Read an extract from Trace by Rachael Brown
Trace: Who Killed Maria James? is ABC broadcast journalist Rachael Brown’s gripping account of her investigation into a 38-year-old cold case, which became the Walkley and Quill Award-winning podcast, Trace, and led to the re-opening of the case. This is an edited extract from the book.
April 2016
1.00pm Coroners Court w Ron
– Diary note, 21 April 2016
I wince at Maria’s bruised face in the autopsy photos. Her left eye is slightly opened; the right, swollen and closed. Her skin looks puffy and translucent. Her scalp is missing some clumps of her dark hair. I wonder whether this was the killer’s doing, or the pathologist’s. I’ve seen post-mortem photos before, during my days as a court reporter. Some days, during those grim prosecution sessions aimed at swaying a jury, I’d look; other days, I’d drift. Common journo distractions were newspapers, Sudoku, doodling, or scratching one’s initials into the Supreme Court media desks. I have no doubt this would have looked disrespectful to those crammed into the rigid wooden pews of the public gallery. But once you see, you can’t unsee. And these pictures can creep into your dreams, so sometimes it’s best not to look.
Today I have to, because a seeming contradiction in this cold case has inspired my promise to Maria’s sons that I’ll look into it. A promise, for two boys, now middle-aged men, who’ve lived in a holding pattern for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s promises that can be our undoing, I’ll later learn from [veteran homicide detective] Ron Iddles. For now, as I look at all the white crumbs on Maria’s black jumper, which turn out to be her white shirt peeking through the slashes in the wool, I make her a silent pledge that I’ll do my best.
When Ron arrives to walk me through this final photo album of Maria James’s life, he says he can’t look at these photos through the same sentimental prism I’m using. My sad crumbs are his priceless clues. ‘I see that as part of a jigsaw puzzle,’ he tells me. ‘If I looked at that in some other way, I don’t think I would’ve lasted 25 years.’ He’s been a constant figure at police doorstops throughout my career as a journalist with the ABC, but I’ve never worked with him personally. He’s 61, burly, and he wears that appraising stare, synonymous with any cop. But there’s a gruff warmth about him, a reassuring presence. He’s known for his no-bullshit approach and his compassion towards victims, families, and even crooks.
‘Most aren’t bad people,’ he tells me. ‘They just make bad choices in life.’ He has a certain knack. I’ve watched a killer go to water in an interview room when Ron put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘It’s a big burden to carry, don’t let it eat you up.’ The killer dragged his chair forward, put his hands around Ron’s, and confessed. I remember a fellow journalist commenting, ‘If I had anything to confess, I’d confess to Ron’.
The lines on Ron’s forehead and around his piercing blue eyes read like a diary of those 60-hour shifts he’s spent at horror scenes. And there’s something of myself I recognise in him – sheer stubbornness. But this has made him a divisive figure within the Victorian police force. Ron is part of the old guard, a copper who’ll buck the system by releasing information if he feels it’ll help a case. Which is why I need him. He’s approaching retirement from his position as secretary of the Police Association, the police union. It’ll mean handing in his badge – number 18150 – for good. He should be daydreaming about fishing trips with his son off the coast of Cairns, or bike rides, or, finally, getting some decent sleep. Instead, he’s graciously fielding questions from me, about his very first case, which still grates like hell.
*
June 1980
Ron Iddles’ crew moves into the ill-fated bookshop on High Street, hoping the walls might talk. Or that the locals will. The thinking is that the detectives’ presence might encourage people to drop in with information about the stabbing. Sixty-eight wounds. Christ. This tells Ron that the killer’s emotions have outrun their intelligence. It was unplanned, he suspects, but furious all the same. He’s seen death before, but this is something else. And the force doesn’t employ cleaners, so each time he walks past the bedroom he sees the victim’s blood soaked into the carpet.
For this Homicide rookie, it feels very strange for his crew to be treating this house like their own. A woman has been viciously killed in here, and they’re going about their lives as if it’s all normal. They’re using her cutlery, crockery, kettle, even the outside barbecue for dinners, as they usually don’t knock off till 22:00 or 23:00 most nights. Then they go home, shower, maybe chat to their wives, pass out, and return by 07:00 to do it all again. His crew has turned the dining table – a billiard table with a board perched on top – into their communal desk. It’s now a nest of paperwork being peered over by detectives sporting brown suits and moustaches.
Ron spots Mark James, the victim’s 13-year-old son. Mark and his little brother, Adam, have been shipped off to live with their dad, but Mark’s occasionally allowed back in for clothes. Ron quietly wonders about Mark, what he’s making of all this, of his house being commandeered, his home forever lost.
*
March 2016
I would’ve got as many photographs as I could of mum. She was a Christian woman, and I would’ve liked to have taken her cross, and I would’ve taken my toys, I had a remote-control car.
– Mark James’s interview with Rachael Brown, 14 March 2016
It was Father Anthony Bongiorno who presided over Maria’s funeral at her parish, St Mary’s Thornbury. But that’s all a blur for Mark James. He tells me all he remembers is white noise. The church was crawling with cops, and it made him anxious.
*
The local church had loomed large in the family’s life. Mark was an altar boy, Maria James would regularly make the short trip three doors down for masses, and sometimes she’d leave Adam with Father Bongiorno. The 11-year-old demanded a lot of attention, with his cerebral palsy and Tourette’s, so his time with the priest also allowed Maria to run errands or have some quiet time.
But Mark says the brash Italian priest had upset his devout Catholic mother in a very public roasting, the year she died. It was about those magazines she kept under the counter.
‘They were inside sealed plastic, so it’s not as though people could come in and open up and look at them, but he made a big deal about this in church and actually referred specifically to my mum, which was a little odd because at the time there were a few other shops in the area that had similar or worse material, and he made no mention of them, just of my mum. She was embarrassed and humiliated. It upset her a lot.’
It was actually Father Bongiorno who broke the tragic news to Mark, with the delicacy of a sledgehammer. Usually after his weekly bowling excursion, the bus would drop Mark off at the bookshop, as it was on the way. This time, the bus went straight back to his high school, Immaculate Heart College, Preston, where his local parish priest was waiting for him.
‘I remember Father Bongiorno was there. I think there was a police car there as well. We were heading towards the school office and he broke the news to me, and I could barely stand up … I was in shock, I kind of collapsed and had difficulty walking. I would’ve expected Father Bongiorno to pick me up and to help carry me, but he wasn’t really doing much. He was having to half-drag me into the principal’s office. I’ve reflected on the way he said it. It didn’t appear to come out in a compassionate or sympathetic way – it was more like something he just wanted to get over, you know, finish off and get it over with. I think Father Bongiorno and I drove back either in a police car or in a taxi to the bookshop. Police were everywhere.’
‘It was almost like my life stopped. Everything just stopped dead. I can see the flurry of activity, the police are there, later on the media arrived, there are passers-by standing around watching, and there are also some shopkeepers, and these people were all agitated obviously, interested to know what transpired. Everyone was upset.’
‘My dad was there. He’d been crying, and he was giving me hugs and he was in shock. He just told me that Mum had been murdered, he didn’t give me any other details.’
Then the two bereft sons were shipped off to their dad’s with nothing more than the school uniforms on their backs.
*
2002
Maria James’s exhibits are back from the forensics lab, and, two decades on, police have their strongest lead yet. Ron was always pretty confident that some of the blood found on Maria’s pillow would have belonged to her killer. That pillow has now yielded a male DNA profile, which detectives can use to compare against that of suspects – Mario Falcucci, for example, whose twine and bloodied trousers have long bugged Ron. He finds Mario in a nursing home, but Mario, now elderly, no longer has all his faculties, so Ron seeks permission from Mario’s sister for a buccal swab. The old man licks the cotton bud like an ice-cream, and the sample is sent away for comparison to Maria’s pillow. It turns out to be no match.
*
A decade sails by, frosting over the trail of Maria’s killer. This equates to around 120 homicide investigations for Ron, including the 2001 disappearance of arts graduate Elisabeth Membrey, the 2005 murder of Fairfield solicitor David Robinson, and the 2006 shooting of security guard Erwin Kastenberger. Time, and evil, march on.
Then, in 2013, Adam James drops a bombshell that Ron never saw coming. Adam’s revelation alerts Ron to the possibility that at Maria’s funeral, when detectives were scrutinising the congregation for her killer, maybe they were all looking in the wrong direction. Maybe they should’ve been looking up at the altar.
