Experience: I was a murder suspect for 18 years

I don’t remember walking home that night – I barely remembered it the next morning. I was 17 and had been drinking all evening with a friend, then had staggered out of the pub alone in search of pie and chips. After arriving home, I sloped straight off to bed.

The next day, muzzy-headed and dehydrated, I grabbed the evening paper from the doormat on my way to the kitchen, glancing at it as I threw it down on a table. Then I froze. There, on the front page, was a picture of me – an artist’s impression of a murder suspect, wanted in connection with a killing that had taken place the previous night.

Though photofits often look nothing like the face they’re meant to represent, this one might as well have been drawn from life. No one who knew me would have been in any doubt that the picture was of me. I read the accompanying story with mounting dismay. A driving instructor called Keith Slater had been woken in the night by an unexpected knock at the door. Opening the bedroom window, his wife Carol had heard the sounds of a struggle, rushed downstairs and found her husband bleeding to death from a stab wound to the neck. The image of her being roused by that knock has haunted me since. I am an artist and, years later, I painted the scene.

There had been no witnesses to the killing, but someone had spotted me turning off the street and given a description to the police. It was the route I usually took back from the pub and, according to the witness statement, I must have passed the Slaters’ house within minutes of the murder taking place.

My dad reacted much as I had when I showed him the paper – grim as the situation was, it seemed absurd that I was implicated. “You know who you ought to call,” Dad said. I did; I was already dialling.

My sister picked up straight away. “I take it you’ve seen the paper?” she said. “What have you been up to?” She was a police officer at the time, so she ended up taking my first statement. I would be interviewed many more times over the months and years that followed, but the police couldn’t find any way to link me to the victim. I remember being asked if I smoked, and later discovered that this was because a matchbox had been found near the crime scene with three numbers written on it that turned out to include the victim’s house number. A bloodstained tissue was found, too, but this vital evidence was free of fingerprints and in 1988, when the stabbing took place, DNA testing was still relatively unsophisticated.

It was established early on that there was little point trying to jog my memory, but I was warned in advance that the case would be featured on Crimewatch. I watched with several mocking flatmates as my drunken walk down the road was re-enacted by someone who bore no resemblance to me.

I remained a suspect. The case was periodically reopened and my dad would call to say my picture had been in the paper again. He kept them all, a curious archive. People would sometimes say, “Oh, you’re that murder suspect”, and I’d have to relate the whole story. But I wouldn’t tell new friends or girlfriends until trust was well established, for fear of scaring them off.

It took until 2006 for forensics to catch up with the real culprit. A more sophisticated test on the tissue yielded DNA with a match in Australia. The killer had moved there years before and a couple of minor crimes had left him with a police record. His motive was extraordinary. A member of a devil-worshipping clan, he had been inspired by his occult beliefs, viewing Slater as some kind of evil spirit. It was only after he’d been jailed that I considered how differently things might have ended for me if the police had come under more pressure to link me to the crime and if this new evidence had never come to light.

The killer looked nothing like me, of course, but that didn’t stop newspapers running my photofit picture one last time – “former suspect Robin Lee”. Exonerated but still associated, one last cutting for my dad’s archive.

As told to Chris Broughton

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com