by Justine Ford
But no one laughed at Ron’s organisational skills when he started saving the company time and money by streamlining its deliveries. ‘I divided the Melbourne metropolitan deliveries into areas, which I put onto a sheet on the wall,’ he says. It wasn’t like analysing the timeline of a murder, but it required careful consideration nonetheless.
The more Ron learnt about the trucking business, the more he realised there were ‘two sides to the ledger’. While he had plenty of money coming in, there was plenty going out too. ‘I spent $1200 a week on diesel,’ he recalls. ‘And the truck had a 300-horsepower Cummins diesel motor which needed a big electrical charge to run. So if the truck didn’t start, you’d have to “Holler for a Marshall” [call a battery company], and buy a battery that cost $650.’
Ron also had to replace his tyres regularly because his truck carried a whopping twenty tons of potting mix at a time. ‘Tyres were $320 each,’ he says. He had ten of them.
And even though Ron was enjoying working by himself, at times it was a struggle. ‘I’d even have to go to work with the flu,’ he says. ‘If the wheels didn’t turn, I didn’t get paid. That’s when I started to realise how good a job Victoria Police was.’
Sometimes, Ron still had to attend court cases, which meant time off work, so he looked for another way to keep the wheels turning. ‘I found a driver who I thought was reliable and paid him a small wage to keep the truck on the road,’ he says.
Ron liked working for Debco but was all ears when a man named Peter Wilson phoned, having heard Ron had left the force. Peter owned a company called Coringle Furniture which manufactured and distributed pine furniture to shops around Melbourne. Before Ron accepted the job at Debco, he’d had a chat about the trucking business with Peter. ‘Peter Wilson was an astute businessman and we really hit it off,’ says Ron. ‘When he called he said, “There’s a driver leaving. If you want to come here, here are the conditions”.’
At Debco, Ron was paid in accordance with how much work he did. Coringle Furniture, on the other hand, paid by the hour. That didn’t make sense to Ron. ‘I said, “There’s no incentive. I could go and park under a tree”,’ Ron recalls. ‘He said, “That’s the way it is, but I’ll guarantee you five days work”.’
Ron had to admit it was a good offer. Attracted by the stability, he sold his prime mover and bought a brand new Isuzu truck. ‘It carried fifty cubic metres of furniture,’ Ron says, always happy to talk makes and models.
It was hard yakka, but Ron was up for it. ‘We’d start loading the truck at seven in the morning,’ he says. ‘In the end I could load the truck in an hour.’
Ron got so fast at loading and unloading that he invariably ended up back at the depot hours earlier than his workmates. ‘What are you doing back here?’ his boss would ask. ‘I’m finished,’ Ron replied. ‘So from then on they reckoned I could sometimes do two loads a day and I did,’ he adds. It got to the point that a record amount of furniture was hitting shop floors, and within a year of Ron starting work, the company expanded. ‘So I got the option to buy a second truck and I employed a driver for the second truck,’ he says.
It was late 1990, and Ron’s first time as an employer. Unfortunately, his second driver wasn’t up to scratch. ‘One morning I came in and there were cuts and bruises all over his face and I thought he was still affected by alcohol,’ Ron says. ‘I said, “Mate, you aren’t working today”. It was a busy time, so I kept him on, but he only lasted two months.’
From then on, Ron decided it would be smarter to trial potential drivers before offering them a permanent job. But that plan also went awry. ‘I got a young bloke who I took out with me on a trial run and he was atrocious,’ Ron remembers. ‘He’d said he’d worked for a big trucking company but he was continually hitting the kerb.’ After suggesting to the young man that he’d never driven a truck before, Ron paid him for the day’s trial and told him not to come back.
A week later Ron received a letter, summoning him to the Industrial Relations Commission. ‘The driver I’d terminated got up before the commission and said, “I thought it was a permanent position and I gave up a job to do it”,’ Ron says. He couldn’t believe his ears when, after he explained he was trialling the young man, he was told there was no such thing as a trial. ‘So we went to conciliation and the young bloke wanted two weeks’ pay.’ Ron gave it to him, keen to put the incident behind him and get his truck back on the road.
It was a steep learning curve. ‘I learnt that employing people is not that easy,’ Ron says. ‘At that time I had no idea about industrial relations or workplace contracts.’
*
On 2 July 1991, during Ron’s truck-driving stint, he and Colleen welcomed another baby girl. They gave her an Irish name, Shae. ‘We often went to Merimbula in our caravan for holidays and stayed beside a couple who had three young girls,’ Ron says. One of them was called Shae. ‘Colleen fell in love with the name.’
Joanne, who was fifteen at the time, was present at the birth. But there was something in it, besides a baby sister, for three-year-old Matthew too. ‘We purchased a large toy truck for Matthew so he did not feel out of it,’ Ron says with a smile.
Over the years, the family moved from Launching Place to the outer Melbourne suburb of Boronia, then to Wantirna, twenty-four kilometres from the city. There, they lived in a red brick house with timber frames which gave the impression of an oversized cottage. The day they moved in, Ron began to renovate, tearing down the outdated wallpaper, before installing a new kitchen, a new bathroom and laying fresh carpet.
By this stage Joanne was well into her teenage years, and Matthew had grown into an inquisitive little boy interested in machinery, just like his dad.
‘My earliest memories are probably of Dad as a truck driver,’ Matthew says. ‘I do remember going on journeys with him. To keep me entertained he’d let me operate the high beam and dip the lights and what-not.’
Matt particularly remembers the overnight chicken runs. ‘I carried a box or two but he was probably just giving me light boxes to make me feel like I was doing something,’ he figures. ‘It was probably while I was in grade one or two, and he paid me a dollar an hour.’
Not surprisingly, Ron developed a reputation as one of the best owner–drivers in town. Added to his six-day-a-week driving schedule was maintenance work on his truck on Saturday nights or Sundays. It didn’t leave much time for home and family, but Ron never lost his hardworking, farm-boy attitude.
While he was at Homicide, Ron mightn’t have talked about murder to his three kids, but growing up, Joanne, Matthew and Shae couldn’t help noticing their dad wasn’t like their friends’ fathers. Yet there were times when the reality of their father’s job registered. ‘I guess I was exposed to photos and videos,’ Matt says. ‘Not intentionally, but if Dad was reading books on the table I’d flick through and see things. I was privy to some crime scene photos and stuff. I had some nightmares.’
Like Joanne, Matt also remembers his dad taking phone calls in the middle of the night when there had been a murder. ‘He’d be arranging for photographers, forensic analysis and calling the rest of his crew,’ he says. Sometimes, when Ron was spending a day at the office, Matt would get a lift to school with him. When he picked up other detectives on the way, Matt couldn’t help but overhear them discussing the latest case. ‘But that was my life and that was just normal to me.’
Shae also remembers being woken during the night. ‘You’d hear Dad pacing up and down the corridor,’ she says. ‘You’d hear Mum asking what was going on and then she’d be laying out his clothes and helping him get ready.’
Even though Shae knew what her father did for a living, as a young child, she didn’t dwell on it. ‘I often forgot the severity of his job,’ she says, ‘that he’d often just come home from seeing a dead body.’ In an echo of Matthew’s memories, she adds, ‘To us kids, he always kept on the down-low about it.’
During Melbourne’s gangland wars, which erupted while Shae was in high school, her father was even more secretive than usual. ‘We couldn’t know his location for a whole year,’ she recalls. ‘We did see him but we didn’t know where his office was. It was something to do with the underworld.’ At times like that, Shae realised her dad’s job was extremely dangerous.
By the time she was a teenager, Joanne had two much younger siblings, and it fell to her, as the eldest, to help her mum around the house. ‘It was pretty tough,’ Colleen says, recalling the demands of caring for a baby and a toddler at the same time, and working at a psychiatric hospital some nights. ‘Joanne was into parties and boys and gatherings, but she helped me out a lot.’
‘When I was eighteen I had a car, so I’d often do the kinder pick-up or the drop-off at school, or I’d look after Matthew and Shae,’ Jo remembers. She didn’t really mind because she knew how hard her parents were working to support the family.
She also noticed how they kept a keen eye on her welfare. Whenever she went out with friends, her dad would always drive her safely home. ‘He never let me catch a taxi. He always dropped me off and picked me up, no matter what time it was,’ Jo says. ‘Looking back, I’m so grateful.’
Colleen always understood why her husband was so protective. ‘He’d seen so much on the streets and didn’t want Joanne to become a victim,’ she explains.
Ron agrees that he worried about the risks that young women, including his eldest daughter, faced at night. ‘Everything that I dealt with work-wise was negative, so in the end you build a fence around your family,’ he says. ‘But you can become over-strict. It took me a long time to realise not everyone out there is bad.’
Jo says that during the Homicide years, when her dad usually left home at five in the morning and didn’t get home until eleven at night, her parents were like ships in the night. Yet they were still a formidable team. ‘She really gets him,’ Jo says of her mum. ‘She knows when he’s had a hard week. They were just amazing parents together.’
Ron would have liked to have spent more time with his kids, but he did his best. ‘Colleen used to say that I’d build the sandpit but wouldn’t play in it,’ he says. ‘But I always took an interest in what the children did at school. I was always on the school council and involved in working bees.’
Yet having a dad who was as meticulous as Ron could be a challenge, especially when it came to schoolwork. If Jo ever complained about a sub-standard result in an essay or a test, Ron would announce, ‘You’ve got to get back to the six Ps, Joanne! Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance!’ At the time she detested the six Ps; now the concept amuses her.
When it came to boyfriends, Ron was always going to regard them with suspicion. ‘He was such a policeman at that stage,’ Jo says. It didn’t help that her first love – a taciturn seventeen-year-old named Marcus Zammit – always turned up looking casual and brandishing a Slurpee. ‘My initial thoughts about Marcus were mixed,’ Ron says. ‘He was a young guy who wore his baseball cap backwards.’ What sort of guy does that? Is he good enough for my daughter?
A couple of years later the young couple started talking about marriage. ‘Colleen and I were both saying, “Hang on a minute, you’re only nineteen or twenty”,’ Ron says. ‘Then we thought, Hang on, Colleen was eighteen and I was nineteen and we survived. But it was probably a different era.’
Even though Jo and Marcus had started making wedding plans, there was no way Ron was going to let them share a room; Marcus had to stay in the bungalow out the back if he was visiting. ‘Dad would never let us sleep in the same room even when we were twenty,’ Jo recalls. On one occasion, he used his detective skills to accuse her of breaking the rules. ‘Joanne, come inside now!’ he bellowed. She did as she was told. ‘He was determined that I had been in the bungalow with Marcus all night,’ she says. Colleen weighed in, as she knew her daughter was innocent, but there was no convincing him.
‘Feel Joanne’s bed!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s cold!’
They can laugh about it now.
The following year, at twenty-one, Jo graduated from Deakin University with a degree in primary-school teaching. It was all she had ever wanted to do.
‘As a kid, she’d sit her dolls in a chair and act as if she was a teacher,’ Ron remembers. Watching the graduation ceremony, he felt incredibly proud of his little girl – who, at 171 centimetres tall, was not so little anymore.
With her university days behind her, Jo and Marcus set a date. Ron remembers riding to the chapel in the hire car with his daughter. ‘It was about a thirty-minute drive, so we just chatted and I wished her all the best in her married life,’ he says.
Relieved to know that her father had accepted her fiancé, Jo’s only concern now was the weather. ‘It was March but we had hail, thunderstorms, the works,’ she says. But, ‘The minute I got out of the car and was standing with Dad, ready to go inside, a beam of sunshine literally shone on my dad and me. It came right through my veil. I don’t know if it meant something …’
Moments later, with the sun still shining, Ron walked his daughter down the aisle. ‘It was a very proud moment and she looked stunning,’ he says. In an unconventional twist, Colleen joined her husband and daughter at the altar. ‘We’d decided when the celebrant said, “Who gives this woman away?” instead of me saying, “I do”, we said, “We do”,’ Ron recalls.
Having realised Marcus was worthy of his daughter, Ron welcomed him into the fold. ‘It is easy to stereotype,’ Ron admits. ‘Over the years our relationship has grown. We ride bikes together, we go on family holidays together and are all very close,’ he says.
‘I think as Dad got older he let his guard down a little bit,’ Jo remarks. ‘Soon they had a great relationship and they like sharing a red wine together.’
Ron is now granddad to Keenan, Ella, and Darcy, whose middle name is Ronald, just like his granddad. ‘We often watch Poppy on TV,’ Jo says. ‘He gets so excited!’
‘He has always made time for us,’ Shae, says. ‘Even though he was on-call in his job, he was on-call all the time for us. You could call him and go, “I don’t know what to do about this situation”, and he’d say, “I’ll sort it out and call you back”. And he’d fix it.’
‘I think I was the sneakiest out of the three of us. I probably did play up a bit,’ Shae, who’s now a marketing manager, admits. Aged sixteen, Shae would tell her parents she wanted to go out on Friday or Saturday nights.
‘I’d say, “What’s the function?” She’d say, “Just a gathering,”’ Ron recalls. ‘In the end I realised she was conning us. A gathering was a party.’ And at parties, Shae wanted to drink. ‘We were not overly strict,’ Ron remembers. ‘I told her she could have two Vodka cruisers.’ Shae did not, however, stick to the two-drinks rule. ‘Colleen was cleaning her room one day and found two twenty-six-ounce Vodka bottles,’ Ron reveals. ‘Along with the liquor was a bra and two plastic ziplock bags. Ever the detective, Ron suspected Shae had been concealing the vodka in the plastic bags and stuffing them in her bra before she went out. It gave a whole new meaning to being in your cups.
And while Ron’s parenting style mellowed as his two younger children grew older, Jo didn’t mind that he’d been strict with her. ‘He was brought up with a lot of good values and I think he tried to follow that through. He was very different to what he is now,’ she says, adding that his firmness came from love. ‘He’s got the biggest heart of anyone,’ she says.
And if ever his adult children were feeling down, Ron would email them, telling them he was thinking of them.
‘He’s very touching like that,’ Shae says. He doesn’t say a lot, but when he does he really melts your heart.’
Matt, today a Qantas pilot, agrees. ‘I know he loves us all. He’s probably not very verbose in expressing that, but you know through his actions how much he cares about you.’
&
nbsp; And that, Matt adds, is mutual.
14
HOMICIDE – TAKE TWO
‘After four-and-a-half years I never thought I would return to Victoria Police, let alone the Homicide Squad. It was an exceptional feeling to be sought after and supported by senior police and return to Homicide. I was apprehensive at first, not wanting to get ahead of myself, but once I was back there and with a few jobs under my belt, it was fantastic, and I owe that all to Geoff O’Loughlin.’
– Ron Iddles
The police force wanted Ron Iddles back. Inspector Geoff O’Loughlin had first met Ron during the investigation into the Marafiote murders when he was a senior sergeant coordinating the three jurisdictions involved. It came as quite a shock to O’Loughlin when he heard a few years earlier that Ron had left the police force. ‘I remember thinking at that time, what a loss to the department.’
O’Loughlin was running the sergeants’ course at the Police Academy but had also spent around twenty years on the force’s recruit and reappointee boards. ‘As a result of being on this panel I was always aware of getting talented applicants to rejoin and I knew Ron would be a great asset if he came back,’ O’Loughlin says.
By the early 1990s, Victoria Police needed more experienced leaders within its ranks and, for O’Loughlin, Ron was an obvious choice. He recalled how, during the investigation into the Marafiote murders, a South Australian officer had spent several hours trying to wear down Judy Ip, when Ron calmly asked if he could interview her. Even though he was granted permission to speak to Ip, O’Loughlin still had to stop the South Australian detective from re-entering the interview room. ‘I think he was concerned Ron could achieve what he couldn’t,’ says O’Loughlin. He was right.
‘After about an hour Ron came out and said to me, “The body is buried in the chook shed at the farm”,’ O’Loughlin says. Ron continued interviewing Ip while O’Loughlin arranged the subsequent search. ‘After they [the crime scene investigators] dug down about two feet I said to Ron, “They haven’t found anything”. He just said, “Keep digging”. They did, and the body was eventually located, much to everybody’s jubilation – except the killer’s!’