Jennifer Smith

Jennifer Smith... facial injuries.

MORE than 13 years after Jennifer Maree Smith was bashed and left for dead on the streets of Newtown in Sydney's inner west, cold case police have finally made an arrest.

The last, grainy image of the freelance journalist was captured on an ATM security camera in King Street in the early hours of January 17, 1998.

Yesterday detectives arrested Wayne Joseph Castle, 52, the man they believed killed her in a bashing that fractured her skull and caused internal bleeding. Mr Castle has been the only suspect.

In 1999 a coronial inquest into the death of Ms Smith, 32, which included evidence from her friend, the musician Tim Freedman of the Whitlams, was terminated after it found there was enough evidence to charge someone.

But the police received legal advice that they had insufficient evidence.

Last year homicide detectives reopened the investigation.

Yesterday the head of the homicide squad, Detective Inspector Peter Cotter, said: ''I think the police always had a reasonably confident assertion of who may have been responsible for that murder.''

Ms Smith's body was found in Hordern Street 40 minutes after her image was captured on an ATM camera just after 5am. Her handbag and jewellery were missing and she had facial injuries consistent with having been punched in the face and then having fallen on the road or footpath. Police stopped Mr Castle in Glebe yesterday and took him to Newtown police station for questioning. He was charged with murder, robbery and drug possession and is due to appear in court today.

''There was certain evidence around the fateful incident and that, along with a number of interviews and re-interviews with people in piecing together the evidence, and some fresh testimonies … have put us in a considerably stronger position,'' Inspector Cotter said.

Mr Freedman had not been re-interviewed as part of the new investigations.

Ms Smith's family, which comes from Moree in the state's north-west, had been told of the arrest. ''We often talk about the word closure,'' the inspector said. ''From my experience … there is no absolute closure. It's more just a transcendence from one realm to another, from one stage to another.''