Who hired a hitman to kill young mum Angie Bartkowiak?
FOR years they said a burglar had killed young mum Angie. But it was an ice-cold execution, hardly the work of a bumbling thief. Now Andrew Rule uncovers the shocking secret that has haunted someone for decades. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST.
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IT’S time for the old man to come in from the cold. He has a story so dark he has spent half his life trying to keep it secret, and has almost succeeded.
Until now, he has had powerful reasons to stay silent. Soon, he will have powerful reasons not to.
Let’s call him The Suspect: that is what he has been for nearly 37 years.
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As he shuffles around trash and treasure markets in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and sees a young mother with a toddler, it must remind him of a young woman he once knew, mother of a beautiful fair-haired child.
That was the woman he had killed, police believe. They don’t know who pulled the trigger but they are working on that, too.
It’s time for the old man to tell them what he knows because the alternative for him is bleak. He needs to reach out before the past comes knocking.
His life isn’t worth much and those who know his dreadful secret would snuff him out in a heartbeat, the way they killed Angie Bartkowiak.
A DANGEROUS SEDUCTION
THE week before Angie was murdered, she got a fright. She was walking home from the shops to her brother’s house in St Albans when a car pulled up near her.
Angie hurried inside and the car vanished but the incident rattled her, she told her best friend, Sonia Widders.
Sonia lived nearby with her husband Lance and three children. The two women had known each other from school. Sonia knew the ups and downs of Angie’s life.
Angie had been married to a German ship’s officer, a nice man named Wolf Arlt that her father, a waterfront worker, brought home from the docks.
Wolf was pleasant but he was away at sea for weeks at a time. They were happy for a while in their flat in Ballarat Rd, Footscray.
But absence can make hearts wander, and Angie’s did. She was working at a large engineering plant in the inner west, a business servicing expensive gearboxes.
What the management didn’t know was that a bent supervisor had set up a racket, taking good parts from clients’ gearboxes and replacing them with expensive new parts at full cost.
The crooks recycled the second hand parts, using them to repair other customers’ gearboxes but charging for new parts. With some trick bookkeeping, they could pocket the difference. It was like turning water into wine.
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One man heavily involved in this was a persuasive character with a nasty streak. He was older than Angie but soon seduced the absent sailor’s lonesome wife. He had cash to flash and drove good cars.
The day came when Wolf returned from sea to find Angie gone. Wolf didn’t realise until later that his wife’s lover had been living in the flat with her.
Angie Bartkowiak’s family had come from Europe to build a new life far from the terrors of war. But terror can strike even in quiet suburban streets. A brush with evil can wreck lives — or end them.
Three other women had endured years of fear and loathing and escaped this man, scarred and scared but alive. Angie was not so lucky.
The story of her short life and violent death is one of the most sinister unsolved murders in the cold case files. She has been forgotten except by those who loved her — and by investigators quietly stalking her killer.
They know The Suspect is still living quietly in the suburbs. What they want to know next is who he paid to kill the mother of a three-year-old.
It is the question that looms over a case where domestic violence and naked greed led to a deal with someone who kills for cash.
The sort of person who would be just as happy to kill the one who paid him, even after all these years.
The Suspect is old now and faced with cutting a deal so police can find a faceless hitman before the hitman finds him.
THE MURDER OF ANGIE BARTKOWIAK
MURDERS don’t come much colder than the killing of Angie Bartkowiak.
Cold as in cold-blooded — the way the hitman did it, as callous and casual and careful as a slaughterman sticking a pig.
Cold as in old, a case that sank to the bottom of the homicide squad’s “too hard” basket decades ago.
The killer broke a trellis climbing over the fence of Angie’s brother’s house in Theodore St on that Tuesday morning, September 15, 1981.
He forced the back door, produced a .357 magnum handgun and shot Angie once in the chest and once in the head. A third shot was later found in a wall.
A neighbour two doors away, Iris Johnson, heard a bang about 8.30am and thought it was a garage door. She heard nothing else to alarm her.
Earlier that morning, the house’s occupants went about their weekday routine.
Angie’s brother Eric and his 18-year-old daughter Camille, a city clerk, left for work at 7.40am.
Camille’s 15-year-old sister Fiona lived with her mother a few blocks away.
After school, Fiona visited the house to see her aunt Angie, who was visiting from Queensland — where she had gone to live with her parents the previous year.
She got there after 3pm, using her house key. She looked into the “TV room” Angie was using.
Her aunt’s body was on the divan. She was on her left side, face down, wearing a “nightie” and dressing gown. Blood pooled under her head.
The horrified girl ran to call an ambulance.
A homicide crew arrived about 4.45pm. Among the four investigators were detective Sgt Michael Friend and a young detective, Sal Perna.
By this time Camille and Eric had come home to face the horror. The police talked gently with the shocked girls and their father. Eric then had the heartbreaking job of telling his parents in Queensland that their only daughter was dead.
All they had were memories and her three-year-old boy, Christopher, who had stayed with his doting grandparents when Angie went to Melbourne as a witness in a minor traffic case.
By the time the experts had finished looking for fingerprints and other traces left by the killer, the detectives were forming ideas that haven’t changed much in 37 years.
MURDER NOT BURGLARY
THE detectives turned up at The Suspect’s small business next morning, just after opening time. Curious staff looked through the glass door as the poker-faced pair told The Suspect that one of his former partners had been killed. Her name still hadn’t been published at that point.
The man receiving the “bad news” looked shocked. He dropped on to a pile of tyres, holding his face in his hands. But the police weren’t convinced his grief was real.
Meanwhile, a senior officer in the crime department was already pushing the case towards the “too hard” pile.
The then head of the Melbourne CIB, detective Chief Superintendent Phil Bennett, was always good for an oddball quote. He excelled himself this time, suggesting the obvious “hit” was a burglary gone wrong,
The homicide crew had no idea why he would tangle the truth about such an obvious execution.
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An extra complication for the investigators was that it was a huge week for police and the media.
Motorcycle daredevil rider Dale Buggins had shot himself in a Parkville motel, and there were at least two other homicides to chase. And the Azaria Chamberlain inquest finding had been sensationally overturned in the Supreme Court.
The idea that some thief out to steal video players and piggy banks would execute a sleeping woman with a high-powered handgun was almost perverse. But it went unremarked, at least officially.
The two detectives juggling the case never believed the “burglary” scenario. Half a lifetime later, long after leaving the force, they still don’t.
A witness who intrigued them was the manager of the Commonwealth Bank’s St Albans branch, Noel Johnson. He reported a strange exchange he had with The Suspect, some time before the murder.
The Suspect had been discussing whether his former partner would pursue her claim for a house they jointly owned, when he had blurted out to Johnson she would not dare or he would “get” her.
The hostile outburst shocked the bank man and made Friend and Perna even more suspicious. In August 1982 they visited The Suspect at a Coburg flat and put the bank manager’s statement to him. They also demanded a palm print. It was nearly a year since the murder and one of the few times anyone saw The Suspect rattled. “He was sweating,” recalls one of those present.
The police accepted that The Suspect’s alibi for the killing was almost bulletproof: eight apparently reliable witnesses believed he had been at his workplace at the time.
Timed re-enactments showed it was possible but unlikely he could get from his work to the scene of the crime and back again without his absence being noticed.
By chance, the list of alibi witnesses included two serving police, honest officers with nothing to gain and plenty to lose by lying.
One investigator thought The Suspect might have managed to do the killing himself. The other thought it was a paid hit until proven otherwise. In which case, who pulled the trigger? It was a question the coroner could not answer after the inquest in 1983. Nothing has changed since then.
THE TIP-OFF
VICTORIAN cold case investigators were wrapping up another long-term mystery when new information turned up last month about Angie Bartkowiak’s death.
The tip-off was that The Suspect had told someone he had hired a killer. Someone, somewhere, had talked about it and now it wasn’t a secret anymore. Several people knew about it. Now the police did, too.
Other details are buried in the files. Such as the fact Angie owned a bungalow in St Albans that had burned down. And her prized HQ Holden had been stolen.
Police believe The Suspect stole the car using a duplicate key. A man has told them The Suspect drove it to an associate’s “chop shop” on the outskirts of the northern suburbs, where he used an oxy-acetylene torch to cut it apart to salvage saleable parts.
ICE QUEEN’S REIGN OF DESTRUCTION
He sold the V8 engine to an unsuspecting policeman he employed part-time. The policeman was delighted to have the motor fitted in his Torana at a bargain price.
The policeman would go on to a distinguished career. Until the day he died in 2012, he never knew that the man who had sold him the engine was the prime suspect for Angie Bartkowiak’s murder.
The policeman and his wife once had dinner with The Suspect and his latest partner in November 1980. The policeman’s wife did not like the other couple, and thought The Suspect was trying to cultivate a friendship with her husband for his own ends.
Michael Friend recalls searching The Suspect’s business premises. He asked a younger policeman, Andy Guenther, to dive into the giant bin outside a nearby shop, hoping he would find the weapon or some other evidence. There was no “smoking gun”, but there was an old leather satchel, of the type used to deposit cash in bank night safes. The sort of bag someone might use to fetch a large amount of cash.
As for The Suspect, police have established he became estranged from his adult children and formed on-again, off-again relationships with a series of younger women. Each fell under his malignant spell, only to escape from him. Violent and manipulative, he always hurt them physically and mentally.
Now, maybe, the past has caught up with him. If there is a knock at his door, he will have to hope it is the real police, at last, and not someone else playing for keeps.
WHO KILLED ANGIE?
September 1, 1981: Angie Bartkowiak arrives in Melbourne from Queensland
September 15, 1981: Angie Bartkowiak shot dead at her brother’s house in Theodore St, St Albans
September 16: Homicide detectives tell The Suspect his former partner has been killed. They suspect his grief is fake
August 1982: Detectives interview The Suspect again, putting new information to him. he is uneasy
June, 1983: A coroner finds that Angie died of gunshot wounds from an unknown person
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