by Justine Ford
Rule had something of a colourful past, however, but nowhere near as colourful as he liked to make out. ‘We established that Peter was a guy that talked the talk; he always wanted to give the appearance of being tough, and inferred to people that he wanted to be a gangster, but he was pretty much the opposite,’ Ron says. ‘He did some debt collecting and repossessing of cars but relied predominantly on a disability pension.’
Rule – who was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder just before he turned fifty – grew up in the rough Melbourne suburb of Glenroy in the 1950s and 1960s. When Rule was ten his mother died of an aneurysm, so his thirteen-year-old sister left school to look after her eight younger siblings while their father went to work. With no parental guidance, the young children did as they pleased, and some of the boys took to stealing other people’s belongings – bicycles and the like. It was a habit they all outgrew, except for Rule who, as an adult, was convicted of minor dishonesty and drug offences. Yet his misdemeanours did not detract from the fact that he was a loving dad and brother, someone his family could always count on. ‘He wasn’t a bad person by any means,’ Bill says.
Ron explains the circumstances surrounding his mysterious disappearance. ‘One Sunday Peter told his son that late that night he was going to meet someone who was going to show him an old motorbike,’ he says. ‘I think maybe it was meant to be a BSA [Birmingham Small Arms Company] bike from the 1950s.’ Peter would have been excited to see the vintage model because he loved motorbikes as much as cars.
Two days later, on Tuesday, 17 November 2009, one of his neighbours reported him missing after noticing the light on in his unit, and realising his much loved dog, Bella, was inside. Rule hadn’t called Darcy either, which was so unusual that his brother Joe also alerted the police, who went to Rule’s unit to look around. ‘His car was there and the door was closed but unlocked,’ Ron says. ‘It was odd because inside was his mobile phone, his wallet and his dog.’
By Sunday, 29 November, with no sign of Rule, the Homicide Squad took over the case. It was up to Ron and his crew, including another talented investigator, Detective Senior Constable Paul Rowe, to find out what had happened to the missing dad. ‘The local police had made some inquiries but they hadn’t taken any statements,’ Ron recalls. ‘So we decided to conduct a doorknock.’
One of Rule’s neighbours recalled seeing something unusual. ‘A dark-coloured four-wheel-drive had stopped and pulled up out the front,’ Ron says. ‘The neighbour saw a man go to Peter’s front door but didn’t know who it was. A short time later the black four-wheel-drive left.’
Who was the man in the four-wheel-drive? Ron wondered. And did he have anything to do with Peter’s disappearance?
Ron looked at the timeline on his whiteboard to consider Rule’s movements before his disappearance. ‘We knew on the Sunday night he’d dropped his son off at Southern Cross railway station, and spoken to his brother Joe at about 8.35,’ he says. ‘The other thing we knew was that he’d indicated he was going to meet someone.’ But who?
Ron held a media conference and released Rule’s photo in the hope that someone might come forward with information. ‘No one had seen him, but we thought it might relate to the fact that he’d dobbed someone in for armed robbery,’ he says. ‘That person was in jail, but we eliminated him.’
Hoping Rule’s worried siblings could shed some light on his disappearance, Ron drove to the country to see them. ‘After speaking with them, I was confident Peter had met with foul play,’ he says. ‘He just wasn’t the sort of person who wouldn’t contact his son.’
Ron and his team also spoke to some of Rule’s associates in the car-repossession business. ‘We found out he was to meet someone called Potato Head,’ Ron says. Ron wanted to know Potato Head’s real name and eventually found out through a man at a car yard. ‘Paul Rowe said, “I think Potato Head is a guy called Leonard Borg”.’
Ron and Rowe discovered that Leonard Borg was twenty-five and lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. ‘We also found out that on 12 November – only a week after Peter had gone missing – Leonard Borg had gone to Malta,’ Ron says. It was a planned trip, not a spur-of-the moment decision. ‘We found that out from his mum,’ Ron says, adding that the detectives asked if she could arrange for her son to call them upon his return. ‘He did, and we took a statement. He admitted he knew Peter Rule.’
As it happened, the men were friends. Borg told the police that on the Sunday night in question he was working in Campbellfield at a factory owned by Corey Small. ‘Leonard Borg was a boilermaker and had been doing some welding work there,’ Ron explains. ‘He said he could get some timesheets to verify he’d worked late that night.’ By and large, that put Borg – who provided the timesheet as promised – out of the picture. ‘And the investigation came to a bit of a standstill.’
But things changed suddenly on Tuesday, 6 April 2010, when nineteen-year-old welding apprentice, Michael Spiropoulos, walked into a police station in the early hours of the morning. ‘He wanted to see the Homicide Squad,’ Ron says. ‘I arranged for Paul Rowe and another detective, Sally Leach, to go to the police station and see him.’
A short while later, Rowe called Ron back. ‘He said that Michael’s come in because he can’t live with what he knows. He says Leonard Borg killed Peter, but he was involved in the disposal of the body and he wants to assist and help the police.’ Ron advised Rowe to formally interview and caution Spiropoulos, but also to arrange for the young man to get some legal advice.
After receiving the necessary advice, Spiropoulos – who had met Borg through work – gave the detectives a detailed account. ‘He said that on the Sunday night he received a phone call from Lenny, who asked him to buy him some bleach, then go over to a factory where they’d been doing some welding in Campbellfield. So Michael went to Safeway, bought ten bottles of bleach, some garbage bags and rags, then drove to the factory, where they had a conversation,’ Ron says. ‘Leonard told him Peter was dead and in fact he was still lying on the floor of the factory.’
Spiropoulos said Borg asked him to wait in the office. He then heard a forklift moving, followed by the sound of the boot of Borg’s Volvo being closed, and assumed Borg had used the forklift to move the body before putting it in his car. The older man asked Spiropoulos to help him scrub the walls and floor of the factory with bleach. Spiropoulos did as he was asked.
A short time later, Spiropoulos noticed blood spatter around the entrance to the female toilet cubicle. ‘Borg told Michael he’d shot Peter ten times with a .22 semi-automatic rifle,’ Ron says. ‘He told him he’d picked Peter up from home, they’d had dinner, and after driving around for a while, he’d taken Peter back to the factory. He said he’d shot Peter as he stood near the toilets. Lenny and Michael then found nine spent shells, which Lenny crushed with a hammer, wrapped in toilet paper and flushed down the toilet, but they couldn’t find one.’
Once the factory looked spotless, the men put everything they’d used to clean it into Borg’s Volvo. They then headed to a factory in Thomastown. Borg had leased the premises to cultivate cannabis, with Spiropoulos’ help. ‘He’d convinced Michael to borrow $35,000 to help fund it,’ Ron says.
After that, Ron says, the pair drove to a service station where they bought firewood and filled a fifteen-litre jerry can with petrol. Borg returned to the Thomastown factory, where he had a bed, while Spiropoulos went home for the rest of the night.
‘The following day, Michael came back to the factory, where Leonard was burning the body in a forty-four-gallon drum,’ Ron says. ‘There was black smoke everywhere and Michael said the smell was shocking.’ The younger welder noticed that, around the bottom of the barrel, Borg had spread coco soil – used in the cultivation of the cannabis – as the barrel had begun to leak. Over the next few days the two men visited Bunnings to purchase various items including citronella oil to remove the smell, a hatchet and hydrochloric acid. ‘Th
ey also bought a shovel, which was used by Leonard to keep poking the body down,’ Ron says. ‘He also dismembered the body with an electric chainsaw and the hatchet.’
Borg then emptied the barrel’s contents onto the factory floor. ‘He got a hammer and smashed the bones,’ says Ron. ‘Leonard had a view it would go to a powder.’ Borg put what remained into a black plastic tub and poured hydrochloric acid over it. After placing the black tub into the boot of Spiropoulos’s car, they loaded the coco soil into the garbage bags and put them on the back seat.
Spiropoulos told the police they drove to the Great Ocean Road, stopping about three kilometres from Anglesea. ‘They went down a track near the beach and tipped out the garbage bags containing what was left of the body, after it had been burnt, cut, and put in acid,’ Ron says. They then went to a beach about five kilometres east of Lorne, where Borg tipped the black tub into the ocean.
Not surprisingly, drops of acid from the tub had burnt holes in their clothes. ‘So as they drove to Lorne they bought matching shorts and a top each,’ Ron says. They later returned to the Thomastown factory, where they left the tub and the garbage bags in a corner. They also drove their cars through a car wash. ‘And they re-painted the floor of the Thomastown factory.’
Borg headed off for his trip to Malta on 21 November, leaving Spiropoulos to tend to the cannabis crop. ‘He also instructed Michael to get rid of his Volvo, which he did, and he removed the number plates,’ Ron says. Upon Borg’s return the following January – around the time police first interviewed him – the men took all the incriminating items and dumped them in a skip in Campbellfield.
*
On the day of his confession, Michael Spiropoulos accompanied Paul Rowe and a colleague to the factory site in Campbellfield where he’d said they’d dumped the suspicious items. The skip had gone, but among some rubbish on the nature strip were several pieces of broken plastic tub and a piece of plastic, flecked with blue paint. There was also a cigarette butt and a substance that looked like soil. Forensic tests later showed that the blue paint on the melted plastic was the same as the paint on the floor at the Thomastown factory.
The following day, Spiropoulos led the investigators to the hatchet, and two days after that, he accompanied them down the Great Ocean Road. Rowe told Spiropoulos to point out the locations he’d told them about. Spiropoulos led them to a tea-tree grove near Aireys Inlet where they found piles of coco soil containing burnt plastic, other burnt items and flecks of blue paint. ‘In some of it was a piece of bone which turned out to be human,’ Ron says. Again, the blue paint matched the paint on the floor at the Thomastown factory. Among the debris they also located a burnt mobile phone. ‘It had a partial model number that was the same type of phone Peter last used,’ Ron adds.
Other members of the team executed a warrant at the Campbellfield factory where Rule had been murdered. Rowe spoke to the owner, Corey Small, who had supplied Borg’s timesheet in good faith and had no idea what had gone on in his premises. ‘He’d thought Leonard had been welding, until we went and saw him,’ Ron explains. ‘He remembered coming in on the Monday morning and it had all been cleaned, especially around the toilet area. Leonard had said he’d spilled something and he’d accepted it.’ The crime scene investigators ended up finding microscopic blood at the scene that turned out to be one and a half billion times more likely to belong to Peter Rule than anyone else.
Armed with more than enough evidence, Ron and his team had closed in. ‘I arrested Leonard Borg as he was driving home around eleven one morning,’ he says. ‘I got a team of detectives to execute a warrant on his factory and his home. He came back with me to St Kilda Road.’
On his arrest, Borg came across ‘as if he was shocked’, Ron says. ‘He wanted legal advice. After that he answered some very basic questions.’ Ron put Spiropoulos’ story to him, to which Borg had no comment. Ron attempted to engage Borg, but he was not talking.
When the paperwork was finished, Ron told Borg police were searching his factory and had found his dog. ‘I told him the police shot him, Ron says, the tougher side of the veteran detective, apparent. ‘He goes, “What?!” I said, “Yeah, it’s been shot”.’ The comments visibly upset Borg who, like Rule, loved his dog. ‘I said, “I’m only joking”,’ Ron continues. ‘But I said, “You’re worried about a dog when I’ve accused you of shooting someone, cutting him up and burning him? For goodness sake!” ’
During the search of Borg’s Thomastown factory, police found, among other items, the hydroponic cannabis set-up, two fired .22 calibre cartridge cases, a shovel and a tin of blue floor paint.
At one stage, Spiropoulos walked the detectives through the scene and showed them where Borg had burnt Rule’s body. When Rowe looked up, he saw black soot on the ceiling, which supported Spiropoulos’ story. Spiropoulos also revealed that Borg’s firearm was kept on the mezzanine level, and while it was not there, the investigators did find a box of .22 ammunition. It was missing ten rounds, the exact number reportedly used to shoot Rule. They also found damaged number plates that had come from Borg’s discarded Volvo. ‘Michael had chopped them up, but forensic scientists were later able to put them back together,’ Ron says. ‘Investigating this case was like putting a jigsaw together.’
At the house where Borg lived with his unsuspecting parents, police found several tins of blue paint, a photo that indicated he was familiar with the Great Ocean Road, and the LBAY brand shorts he had bought after the acid burnt his clothes. ‘We’d been to the clothing shop in Lorne and the lady had gone back through the cash register,’ Ron says. ‘One day during the time period we were interested in, she had sold two pairs of shorts and two pairs of tops. It was the only place in Australia where you could buy the shorts which matched those in Leonard’s bedroom drawer.’
During a subsequent visit to Borg’s home address, police found, quite by accident, a firearm poking out of a piece of PVC pipe in Borg’s ute. They also found a silencer, spent cartridge cases and empty cartridge boxes. ‘In his factory we also found a piece of PVC pipe which was about three feet long,’ Ron says. ‘It [the cut end] matched perfectly the pipe in the back of the ute.’
Thanks to some nifty forensic investigation, and the help of Michael Spiropoulos, the pieces of the puzzle had well and truly fallen into place. ‘Everything Michael had told us, we were able to corroborate,’ Ron says. ‘Come Leonard Borg’s trial, Michael had pleaded guilty to the charge of accessory to murder. In other words, he’d assisted in the disposal of the ashes and so on. He was given a three-year suspended sentence on the basis that he gave truthful evidence for the Crown.’
Ron says that during Borg’s trial in 2012, Spiropoulos gave evidence for a week and ‘didn’t miss a beat’. He also had the opportunity to explain why he had helped Borg. ‘I didn’t really feel I had much of a choice,’ he said in court. ‘He wasn’t just going to let me go after I had seen what he had done. I felt I either had the choice of helping him do it or have the same sort of fate happen to me.’
At the end of the six-week trial, the jury found Leonard Borg guilty of murder. At the pre-sentence hearing Judy Rule read out a victim impact statement by Darcy, then aged fourteen. In part, it read: ‘When I found out the news about my father and what had happened, all I could do was cry and cry because I missed him so much and I wish and wish that none of this had ever happened,’ the statement began. ‘For a while I didn’t know what to do with myself because I wanted to be with him so very much.’
Borg was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison with a non-parole period of nineteen. But the investigators and the Office of Public Prosecutions didn’t think that was enough. ‘We appealed it and he got more,’ Ron says, explaining that in July 2013, the sentence was increased to twenty-eight years and nine months with a non-parole period of twenty-four years and nine months. Ron felt the nature of the crime demanded the longer sentence. ‘It’s one of the most horrific murders I’ve in
vestigated,’ he comments.
Why did Borg do it?
‘He thought Peter Rule had dobbed him in for a cannabis crop he used to have in another location,’ Ron says. ‘Peter knew about his set-up at Thomastown and figured Peter was too big a risk, so he lured him – probably by saying he wanted to show him a motorbike – and killed him. The ironic part of it was, Peter Rule had never dobbed him in at all. And if Borg hadn’t involved anyone else, he might have gotten away with it.’
While nothing was going to bring Rule back, Ron was satisfied that he and his team could solve the case for the Rule family and, in a way, help them to grieve. ‘In the end one of the greatest things was to give back to the family a piece of bone so they could at least have something to bury,’ he says.
24
THE IDDLES EFFECT: CONNECT
‘If people reached out to me I always wanted to respond and help where I could’.
– Ron Iddles
You could call it the Iddles Effect: the unique way in which Ron has touched the lives of those he met, including fellow police, the media and, most significantly, victims’ families.
Armed Robbery Squad detective Allan Birch’s life changed the day he met Ron Iddles. Birch’s superiors said he needed greater levels of supervision, but who, in the high pressure world of the Crime Department, was going to take him on? Ron. Of course.
Soon after joining Ron’s crew, the outspoken newcomer found himself impressed by his new boss’s investigative skills and compassion for the victims. He realised he was under the tutelage of the finest cop he had ever met – and was smart enough to know he could learn from the best. Ron recognised his new sergeant was ‘a great strategic thinker and brilliant operationally’; all he needed was ‘a bit of polish’. With Ron’s guidance, Birch went from the bad boy of the Crime Department to one of Homicide’s most valuable investigators. Together, they worked on around 70 cases and became lifelong friends.