The Good Cop

by Justine Ford

  NO LOOKING BACK

  ‘By February 2014, I had prepared myself mentally to leave Homicide. I had to close the door behind me and move on. It was now about the next chapter in my life.’

  – Ron Iddles

  Sometimes, says Ron, it’s not about what is said but what is not said.

  When he told senior police he would be happy to spend another three years at the Homicide Squad before retiring, they said very little. ‘They told me I’d be a great secretary for the Police Association,’ he recalls. He took their silence to mean that he would probably be rotated out of the Homicide Squad, just like his fellow team leaders had been.

  Despite the feeling of standing on shifting sand, Ron remained focused on solving homicides. In 2013, he investigated seven violent ice-related murders in a row. Some of the cases involved torture, suffocation, dismemberment and fire. ‘They were disputes over drug trafficking and payments,’ Ron says, ‘or the accused were affected by ice.’ The extreme level of violence shocked him, which was saying something.

  Ice had become an epidemic, so serious that the former Chief Commissioner, Ken Lay, was heading a national taskforce to tackle the problem. ‘I guess after twenty-five years at Homicide, I was now dealing with a different sort of murder investigation,’ Ron explains. ‘I was getting to the stage where, if I was moved, I would probably have accepted it and said I’d had a good run.’ And he realised if his application for the job at the Police Association were successful, it would provide him with the chance to reinvent himself.

  But still, he thought, it would be good to have the choice.

  *

  On Christmas Eve 2013, Ron was toiling away at Homicide. He was looking forward to the end of the day, when he planned to enjoy a glass of his favourite Barossa Valley shiraz with Colleen and put the last of the presents under the tree. He loved seeing the grandchildren’s faces light up when they receive a gift they’d been hinting about all year.

  That day, Ron’s superintendent had invited him to a meeting at 1 pm. It wasn’t for a kiss under the mistletoe. ‘There was a discussion about my future,’ he recalls. ‘I was told I was going to be moved and it was based around my welfare.’ The superintendent asked him where, in the police force, he might like to work and explained that there were excellent opportunities open to him – just not at Homicide.

  Ron told his boss, ‘Come March next year I’ll go, and if I don’t get a position at the Police Association, I’ll go and lecture at the academy.’

  The superintendent thanked Ron for all he had done. ‘And I still remember the statement, “As your supervisor, I cannot afford to give you back to your family a broken man”.’

  Ron accepted the decision, but could not understand the rationale. ‘I’d done the job for nearly twenty-five years and I believed I was the best person to judge my emotional state,’ he says. ‘I thought I had done fairly well over a long period of time and if I was going to fall down, I would have done so by then.’

  What made the decision even harder for Ron to understand was that he had just solved ice murder after ice murder, and they weren’t easy jobs. ‘To me it didn’t make a lot of sense,’ he says. ‘Surely it was good for the Homicide Squad and the Crime Department to show we had the ability to solve these really complex investigations?’

  Ron steeled himself to tell his colleagues. ‘The hardest part was to say to my crew members who were there that day, “The journey’s over. Come March next year, I won’t be here. I’ve been told I can have any position I want but it won’t be at Homicide. It’s happened and I’ve accepted it. It’ll come to an end”.’ He sent his crew home early to enjoy Christmas, but he knew there would be a dark cloud over their festivities.

  Allan Birch was particularly stunned by the inference that Ron had nothing more to give. His crew felt differently. Birch recalls how, in the lead-up to the decision to let Ron go, the crew had been cautious of their every move. ‘Everything we did, we thought, How would this impact on Ron? We’d rather leave than have him leave. That’s how much we valued him.’

  But the deed was done.

  On the drive home, Ron called Colleen. ‘I said, “I’ve basically been told my time’s up”,’ he recalls. She was almost speechless. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she managed to say.

  Colleen had seen the writing on the wall since Ron showed the photo of Jill Meagher a month earlier. ‘It was the saddest thing, because he lived and breathed doing homicide investigations,’ she says. ‘That’s what he’d always wanted to do since he was a child. All he wanted to do was be a good cop and do a good job.’

  And even though, Colleen says, Ron will never forget the timing of the meeting, he forgave those responsible for the decision. ‘He was shattered,’ she says, ‘but he doesn’t hold a grudge.’

  *

  Christmas Day that year was a sombre affair in the Iddles household. The following day, Ron was back investigating a man’s suspicious disappearance in Bendigo – another ice murder. ‘He’d also been cut up,’ Ron recalls.

  In the new year, the Age newspaper called him. ‘The journalist said, “I hear you’ve been asked to leave and your career’s finished at Homicide”,’ Ron remembers. He suggested they call Police Media instead.

  ‘I then had a meeting with the head of Homicide, Detective Inspector John Potter, and my superintendent to discuss their response to the newspaper,’ Ron says. ‘The formal response would be that we had met on Christmas Eve and this was not unusual as senior managers often met with their staff,’ he explains. The following day the Age expressed that fact, and ran the story under the headline, ‘Homicide Detective Ron Iddles Asked to Move On’.

  It did not come as a surprise to the Age’s John Silvester. It was not his article but, as the chief crime reporter, he knew that, with the other senior sergeants already moved out of the squad, it was only a matter of time. ‘Ron was the last. He lasted longer than any of them. It was inevitable he was going to go,’ he says.

  Silvester believes Ron’s superiors had been genuinely worried about his emotional health. ‘There were serious concerns at a higher rank that after investigating case after case after case, that could squash him,’ Silvester says. ‘We’ll never know if that was true or not. His emotionalism might have been misinterpreted as a sign he was not coping.’ Silvester suspects that Ron’s emotional nature actually suggested he was coping, and that, coupled with driving buses, actually relieved the stresses of the job.

  When Chief Commissioner Ken Lay saw the newspaper article he immediately called Ron. ‘He said, “You can stay as long as you like at the Homicide Squad”,’ Ron recalls. ‘He said, “I don’t want there to be any ill feelings”.’

  Admittedly, there were other considerations, with Ron in the running for Greg Davies’ position at the Police Association. ‘So there were now others who I would disappoint if I withdrew,’ Ron says. ‘But if I did not get Greg’s job, then I had assurance from Ken Lay that I could stay at Homicide.’

  In February 2014, Ron made his decision. He was offered the job at the Police Association and, seeing it as a new way to make a difference, decided to take it. He would start the following month.

  On his last morning as a homicide investigator, Ron dropped in at the home of convicted killer Bruce Nicholls. Perhaps it was a subconscious way of saying goodbye to murder. Nicholls was among the long list of people who felt deeply saddened that the squad had lost its finest investigator. ‘He deserves great recognition for putting so many years into the police force,’ Nicholls says.

  But it was people like Mark James, who first met Ron when he’d worked on his mother Maria’s murder in 1980, who were hit hardest by the news. ‘I think what happened to him was very unfair,’ Mark says. ‘It was vexatious.’

  ‘I could have got bitter and twisted, but would it help the team?’ Ron asks. ‘No. Would it help me? No. When I knew I was going to the Police Association,
I got my head around the fact that my days at the Homicide Squad were over.’

  Arriving at the familiar St Kilda Road office, Ron packed up his belongings and shredded sensitive documents he no longer needed. He and Colleen then treated his crew to lunch at the nearby George Hotel in South Melbourne. He told his colleagues there were to be no speeches or presentations, but Ron being Ron, he made an eloquent speech, thanking his crew for their hard work, loyalty and dedication to the job.

  The only time Ron’s crew ever defied him was a couple of weeks later. Despite his orders, there was no way they were letting him leave without something to remember them by. ‘Allan Birch had made up a collage of snapshots of me at crime scenes,’ Ron says. They also gave Ron and Colleen a generous gift voucher to Melbourne restaurant Vue de Monde. ‘And they gave me a bottle of Penfold’s Grange,’ Ron adds. It was from 1980, his first year at the Homicide Squad.

  ‘I always said, when I walked out the door, I won’t look back and I won’t come back,’ Ron says. ‘And to this day I haven’t been back.’

  He would miss those guys, but it was over.

  26

  STEERING THE SHIP

  ‘The history of the Police Association shows it is a tough job and many have failed or been removed from office. History will be the judge of my time.’

  – Ron Iddles

  They say that when one door closes, another one opens. In Ron’s case, behind an oak-panelled door in East Melbourne, a new future awaited.

  Ron had never run an organisation. Yet here he was, in the corner office of the Police Association of Victoria, a CEO with thirty-seven staff and answerable to 14,000 members. It was a lofty position and he soon found himself in regular meetings with the premier, the leader of the opposition, and the chief commissioner.

  After a two-week handover with the outgoing secretary, Greg Davies, in March 2014, it was up to Ron to shape the association as he saw fit. He remembers his first day at the helm.

  ‘I felt sick,’ he says. ‘I was totally out of my comfort zone. I remember going home to Colleen and saying, “I feel so far out of it”.’

  But things quickly changed. ‘I decided I couldn’t just sit back and not get a handle on everything that was happening,’ Ron says. ‘So I spoke to each staff member on a one-to-one basis to find out what they did and the association could do better.’ They were enlightening meetings that also helped the new boss remember his employees’ names.

  Ron discovered his colleagues were as eager to help him as he was to learn about them. ‘Without the support of the staff, but in particular the assistant secretary, Bruce McKenzie, it would have been difficult to make the transition,’ Ron says. ‘They were fantastic.’

  Ron then turned his focus to the members, who were other police just like him. ‘While we’re not a union as such, we’re often referred to as one and realistically we operate as such even though we’re a business,’ he explains. ‘So I developed a road map for where the association was going over the next three years.’ The three-year strategic plan was published online for all members to see.

  Most importantly, Ron chose to emphasise that the association existed for officers’ welfare. ‘I made a decision when I took over that if a member was involved in a critical incident such as a fatal police shooting or a pursuit which ended up being a fatality, I would personally go out and attend those incidents, but not in an investigative capacity,’ he says. ‘The decision was solely about showing the members of the Police Association that we were there to support them, to make sure they got the right legal advice if required, but mainly to be there for their welfare.’

  Ron made it clear that he was personally available to members twenty-four hours a day. It was a move embraced by the membership. ‘Currently there are twenty-two members a month who are going off on sick leave related to depression, issues with alcohol or post-traumatic stress disorder,’ he points out. ‘So there’s a real need to focus on that and get members to say, “I’m struggling, I need help”, and for us to provide a good, personalised service.’ As part of that service, Ron decided to introduce a sophisticated phone app in conjunction with Victoria Police and the state government. It enables officers to self-assess how they are coping with the demands of the job and determine whether they need any help.

  In order to provide the association’s members with the level of service to which he’d committed, Ron had to resign from his job as a part-time bus driver for Firefly. His boss, Joe Bono, was disappointed. ‘I was in shock,’ Joe says. ‘I said, “You’re kidding?” But he said it was for the members. He’d have to put all his focus on the job, which I understood.’

  As ever, Ron did the job his way, including working the switchboard on Fridays, which was also an effective way to find out more about the members’ needs. ‘I don’t consider myself the boss there,’ he says. ‘I just see myself as a worker who comes in and steers the ship. But I’d like to think that when I leave the organisation, it will have a bigger focus on member welfare.’

  Ron sees the opportunity to lead the Police Association as a privilege. Colleen points out that, as its secretary, her husband had become one of the two most powerful police in Victoria and yet, as usual, he has remained unassuming. If you ask Ron, he’ll say, ‘I’m only just a policeman.’

  Few people consider Ron ‘just a policeman’, and on Australia Day 2015, he was awarded a prestigious Order of Australia Medal by Victorian Governor Alex Chernov, for his contribution to charity and his years of work for victims and their families.

  The former police guard at Government House had come a long way.

  *

  Although he was focused on police officers’ welfare, Ron couldn’t just forget the hundreds of cases he had investigated over the years. Never more so than when those cases threw up new developments. Even during his first year at the Police Association, one of his cold cases went to trial. It was the Michelle Buckingham murder.

  Ron recalls the chain of events perfectly, of course.

  It was a distressing case. Sixteen-year-old Michelle Buckingham, who lived alone in a caravan park, had gone missing in October 1983. A fortnight later a farmer stumbled upon her body amid long grass at Kialla East on the outskirts of Shepparton. She been raped, and stabbed up to nineteen times.

  A local, Gregory Gleadhill, was charged with her murder but it was dropped. Ron could clearly see that police had charged the wrong man. Buckingham’s mother, Elvira, did not think Gleadhill had killed her daughter either, but doubted she would ever find out who had.

  But in 2012, Tammy Mills from the Shepparton News got the ball rolling again. Eager to find a way to help the victim’s mum Elvira, the cub reporter called and urged Ron to reopen the case. She knew that since 2010 he’d been heading two new, specialist units – Homicide Missing Persons and Homicide Cold Case. ‘I said we wouldn’t have the resources to take it on right then,’ he remembers. But Mills wasn’t giving up that easily and called him again a month later. He drove to Shepparton to see her, and the plucky twenty-five-year-old convinced him to take on the case.

  Ron thought the media coverage could help. ‘When Tammy wrote her first story about the case, saying it had been reopened and that I was investigating, thirty-five pieces of information came in,’ he recalls. But with no available staff, Ron had to investigate each report on his own.

  He learnt that a man named Norm Gribble called Shepparton Police about a week after Tammy’s story, with information that could probably solve the case. Gribble suggested Ron and he meet at the Shepparton East Football Ground. Another clandestine meeting with a stranger, Ron thought. ‘Silly as it sounds, I went with no gun or equipment. I never took one unless I was going to make an arrest.’ He always hoped words would work better than a gun.

  As Ron waited for the enigmatic Gribble, tumbleweed might as well have rolled across the football ground. ‘There was no one else around,’ he remembers. ‘Then
a ute arrived. There were two people in it and one got out.’ But Gribble – who Ron estimated was about sixty-five – was not at all threatening. ‘He said, “I can’t live with what I’m going to tell you”,’ Ron recalls. ‘He said he had lived with this secret for some thirty years.’

  ‘Gribble said his brother-in-law, Stephen Bradley, had come to him one Saturday morning,’ Ron begins. ‘He was very upset and had blood on his hands.’ Bradley was too upset to say what was wrong, so Gribble suggested the pair go for a drive. They bought some beer, then sat in a picnic area, where Gribble said his brother-in-law Bradley told him what he’d done.

  ‘I stabbed Michelle Buckingham last night,’ Bradley reportedly told Gribble. ‘He said he’d picked her up and driven her to the Pine Lodge Hotel in Shepparton East,’ Ron says.

  According to Ron, Bradley’s story continued like this: ‘It was dark. I put the hard word on her and she didn’t come across,’ he said. ‘I stabbed her.’

  Bradley told Gribble he drove to Violet Town Road and dumped Buckingham’s body. ‘Later, he sat beside a river thinking about what he should do.’ Bradley wondered if he should drive into the river and kill himself. But he unburdened himself on his brother-in-law instead.

  It put Gribble in an unenviable position. ‘Norm said, “I’ve only got one option – I’ve got to go to the police”,’ Ron continues. ‘Stephen said, “You can’t,” so Norm said he had to go himself.’ But on the drive back to Gribble’s place, Bradley said he wouldn’t go to the police.

  ‘And that was probably the last time Norm saw him,’ Ron says, adding that almost straightaway, Bradley got rid of his 1973 green HQ Holden and bought a different car. ‘He also moved out of the area and never really returned.’

  Ron says that when Buckingham’s body was found about two weeks later, Gribble realised what Bradley had told him was true. ‘He said he could never do anything with that information because he was married to Bradley’s sister, so he felt he couldn’t tell,’ Ron explains.