by Justine Ford
Inside the briefcase they found a number of American Parade magazines. Some of the articles were about sexual killings. ‘He’d tried to get Maria to buy his magazines,’ Ron says. ‘He said that when she wouldn’t buy them, they had an argument, then he left.’
But there was something else about Mario Falcucci that piqued the investigators’ curiosity. ‘Maria’s wrists had been tied with hay band, which is used to tie hay bales, and we found out Mario had tomatoes which he’d tied up with hay band,’ Ron says. In those days, however, it was not unusual for backyard gardeners to own hay band.
‘We also found out that the day after Maria’s murder, he took some clothes – a nice pair of slacks and a reefer jacket – to Fletcher Jones in the city for dry-cleaning,’ Ron continues. Falcucci didn’t normally send his dry-cleaning into the city, but he had once worked there in a menswear store. ‘We went to Fletcher Jones and they said they couldn’t remember if anything was on them or not.’
Even though the neighbour appeared to be a ‘good suspect’, Ron was about to learn that, in murder investigations, there is often more than one.
‘Maria had told some people she was having an affair, and that the guy worked for Telecom,’ Ron says. ‘Two days before she was murdered she received a massive bunch of flowers from a florist in High Street at Northcote but there was no card, so we weren’t able to establish who sent them.’
The investigators did, however, track down a man from South Yarra who worked for Telecom and called on her regularly. ‘We interviewed him and he admitted he’d frequented the shop and said he knew Maria,’ Ron says.
But that lead took them nowhere: four days after the interview, he committed suicide. On face value, it looked like the act of a guilty man, but the investigators could find no reason why he might have wanted James dead. As far as they could tell, he was just a man who liked to read.
Ron knew from his days as an inner-city policeman that there’s invariably more than one way to gather evidence about a crime. He and his fellow crew members knew that James was a practising Catholic, and well acquainted with the parish priest, Father Anthony Bongiorno. Had Maria confessed the details of her illicit relationship to Father Bongiorno, who maybe knew her lover’s name?
‘The inspector at the Homicide Squad, Brian Ritchie, went to see Father Bongiorno,’ Ron recalls. But under church law Father Bongiorno could not be forced to say what he had heard in the confessional, and refused to name names. From that moment on, there was nothing but friction between Detective Inspector Ritchie and the priest.
Soon after, the crew found a name of a man James had had a relationship with: a married real estate agent who lived nearby. The realtor admitted to the relationship, but police were able to corroborate his account of where he was at the time of her murder, so he was eliminated from the investigation.
During a quarter of a century at Homicide and with a clearance rate of 99 per cent, it is perhaps more than a little ironic that one of Ron’s few outstanding investigations remains his first ever case as a Homicide Squad detective – Maria James’s murder, back in 1980.
But by the start of the millennium, he’d slowly started to chip away at it again between hot jobs. With significant advances in technology since her murder, Ron knew that DNA would give him a better chance of cracking the case than before because the killer had behind left a vital clue at the scene: his own blood. Also, ‘Bits of information had been coming in, so I decided to take another look at it,’ Ron says.
In 1980, scientists could only determine blood types, but DNA gave them the ability to identify someone through their blood, hair, skin tissue, bone or saliva. ‘The killer’s blood was at the scene because, in the frenzied attack, the knife slipped and he cut himself,’ Ron explains.
In 2001, Ron assembled all the old exhibits and looked at the names of all the suspects who had come to police attention over the years. There were ten in total. He then began the methodical process of checking their DNA against the unidentified blood mixed in with Maria’s at the crime scene.
‘I eventually found Mario Falcucci in a nursing home and got his DNA,’ Ron says. ‘It eliminated him.’
The same year Ron started re-investigating the case, violent criminal Peter Keogh, whom VFA-footballer-turned-politician Phil Cleary nominated as Maria’s killer, committed suicide. In 1987 Keogh stabbed to death Cleary’s sister Vicki, and according to Ron, Cleary thought the nature of the attacks was similar. ‘We got Keogh’s DNA and it eliminated him too,’ Ron says. ‘In fact, we eventually eliminated all ten people we’d been looking at.’
So if the blood hadn’t belonged to the investigators’ best suspects, who did it belong to?
*
Mark James never forgot the day he found out about his mother’s murder. He’d been on a school excursion, after which he expected the school bus to drop him off at the bookshop. But the bus drove on and took him back to school at Marist Brothers College in Preston. ‘When I got out of the bus, I knew something was wrong,’ Mark says. The parish priest, Father Bongiorno, was there to break the news, yet he offered no solace. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, there was something wrong with his approach,’ Mark says. ‘He was cold. There was no warmth, compassion or empathy.’
The news of his mother’s violent death rocked the schoolboy to the core. ‘I collapsed a bit and couldn’t really walk,’ Mark continues. ‘But I didn’t find him much help at all.’
When Mark thinks back, he realises it wasn’t the first time the priest had behaved in an un-Christian manner. ‘There’d been a scandal a few months before Mum was murdered, about three, six, or maybe nine months before,’ Mark recalls. ‘A lot of bookshops had started to sell Playboy and Mum had a box of them hidden away, but they were wrapped in plastic so you couldn’t open them.’
Father Bongiorno had got wind of the racy magazines and took it upon himself to publicly shame Maria James. ‘Mum was sitting there in church and he said something like, “Maria James has those dirty porno books in her shop!” She was hurt by that. It was spiteful, it upset her.’
What made the priest’s remarks really sting was that she had been raised to respect men of the cloth. ‘Back then, things were a bit different,’ Mark says. ‘These guys were demi-gods.’
As it turned out, there was nothing godly about Anthony Bongiorno. In 1995 he faced charges of sexually molesting three boys aged between eight and ten in the early eighties. ‘It was a result of altar boys and others making complaints,’ Ron says. Bongiorno was acquitted, but two years later, Victoria’s crimes compensation tribunal acknowledged that he had committed the acts. Some of the paedophile priest’s victims received compensation.
In 2007, the respected crime journalist Keith Moor wrote an article about the not-so-saintly priest and his link to Maria James in the Herald Sun.
After the Moor article, a family friend asked Mark if he had ever been touched by Bongiorno. Mark recalls. ‘I said, “No, I had sat on his lap and maybe he was thinking dirty thoughts, but nothing happened”.’
The family friend persevered and asked about Mark’s brother. The question took him by surprise because he’d never suspected his brother had been abused. But then again, he’d never asked.
‘I knew how to relax him and soothe him, and get him to talk,’ Mark says of his intellectually impaired younger brother, Adam. ‘So I asked him.’
What Adam told his big brother left him aghast. ‘He told me Father Bongiorno had been touching him down there and it was just before Mum was murdered.’
But there was more.
‘Mum had sensed something was wrong with him,’ Mark says. ‘She asked him and he told her. Mum said to him shortly afterwards, “Adam, I’m going to do something about this”.’
‘Having told Adam she was going to do something about it didn’t make Bongiorno the murderer, but it made him a damn good suspect,’ Mark says, recalling how he phon
ed Ron with the information straightaway.
The detective agreed Bongiorno had a motive. ‘If Maria had confronted him, he could have thought she might have exposed him,’ Ron says. ‘And while Mario Falcucci had gone into the shop that day, the description of the man seen going in the door was not dissimilar to Father Bongiorno either.’
In 2012, when Ron took a statement from Adam – the first ever – he repeated the same story.
Ron knew there was only one way to inculpate or exculpate the paedophile priest: DNA. But Father Bongiorno died in 2002, aged sixty-seven. Ron’s best bet was to collect DNA from his sister, who refused.
The only other alternative was to exhume the priest’s body, but to get permission from the Coroner’s Court, the police needed a stronger case. ‘Ron had a novel way of going about it,’ Mark remembers. ‘He said, “It’s not an exhumation, it’s a search warrant!” ’
Unfortunately, Ron’s request to dig up the priest’s bones was rejected and, in 2015, a new team of cold case investigators used confidential techniques to eliminate Bongiorno. Even so, Mark James says the case would never have progressed as far as it did had it not been for Ron. ‘He’s still giving me hope,’ Mark says. ‘It’s amazing how he won’t give up and that’s given me the confidence that one day this will be solved.’
7
’TIS THE SEASON
‘I have a lot of memories growing up of listening to him on the phone in the middle of the night. He wasn’t around a lot – not because he didn’t want to be there but he just worked and worked and worked.’
– Joanne Iddles
Joanne Iddles, snowy-haired like Ron was as a child, was just starting kindergarten when her dad started catching killers. Ron tried to shield his little girl from the horrors of his work so that her early childhood was as it should be – full of fairies and princesses and special occasions spent with her family.
Christmas, for instance, never lost its magic for Ron, even though he was, by now, a non-believer. As a policeman who’d already witnessed countless autopsies, he’d concluded that once a person is dead, they’re dead. ‘Every year, we’d watch Carols by Candlelight on Christmas eve. They’d always sing “Silent Night, Holy Night” and it was like the world had stopped, almost as though a line had been drawn and everything went into a quiet space. I always hoped the next day would be a time to spend with my family, but it rarely happened. I knew as soon as the phone rang I was going to work.’
Christmas was not always so happy for others, which was why, Ron says, ‘On-call homicide investigators are always on edge at Christmas.’ During his twenty-five years at Homicide he worked as many as eighteen Christmas Days and often investigated murders in other parts of the state. It was tough because Ron wanted to make Christmas special for his little girl, but other people needed him more. ‘It was disappointing if I was called out when Joanne was young as it meant she was left at home with Colleen, which happened during many of her early years. It would have been better if I was home, but it was not the case.’
The call from work usually came during the late afternoon or early evening, after families had had too many eggnogs and started getting on each other’s nerves.
‘In the early days we had pagers, and later, telephones, and when I’d receive a call from a particular number, I knew I was going to work. It would be the supervisor from D24 [police communications],’ Ron says. ‘One of the things about Homicide is that while you can plan for things, you can’t plan for anything. Even on Christmas Day you’d always be packing up to go to work.’
Such is the life of a homicide cop – often sacrificing family life to go to the aid of a family who has lost a loved one under the worst of circumstances.
Ron remembers the first time he was called to a murder during the so-called festive season. It was Christmas eve 1980, and a woman had been stabbed to death at a caravan park in Springvale South, in Melbourne’s south-east, because the husband thought the wife had spent too much money on Christmas presents.
‘Throughout my journey at Homicide, there was often a murder on Christmas Day, and it normally revolved around families that were somewhat fractured – yet someone had decided they should all get together,’ Ron says. ‘When they mixed alcohol into the situation, there would be an argument. At one stage there was a murder on Christmas Day for eleven years in a row.’
Not all spouses would find the cop’s life easy to accept, but Colleen was different. ‘I couldn’t have done it without an understanding wife,’ Ron says. ‘Colleen knew what I did, she accepted it. She totally understood and supported me if I had to go to work. At the time I did appreciate it, but looking back I appreciate it far more now because in my career I’ve seen relationships break up because a wife or partner hasn’t totally understood the nature of being a detective.’
Ron particularly remembers the tragic death of a man at Rye on the Mornington Peninsula one Christmas. ‘It involved a fifteen-year-old boy who’d been given a new archery set,’ Ron says. ‘He had a lot of experience.’
That day, more than thirty of the boy’s family and friends were spending Christmas at his house. And, as Ron would discover, this was no feuding family: they all got along well, and were grateful to spend time together and exchange gifts. Then things went terribly wrong.
‘The fifteen-year-old boy went outside with some other teenagers,’ Ron begins. ‘He took his new crossbow and set up some hay bales to fire into them.’
It seemed like a fun thing to do while he waited for his mum to serve a roast lunch, and as an experienced archer who understood that his arrows, once fired, would embed themselves safely in the hay bales, there was no obvious cause for concern. At the same time the boy was setting up the hay bales, his next-door neighbour went out to his backyard to enjoy a can of beer while he waited for his lunch; it was too windy out the front. It was a fatal mistake.
‘Just as he sat down in a plastic chair, an arrow came through the fence and went through his back and heart,’ Ron says. The teenage boy – despite his experience and ability – had looked through the wrong side of his crossbow, which had sent the arrow flying through the fence instead of the hay bale.
‘The boy saw the man on his back and called his dad,’ Ron continues. Panicked, the father and son jumped the fence to their neighbour’s aid. ‘They took out the arrow – which was probably not the best thing to do – and the man died.’
‘By the time we got there, at about two or two-thirty in the afternoon, the table was set with all the Christmas trimmings,’ Ron remembers. ‘We had to say, “Sorry to meet under circumstances like this, but the fifteen-year-old will have to come to Rosebud Police Station with his dad”.’
Once the interview was over and Ron was thoroughly satisfied the man’s death had not been deliberate, the shaken teenager was allowed to go home at around 10 pm.
‘Christmas didn’t happen for them,’ Ron says. ‘I felt bad for everyone, especially the guy who was dead, and his wife.’
‘Two seconds either way, the man wouldn’t have died and it wouldn’t have been a tragic accident,’ Ron reflects.
*
The hardest cases to deal with were the ones in which the victims were children.
Ron recalls receiving one call – which, like so many others – came at 2.30 in the morning. D24 was telling him that a woman had killed her three children and husband. That mild September night in 1982, Pina Zikos had slain her husband Nick, their daughters Tracy and Wendy, and their son Mark. The image of their dead bodies has haunted Ron ever since. ‘I can still see that bedroom where it happened all these years on – it’s a vision that never leaves you,’ he says. ‘In the bedroom were the three children. There were two single beds in there and one child was dead in each bed. The oldest child, a girl, was lying on the floor.’ She was the one closest in age to Joanne.
‘When you deal with grief and death all the time, you want to shi
eld those closest to you,’ Ron says. ‘It can distort your view of the world, so throughout my career I basically put a fence around Colleen and the kids.’
Colleen will never forget the Zikos case either. ‘In the old days, homicide cops used to bring home crime-scene photos,’ she reveals. ‘I could cope with that because I was a nurse and I saw a lot of things. But I can still see the Zikos children lying on their beds …’
The children’s father had been unable to protect them. ‘He was behind the door, slumped in the corner,’ Ron recalls. ‘They’d all been stabbed twenty-six, twenty-seven times.’
Ron pieced together how it had happened.
The previous night, the family had gone to Cockatoo in the Dandenong Ranges to visit friends, in whom a troubled Pina had confided. ‘She had said to them, “I feel like I’m going like my mother” – Pina’s mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia – “and I think I need help”.’
Pina’s friends did all they could. ‘They rang Lifeline and Pina spoke to a counsellor, and they made an appointment for her to go and see someone the following morning. I think even though she made the appointment to go to Lifeline, she knew what she was going to do that night,’ Ron says, adding that even though the children each had their own bedroom, Pina decided to settle them all in the same room when they returned home. After the children were in bed, she and Nick turned in themselves. ‘Then, once the husband had fallen asleep, she got up and got a Staysharp knife.’
‘I had to treat the scene as a jigsaw puzzle,’ Ron says, to figure out what happened. ‘Part of it was clinical, but when you go to reconstruct what happened in the bedroom, then it becomes personal and emotional.
‘It was like a bloodbath,’ he says. ‘It looked like the young boy, who was about four, had been stabbed first whilst in bed, as he hadn’t moved. You could tell that the next one killed, who was about six, had woken up because she had defence marks. You could see that she’d put her hands up and been stabbed. The eldest girl, who was about eleven, was on the floor. It looked like she’d woken up after the first child was killed, and that she’d stood up, been stabbed, and fallen on the floor.’