The Good Cop

by Justine Ford

  And that’s when malice turned to murder.

  ‘Alby said a plan was hatched to collect Sid Graham from his boarding house and take him for a drive in the country on the pretext they were going to cut a safe at a bank,’ Ron says. The starting point for the ‘drive in the country’ was a property near Britannia Creek where Curran had once stayed, and where a man known as Beatle Bailey was living at the time.

  Bailey, an unemployed man with no criminal aspirations, had no idea what Torney was planning to do after he left his house with Curran and Graham. Torney had told Graham, however, that he wanted him to collect some oxy gear from the banks of Britannia Creek, three minutes’ drive away. It was the gear they needed, he said, to cut the safe. When they arrived, Torney maintained the bogus story – if only for a moment.

  ‘They told Sid Graham to get out of the car, go to the creek and get the oxy gear from the creek,’ Ron says. ‘The others were about ten feet behind, and when Graham got to the creek, Torney shot him. Torney and Curran went back to the house and told Bailey they’d put him off [killed him],’ Ron continues. It came as a shock to Bailey, who’d had no idea Torney had been planning a murder. ‘Bailey didn’t want to know about it and didn’t come back to the house again.’

  ‘He knew they’d come looking for him and would have realised they shouldn’t have told him,’ Ken O’Connor adds.

  Ron and Brian McCarthy caught up with Bailey near Morwell, and from the moment he sat inside the police car, he was willing to help and tell the police what had happened. Rather than wait until they got to the police station, McCarthy, who didn’t want his witness to change his mind about assisting police, took Bailey’s statement then and there, on the bonnet of the car. ‘Brian taught me something that would later serve me well,’ Ron says. ‘Commit them to a story or commit them to a statement, then and there. Never come back at a later time for a statement, as they may have changed their mind.’

  The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. ‘We had the information from the JP, we had Alby’s statement, and now we had Beatle Bailey’s statement,’ Ron says.

  *

  In his late twenties, Torney had a girlfriend, a cleanskin named Amanda Sinclair.* The twenty-one-year-old customer service officer recalls introducing her boyfriend to her parents. ‘They could tell what he was like,’ Sinclair says. ‘My father was a very good judge of character.’

  Yet to Sinclair, Torney had his appeal. ‘Because I was very young and naive I thought he was a bit of a charmer, and he was good-looking and paid attention to me.’ And even though he was never violent towards her, Sinclair caught a glimpse of his dark side. ‘He used to tell me if I ever did the wrong thing, he would find me. I used to be scared of that.’

  Torney never told Sinclair what had happened to Sid Graham – she figured it out for herself after hearing strange snippets of his conversations with Curran, who she considered to be ‘a normal, everyday guy’. Then Graham’s floor rug turned up at her house, along with a few other belongings. But it was when she saw a story on the news about Graham’s disappearance that she knew her boyfriend of less than six months had something to do with it. ‘I don’t know how I knew,’ Sinclair says, ‘but I did.’ She decided not to raise the subject.

  ‘I met Sid a couple of times,’ Sinclair continues. ‘I’d been to his home in Hawthorn. He was a gentle man – just like Curran. Like a person who was looking for a friend.’

  *

  As the investigation continued, the detectives discovered that after Graham’s murder, Torney and Curran had visited his boarding house. Torney had kept a couple of items, including the rug, but otherwise they’d tried to destroy evidence that might link them to the dead man. ‘They cleaned out his flat and chucked his possessions in the Yarra,’ O’Connor reveals. ‘But the whole flat was dusted for prints and inside one of the dressers was a full handprint of Curran’s.

  ‘All the evidence we were able to collect turned out to be through Ron’s brilliance,’ O’Connor continues. ‘Each night we’d be getting home and we’d know we were getting a bit closer, a bit closer. Then it got to the stage where they could be arrested.’

  The police were looking for Amanda Sinclair too, whom they suspected of being an accessory to murder, but she had fled to Brisbane so Torney could not find her. A friend took her in and she unexpectedly fell pregnant. Ron being Ron, it didn’t take him long to find her, so he hotfooted it up north, arrested her and took her back on the plane. She was surprised the tall, sharp-eyed detective was so considerate. ‘He took off the handcuffs so I wasn’t embarrassed,’ she says.

  ‘I brought her back to Melbourne and she was terrified,’ Ron remembers. When she made a detailed statement, however, the police realised the polite, softly-spoken woman had done nothing wrong. ‘She said if Torney found out she’d made a statement, he’d kill her,’ Ron says. He felt sorry for the innocent witness, whose only misstep had been to form a relationship with the wrong man. ‘What a tangled web we weave,’ he muses.

  In those days, there was no such thing as witness protection, but the Homicide Squad crew arranged a change of name for Sinclair and public housing, determined to protect her from Torney. ‘After we got her from Queensland she was destitute and desperate,’ Ron remembers.

  Around that time, the Armed Robbery Squad – the first to investigate Torney – arrested him, while the Homicide Squad brought in Curran. ‘Curran made a full confession and took us back to Britannia Creek,’ Ron says. On the way there, he pointed out places where he, Torney and Graham had stopped along the way. ‘So we’d stop the car, get him to point to the scene and take photographs for evidence,’ Ron says.

  Torney refused to confess. But McCarthy knew there were more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with cream.

  While Torney and Curran were locked up in the city watch-house, Brian came up with a plan that was years ahead of its time – to use a listening device. McCarthy decided to keep Torney locked in his cell but allowed Curran to wander along the long bluestone walkway between the cells, in the hope he would find Torney and start talking to him. As the police had a warrant for the listening device, whatever Torney and Curran said would be admissible in court.

  ‘Brian got the listening device put in the food hatch leading to Torney’s cell,’ Ron says.

  The idea was a success. ‘One of the first things Lee Torney said was words to the effect of, “I know how I’m gonna beat this. I’ll do the same to Amanda Sinclair as was done to Debbie Boundy”,’ Ron says.

  Debbie Boundy, as the detectives were aware, had been poised to give evidence against alleged hitman, Christopher Dale Flannery, when she disappeared on Christmas Day, 1981, believed murdered. Flannery and two other men had been accused of murdering a barrister named Roger Wilson, who disappeared from East Gippsland in 1980. Nineteen-year-old Boundy was in a relationship with one of Flannery’s co-accused.

  As a result of Boundy’s disappearance, the case against Flannery, otherwise known as Mr Rent-a-Kill, was weakened. He and the two co-accused were found not guilty. Ron’s fear now was that Torney would try to find a way to permanently silence Sinclair before she could testify against him. ‘Straightaway, that heightened everything,’ he says. ‘Amanda Sinclair’s evidence became crucial and we moved her again for her own safety.’ Sinclair says not only did Ron save her life, but his practical help and advice got her back on track.

  *

  Sinclair wasn’t the only thorn in Torney’s side. As it turned out, his associates weren’t backing him either. ‘He thought Alby would stay fat and not be a dog, and he thought Beatle Bailey would do the same,’ Ron says. Torney was wrong on both counts. ‘And Grant Curran had already admitted it and said, “Torney was with me”.’

  During the course of the investigation, Ron found other damning evidence too. At Torney’s parents’ home, he found a hacksaw used to cut down the sawn-off shotgun. O’Connor remembers t
hat ‘Ron just went all the way to corroborate all the evidence.’

  The trial began in Melbourne’s Supreme Court on 1 June 1982. ‘I spent the whole winter at court,’ Ron remembers. Amanda Sinclair, seven months pregnant, gave evidence about Torney’s character and activities for half a day. She wished ‘the earth would swallow her up’, but knew she was doing the right thing.

  ‘After a trial lasting more than three months, Torney and Curran were convicted of murder,’ Ron says. ‘They both got life but the law changed and life became twenty-five years, so both of them eventually got out.’

  More than thirty years later, Amanda Sinclair was watching the news when she saw Ron, visibly upset that the mother of a murder victim whose case he had been working on had passed away. All the memories of the kindly policeman flooded back and she decided to get in contact. ‘I decided to write to him and send a photo of me, my children and my grandchildren,’ she says. ‘I said, “Thank you. We’re all here because of you.” ’

  Lee Torney did not enjoy such a happy ending, however, and ultimately he reaped what he’d sown. ‘Years after Sid Graham’s murder, Lee Torney was re-arrested over a massive crop of marijuana and stolen property, Ron says.

  ‘Then in 2005 he was bashed to death with a shovel and dumped in a mineshaft near Maryborough.’

  *Name changed

  6

  OPEN FOR BUSINESS

  ‘Every family of a victim has a right to answers. It is not about closure but about giving them answers which might explain why. This case will never be closed and failure should never be considered as an option.’

  – Ron Iddles

  Stepping out of the unmarked police car and into the musty second-hand bookshop, Ron Iddles knew he’d arrived. Since he was a child he had longed to join Victoria Police’s elite Homicide Squad, and here he was, about to investigate his first murder. Once inside, the lanky twenty-four-year-old paused to take in the sights and sounds and smells. The shop in High Street, Thornbury, in Melbourne’s north, was crammed with works of the imagination: romance novels, science fiction, literature and even a few Playboy magazines, wrapped tightly in plastic and hidden discreetly inside a wooden box. A timber door with a daintily curtained window separated the bookshop from a large, dark but well-appointed apartment in which the bookshop’s owner, thirty-eight-year-old Maria James, had lived with her two sons, Mark, aged thirteen, and Adam, eleven.

  The daughter of Italian migrants, James was an attentive mother and accomplished home cook. She had maintained an amicable relationship with her former husband, John James, who had remarried, and sometimes she took the boys on outings with John and his new wife. She was much loved by her extended family and friends, and an active member of the St Mary’s Catholic parish at Thornbury, where Mark was an altar boy. Adam had cerebral palsy and a mild form of Tourette syndrome which made it difficult for him to communicate, but whenever he had something to say his mum stopped what she was doing to listen and comfort him.

  On the day of her murder, Tuesday, 17 June 1980, James packed her boys off to school as usual, but left the ‘closed’ sign on the front door as she didn’t work on Tuesdays. Sometime during that morning, she opened the door to a killer who stabbed her sixty-eight times, at one point pressing a steel potato masher so hard into her face that its unmistakable diamond pattern was left indented in her skin.

  It was a relentless, angry, frenzied attack. James was neither raped nor robbed, yet whoever wielded the knife wanted to make sure their name would never pass her lips. Two unfinished cups of tea at the scene suggested she had been entertaining before she was slain, and the cops were pretty sure it was someone she knew. Ron wonders if ‘It was possible that her guest had become enraged during their conversation, because she was attacked with a knife from her own kitchen, not a knife the killer had brought himself. That told us that her murder was not pre-planned.’

  James’s estranged husband discovered her body. He said she had rung him that morning at Fitzroy Town Hall where he worked, asking him to come over, as she was in a spot of bother. She then asked him to hold the line for a moment. While he waited, he heard voices in the background, followed by her chilling screams. Then silence.

  John James drove to the bookshop as quickly as he could, but couldn’t get in because the front door was locked. He went around to the back door but it was locked too. What was going on? Growing increasingly worried, he fetched a ladder and climbed in a window.

  ‘He walked up to the bedroom and saw a pool of blood, and then Maria, stabbed,’ Ron says. In a panic, James raced out the back of the shop to call the police, but when he returned he discovered that the door leading from the residence to the shop, as well as the bookshop’s front door, were now open.

  ‘That only meant one thing,’ Ron says. ‘That the killer was hiding in the bedroom when John arrived.’

  The bedroom’s cream-coloured shag pile carpet would have been stylish in its day, but by the time Ron saw it, it was soaked with blood. ‘There were no crime-scene cleaners in those days,’ Ron recalls. ‘And when someone has been dead for a couple of days and their blood has congealed, it is a strange smell. It is the smell of death.’

  John James was quickly eliminated as he had been at work when Maria was slain and had no motive for her murder. Without obvious suspects, a crew from the Homicide Squad was dispatched to run the murder investigation from Maria James’s bookshop, while John and his new wife looked after Mark and Adam.

  Senior Sergeant Brian McCarthy led the investigating crew, which included Detective Sergeant Jack Jacobs, Detective Senior Constable Roland Legg and newcomer Detective Senior Constable Ron Iddles. It was the start of a highly cohesive working relationship. ‘It was about knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, understanding your role, and knowing you could not achieve a result if you were a lone wolf. This was important because the hours were long.’

  Maria James’s murder was front-page news, and made the Victorian papers almost every day for weeks, until baby Azaria Chamberlain vanished from Uluru (then Ayers Rock) in August 1980. No one could understand why a loving mother – with seemingly no enemies – had been killed with such fury.

  It wasn’t unusual for the crew to work from 7.30 in the morning until eleven at night. And while homicide investigators past and present have always worked long hours, today’s detectives would never conduct an entire investigation from a crime scene.

  ‘It was the view of Brian McCarthy that it would save time,’ Ron explains. ‘So rather than going into the office and then to the crime scene, we were there all day and into the night. It was a good idea because a lot of people from the Thornbury/Preston area would come in with information, and the media would come in to talk to us. I guess you could say we were open for business.

  ‘We were set up in the living room and the kitchen, boiling Maria’s jug for tea and coffee,’ Ron remembers. ‘And in the late afternoon, the crew would have a barbecue and talk over the information they’d picked up during the day.’

  But there was no getting away from what had happened in James’s bedroom just a few short steps away. ‘The stark reality was that we knew she had been stabbed to death in there. It was voyeuristic but we had to go through her personal things and look at the bedroom and think about how she’d lived. I would stand at the bedroom door, replaying over in my head what I thought had happened,’ Ron says. ‘I’d look at the photos of Maria’s body and, in my mind, re-create what had gone on there. From the photo and the blood on the floor, I could see which way she had been lying. What had happened to her was horrific.

  ‘Here I was, a fresh arrival, working on the most high-profile case, right in among it. I thought, I can see what’s happened here. I know this is where I need to be.’

  Police didn’t have computers in those days, so everything had to be done by hand. ‘We had to write in an A-to-Z index all the information that came to
us,’ Ron says. ‘That manual indexing would take up the better part of the day.’

  Ron and his colleagues had promising leads to explore, but as it became a case punctuated by twists and turns, the investigators sensed it would not be easy to solve. Remarkably, Ron remembers every event, every time and every suspect’s name as though it was yesterday. ‘I do remember things,’ he says, ‘I don’t know why, but I do.’

  The first strong lead in the investigation came from a Repco employee who’d been to a service station near the bookshop on the morning of James’s murder. ‘At 9.10 that morning he saw a man wearing a pair of fair-coloured slacks and a blue reefer jacket, carrying a small black suitcase, going into the shop,’ Ron says. ‘He saw this guy knock on the door and go in, which told us that Maria had opened the door and let him in. He was described as being only about five foot seven, with darkish hair which was pulled back.’

  Police released the man’s description to the media, with immediate results. ‘A lot of people rang in and said it sounded like a man called Mario Falcucci, who lived opposite Maria’s,’ Ron says.

  As it turned out, there had been other sightings too. ‘At 12.20 pm a lady driving south along High Street saw a man run out of the shop, cross High Street, and run up Hutton Street, past where the neighbour lived, to the railway line,’ Ron says. ‘The guy in the signal box also saw a man running and carrying something, then crossing the railway line. Everyone said it was most likely Mario Falcucci.’

  From the physical description, it certainly looked like the person the locals had seen was James’s neighbour, a short, dark-haired loner who lived with his mum. As Ron and the crew dug deeper, they unearthed further circumstantial evidence to suggest he was their man. ‘When we interviewed him he admitted he had been to the shop and that he was carrying a briefcase,’ Ron says.