The Good Cop

by Justine Ford

  With the likelihood that he was now investigating a double murder, Ron had to get both men identified, quickly. Perhaps, Ron thought, if I can find out the identity of the second man, it will lead me to the identity of the first. He made a snap decision, even though he knew it was unorthodox. ‘We had a camera in the car,’ he says, ‘so I took a photo of the second man’s face and, without consultation, decided I would release it on the six o’clock news in the media.’ He was certain someone would recognise the man and call police straightaway. ‘Again, it’s about going with your gut instinct.’

  At two minutes past six, Ron received a call from the boss, Detective Inspector Chris Enright, who had watched the news and asked Ron if he thought an artist’s sketch of the man’s face might have been more appropriate. ‘In hindsight, maybe it was a mistake,’ Ron concedes, ‘because I think if you deal with death as a homicide investigator it isn’t offensive. You forget there are a lot of people in the community who haven’t seen a dead person, so they might well be confronted by an image on the news.’

  Especially in a close-knit community like Shepparton, where locals might know the dead man. But it yielded a result, just as Ron had hoped. ‘By 6.05 I had at least five phone calls identifying the man I’d pulled out of the river as Allen Raymond Thomas,’ he says. The callers also revealed where the forty-six-year-old had lived. ‘We went to that address, not really knowing what we’d find,’ Ron remembers. ‘There was evidence of some sort of disturbance in the kitchen and lounge room, but no one was home.’

  The detectives doorknocked the neighbours’ houses to see if they could shed any light on the matter. ‘We established that two men were living there and from the description we gave, we established the identity of the second person in the river as sixty-year-old John Gordon MacKay.’

  The dead men were housemates.

  Thanks, in part, to the country-town grapevine, Ron quickly found a suspect – Daniel John Nuttal – a twenty-five-year-old from Shepparton who was acquainted with the older men. When Ron took him in for questioning two days after the bodies were found, it looked like he’d have a quick result. ‘He made full admissions,’ Ron says. ‘He even did a re-enactment for us.’

  Nuttal told them another man had been involved – thirty-two-year-old Jason Paul Guthrie, also from Shepparton. He and Daniel used to drink with Thomas and MacKay. At first, the police couldn’t find him. ‘I’d been back in Melbourne for a couple of days when I received a phone call to say he was at a farming property about thirty kilometres outside Shepparton, so I arranged for the Shepparton detectives to go and arrest him,’ Ron recalls. Once the arrest had been made, Ron drove back to Shepparton to interview him. He, too, made admissions.

  With both Nuttal and Guthrie charged with murder, Ron returned to Melbourne to prepare the brief.

  *

  Nuttal and Guthrie’s night had begun with several alcoholic drinks and later a drive to Allen Thomas and John MacKay’s house in Ashenden Street, Shepparton. They forced their way in through the front door, then MacKay was bundled into the back seat of the car and Thomas into the boot.

  Nuttal then drove Guthrie to ‘Sand Bar Number Two’ on the banks of the Goulburn River, during which they discussed killing the men. Guthrie struck MacKay forcibly to the head and body with a metal car lock, inflicting grievous bodily harm. Nuttal maintained that he asked Guthrie to stop and had tried unsuccessfully to pull him away. Nuttal then helped him drag MacKay into the water and held him down until ‘the bubbles stopped coming up’.

  Nuttal said he’d agreed to help get Thomas out of the car boot as he was afraid Guthrie might hurt him too. In sentencing Nuttal, His Honour Justice Robert Osborn stated: ‘Thomas struggled but Guthrie dragged him into the river and held him under the water for a period which you estimate at four to five minutes.’

  After all the violence, Nuttal drove Guthrie back to Nuttal’s mother’s house where the men questioned what they had done. According to Nuttal, Guthrie apologised for involving him. The men then drove to nearby Broken River where they burnt the clothes they were wearing, afraid they might implicate them, before drinking more alcohol.

  *

  The trial began in November 2004, with the jury finding both Nuttal and Guthrie guilty of two counts of murder. During sentencing, Justice Osborn outlined the circumstances Ron had uncovered while investigating the case. For participating in ‘the senseless and horrific destruction of two lives’, Justice Osborn sentenced Nuttal to thirty years with a non-parole period of twenty-four years. He said he was not satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that Nuttal had been coerced into his actions. Justice Osborn sentenced Guthrie to a total effective sentence of thirty-two years, with a non-parole period of twenty-six.

  It was alleged in court that during a previous incident Guthrie had been angry with Allen Thomas who had accused him of spending his (Thomas’) rent money, while he (Thomas) was in jail. So had a possible grudge led to murder? The judge said this in sentencing Guthrie: ‘No sensible explanation for your conduct on the night of the killings was (however) advanced either to investigating police or at your trial other than you were “pretty pissed and off your head” and “just drunk and stupid”.’

  Regardless of motive, Ron says murder is ultimately about ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. It’s that simple.

  ‘I often get asked what does a murderer look like,’ he says. ‘I reply, “They look like you or me”. But they’ve made a bad choice.’

  22

  THE ANSWER’S IN THE FILE

  ‘This chapter is about my commitment to a dying father whose six-year-old had been raped and murdered. The lesson is the ABC of Homicide: Assume nothing, believe nothing, check everything, and ensure the facts guide you.’

  – Ron Iddles

  Ron’s hard won maxim, ‘The answer’s in the file’, was put to the test in 2001, when he was appointed head of a new investigative team called the Homicide Cold Case Unit. It ran for three years and was set up to investigate unsolved historic cases. At the same time, the supercop continued investigating hot jobs as well.

  One morning, as he was chipping away at yet another troubling case, the phone rang. At the other end was Denis Clarke, who’d read in a newspaper article that Ron had been put in charge of the new unit. Clarke told Ron that his daughter, Bonnie, had been raped and murdered when she was just six, back in 1982. Ron had heard of the case and found it deeply disturbing. Impressed by Ron’s unparalleled clear-up rate, Clarke believed Ron was his last hope. ‘I need you to do something about this,’ he said to Ron. ‘I’m dying of cancer.’

  Solving a historic murder is no mean feat; in most cold cases, there was no fresh evidence and leads had dried up. So Ron knew better than to make promises, but he gave Clarke an undertaking he would look into it. He immediately started digging into the file with a brand new Homicide Squad investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim Day. Ron and Day familiarised themselves with every detail of the murder, which had happened in the northern Melbourne suburb of Northcote. Bonnie, a happy, intelligent child, had lived in a house in Westbourne Grove with her mum, Marion Clarke (now Wishart), who was separated from Bonnie’s dad. They’d been there for about two years.

  Around eleven o’clock on the night of Monday, 20 December 1982, Marion checked on her daughter before going to bed herself. She saw that Bonnie was sleeping soundly with her much-loved poodle-chihuahua cross, Moomsie, dozing at the end of the bed.

  The following morning, when she poked her head into Bonnie’s room, Marion noticed she was still in bed, and unusually pale. When Marion drew back the covers she was horrified to discover that Bonnie was naked with a hole in her chest and bruising to her neck. There wasn’t much blood, though; it looked as though someone had cleaned it up. Frantically, Marion dialled triple zero before running screaming into the street.

  *

  Around the time Ron and Day started picking the o
ld file to pieces, they arranged for a story to be published in the Herald Sun, calling on the public to come forward with any information that might help them solve the case. A school friend of Bonnie’s, Kylie Ward, also six years old at the time of the murder, called police straightaway, expressing concerns about a boarder who had once lived in the Clarkes’ house. ‘She used to go there after school and the boarder would look after them,’ Ron says. ‘He would have Bonnie on his knee and touch her.’ Even as a child, Kylie found the boarder’s behaviour unsettling, and remembered Bonnie telling her that he had once stood over her bed watching her.

  Kylie wasn’t the only one who’d found the boarder’s behaviour unusual. As the detectives leafed through the old statements, they read that an adult visitor to the house had recalled the boarder saying he ‘liked little children’. The boarder had also reportedly used the word ‘attracted’ when, after a bath, Bonnie had walked naked into the lounge room to dry off in front of the heater. Who was this mystery boarder? Ron and Tim set about trying to identify him.

  They didn’t ask Marion for the boarder’s name because the original investigators had suspected her of murdering her daughter, and she had not yet been eliminated. ‘The original investigators thought Marion wanted Bonnie out of her life and suspected the sexual assault was a throw-off, in other words, a secondary crime to make the police look for a male, not female offender,’ Ron explains.

  Marion, who was devoted to her daughter, was suspect number one. ‘I was questioned at length and accused within the first hour,’ she recalls, adding that the detectives said she was ‘not grieving properly’. The media was quick to get in on the act too, portraying Marion as a potential killer, after which members of the public wrote her vile, threatening letters.

  Day soon identified the boarder as Malcolm Joseph Thomas Clarke, unrelated to his victim. Some people knew him as Mal, but others called him Joe. In 1982 the twenty-eight-year-old worked as an assistant film projectionist at three cinemas in the city. On the day of Bonnie’s murder, he was on a rostered day off. In the early days of the investigation, police spoke to Clarke but did not consider him a suspect.

  Ron and Tim put Malcolm Clarke under the microscope. They discovered that eight months after Bonnie’s murder, in August 1983, Clarke had been arrested over the aggravated rape of a neighbour in Brunswick. He had used a knife during the terrifying attack. Not only that, but during the investigation, police found items in Clarke’s unit relating to the mutilation killing of a twenty-two-year-old Prahran woman, Theresa Crowe, in June 1980. Clarke was finally found guilty of sexually assaulting the Brunswick woman and also the manslaughter of Theresa Crowe. He served eleven years behind bars and was released in 1994.

  The way Ron saw it, the modus operandi in all the crimes, including Bonnie Clarke’s murder, was similar. ‘The victims had been asphyxiated, stab wounds had been inflicted, and the crime scenes had been cleaned,’ he says. Bonnie might have been the only child victim, but there were enough similarities for Ron to strongly suspect the boarder of her murder.

  If only the original investigators had seen it that way. Within minutes of finding her daughter dead, Marion realised there was only one person who could have killed her: the boarder, and she told the police so. He was the only person who knew how heavily she slept, and that Moomsie would not bark if he were in the house because she knew him. She also said he would have known she left the back door slightly ajar to let out a second dog, which was not housetrained. The boarder also knew the layout of the house and where she had placed little ‘traps’ – plants and the like – to alert her if there was an intruder.

  So why did the police think Marion had done it? ‘The original investigators thought she was an unfit mother because she would have a drink from time to time, or occasionally leave Bonnie with other people in the house,’ Ron says. The reality was, Marion was a hardworking student and agency nurse who asked her boarders to watch Bonnie while she was at work, and Bonnie had never told her she was uncomfortable around Clarke. ‘If she had have been afraid, she would have told me outright,’ Marion insists.

  Back then, there was no occasional childcare so even though Marion was doing her best, the police did not see it that way. ‘Single mothers were not well looked upon,’ she remarks. ‘It was not as if I was on government handouts – I was working, and hard. I was working towards our future.’

  Not surprisingly, when Tim Day first went to speak to Marion she was wary. Then he said he thought the early investigation had been botched. It was enough to make Marion break down in tears, grateful that, after all these years, there was finally some hope. She subsequently agreed to a polygraph test, which she passed with flying colours. ‘By this time we were totally satisfied that she hadn’t done it,’ Ron says. He turned his attention more closely to Malcolm Clarke.

  Ron and Day found out that Clarke was working as a nurse and also as a guard on the famous Dandenong Ranges steam train, Puffing Billy. Ron put in place a covert operation, arranging for an undercover operative calling himself ‘Terry’ to buddy up with Clarke. ‘Terry offered Malcolm Clarke a lift home one day and after that they saw each other two or three times a week,’ he says.

  Meanwhile, Ron and Denis Clarke talked on the phone regularly. Ron was not at liberty to tell the dying father much about the investigation, but he did encourage him to keep the faith. ‘As time went on I told him I was confident we could solve it but it created pressure which I did not need,’ Ron admits. ‘I think when you put yourself under that much pressure you have to be conscious you do not make a mistake or try too hard to get a confession. It always has to be about finding the truth of the matter.’

  Despite the mounting pressure, Ron kept the investigation on track, and a few months into the covert operation, he arranged for Terry to take Clarke to meet another undercover operative calling himself Mark. That was when Clarke finally came undone, confessing in a covertly recorded conversation to having harmed Bonnie Clarke. ‘I played with Bonnie,’ Clarke told the undercover officer. ‘I think she wanted to go scream or something and I covered her head. And I probably had a knife with me, I don’t know. I was that fuckin’ drunk.’

  Clarke explained how he had entered through the unlocked back door before going into Bonnie’s room where he had ‘fingered’ her. He said that when she had tried to scream he covered her head with a pillow. He stabbed Bonnie in the chest with a knife and panicked. He then pulled out the knife and left, having pulled up the little girl’s pyjama bottoms and the bedsheet.

  Ron was one of the team who arrested Clarke for Bonnie’s murder just over an hour later. It was June 2002, sixteen months since Ron first agreed to look into the case for Bonnie’s dad, and almost twenty years since Bonnie’s mum was wrongly accused of murder.

  *

  During the video-recorded interview, Clarke recounted the whole, terrible story. ‘To interview him with Tim Day was fascinating,’ Ron says. ‘Clarke was a quiet man, sometimes tearful. I’m not sure if it was because he’d been caught or the fact he felt sorry for himself. He said he’d confessed to the undercover officer because he liked him. That being said, he went on to plead not guilty.’

  A Supreme Court jury found him guilty of Bonnie Clarke’s murder and in December 2004, Clarke was sentenced to life in prison, with a twenty-five-year non-parole period. ‘He then appealed to the Supreme Court in Melbourne, and eventually to the High Court of Australia,’ Ron says. ‘The issue was around the methodology used in employing an undercover operative, and the allegation he had made a false confession. In the end we won both arguments and his original conviction and sentence stood.’

  It was an extraordinary result and, at the time, the oldest homicide Victoria Police had solved. It was also a relief, and while it wouldn’t bring Bonnie back or take away the bitter memories of having been a murder suspect, Marion later remarked, ‘My dark period is coming to an end. It’s not as hard as it used to be.’
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br />   Getting justice for Bonnie, Ron acknowledges, was one of the highlights of his career. ‘To vindicate an innocent woman was massively satisfying,’ he says, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘And to grant a dying man’s wish … that’s something I’ll never forget.’

  Denis Clarke – who ultimately saw a man found guilty of his daughter’s murder – passed away a short time later.

  23

  PETER RULE’S TERRIBLE END

  ‘Leonard Borg committed this crime out of greed so his drug business would not be put in jeopardy. What he did to Peter Rule as a fellow human being is difficult for me to comprehend.’

  – Ron Iddles

  Peter Rule wasn’t an angel, but no one could accuse him of being a bad dad. Separated from his wife, Rule wished he could have his son with him all the time, but he made do with access visits, picking up his boy Darcy from Southern Cross railway station every alternate weekend and during school holidays. Both father and son were mechanically minded, and would spend hours tinkering with Peter’s car on access visits, happy amid the grease and spare parts.

  In November 2009, Peter Rule went missing. It was out of character because he hadn’t told Darcy he was going away. He’d also left behind his dog, which was peculiar as they went everywhere together. When local police determined Rule’s disappearance was suspicious, they called on the Homicide Squad to find out what had happened to the single dad.

  As soon as Ron spoke to Rule’s family, there was no doubt in his mind that the fifty-six-year-old had been murdered. Before he disappeared, Rule lived alone in a public housing unit in the Melbourne suburb of Meadow Heights. He and his ex-wife, Judy Rule, shared custody of eleven-year-old Darcy. Every night without fail, Rule would ring Darcy to wish him goodnight. Bill Rule, one of his brothers, says he loved his son so much he used to think up fanciful ways of seeing him more often. Rule first shared his love of mechanics with Darcy when he was very young. ‘Peter taught him to drive when he was probably about seven,’ Bill recalls. ‘Darcy is car mad and Peter was a car nut!’