Man jailed over the ‘barbaric’ rape and murder of Filipino prostitute Pia Navida in 1992

MORE than two decades after Pia Navida’s naked, battered body was found lying off a NSW bush track, a man has been sent to jail for her rape and murder.

**This picture has a scanned reverse - see the Versions tab** Pia Navida, prostitute whose body was found in the Royal National Park in 1992.

MORE than two decades after Pia Navida’s naked, battered body was found lying off a NSW bush track, a man has been sent to jail for her “barbaric” rape and murder.

Steve Isac Matthews, 43, was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years and three months behind bars in the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to the aggravated sexual assault and murder of Ms Navida, a 37-year-old Filipino woman, in 1992.

Justice Geoffrey Bellew said Matthews’s maximum sentence of 21 years and six months was appropriate given the “barbaric” and “horrendous” nature of his crime.

Ms Navida was found dead in the Royal National Park, south of Sydney on February 1, 1992.

She was known to Police for soliciting for sex and was last seen alive on the afternoon of Friday, January 31, that year near Sydney’s Central Railway Station.

Her naked body was found by bushwalkers in scrubland near Bundeena, inside the Royal National Park, around midday the following day. The contents of her handbag strewn on the ground around her.

Justice Bellew said Ms Navida, who arrived in Australia in the early 1980s from the Philippines as a young bride, lived a nomadic lifestyle, was involved in drugs and worked as a prostitute near Sydney Central.

Police displayed clothes that Ms Navida had been wearing before she was brutally murdered in the hope of jogging memories but it was not until 2011 that arrests were made.

The cold case went unsolved until 2011 when advances in DNA technology allowed police to match semen found on and inside Ms Navida’s body to Matthews and another man, Rodney James Paterson. Paterson maintained his innocence and was acquitted in March when Justice Bellew upheld his application that the evidence was incapable of convincing a jury of his guilt.

Justice Bellew said on Thursday Matthews had taken a girlfriend for picnics to Bundeena, where Ms Navida was found, when he dated her in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Matthews told her he had killed a person in a bush area and demonstrated to her what he had done.

Pia Navida’s naked body was found by bushwalkers at Royal National Park south of Sydney.

The court heard Matthews was himself a victim of a major assault in 2005, which had left him with a serious brain injury and little memory of his life prior.

But Justice Bellew said that while Matthews had recently shown remorse, saying he was “sickened and disgusted” by his actions, his criminal history did not allow for leniency in his sentence. Matthews will be eligible for parole in November 2027.