The crimes that keep Ron Iddles awake at night
NOT many murderers have escaped the clutches of Ron Iddles in the 25 years he’s hunted killers. These are the few that did — and he hasn’t given up on catching them.
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NOT many murderers escaped the clutches of Detective Ron Iddles.
His conviction rate over 25 years of investigating more than 300 murders is around 95 per cent.
This is why those who did get away with murders he probed as an on-call homicide squad detective — and later as founder and head of the force’s cold case unit — still eat away at him.
As he retires from Victoria Police, and his current job as Police Association secretary, Sen-Sgt Iddles, 61, has identified several murder cases in which he believes he can identify the killer.
The suspects were not charged because there wasn’t enough evidence to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt of their guilt, or because they died before evidence surfaced to implicate them.
These are the cases that keep Sen-Sgt Iddles awake at night.
Wrong man sentenced to hang
Elizabeth Williams, 20.
Her body was found at Albert Park beach in 1949.
Prominent Melbourne radio announcer John Bryan Kerr was found guilty of her murder, but evidence later obtained by Sen-Sgt Iddles strongly suggests Kerr was wrongly convicted.
Shirley Collins, 14
Was abducted and beaten to death with a lump of concrete guttering before being dumped in the driveway of a Mt Martha home in 1953.
Susan Oyston, 18
The daughter of Prisoner actor Sheila Florance.
She was thrown off a Melbourne building in 1954 allegedly to stop her revealing she knew her killer had murdered Shirley Collins.
SEN-Sgt Iddles believes the same man almost certainly killed Elizabeth Williams, Shirley Collins and Susan Oyston.
That belief comes from a deathbed confession in 2005.
As he lay dying from cancer, the man’s carer made notes which she later provided to Sen-Sgt Iddles.
“The carer was believable. She wrote notes of the confession because he said to her he wanted her to write it down, so she did,” Sen-Sgt Iddles said.
“All in all, after a thorough investigation, I think that confession was probably true.
“Sadly it came too late for John Kerr, who was convicted of murdering Elizabeth Williams, and the man who admitted he killed all three girls was dead by the time I got the written confession.”
The evidence against Kerr was weak enough that the jury failed to reach a verdict at his first two trials, but a third jury convicted him and he was sentenced to hang.
That sentence was later commuted to a 20-year jail term. He served 14 years and died maintaining his innocence.
Lover’s lane murder
Thomas Cooper, 18
Shot three times as he and his girlfriend tried to flee the man who attacked them in a lover’s lane at Ricketts Point in 1980.
The prime suspect was given an alibi by his girlfriend.
Sen-Sgt Iddles believes it was probably a false alibi made up — either through fear or loyalty — to prevent her boyfriend being charged.
While the evidence came too late to charge the dying man with the Williams, Collins and Oyston triple murder, there is still a chance the killer of Thomas Cooper, 18, will be brought to justice.
“The person who shot Mr Cooper was someone who wore a big dark overcoat and had something on like a cowboy hat,” Sen-Sgt Iddles said.
“There was a person who lived nearby at the time who often dressed like that.
“We then executed a search warrant on that person’s house and he said ‘Oh, by the way, I was driving past Ricketts Point at the time’.
“He said he had been to a chemist shop and was driving home from there. We went to the chemist shop but the chemist couldn’t verify whether he had been in or not, everybody paid cash in those days.
“I thought it was significant that he volunteered that he was driving right past Ricketts Point at the time of the shooting.
“I believe that was so if any witnesses came forward later to say his car had been seen in the area he would have an explanation.
“He had a girlfriend and his girlfriend ended up saying that she was with him on the night.
“But we made some inquiries which would indicate that maybe she wasn’t in the car with him, but we couldn’t prove that.
“The suspect thought his girlfriend at the time was playing up. My theory is he thought it was his girlfriend in the car with Thomas Cooper.
“His girlfriend did look a lot like the girl that actually was in the car with Thomas.”
Sen-Sgt Iddles said he and other homicide squad detectives had visited the suspect’s girlfriend a couple of times since 2000 in the hope she would confess to providing a false alibi.
“Her story changed slightly that time, but she still supported him,” he said.
“I think we were right that the suspect did it, but we never got enough to charge him.”
The girl who was in the car with Cooper recently wrote to Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton asking for a $1 million reward to solve the case in the hope that a life-changing amount of money might be enough for the suspect’s girlfriend to come forward.
Who took Terry?
Terry Floyd, 12
Sen-Sgt Iddles believes Terry was abducted and murdered in 1975 by convicted paedophile Raymond Kenneth Jones. Jones continues to deny it.
There is already a $1 million reward on offer to solve the disappearance and presumed murder of Terry Floyd, 12, but, sadly, nobody has provided information yet which would enable police to charge the prime suspect, convicted paedophile Raymond Kenneth Jones — or anybody else.
“Fair enough you can have coincidences, but on the night that Terry Floyd went missing in 1975 he was standing near the Avoca post office,” Sen-Sgt Iddles said.
“There was a telephonist who saw a white Holden panel van pull up and she saw Terry talking to the driver.
“She looked up again shortly afterwards, the van had gone and Terry was gone, so we assume whoever was in that van took Terry.
“Is it a coincidence that Raymond Kenneth Jones had an identical van? Is it a coincidence that his own evidence has him leaving Avoca in that vehicle and driving past where Terry was around the time Terry disappeared? Is it a coincidence that Jones’s alibi is not that strong?
“And is it a coincidence that a person very close to Jones told me that I had the right person?
“I don’t think all those things are coincidences, I think they are evidence which helps justify my view that Jones is the prime suspect.”
The Herald Sun spoke to Jones in a small town near Mildura. He insisted he had nothing to do with Terry’s disappearance and said he had nothing to fear from the current search for Terry’s body.
Terry’s brother Daryl believes Terry’s body was dumped in a filled-in goldmine near Avoca and is in the process of excavating it.
The nightclub singer & the body in the ravine
Haroula Kipouridou, 26
A nightclub singer, Haroula’s semi-naked body was found in the lift of her Richmond housing commission block in 1981.
Sen-Sgt Iddles is confident she was attacked and raped by Barry Harding, who died in a car accident before he could be charged.
GINA ROSSATO, 48
Her naked body was found in a ravine in Somerton in 1982.
Her throat had been cut.
Evidence strongly suggests she was murdered by somebody close to her — and Sen-Sgt Iddles is pretty sure he knows who that person is.
A fatal mistake
Jane Thurgood-Dove, 34
This mum was mistakenly murdered in 1997.
The real target was the wife of a criminal who lived in the same Niddrie street, drove a similar car and looked like her.
Bungling bikie hitman Stephen Mordy allegedly shot Ms Thurgood-Dove in front of her three children.
He died before new evidence obtained by Sen-Sgt Iddles identified him as the killer.
Mordy’s accomplice, Jamie Reynolds, also died before the new evidence implicated him.
Sen-Sgt Iddles believes he knows who ordered the death of the criminal’s wife.
A false alibi
SLAWOMIR TOMCZYK, 44
A security guard whose bashed body was found at the back of the Casablanca reception centre in Cranbourne in 2002.
Sen-Sgt Iddles initially charged the wrong man, Peter Samuel Smith, and later apologised to him for the mistake.
He now believes the killer is a person named by an anonymous caller to police on the morning after the murder.
That person was interviewed and eliminated because his partner gave him an alibi.
Sen-Sgt Iddles now believes the alibi was false and the person named by the anonymous caller did it. Sadly, the suspect died before the evidence was available to charge him.
How Bonny’s murder was solved
Sen-Sgt Iddles praised the role of the media in publicising unsolved murders and other cold cases.
He said one of the early successes for Victoria’s first cold case squad, which he formed in late 1999, came from a tip off following a Herald Sun article which mentioned the unsolved 1982 rape and murder of six-year-old Bonny Clarke.
Bonny’s friend Kylie Ward read the article and told her boyfriend she had always suspected the man who was a lodger in the Clarke home as he often walked she and Bonny to school and acted in a weird sexual way.
The boyfriend rang the Herald Sun journalist who wrote the article and he arranged for Ms Ward to contact Sen-Sgt Iddles.
It turned out the lodger named by Ms Ward, Malcolm Clarke (no relation to Bonny) was the murderer and he was charged and convicted in 2004 after an elaborate undercover sting organised by Sen-Sgt Iddles and homicide squad detective Tim Day.
That sting led to a secretly taped confession by Clarke that he did it.
“The media has a big part to play in helping police get information to solve crimes,” Sen-Sgt Iddles said.
“Former homicide squad chief Paul Delianis said to me in 1980 ‘as a homicide squad investigator Ron, you need the media and the media need you’.
“That still holds true today because there is no doubt Bonny Clarke’s case wouldn’t have been solved if the Herald Sun hadn’t written the article which prompted Bonny’s friend Kylie to come forward with that one bit of vital information.”
The creation of the cold case unit
While much of Sen-Sgt Iddles’ career was spent investigating “hot” murders, that is, those that have just happened, he is also the man largely responsible for the fact Victoria Police now has a well-resourced cold case unit looking at old murders.
The Angela Taylor Memorial Trust, set up after the death of Constable Angela Taylor in the 1986 car-bombing of Russell St police headquarters, provides money for overseas scholarships for police.
Sen-Sgt Iddles was awarded one in 1999 and chose to use it to travel to the United States to examine how the FBI and US police investigated unsolved murders.
On his return he was able to convince Victoria Police bosses they needed to form the force’s first cold case homicide unit, with him at the head of it.
Previously, old unsolved homicide cases were generally only re-examined if new information came in and it was the job of on-call detectives to do it in whatever spare time they had in between investigating hot homicides — which meant very few cold cases got solved because hot ones always took priority.
Sen-Sgt Iddles argued, successfully, that cold cases were much more likely to be solved if detectives were allowed to drop everything else to concentrate all their efforts on a particular cold case.
That first cold case squad started off small in late 1999, with Sen-Sgt Iddles only having three detectives available to him.
Sadly, despite Sen-Sgt Iddles arguing against it, Victoria Police scrapped the cold case homicide squad in 2008 as part of a major reshuffle of the crime department.
“It was started up again in 2011 and today force command has a very strong commitment to investigating cold case homicides.
“The way it is structured within the homicide squad now, where they have up to 16 detectives devoted to unsolved homicides, is fantastic.
“The cold case detectives are doing a great job. They have more resources than ever, are looking at more investigations than were ever done in the past and they are getting great results.”
After 43 years, what next?
Sen-Sgt Iddles is leaving Victoria Police after 43 years in the job and his last day as boss of the police union is on February 24, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he will never work again.
“I’ve already been offered several jobs, but I think I will take the advice of Jeff Kennett,” he said.
“Jeff rang me and said ‘Ron you should have four or five months off and do nothing then do something that’s physical and do something that mentally challenges you, but never work full time again’ and that’s probably the advice I will take.”
Sen-Sgt Iddles, who is now a grandfather, intends spending more time with his wife Colleen and their three children.
His demanding job as a homicide squad detective meant he missed many family milestones, such as birthdays and wedding anniversaries.
“I couldn’t have achieved what I have achieved without the support of Colleen,” he said.
“Mothers would understand the difficulties of taking children to school, taking them to sport and different events and doing all those other things you have to do as a parent.
“What often happened was I would get a call in the middle of the night about a body being found.
“I would get up, pack a bag and say ‘I’ll see when I see you’ and I might be gone for a week.
“Whatever Colleen had planned for the next few days was turned upside down and she had to do it all without me there.
“She’s been my rock when times have been tough; she’s always been there for me and I thank her for doing so.”
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