There was no evidence of a struggle. Nothing, it appeared, was out of place. Crime scene photographs taken throughout the house would show that nothing had been disturbed in the three-bedroom, one-bathroom property with its combined lounge and dining room, kitchen, sunroom, and downstairs toilet and laundry.

Part 1: The mild-mannered Moffats

Only the bedroom where the bodies of William (Bill) Alan Moffat, 51, and his wife Edith Gilmor Moffat, 49, rested was strikingly abnormal.

“When the police examined them, both in their dressing gowns, both in pyjamas, and both had slippers on, Mrs Moffat was lying across the end of the bed, parallel to the end of the bed, and their hands were tied behind their backs,” says Maryborough police sergeant Bruce Hodgins, who has been investigating the case for the past 30 years.

“Both had a necktie tied in a knot behind their heads to gag them. Mr Moffat was found in a ­similar position to his wife, slightly away on an angle at the base of the bed … their heads very close together. There was a pillow lying off to the side, near the bodies, but no actual head was on the pillow.

“Whether it may have been placed there originally for them, I’m not sure. The bedding on the bed had been thrown back, as you would expect people to get out of bed. It appears they’ve got out of bed to do something, to answer the door maybe, to check on the dog maybe, to check on a loud noise outside, to check on a bump at the back of the house, we don’t know. It appears they’ve gotten up together, or one got up first to answer a door, who knows, and the other got up at a later time.”

The woven pink nylon cord used to bind the Moffats in September 1977, was later discovered to be common and easily purchased in most hardware stores.

SHOT TO KILL

Death, it appeared, had been pretty much ­instantaneous. “Mr Moffat’s entry wound was behind the ear to the back of the neck, and Mrs Moffat’s was in the back of the head, ­directly above the centre of the head,” Hodgins says. “Autopsies pointed to .22 calibre bullets, two removed from the bodies which we believe were fired from the same weapon … if you’re close-range, it’s lethal.

“I don’t believe you need any heavier calibre to do that sort of damage. We can’t say whether the weapon was actually held to the head or an inch or two away, it’s hard to tell. They were certainly shot with the intention of killing them. They weren’t shot with the intention of incapacitating them. They were already incapacitated.”

The two empty .22 shells were never found, ­indicating the killer or killers took the casings with them. Detectives first on the scene discovered Mr Moffat’s keys in a bedside cabinet drawer. Attached were also keys that gave him access to the doors of the [CBA] bank in town [where Bill worked as the manager]. His wallet, containing a small amount of cash, was also present.

“There was certainly no evidence of any ­damage to the front and back doors,” says Hodgins. “Whether Mr and Mrs Moffat had let people into the house, or people were already in the house and they were ordered back to the bedroom, we don’t know. Did they go out the back door of the house and find someone on the back patio area, and the perpetrators have ordered the Moffats back inside at gunpoint? We don’t know.

“It has to be that someone has gone to the house with the ­intention of … the most obvious ­intention is that perhaps they might be able to get him to the bank and open the [vaults] up, maybe. He had keys to the bank but he had no keys to get any money. To open the vaults of the bank, to open up the strongroom, you needed two people there that had the combination locks, which were ­numbers in their heads.

“The accountant and the head teller were the two who had the numbers. Mr Moffat couldn’t get any money whatsoever. His keys that he had … normal house keys, car keys and keys to get into the door to the bank, they were just normal-­looking keys, not big keys to get into safes.”

What other conceivable motive could there have been, apart from the killers’ mistaken belief that the manager of the Commercial Bank of Australia, Maryborough branch, could access large amounts of cash? And what happened when they realised that was impossible?

“For a normal person you’d have to think, do I take the risk of taking Mr Moffat to the bank in his pyjamas, driving there with him, forcing him out and risk getting seen to try to get access?” ­theorises Hodgins. “Who’s to say Mr Moffat didn’t finally convince them that there was no way he could get access to the vaults, and they’ve accepted that and realised they’ve done something terrible, they don’t care, they’ve got no remorse and no feeling, and they’ve just shot them in cold blood.

“With any murder you’ve got to find a ‘why’ to find a ‘who’. If you can’t understand why, then it puts you further back behind the eight-ball.”

WHAT ABOUT THE DOG?

The double murder was front-page news on Friday, September 23. It had been quite a month for killings. Less than a week earlier, on Friday, September 16, notorious Brisbane brothel madam Simone Vogel had vanished ­without a trace. Earlier that evening she had gone to two of her city brothels and retrieved two cash cheques for $3000 each. She was also in ­possession of substantial amounts of jewellery.

Speculation was rife that she had used the money to pay off corrupt police and finally buy her way out of the system of graft known as The Joke. She had been paying off dirty coppers for years.

Then the following week came the Maryborough atrocity. Was there any link between the two? In the Brisbane Telegraph’s coverage of the Maryborough killings, questions were asked about the family dog, Bindi, and why it had ­remained silent throughout the entire ordeal. The Moffats’ immediate next-door neighbours said they’d heard nothing throughout the night and into the early morning.

Neighbour Colin Barker reportedly said: “The dog almost always barked when they arrived home or when there was a disturbance in the neighbourhood, and we usually looked out when we heard it. Had the dog kicked up a fuss, we would have investigated and might have been able to help.”

Hodgins also looked into the dog issue. “Poor old Bindi was crook, she’d been on this medication,” he says. “I think the poor thing was on the way out … she’d had some trouble, and was outside but down in the carport area.”

A neighbour who lived diagonally across the street from the Moffats, Eddie Crawford, thought he’d heard something in the early hours of the morning. “Eddie got up to use the toilet around 3am and he heard what he thought were two muffled shots, seconds apart, coming from the direction of the Moffat house,” Hodgins says. “He was probably half-asleep. He went back to bed. I think he didn’t know if he had heard it or not, I’m not sure, but he went back to bed. He immediately came to the police the next day when he heard about the tragedy.”

Police would later test several firearms, shooting into sand bags, at the Moffat property to see if any of the gunshots could be heard at the Crawford house. They could.

One source says that when premier Bjelke-Petersen became aware of the murders, he ­contacted then police commissioner Terry Lewis and ordered that all resources be put behind ­solving the killing of his “friend” Bill Moffat. (Moffat had recently been with the CBA in King­aroy and they had attended the same church.) A team of crack detectives was sent north. At one point there were more than 30 detectives working on the case. They ran down every lead they could think of. They even interviewed members of the Maryborough stamp club, wondering if Bill ­Moffat’s collection was valuable enough to kill for.

Police now say there was one aspect of the ­investigation that needed further fleshing out – a scenario that had, improbably, Sydney gangsters on the doorstep of the Fraser Coast region around the time of the killings.

SOUTHERN MONEY LAUNDERERS

At some point in the lengthy Moffat murder investigation, information came to police about some dodgy real estate deals taking place mainly in the Hervey Bay area, just 30km north-north-east of Maryborough.

“As the investigation went on they brought up detectives from Brisbane, from the Homicide squad, to assist local police, then information came in through a combination of business houses and accommodation houses and real estate agents in the bay area,” says Hodgins. “People in those areas … were dealing with a lot of people who were coming up and buying land at Hervey Bay at the time.

“There was a big push mainly advertised in the southern capitals – Sydney and Melbourne – ­portraying Hervey Bay as the new mini-Gold Coast of Queensland, shall we say … land up here was reasonably cheap, that was true … [and] there were a number of companies selling land in the area.

“Everyone started getting in on it, and there was money to be made. There were companies flying people up for free, direct to Hervey Bay, to look at land, and they were advertising that if ­[potential customers] decided not to buy a block up here, all they had to pay back was half the ­airfare, but they were flown up here on one ­particular day, kept overnight and viewed the land. They were looked after, fed, and flown back the following day.”

There appeared to be plenty of buyers, even if the land was marginally overpriced. Hodgins adds: “Along with that, information came in that there were a few people who were more ­unscrupulous, or who were involved in money laundering, and had gotten into this sort of thing. The criminal element.

“They invested in land they could later wash their money through. The only link with Mr ­Moffat was that, originally, there wasn’t a CBA bank at Hervey Bay, and Mr Moffat had to go down at different times and value these blocks of land for the bank if they were providing finance to certain people.

“There weren’t any great complaints to police, but it’s hard to tell nowadays. There were ­certainly no big investigations. This is what was going on. It was an open secret. There were ­criminals running casinos and other businesses in Sydney, and I believe [Sydney gangster] Lenny McPherson’s companies might have been buying land. In relation to the Moffats, here we have an investigation going on with this terrible crime in this house, and they’re shot dead, we’ve got police running around making local inquiries here, ­believing because they were fully clothed they may have let someone into the house because it may have been someone known to them, and that was a lot of the thinking at the time.

“On the other end of the scale you’ve got information that comes in that, during the same invest­igation, you’ve got these business dealings not far away at Hervey Bay to do with this land. So naturally that was looked at partially back then, but they found at the end of it all that, other than the fact that Mr Moffat did value some blocks of land, there was no real connection with land dealings in the bay to Mr Moffat. But ­naturally, it has to be revisited.”

One Maryborough CBA employee recalls that at some point prior to the murders he was ­approached by a local manager about a request from a Sydney CBA official to look over some land valuation documents relating to properties in Hervey Bay. “They came to me because I knew a lot about the Maryborough region and Hervey Bay,” the employee recalls. “There were half-a-dozen valuations. They all looked a bit high to me.

“I checked with some agents I knew and filed a report. I have since come to believe that in ­relation to those documents, the Sydney manager who gave the instructions was tied up with ­criminals who were laundering money through Hervey Bay land.

“Bill Moffat was a stickler. He was straight up and down, and probably not ruthless enough with some of these customers.”

Hodgins says the individuals involved in the dodgy land deals were never spoken to by police.

“But looking at it as a detective, looking at it more globally, it’s a situation where you have … it’s Maryborough, this isn’t St Kilda, this isn’t ­Parramatta … but one minute you’re making ­inquiries with people from the local church here, and the next minute you’re talking about Lenny McPherson.”

There were two funerals held for Bill and Edith Moffat. One in Maryborough, where they were farewelled by local friends and the employees at the bank, and a second in Home Hill, near Ayr in north Queensland, where Edith grew up and where she married Bill. Naturally, Edith and Bill were buried together.

Their headstone reads: “In Loving memory of William Alan & Edith Gilmor Moffat … Tragically Taken 22.9.77, aged 51 & 49 years. AT REST.”

EVERYONE WANTS AN ANSWER

It’s dark outside the Maryborough police ­station and Bruce Hodgins is at the end of ­another long day. He talks of the case as he exits the ­station and talks some more under the huge trees in Lennox St.

“My wife and I don’t have any children and I’m thinking that if something drastic happened to us, who would carry the torch?” he asks himself. “There isn’t anyone. And sometimes I think of poor old Mr Moffat and Mrs Moffat. Who fights their battles? They didn’t have children of their own either … ”

The melancholy bells of the City Hall sound again, and there’s a sudden chill in the air. Time marches on.

“It still affects the people who knew them,” Hodgins says. “And there were a lot of people who knew them who weren’t necessarily in Maryborough at the time who have also been affected by it. I’ve spoken to the extended families and they all want answers. Everyone wants an answer. They realise there may never be a trial or anything. They just want an answer. People want to know before they die themselves.

“We as police have an obligation to satisfy that as best we can, but if we can’t, we can’t. You can’t do everything, of course, but you can do what you can. Do you become personally involved? Yes, you do … ” ■