Both the Supreme and Magistrates courts have had a busy 12 months, with high-profile cases including the Australian Defence Force Academy Skype case, the Peter Slipper taxi voucher misuse allegations, and the non-conviction of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s chief of staff Peta Credlin for drink driving.

But it has been murder cases, whether in trials, appeals, sentencings, inquiries into convictions, or disputed facts hearings, that have marked 2013.

Even at the year's end, the ACT was facing another murder investigation, after a man's body was found in a Lyneham unit on Saturday. The victim was named on Wednesday as 27-year-old Nicholas Sofer-Schreiber and police said he had stabbed multiple times.

No sooner had that information been released, ACT Policing sensationally announced on Wednesday afternoon an investigation into another suspicious death, this time a 71-year-old killed in Phillip.

Back in 2013, the first murder conviction came after Kai Yuen, 28, pleaded guilty in February to the shooting murder of his long time friend, Brendan Scott Welsh, 28, outside the Hughes Shops in 2010.

Mr Welsh was shot dead as he sat in a car behind the shops, after being lured to the location on the pretense of a drug deal.

The former friends had fallen out, initially over a car, and a tit-for-tat argument had escalated to threats and counter-threats, with Yuen warning Mr Welsh to ‘‘arm up’’.

Eventually, Yuen donned a disguise, picked up his double-barrelled shotgun, and spent hours trying to confront Mr Welsh across the city.

He eventually managed to get Mr Welsh to the Hughes shops, and emerged from a hiding spot, shooting the victim from close range.

Despite pleading guilty to murder, Yuen disputed what actually occurred in the moments leading up to the shooting, including his claim that the gun discharged accidentally when he let go of it as he tried to open the car door.

That led to a lengthy disputed facts hearing in the ACT Supreme Court, before Yuen was eventually sentenced to 28 years jail for the murder and a prison bashing.

Yuen’s plea of guilty to the murder charge was the first in more than 15 years.

A second murder conviction followed just months later, after Corey Martin, 39, was found guilty by a jury after a trial in the ACT Supreme Court.

Martin was responsible for brutally bashing a Canberra public servant and drug dealer less than half his size during a robbery at a block of Belconnen apartments in 2010.

The beating left Andre Le Dinh, who weighed just 48 kilograms and stood 165 centimetres tall, choking on his own blood, and with multiple fractures to his skull.

Neighbours reported sounds reminiscent of a bowling ball being dropped on the floor.

Martin had maintained his innocence to the murder, saying the smaller man had attacked him, and had been alive and standing up when he left with $30,000 cash and four pounds of cannabis he found lying on Mr Le Dinh’s coffee table.

But a jury rejected his version of events in late May, finding Martin guilty. He was sentenced to 22 years jail in October.

In August, a tragic case of a mentally ill son who strangled his mother to death in their Yarralumla home came to a close.

The son, Gabor Laszlo Aranyi, 33, had lived an isolated life and was almost totally dependent on his ageing mother Ottilia Aranyi, 75.

He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, experiencing delusions, hallucinations and serious disturbances of thought.

Aranyi formed a conspiracy that involved his mother, believing her to be possessed by the devil, while he was a ‘‘messenger of God’’.

His delusion was fuelled by everyday things like the colour of his mother’s car, the 666 ABC Canberra frequency, cloud shapes, and his belief he could influence human and natural events.

That eventually led the son to strangle his mother to death in their kitchen, after she tried to make him go to an appointment with mental health services.

Aranyi was found not guilty by way of mental impairment to the charge of murder in August, with the court indicating he would have received 20 years in jail if deemed guilty.

Perhaps the most brutal case to come through the ACT Supreme Court this year involved the ‘‘indescribably vicious’’ killing of a young university student walking home along Northbourne Avenue in the dark in August 2011.

Taylor Schmidt, 22, and a juvenile, who cannot be named, used a baseball bat and a machete to kill Liang Zhao, before robbing him of his mobile phone and just $21 in cash.

The pair had randomly come across Mr Zhao as he walked home along Northbourne Avenue, after getting off a bus from Melbourne at the Jolimont Centre.

Both pleaded guilty to the killing in August, with Schmidt later sentenced to 20 years and six months, and the juvenile sentenced to 17 years.

The past year has also been marked by the inquiry into the murder conviction of David Harold Eastman.

Eastman was convicted in 1995 of shooting the ACT’s police chief, Assistant Commissioner Colin Stanley Winchester, six years earlier.

But he has always maintained his innocence, and an inquiry was ordered into his conviction after fresh doubt was raised.

That inquiry has already heard a substantial amount of evidence this year and had been expected to resume in 2014.

But a challenge from the Director of Public Prosecutions, which began in the ACT Supreme Court in December, could see the inquiry stopped in its tracks.

The full bench of the Supreme Court is still hearing that challenge, but the inquiry will continue in the meantime.

At the end of the regular sitting for the ACT Supreme Court, there were still two unresolved murder cases before the ACT Supreme Court.

The first involves Luigi Costa’s alleged murder of his neighbour, businessman Terrence Freebody, 89, in Red Hill.

The second is the case of Aleksander Vojneski, 29, who stands accused of stabbing his partner Paula Conlon, 30, to death in a home in Macgregor.

Two other killers - Rebecca Anne Massey and Scott Alexander McDougall - also lost appeals against their murder convictions this year.