Richard Giardina, serving life for murder, revealed as a ‘smirking’ cold case rapist

Richard Giardina was serving life for murdering his wife and burning her body - then DNA revealed he was the ‘smirking’ rapist who struck decades earlier in Sydney.

Covincted wife killer Richard Giardina. Picture: Facebook

A heinous killer, already in prison for murdering and burning his wife, has learned his fate after DNA revealed him as a smirking rapist who attacked a woman in her bed in the 1980s.

Richard Giardina is serving a life sentence for murdering his estranged wife, Lisa Maree Keem, in 2008.

Giardina was convicted in Queensland in 2011, three years after he broke into Ms Keem’s Hervey Bay home and strangled her.

The killer drove his wife’s body to a state forest near Kempsey, in northern NSW, doused her in petrol and burned her remains. Giardina was apprehended after trying to flee to Sicily.

DNA samples were taken from Giardina, after his arrest in 2008, and passed on to NSW Police.

Lisa Keem was murdered by her estranged husband, Richard Giardina, in Queensland in 2008.

One year later forensic pathologists told NSW Police that the DNA had been linked to a 1988 rape in Sydney.

Despite that, the NSW District Court heard, the link was not used to advance the cold case rape investigation in NSW for more than a decade.

Giardina was finally charged in 2020 and pleaded not guilty before a jury in June this year.

Prosecutors told the jury that, days before Christmas 1988, a stranger had broken into a 20-year-old woman’s darkened bedroom while she slept in her ground floor apartment.

The half-asleep woman, known only as JS, thought it was her friend and asked the intruder “is that you Glenn?”, prosecutors told the court.

The stranger in her room was Giardina - he answered “yes” and raped JS, knowing she had mistaken him for someone else.

Giardina, while serving life in prison, was revealed to be a “smirking” rapist who attacked a woman decades earlier in Sydney.

Giardina was sentenced in court on Friday, decades after he raped the woman known as JS in her own home during a break in before Christmas in 1988.

When JS turned on the light she was panicked.

“Who the f*** are you?” she asked, the court heard.

Giardina smirked back at her “I’m the one who just f***ed you”, he said before fleeing.

The jury found Giardina guilty of breaking and entering and sexual intercourse without consent in July and Giardina faced sentencing this week.

NSW District Court Judge Phillip Mahony SC, on Friday, said the attack on JS was “opportunistic” but it was irrelevant there was no coercion, threat or violence - as Giardina’s legal team argued.

Giardina is led away from the Hervey Bay court .

“(That claim) ignores the fact that a sexual assault is of its very nature an offence of violence in terms of the violation of the victim’s body,” the judge said.

The decades of delay, the court heard, were the result of Giardina fleeing NSW and ending up in a Queensland prison - but also because NSW Police were “dismissive” of the traumatised JS.

The trauma of the attack was “substantial”, the judge found.

Judge Mahony sentenced Giardina to four years prison, backdating to September 2021.

Giardina will become eligible for parole over the murder of his wife in mid-2023.

He will become eligible for parole for his rape of JS in March 2024.