Police called at their Ferntree Gully home with the news their daughter Jeanette, who had been travelling overseas, had been brutally murdered on the streets of Paris.

For the next decade, 79-year-old Mr O'Keefe - a man "brought up tough, during an era when men weren't supposed to cry" - and his wife shed many tears while they waited for justice.

Finally, last Friday the family got some resolution, when Brazilian-born Adriano Araujo Da Silva, 36, was found guilty of Jeanette's murder and sentenced to 30 years' jail, with a minimum of 20 years.

Mr O'Keefe said he was relieved with the verdict, but nothing would bring his daughter back.

"It is like having a type of chronic pain. It's always there and it never goes away. At times it is better than others, but every now and again it gets antagonised by something and you go through the pain all over again," he told the Weekly last week.

Mrs O'Keefe said Jeanette, a computer programmer, was a quiet and intelligent woman who loved to play music. She had travelled to Paris to learn French so she could create computer programs for people all over the world.

Her body was found rolled up in Da Silva's sleeping bag in Les Mureaux, a suburb in the outskirts of Paris, on January 2, 2001.

The 28 year old had been bashed and strangled after a series of mishaps left her alone and without a place to sleep on New Year's Eve.

French investigators identified Da Silva through a DNA sample taken from under Jeanette's fingernails.

His genetic profile was on a national database and re-emerged after he was arrested for petty theft more than eight years later.

As Mr O'Keefe recalls the last moments of his daughter's life, his eyes well up. He had an inkling something wasn't right the last time he spoke to her on December 30, 2001.

"I wanted her to leave Paris. I had this feeling, a sense of fear that something was wrong," he said.

"She was five-foot nothing, a tiny petite little thing. The horror of her last moments as she fought against that monster is something I find particularly hard to deal with. The fact that I wasn't there to help her is something I have faced every day for the past 11 years."