[4] O'Hearn was a local shopkeeper, and after he failed to open his Kanahooka Road corner shop a family member attended his home and discovered his body.
[5] It was a scene I'd never encountered in all my years in the police...there was a body of a male laying on his back...he had been decapitated with his hand sitting on a lounge and it appeared he was completely disembowelled with his intestines on a silver tray beside the bodyThis quote[6] from a seasoned homicide detective of the New South Wales Police Force encapsulates the particularly grisly murder of O'Hearn.
[8] Given the nature of the crime and the drawings on the wall, police initially looked into the murders as potentially being linked to a satanic cult.
A number of satanic drawings were found in Schreiber's possession, which were noted as being consistent with the crime scene of the O'Hearn murder.
[11] Few leads were produced from the O'Hearn crime scene, and police quickly realised that Schreiber was not involved as he had been residing elsewhere on the day of the murder for work.
At the Arkell murder however, a pair of bloodstained pants and boots lead to a tip-off from a woman claiming these belonged to her ex-boyfriend, Valera.
[12] Valera's interview notes from when police had spoken to him about Schreiber were examined, and his fingerprints matched those at the O'Hearn crime scene.
[7] In August 2000, Valera was found guilty of the murders, and in December 2000 he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
[7][13][14] At sentencing, Justice Studdert noted "the scene that presented itself to those who entered the deceased's premises on that Saturday morning can only be described as gruesome in the extreme.
"[7] Studdert noted previous court decisions observing that some cases where the level of culpability is so extreme that community interest in retribution and punishment can only be met through a life sentence.
[17] Less than two weeks after Valera became the third-youngest person in NSW to be sentenced to life without parole, his father, Jack van Krevel, was found stabbed to death in his Albion Park home.