Sydney - Jeffrey Gilham got on with his life after pleading guilty in 1993 to avenging the slaying of his parents by stabbing his brother to death.

He finished his engineering degree, landed a civil service job, moved into a nice house on Sydney's leafy north shore, got married and had three children.

It would have been end of story but for Tony Gilham, the uncle who suspected Jeffrey was the killer, not his brother Christopher.

"That's what's kept me going and now he's finally paid the price for it," Tony Gilham said last week after Jeffrey, 37, was convicted of the murder of his parents. "I'm so pleased the jury worked it out. I'm so pleased they worked out fact from fiction."

Still, it took the jury eight days to decide that Christopher had unfairly gone to his grave a convicted murderer.

Later this week Jeffrey will be sentenced and his Uncle Tony vindicated.

Other relatives are not as comfortable as Tony Gilham with the last act in a family tragedy that began when Jeffrey told police, enraged at the sight of Christopher standing over the lifeless bodies of his parents, he had wrestled the knife from his older brother and stabbed him 17 times.

"For those of us who believe he is innocent, the verdict has only compounded our grief," Claire Jarrett wrote in a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald.

What's shocking to many Australians is that someone was able to get away with a triple murder for 15 years.

There was the original trial for manslaughter, which ended with Jeffrey walking away a free man because of the extraordinary circumstances of his crime. There were two coroner's inquests, after which the public prosecutor refused to press charges, believing a trial would be a waste of time because a conviction would be unlikely.

At a second trial, and following a month of evidence, Jeffrey again walked free when jurors were unable to decide whether he killed his parents.

Prosecutors thought they had assembled a strong case against Jeffrey at that second trial. A highlight was this exchange: "Do you tell this court it's a sheer coincidence that all three of your family members were stabbed - 14, 13, 16 times - with great force to the region of their heart?" the prosecution asked. "Yes," Jeffrey replied.

The jury must have thought so too - despite evidence that the wounds were all a uniform angle and depth, and appeared to be inflicted by the same hand.

At the trial in which Jeffrey was convicted, his third time in the dock, the prosecution honed in on the timeline of events, noting there was no accounting for a 20-minute interlude in the run up to him alerting neighbours and police to the bloodbath at his home.

In that window of opportunity, the prosecution alleged, Jeffrey showered - his hair was wet when he banged on the neighbour's door - and he used petrol to set the house alight to destroy evidence.

It was also argued that the killings were not the outcome of blind rage, but the culmination of a plot in which Jeffrey tried to incriminate his brother.

According to Tony Gilham, Jeffrey wasn't clever at all. He blundered by claiming his parents' million-dollar inheritance from lawyers before claiming their ashes from the crematorium.

And, Tony Gilham said, he showed not a jot of remorse over the death of his family.

When the guilty verdict was read out, there was emotion aplenty. As his wife wept, Jeffrey Gilham slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. (dpa)