The man who ordered the hit on young mum Antje Jones finally unmasked

Antje Jones was gunned down in a calculated contract killing 43 years ago. But it’s only now that the full, sad story can be told.

Angie Bartkowiak Antje Jones with ex-husband Clifford Jones

IF Clifford Jones were still alive he’d be almost 90, an evil old man who got away with the contract killing of his young wife half a lifetime ago.

Jones died exactly a year ago, just days after a macabre anniversary — the murder of Antje Jones in September, 1981.

He was always the prime suspect yet never named publicly as a “person of interest” until 2019 when police announced a million-dollar reward for information about the shooting of the young mother in St Albans on a spring morning 43 years ago.

The truth can now be told, bar the identity of the feared hit man that Jones paid to execute the mother of their three-year-old son to avoid giving her a property settlement.

The truth can also now be told about the only person who might have been able to solve the case. This was the even younger woman Jones had ensnared before he split with Antje, and terrorised before she, too, found the grit to defy him and escape.

That unfortunate girl was Arlene Scotland, just 18 when she met Jones, then in his 40s and father of three adult children with his first wife, the one he’d arrived from the UK with in 1965.

Clifford and Arlene Jones circa 1980.

Arlene Tracy Scotland had gone to school in Romsey and had the bad luck to get a job working the till at Jones’s garage and service station in Maidstone in the late 1970s.

Jones was a sharp mechanic who had reputedly learned his trade in the military in Britain. He attracted clients willing to pay cash for high-performance engines and gearboxes.

Among them were a few local police and some local “heavies” — both groups that the cunning Jones wanted to cultivate to further his own ends.

The background to this is that Jones had, a decade earlier, met Antje when she started work at the German-owned ZF automotive transmission works near Footscray.

The former Antje Bartkowiak was then married to an easygoing German seaman, Wolf Arlt. But Wolf spent many weeks away at sea and, to the dismay of Antje’s parents Eric and Tilly Bartkowiak, the sailor’s young wife fell under the spell of the scheming older man.

As Antje would later tell relatives, there was a reason why Jones drove good cars and flashed cash: he was running a lucrative racket, secretly doing cheap repairs on gearboxes brought to ZF for replacement but charging clients full price for new gearboxes they never got, which he would then sell privately. While it lasted, it was like turning water into wine.

But, of course, it couldn’t last. Neither could the ill-fated relationship between the lying Jones and the briefly bedazzled Antje. Soon after she gave birth to the baby boy she called Christopher, in 1978, the marriage was doomed.

Angie Bartkowiak and her son, Christopher.

Antje’s former husband, the kindly Wolf Arlt, had remained close to Antje’s parents. In 2018, Arlt (by then a retired sea captain), told me from his Hamburg home that Antje’s worried parents, Eric and Tilly Bartkowiak, once got him to go with them to rescue Antje from Jones.

Arlt was shocked to see his ex-wife’s state. She was “green and blue” with bruises and she told them Jones had thrown knives at her.

Soon after that, the Bartkowiaks had sold up in St Albans and moved to Queensland. Antje took toddler Christopher and joined them, determined to extract her share in a property settlement with Jones. That determination, and visiting Melbourne to pursue it, signed her death warrant.

It was Jones’s new woman, Arlene, who would later put the puzzle together. In 2018, two years before Arlene contracted the illness that ended her life, the Sunday Herald Sun traced her to Adelaide. She confided how she had quickly become suspicious, then fearful, over Antje’s murder.

From the start, it was hard for her to ignore the fact Antje was killed after Jones started the new relationship. And it was obvious that Jones was furious about Antje’s demand for a property settlement.

In 2018, Arlene revealed two haunting memories that could not safely be published then. But now both she and Jones are dead — and the feared trigger man is behind bars.

Arlene was right to fear the shooter and his crew. She told me in confidence that, around the time of Antje’s murder, she had innocently accompanied Jones to a Footscray restaurant to meet people he knew, mostly through his stolen car parts racket.

One of the men in the group was a well-known western suburbs thug with an unnerving stare and a reputation for armed violence.

The thug, one of several brothers, would subsequently be investigated over at least three other shooting murders that are still unsolved. He is currently serving a long sentence over one of the biggest armed robberies in Australian crime history and under suspicion for a string of others staged by a remarkably well-informed crew.

Every hit man has to start somewhere, and it seems likely that Antje Jones was this one’s first contract killing. Not that anyone apart from him (and perhaps his brothers) and Clifford Jones knew that in 1981.

Arlene recalls the thug sitting near Jones and saw her husband pass him a bag under the table. She was sure it was full of cash Jones had skimmed from his shady garage business. She believed the deal had been brokered by one of the thug’s brothers, who lived locally and was well-known to Jones.

Regardless of who pulled the trigger of the .357 cal. handgun, it seemed clear to two homicide detectives called to the crime scene on the afternoon of September 15, 1981 that it was a cold-blooded execution with the hallmarks of a contract killing.

The known facts are these.

Angie Jones and her mother Tilly (left)

Antje Jones was visiting Melbourne from Queensland to attend an unrelated court case as a witness in a minor traffic matter. She left little Christopher with her parents, who doted on the child and would later defy the law and go on the run to try to keep him away from his father, who perversely called him “Aaron.”

Antje was staying with her brother, Eric Jr., at his home in Theodore St, St Albans. She told friends she was determined to get her share of the house where she had previously lived with Jones.

Antje’s brother and his teenage daughter left the house early that Tuesday morning, leaving her asleep on a couch. Antje was most likely woken by the shooter entering the room by forcing the back door but she had no chance of escape.

Forensic evidence suggests she tried to grab the killer’s handgun just before being shot twice, the second and fatal shot being to the head at close range.

Significantly, her body wasn’t found for about six hours, when her niece got home from school in mid-afternoon. No one else except the killer and the police should have known until the story broke on the evening news bulletins.

That fact would haunt Arlene for years later and this is why.

At mid-morning that day Arlene went from the garage to a nearby shop to buy morning tea, as usual. When she returned, Clifford Jones said something cryptic that she repeated to this reporter word for word in 2018: “The other Mrs Jones is no longer with us.”

When the news broke that night, Arlene was struck by a chilling thought that would grow over time. How had Jones known of the killing so early?

When the police turned up late on the afternoon of the murder to “break the news” they were not convinced by Jones’s show of shock and grief as he collapsed on a pile of tyres and buried his face in his hands.

It was young detective Sal Perna’s first homicide job. Perna and his boss, Sgt. Mick Friend, were sure Jones was behind the murder. But they couldn’t prove it.

The detectives set out to see if Jones could have done the shooting. After driving fast via the shortest routes from the garage to the murder scene, they judged he couldn’t have done it and got back unseen. Besides, eight witnesses swore they’d seen him at the garage all morning.

The answer, Arlene subconsciously suspected but couldn’t yet process, was that the thug had done it. She would hear later that he had gone to Queensland weeks earlier to see if Antje could be killed there, but had decided it was too difficult.

Antje’s decision to visit Melbourne and to stay in her brother’s house, empty during the day, was the perfect opportunity. Pushing Jones for a financial settlement provided the motive.

But no-one saw anything.

Police found a broken trellis on the back fence, as if an athletic intruder had climbed it to reach the house unseen. A neighbour heard a bang that she assumed was a garage door slamming.

That was 1981. In July 1984, Arlene was living in fear and loathing with Jones in Adelaide when she read a Victorian news story with a familiar surname in it.

Another young wife, Maryanna Lanciana, had been shot dead as she slept in her home in Kiely Ave, Werribee, while her 22-month-old son Daniel slept elsewhere in the house. At 23, the murdered woman was even younger than Arlene.

Murder victim Maryanna Lanciana was shot dead in her home as her young son slept.Picture: Victoria Police

The killer, who had been able to enter the house soundlessly, had shot Maryanna behind the ear. Little Daniel apparently slept through it. His father, Pasquale “Percy” Lanciana, reported finding him in his cot when he arrived the next day after working all night before staying in his parents’ house in Seddon, near Footscray.

Lanciana told police he had worked late at his Prahran pizza house, then worked on the door of a nightclub until 5am before sleeping at his parents’ house rather than face the extra 25-minute drive to Werribee.

As a successful small businessman and sportsman, he put up a $55,000 reward

There were no takers, and none when the government boosted the reward to $1m in 2014. The same applies to the million-dollar reward for the Antje Jones murder announced in 2019.

Former detective Sal Perna, now a respected interstate racing integrity official, suspects someone with the right information could collect on both if they act before everyone involved has died.

There is a postscript. The last time Chris Jones saw the father who called him “Aaron” was in 1989, when he was 11.

Jones had tired of “owning” the boy and handed him back to his brokenhearted grandparents. Chris grew up to become a successful computer expert in Brisbane.

Chris Jones had survived and thrived. But wherever he went and whatever he did, his mother’s death and his father’s part in it went with him. Early this year, he took his own life.