget that night ever in my life.

In those first few years after it had all happened, we just let the police do what they needed to do.

We were obviously grieving.

We tried to live our lives as best as possible and just not think about it as much.

And then sort of like it got to the stage where

In probably around 2010 to 11, I decided I had started a successful business as a graphic designer and I was doing quite well.

And I thought, you know what, I have the resources at my hand.

I'm not satisfied with where things are going because just there had been obviously no arrests and no progress in the case that I would get on board with the Who Killed Emma campaign and ensure that nobody in Canberra forgot what had happened on that night in November 1999.

Well, it's interesting because, yeah, I spent a phenomenal amount of time working in the Canberra community to get the message out, not knowing that it was all the way down the road in Melbourne where we should have been concentrating.

But I started to realise through just talking with police over the years that resources weren't available to continuously work on a lot of these cold cases, including ours, which was one of the most recent ones.

And there were questions about people who had submitted evidence or leads to ACT policing, but there was no resources available to be following them up.

And that sort of like got me into the frame of mind that I really need to do something now about this, because if that is the case, then I want the police and I want the government to do everything they possibly can to be able to catch these people.

I was actually interstate for work and I had received a call from Craig Marriott to say that we've actually arrested, we're about to arrest somebody.

So they had given us a 24 hours heads up just to let the family know.

to prepare ourselves.

And so I flew back to Canberra so that we could do some media straight away as soon as it had happened.

But that was essentially the first time that we had known that they were actually going to arrest somebody for the crime, the first person.

It was a little bit of disbelief.