How rapist and child killer Malcolm Clarke was nabbed in cunning undercover sting
He’d raped and killed before, but somehow Puffing Billy volunteer Malcolm Clarke escaped suspicion when a little girl was murdered at the house where he’d once lived. It would take a cunning undercover sting to finally catch him.
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Malcolm Joseph Thomas Clarke literally got away with murder for years.
Clarke killed Melbourne disco dancer Theresa Crowe in 1980 and escaped detection.
But history shows this sort of depraved offender doesn’t usually just stop.
Two years later he sexually assaulted and murdered six-year-old Bonny Clarke, who was not related but at whose home he had once been a boarder.
It was only when he raped his next door neighbour in 1983 that this involvement in the Crowe murder became apparent — yet he somehow continued to escape suspicion over Bonny’s death, largely due to the police view at the time that the little girl’s mother did it.
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It would not be until 2001 that Clarke became the prime suspect in Bonny’s death.
He had been out of jail for several years by then, and police feared he may have committed other sex crimes during that time — possibly while working in Melbourne aged-care homes and on Melbourne’s popular tourist train Puffing Billy.
Bonny’s murder was the first case a young detective senior constable was handed after joining the homicide squad in 2001 alongside veteran Ron Iddles, who had promised the child’s father he’d take another look.
The detectives quickly became convinced that Clarke was their man.
It would take a controversial but highly-effective undercover method to finally bring Clarke to justice.
The killing of Theresa Crowe
Theresa Crowe was never going to be attracted to a slob like Malcolm Clarke.
But that didn’t stop him trying.
Clarke, who weighed in at 117kg and was a sloppy dresser with a drink problem, was obsessed with the petite dancer.
He first became attracted to her in 1975 when they were introduced by a mutual friend.
She was 17 at the time and he was 21.
Clarke made a point of knowing the nightclubs Theresa frequented. Her local — and therefore his — was Chasers Disco in Chapel St.
By 1980 his obsession had grown to the extent that on the night of June 18, he proposed to her.
He was perfectly serious about marrying her, whereas she treated it as a bit of a joke.
“She sort of laughed and gave me a dead look, you know, sort of stunned, annoyed,’’ Clarke said.
And that hurt Clarke — who was an assistant projectionist with Greater Union cinemas at the time — as did her extroverted dancing style with other men.
When 22-year-old Theresa walked out of Chasers at 2.15am on June 19, 1980, soon after the proposal, he decided to follow her.
Clarke had been in her tiny loft — which measured less than 4m by 3m — a couple of times before.
Theresa had once let him sleep on her swinging settee, which was suspended from the ceiling on ropes, as he was too drunk to go home.
The loft was at the rear of 448 Chapel St. Entry was gained by climbing a ladder up to a trapdoor, which opened directly into Theresa’s single-room living quarters.
Clarke claims he knocked on the trapdoor and Theresa opened it, wearing only a nightie, and that he then made them both a coffee.
“When I took the coffee over to the sink she took the nightie off. She seemed to be c — k teasing,’’ Clarke said in a most unlikely claim when he was finally caught three years after killing Theresa.
The chances of Theresa wanting to be naked with Clarke are incredibly slim — she had made it known to both him and her friends that he was only good for buying her drinks.
He claims she lay face down on the swinging settee and wouldn’t tell him what was wrong.
“I got wilder and bit her on the back,’’ Clarke said.
“She screamed, bit of a scream, but I didn’t think she objected. I don’t know why I bit her. Work her up, I suppose. You know, get excited and that.
“I remember holding her arms and she was sort of struggling.’’ He admits he might have hit her and that he was thinking of having sex with her.
“I was thinking a lot about it, but she wouldn’t let me,’’ Clarke said.
He then admitted climbing on top of her, fully clothed, while she was lying face down on the settee.
“I was just that worked up, you know, she was naked and that,’’ Clarke said.
He admitted he then committed a sex act with one hand while subduing Theresa with the other. Clarke said he then fell into an exhausted sleep on top of Theresa.
Police disagree with Clarke.
They say evidence suggests it is far more likely Clarke went into Theresa’s room seeking sex and when she said no he ripped her nightie off and pushed her face down on the settee while beating her about the head.
They believe he climbed on top of her and masturbated while biting her back and that he used his other hand to hold her head down over the arm of the settee, which cut off her breathing.
An autopsy later revealed Theresa was asphyxiated.
“I was quite a long time on her back. Eighteen-and-a-half stone I was, she was skinny,’’ Clarke said.
“I woke up. She was lying still. She didn’t move like you do when you’re breathing. I moved her to the floor to revive her, give her mouth to mouth. Then I just panicked.’’
Clarke found a sharp piece of metal, which he described as being like a nail file, and deeply cut Theresa in a straight line from the middle of her neck right down to the top of her vagina. He then crossed her arms over her chest and wrapped her tightly in a blanket.
“I went over and washed the cups at the sink. Grabbed the tea towel and wiped the cups, wiped everything I thought I might have touched, you know, no fingerprints and that,’’ Clarke said.
He then put a cloth over Theresa’s face and let himself out of the loft, locking the trapdoor behind him. Clarke threw the keys down a drain 400m away. Theresa’s body lay undiscovered until the following Wednesday, six days later.
Pathologist James McNamara helped throw detectives off track by incorrectly finding Theresa had only been dead for 12 to 15 hours when she had actually been killed several days earlier. It appears the meticulous binding of the body by Clarke slowed down decomposition.
A couple of witnesses further derailed the murder inquiry by innocently — but falsely — claiming to have seen Theresa in the days after she was killed.
That meant Clarke didn’t need to find an alibi for the night she was killed because police were convinced she hadn’t died until much later than she actually did.
It was enough to get him off the hook for years.
The death of Bonny Clarke
He was confident enough by December 1982 to sexually attack and kill again, with his victim this time being six-year-old Bonny Clarke.
She was no relation (and her parents preferred different spellings of her name).
In what became typical of his attacks, Bonny, just like Theresa Crowe, was known to him.
Clarke boarded with Bonny’s mother, Marion, in her Northcote home in Westbourne Grove from January 1982 to September 1982. He returned to the house in the early hours of December 21, 1982.
Mrs Clarke was asleep in the front bedroom and Bonny was sleeping in the back bedroom at the other end of the house.
Clarke knew it was Mrs Clarke’s habit to leave the rear sliding door slightly ajar so the dogs could get in and out during the night.
He also knew the dogs would be familiar enough with him to keep quiet. Clarke pulled the covers off Bonny, cut off her short pyjama bottoms, pushed her top up and digitally raped her with such force he caused severe injuries.
When Bonny inevitably woke he smothered her with a pillow. He then stabbed her in the chest, cutting her left lung and pulmonary vein.
Clarke set about removing all traces of himself from the crime scene. He took off Bonny’s blood-soaked pyjama top and stuffed it behind her bed, along with the pants he had previously sliced from the bottom of the leg to the waist.
Her body was wiped clean before Clarke left.
It was to be another 20 years before Clarke was charged with murdering Bonny.
Bizarrely, it was Bonny’s mother Marion that police suspected almost from day one right up until Clarke became the prime suspect in 2001.
Even the fact Bonny had been raped didn’t quash this suspicion, the theory being Mrs Clarke had accidentally killed her daughter and had tried to throw police off the scent by using an object to assault Bonny afterwards.
The autopsy found Bonny had been penetrated by a finger or blunt object.
Bonny was the only child of Marion Clarke and her husband Denis. They were separated at the time of Bonny’s death. It was Mrs Clarke who discovered her daughter’s body the next morning.
“I pulled back the doona and noticed bruising around her neck, she was naked and there was a wound to the left side of her chest,’’ Mrs Clarke said.
“She was lying on her back with her arms by her side. I didn’t touch Bonny and rang triple-0 and told them.’’
Crime scene examiner Henry Huggins said there was a large wet patch on the bottom sheet of the bed. It extended almost the full length of Bonny’s abused body.
“I formed the opinion that some alteration or cleaning of the scene had occurred since the death of the deceased,’’ Mr Huggins said.
“Looking at the body I got the impression it had been wiped.’’
The sidetracking of the Bonny Clarke murder investigation by the gut feeling of some homicide squad detectives that the mother did it was like manna from heaven to Clarke — as was the Theresa Crowe investigation being hampered by the incorrect time of death conclusion and the false sightings of her long after she was dead.
It all kept Clarke a free man to offend again.
The rape of Clarke’s neighbour
And offend he did, with his third known victim being a 25-year-old female neighbour he raped and terrorised for almost four hours in August 1983.
Unlike Theresa Crowe and Bonny Clarke before her, this incredibly brave woman lived to tell the tale.
She almost certainly only survived because she made the tough choice to submit to his depraved sexual demands to save her life and that of her five-year-old daughter, who witnessed part of the attack.
Clarke said he desperately wanted to have sex with the woman that night, mainly because he had seen her a couple of times “with near to nothing on’’. The second floor lounge window of his flat overlooked the woman’s back garden.
“I was frustrated and I have never been able to get sex from any woman voluntarily,’’ he said.
“The only way I was able to get it was to pay for it down St Kilda in a massage parlour.’’
Clarke was silently crawling on all fours up the hallway towards the woman’s bedroom when a couple of floorboards creaked.
Jane (not her real name) woke.
“Then I heard the phone being dialled and I pounced,’’ Clarke said.
“I wanted to stab her but I didn’t aim for her chest or stomach. I went for her legs so that it would stop her but wouldn’t kill her.
“As I stabbed her I let go of the knife and grabbed for her mouth so she couldn’t scream.
“I had one hand around her mouth and she was biting my thumb pretty hard. I had my other hand around her throat.
“Then I said to her ‘let my thumb go’, she still wouldn’t let go so I applied pressure to her throat with my other hand until she let go.’’
Jane says he then warned her not to make any wrong moves or he would kill her. He started talking to her as they lay on the bedroom floor, claiming he was a prison escapee, that he had three mates waiting outside for him and that he had cut off the breasts of another woman.
In what police consider was a significant statement — remembering that he claimed Theresa Crowe had removed her nightie — he asked Jane to take off her nightie.
“I don’t know why he thought I had a nightie on, because I didn’t have a stitch on,’’ Jane said.
Clarke then started feeling her body as they lay on the floor. As he was doing so Jane heard her daughter call out and looked up and saw her leaning over the bed looking at them.
Jane told the distressed girl to go back to her own bed and not to worry as she and daddy were just playing games — hoping it was dark enough for her not to realise daddy wasn’t in the room.
Clarke grabbed Jane by the throat as soon as her daughter left the room and said: “How easy I could kill you. I could cut you up like the other girl.’’
Fearing for the safety of her daughter more than her own, it was at this point that Jane made the life-saving decision to reluctantly comply with Clarke’s demands and even attempt to be nice to him.
“I’ll do anything you want, but please don’t hurt my daughter,’’ Jane said.
Clarke spent the next couple of hours raping and sexually assaulting Jane in every conceivable way, including biting her, as he had done to Theresa Crowe.
Jane said one of the last things he said to her was “if you have a baby I don’t want you to get rid of it’’.
Knowing Jane’s husband would be home about 6.30am, Clarke left shortly before that. Clarke, as usual, had been meticulous in destroying evidence before escaping.
But what he couldn’t destroy was Jane’s fighting spirit and remarkable ability to provide police with an incredibly detailed statement.
That, coupled with the gut instinct of local detectives Mark Harris and Wayne McDonald, saw him arrested several days later.
Clarke was originally questioned by Sen-Dets Harris and McDonald as a next door neighbour who might have heard something, rather than as a suspect.
Linking the rape to Theresa’s murder
But there was something not quite right about Clarke’s responses and Sen-Det Harris also noticed Clarke’s hand was injured.
His suspicions were enough to leave and get a search warrant.
The search was very fruitful as Clarke had been sloppy. Bloodied clothes he wore the night he raped and stabbed Jane were still in his dirty washing basket.
That find was good, the next even better. Tucked inside his 1980 diary were newspaper clippings about the unsolved murder of Theresa Crowe.
Clarke was taken to the local police station and told his bloodied clothing was to be tested. He then agreed to being medically examined and to having his blood taken.
While waiting in the doctor’s surgery after the examination, Clarke told Sen-Det Harris he had something to tell him.
“You were right, it was me,’’ Clarke said. “I went next door and had sex with the woman.’’
Detective Inspector Brendon Cole and Det-Sgt Trevor Townsend, members of the homicide crew that worked on the Crowe murder three years earlier, were alerted to the rape confession and the finding of the Crowe clippings. They interviewed Clarke two days later.
He must have been in a soul-cleansing mood because he confessed to the Crowe killing almost immediately and agreed to re-enact the crime in the homicide squad office.
Sticky tape was stuck on the floor to represent where the swinging settee was and where the body was found.
Detective Robert Croxford was nominated to play the part of Theresa. Clarke instructed Sen-Det Croxford exactly what position to lie in.
He then positioned himself above the reclining copper and said “I bit her like that’’ as he lowered his mouth to Sen-Det Croxford’s back.
“I lay on her like that,’’ Clarke said on tape as he got intimately close to the increasingly concerned Sen-Det Croxford.
“My hands were like so. I’m very aroused, very aroused at this time.’’
So physically aroused in fact that Sen-Det Croxford decided enough was enough and called a halt to the re-enactment.
A life-size dummy was brought in to replace him.
Inspector Cole said Clarke’s voice became strangely animated as he was hovering above Sen-Det Croxford, describing what he did to a naked Theresa.
“He was mentally and physically aroused during the re-enactment,’’ Inspector Cole said.
“It was disgusting and more than a little disconcerting for Sen-Det Croxford.’’
Clarke was convicted of the manslaughter of Ms Crowe and jailed for 15 years with a minimum of 12, but ended up being released in 1994 after a decade behind bars.
How Bonny’s case was revived
The forming of the homicide squad’s cold-case unit in 1999 provided a chance to reinvestigate Bonny’s murder.
Bonny’s best friend, Kylie Ward, had told the cold-case unit — after reading a Herald Sun article about Bonny’s unsolved murder in 1999 — that she believed a man who had boarded with Bonny’s mother Marion had killed Bonny.
“As I read through the Bonny Clarke file it became clear that Bonny’s mother Marion Clarke had been the suspect,’’ a police officer who worked on the case told the Herald Sun.
“But what stood out to me was that there were a number of other persons who needed to be looked at apart from Marion.
“I decided to have a good hard look at the boarders, and in particular a bloke named by Marion as Mal Clarke. Marion didn’t have any suspicion this Mal Clarke was involved, he was just one of those on a list of people who had lived in her house.
“He had moved out a few months before Bonny was murdered and I wondered if he was the boarder mentioned in Kylie Ward’s 1999 phone call to police.’’
The cold case team then set about trying to discover who Mal Clarke was, armed with just that name and not even sure if it was Clark or Clarke.
The file, now 20 years old and in complete disarray, provided no clues as to the identity of the boarder.
So they set about reconstructing the original file and re-examining witnesses and exhibits.
Six weeks into the reconstruction he lodged himself at the Victoria Police criminal record office with the intention of going through the documents for every Clark and Clarke.
He got quite excited when he found a Joseph Clarke whose profession was given as an assistant projectionist. Marion Clarke had told the original investigators her lodger was an assistant projectionist.
That excitement grew when the record card showed this Joseph Clarke had been convicted and jailed over the manslaughter of Theresa Crowe in 1980.
The next thing to find out was if this Clarke was either out on bail or had appealed and was free to murder Bonny in 1982.
They discovered Joseph Clarke was not jailed until a year after Bonny was killed.
That gave him the opportunity to murder Bonny and, judging by his record, the propensity to commit that sort of offence.
The next step was to establish if Joseph Clarke and Mal Clarke the boarder were the same person.
A close read of the files on the 1983 rape and the killings of Theresa and Bonny established many similarities between the three crimes.
That was enough to convince detectives that Joseph Clarke and the Mal Clarke named by Marion Clarke were the same person and from then on Malcolm Clarke became the prime suspect for murdering Bonny.
Armed with a picture book of 20 or so photographs, one of which was of Clarke, a detective went to visit Kylie Ward on June 22, 2001.
She easily picked out Clarke as being the creepy boarder Bonny had been scared of.
Operation Marauder was launched 12 days later. Its aim was to identify and prosecute the person responsible for the death of Bonny Clarke. Its target was Malcolm Clarke.
They discovered Clarke was a boarder with Marion Clarke from January 1982 to September that year and was living in a caravan at the rear of his parent’s West Brunswick home at the time of Bonny’s December 1982 death.
The team established a list of similar facts relating to Clarke and the Theresa Crowe and Bonny Clarke killings and the rape of his neighbour.
In all cases he either knew the victim or lived with or next door to them. All three crime scenes were cleaned. A knife was his chosen weapon and satisfying his sexual urges the motive. He either suffocated, strangled or attempted one or the other on all three victims.
Detectives were becoming increasingly convinced Clarke was the murderer, but needed to rule out Marion Clarke to justify expensive surveillance on Clarke.
Mrs Clarke initially refused to speak, still angry police had suspected her.
But persistence again paid off, eventually winning Mrs Clarke round to the extent she agreed to take a lie-detector test. She passed with flying colours.
Mrs Clarke was understandably relieved that at last somebody believed she didn’t do it.
Convinced of Mrs Clarke’s innocence, detectives convinced superiors to mount a full-scale operation on Clarke. It included the use of physical and electronic surveillance.
The undercover operation & confession
An undercover officer befriended Clarke, using his love of steam trains and photography to establish the friendship.
“We already knew that Malcolm had an interest in photography, so guess what, the undercover officer was someone who had an interest in photography,” Iddles says in his new Foxtel series, The Good Cop.
“So in the end the two of them are taking photos on Puffing Billy. And Malcolm Clarke was telling him how he enjoyed taking photos of young girls.
“And then the undercover would say to Malcolm, ‘oh are you going to catch the train home? I’ll tell you what Malcolm I’ll drive you home.’ So they formed a relationship over a reasonable period of time.
“After about three months, Malcolm thought the undercover operative was his best friend.”
That officer later introduced Clarke to his associates, who, unknown to Clarke, were also undercover operatives.
Clarke and one of his new-found friends met in room 2810 at Crown Towers hotel on June 6, 2002, where Clarke was secretly caught on tape admitting to murder.
“Clarke told me that he had killed a child named Bonny Clarke approximately 20 years ago,” the undercover officer later testified.
“He initially stated that he had gone in to play with her while he was drunk and then she screamed — he covered her head with a pillow and stabbed her in the side of the chest with a knife.”
He said he had “played’’ with her until she woke up.
“I think she wanted to go scream or something and I covered her head,’’ Clarke said.
He also talked about panicking and stabbing Bonny.
Clarke went into detail on how to clean-up after such a crime, including using a damp tea towel or face washer to clean the body and being careful to destroy fingerprints.
Not knowing police were watching and listening, Clarke even drew a map of the route he took to get into Bonny’s house and used a bottle opener to demonstrate how big the knife he used was.
Police later recovered the drawing and the bottle opener.
Clarke was arrested by Det Sen-Sgt Iddles and other detectives on his crew just over an hour after his first confession.
He then went on to confess again later that day in an openly recorded video interview.
It goes for 49 minutes and is chilling to watch and listen to.
When asked at question 13 what he could tell him about the death of Bonny in 1982, Clarke replied: “I was as drunk as a skunk’’.
“God knows why I went around to that place and whatever happened, it happened,’’ Clarke said.
“And when I come to my senses, I realised that Bonny was deceased. I was as drunk as a Mallee bloody bull and I s — t myself. I think I might have had a knife with me.’’
Clarke then talked about how he got in through the unlocked rear door and went into Bonny’s room, where she was sleeping. He then says he pulled the sheet back and described the sex act he committed on her.
“She woke. I put a pillow over her … try to silence her,’’ Clarke said.
“The next thing I knew, she wasn’t breathing. I panicked.
“I don’t know if I stabbed her in the side of the chest. There was no blood and I panicked and I left the house the same way I came in.
“I probably tried to clean as I went. I am done for.’’
Clarke was asked where on Bonny’s body he had stabbed her.
“Would’ve been on her left side, down here somewhere,’’ Clarke said as he indicated on his own chest where he had stabbed Bonny.
He had stabbed Bonny after putting the pillow over her head.
Clarke then bragged on camera how he had often seen Bonny naked after she had been bathed.
“Many a time she would dry off in — be dried off in front of the heater in the lounge room,’’ he said.
Sen-Sgt Iddles asked Clarke what he thought the result would be of putting a pillow over Bonny’s face.
“I think su, su, cut the a, suffocated her,’’ Clarke stuttered.
Sen-Sgt Iddles asked Clarke if he thought that action would be dangerous to her life.
“I think at the time, I wasn’t thinking,’’ Clarke said.
“I was more thinking of keep her quiet and get out of the place before she screamed the house down.’’
He was then asked what he thought the result of stabbing her would be. “I think Bonny was deceased before I stabbed her,’’ he said.
The Good Cop airs Thursdays on Foxtel.
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