Sex offender priest among the suspects in the 1980 Maria James murder
A DNA bungle has put a paedophile priest and other suspects back in the frame over the 1980 murder of Thornbury bookshop owner Maria James. Take a look at the evidence and possible killers in a case that’s haunted our top detective for decades.
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Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett was among those who told police that Father Anthony Bongiorno might be a paedophile.
Mr Kennett’s information was part of new material which prompted the homicide squad to again question the since-disgraced Catholic priest about the 1980 murder of Thornbury bookshop owner Maria James.
Her killer has never been caught — and suspects once thought to have been cleared are back in the frame after a police DNA bungle was discovered.
MARIA JAMES MURDER: SUSPECTS NAMED
HOW A PRIEST BECAME A MURDER SUSPECT
SON OF MURDER SUSPECT MARIA JAMES BREAKS SILENCE
THE PRIEST AND THE PREMIER
It was in 1998 that Mr Kennett contacted police about Fr Bongiorno.
At that time, detectives only wanted to talk to Fr Bongiorno, who was the James’s family priest, about whether Ms James, or anyone else, had said anything to him in the confessional box that might help them catch the killer.
It wasn’t until nine years later that the Herald Sun revealed police had just been provided with new evidence that prompted detectives to elevate Fr Bongiorno to murder suspect status in the stabbing death of Ms James, 38.
That new evidence included allegations made to the Herald Sun in 2007 that Fr Bongiorno had sexually molested one of Ms James’s two children.
Fr Bongiorno was first spoken to soon after the murder by the then Victoria Police homicide squad chief Brian Ritchie.
Detective Chief Inspector Ritchie took a Bible with him when he tried to persuade Fr Bongiorno to help police with their inquiries in 1980.
He opened the Bible and quoted parts of the gospels to him that suggested Fr Bongiorno should offer assistance.
But Chief Inspector Ritchie’s Bible quoting ploy failed to sway Fr Bongiorno.
The priest refused to say if he had taken Ms James’s confession, or whether anybody else had provided information in the confessional that could be of assistance.
Tragically, police in 1980 mistakenly believed Fr Bongiorno was the most appropriate person to tell Mark James, 13 at the time, and his intellectually disabled brother Adam James, 11 at the time, that their mother Maria had been murdered.
Which is why Fr Bongiorno visited the boys at school within hours of their mother being stabbed to death in her bookshop.
Detectives obviously didn’t know it at the time, but decades later it emerged that Fr Bongiorno might have murdered Ms James.
Mark James later reflected to the Herald Sun on the unusual behaviour of Fr Bongiorno when he broke the news to him about his mother.
“One of the aspects of his behaviour is he didn’t seem to display sorrow or shock,” he said.
“There wasn’t the warmth or the emotional connection or bond that should be present between a priest advising a young boy that his mother had been murdered.”
A 1998 television show that re-enacted the Maria James murder prompted a flurry of new information about what is still an unsolved cold case.
Several people rang Crime Stoppers and suggested Fr Bongiorno knew something about the murder.
Mr Kennett, who was Victorian premier from 1992 to 1999, received written information in 1998 that nominated Fr Bongiorno as a child molester. He passed the letter, which contained a photograph of Fr Bongiorno, to police.
That helped prompt police to speak to Fr Bongiorno again about the Maria James murder. He came into the homicide offices and appeared more helpful than when Det-Chief-Inspector Ritchie first spoke to him in 1980.
Fr Bongiorno told police in 1998 that he didn’t know the identity of the killer and that no person had confessed to him in the confessional.
Bizarrely, he then suggested to police that a possible motive for the murder was that Ms James had been working as a prostitute from the rear of the bookshop.
Police thoroughly checked Ms James’s background and activities and found no evidence of her ever working as a prostitute.
Mark James was disgusted when the Herald Sun revealed to him that Fr Bongiorno had falsely accused his mother of being a sex worker.
He said such an accusation could not be supported and was behaviour quite contrary to his mother’s ethical standards.
“Anyone who knew my mother would tell you Bongiorno’s allegation is quite absurd.” Mr James said.
“It makes you wonder if it was a diversionary tactic to take the attention away from him.
“Bongiorno’s bizarre accusation simply adds weight to the general suspicious and inconsistent nature of his behaviour since the murder of my mother.”
RON IDDLES’S FIRST HOMICIDE CASE
The Maria James murder was the first case former homicide squad detective Ron Iddles worked on.
His gut tells him Ms James knew her killer.
It also tells him the murderer didn’t visit her with death on his mind.
All the evidence suggests it was an opportunistic crime committed in the heat of the moment — probably after an argument.
She was neither robbed nor raped.
The fact the killer used a knife from Ms James’s kitchen to stab her 68 times suggests he didn’t come armed.
Fitzroy town clerk John James was listening on the telephone when his former wife was attacked by the killer in her Thornbury bookshop about noon on June 17, 1980.
She had a good relationship with her former husband and often rang him if she needed assistance with something, or wanted to talk to him about their two sons Mark and Adam.
Ms James rang Fitzroy Town Hall about 11.50am on the day she died and tried to speak to John James.
She was told by her former husband’s secretary, Isabella Fabris, that he was not at his desk.
Ms James said: “There’s someone in the shop. Tell him to ring me.”
Her former husband rang her back about five minutes later.
“Maria answered the phone and said ‘hang on please’,” Mr James said in his statement to police.
“I then held on and while doing this I heard discussion in the background and then a bit of a scream and then there was more discussion and then silence.
“I then started to get edgy and started to whistle into the phone to attract someone’s attention.
“I could then still hear the conversation in the background and I couldn’t hear the exact words but Maria was talking fairly loudly.
“I then heard a second scream. I then really thought something was wrong so I decided to go to the shop to see what was up.”
Mr James took about 15 minutes to get to the shop at 736 High St, Thornbury.
The front door was locked and a customer was standing outside.
Mr James and the customer looked through the window and both saw movement of the curtain that separated the shop from the rear living quarters, as though somebody was peeking through it.
Really worried by this time, Mr James went round the back and climbed through the kitchen window and started yelling, “Is anybody home?”
He opened the back door in case he needed to run out in a hurry.
“I then crept along the passage and on the left is my son’s room and I glanced in there and couldn’t see anything.” his statement to police said.
“I then reached over and turned the light on in her room and I saw her on the floor.
“Her eyes were open and there was blood all over the place. I knew she was dead.”
Mr James ran to a neighbour and phoned police. He then went back to the front of the shop and was stunned to find the previously locked door was open and there was a woman customer browsing the bookshelves.
It appears certain the killer was still in the shop when Mr James arrived and left through the front door as Mr James was climbing in through the back window.
The killer left Ms James, fully clothed, lying on her back with her hands tied in front of her with twine.
“I can’t understand why anybody would do that,” Mr James told police.
“She never hurt a person. She didn’t have any enemies.”
The then Detective Senior Sergeant Iddles, who has since left Victoria Police, told the Herald Sun in 2007 that he was convinced Ms James knew her killer and the crime scene, which he attended, indicated as much.
“They are actually sitting down having a cuppa. There were two cups found on the counter,” he said then.
“It’s somebody she is comfortable with.
“For whatever reason, an argument has taken place.
“The killer has grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the heat of the moment.
“It was a weapon of opportunity, rather than a planned weapon. It wasn’t a planned murder.
“I don’t subscribe to the theory she was tortured or the ropes suggest it was some sort of bondage fantasy, a murder with a sexual motive.
“I believe she had an argument with somebody she knew. That person didn’t go there with the intention of harming her.
“There was a lot of hatred and anger.
“Where you get multiple stab wounds, and you are talking 68 stab wounds here, that’s a lot of anger and some emotional connection.
“It was a frenzied attack.”
NEW EVIDENCE EMERGES
In 2007, the Herald Sun was able to provide Sen-Sgt Iddles with explosive new information about the Maria James murder.
It included that a friend of Maria, Margaret Quill, had told the Herald Sun of her belief that Maria had confronted Fr Bongiorno about her suspicion he was molesting one of her sons.
The Herald Sun also told Sen-Sgt Iddles that it had taken Ms Quill to see Maria’s son Mark and that Mark had confirmed Fr Bongiorno had tried to entice him into his house with Mars Bars and that he had told his mother about Bongiorno’s advances on him.
At the time, Mark James told the Herald Sun he was not aware of whether Fr Bongiorno had molested his mentally impaired younger brother, Adam, but that he would ask him.
The case against Fr Bongiorno strengthened in 2013 when Mark James rang the Herald Sun to say Adam had finally admitted that Fr Bongiorno had sexually molested him and that his mother Maria had found out and had intended to confront Fr Bongiorno about it shortly before she was murdered.
The Herald Sun alerted Sen-Sgt Iddles to the new information and he then took a sworn statement from Adam.
A Herald Sun article in 2013, which detailed the new allegations against Fr Bongiorno, prompted yet another witness to come forward — an electrician who claimed to have seen Fr Bongiorno with blood on him on the day of the murder.
At the request of police, the Herald Sun didn’t report on the electrician’s claim as it might have jeopardised the ongoing investigation into Fr Bongiorno and other suspects.
Police had what they thought was the killer’s DNA from blood samples left at the Maria
James murder scene and they had used it over the years to eliminate a number of suspects.
In 2017, Victoria Police discovered that there had been an embarrassing stuff up and that the
DNA sample they’d been using in the Maria James probe was actually obtained from an exhibit from a different case.
That discovery by detectives was later revealed by journalist Rachael Brown on the ABC podcast Trace.
THE THREE KEY SUSPECTS
In 2019, Fr Bongiorno remains a suspect, as do other suspects who were wrongly eliminated by detectives using the bungled DNA sample.
Among those back on the suspect list is now dead sadistic thug Peter Keogh.
In 2003, Victoria Police wrongly cleared Keogh of the Maria James murder because his DNA didn’t match DNA they believed was from the man who stabbed her to death in 1980.
Fr Bongiorno and Keogh are among what police have told Mark James is their current “persons of interest” list in relation to the murder of his mother.
“Police told me that apart from Father Bongiorno they have two other main suspects, but altogether they have what they called the top five,” Mark James told the Herald Sun in 2017.
Keogh, who lived near the Thornbury bookshop when Maria James was murdered, was convicted of killing his former partner Vicki Cleary — the sister of former federal MP and VFA footballer Phil Cleary — by stabbing her outside a Coburg kindergarten in 1987.
Evidence which puts Keogh as one of the people suspected of murdering Ms James includes:
PSYCHOTHERAPIST Margaret Hobbs was treating Keogh as a patient and became convinced by what he said to her in her consulting rooms that he was responsible for murdering Maria James, telling a psychologist friend after the stabbing that “I am sure I know who did it because the bastard told me”.
KEOGH’S former girlfriend, Judy McNulty, confessed years after the murder that she had given Keogh a false alibi by claiming to police that he couldn’t have killed Maria James because he was elsewhere with her at the crucial time, when in actual fact she wasn’t with him. She was pressured by Keogh to provide the false alibi.
AFTER Keogh was convicted in 1989 of manslaughter, rather than murder, over the death of Ms Cleary, 25, Judy McNulty told Ms Cleary’s mother Lorna that Keogh had “got away with murder before” at the Thornbury bookshop.
CLOSE relatives of Judy McNulty told detectives Keogh often carried a knife and had used it against Ms McNulty.
JUDY McNulty’s sister told police in 1997 that she was amazed Judy initially provided Keogh with an alibi for the day of the Maria James murder because Judy had once told her Keogh had murdered somebody.
OTHER McNulty family members told police Keogh had raped a woman known to them in the same year Maria James was murdered.
A POLICE officer who once shot Keogh in both kneecaps to stop Keogh attacking him with a knife rang the homicide squad after the Maria James murder to say Keogh bore a striking resemblance to the identikit picture of the man a witness saw running away from the murder scene.
Keogh’s psychotherapist, Ms Hobbs, refused to directly tell detectives about her strong belief that Keogh murdered Maria James because she wasn’t prepared to break her code of ethics relating to patient confidentiality.
But she was so convinced of Keogh’s guilt that soon after the 1980 murder she got a psychologist friend to tell police they should question Keogh about the Maria James murder.
The information passed to the homicide squad at the time was vague about why detectives should talk to Keogh. It was more like a suggestion than the crucial clue it actually was.
Years later, Ms Hobbs played a major part in getting Robert Arthur Selby Lowe convicted of the 1991 murder of Sheree Beasley, 6, after Lowe admitted his guilt to her while she was treating him.
Keogh, whose long criminal history included convictions for various sex and violence offences, committed suicide in 2001.
He killed himself in the rear yard of his home in Mansfield St, Thornbury — just 1.5km from where Marie James was stabbed.
At the time he died, Ms Cleary’s brother Phil was strongly lobbying police to reinvestigate Keogh over the Maria James murder.
The then State Coroner, Graham Johnstone, approved a homicide squad request to get DNA from Keogh’s body before it was cremated. They got it from his hair and a piece of bone.
It was that DNA sample that led to police wrongly eliminating him after they later got what they thought was the killer’s DNA from what they mistakenly thought was a bloodstained pillowcase from the Maria James murder.
Police later discovered the pillowcase was from another crime scene and had been placed at some stage in a Maria James evidence bag that was supposed to contain the bloodstained quilt from Maria James’s bed.
The quilt that should have been in the bag was missing.
It could be a crucial piece of evidence as the police forensic officer who collected samples from the murder scene said it was very close to where Maria James’s body was found.
“A quilted bedspread on the bed was heavily stained with blood on the edges near the deceased,” Sen-Constable Terrence Collins said.
“There were spots of blood on top of the quilt which had sprayed across the bed.”
Killers who use knives often cut themselves during the attack, particularly if the victim suffers multiple stab wounds and Maria James was stabbed 68 times — so there is a good chance some of the blood on the missing quilt was from the murderer.
While wanting police to still consider Keogh as a suspect, Mark James told the Herald Sun in 2017 he was as sure as he could be that his mother was killed by Fr Bongiorno, possibly with the help of Fr Thomas O’Keeffe — Bongiorno and O’Keeffe were the James family’s priests at St Mary’s in Thornbury at the time of the 1980 murder.
He said both Catholic priests were sexually molesting his intellectually disabled younger brother Adam in the period before their mother was stabbed to death.
Mark James believes the motive for one or both of them killing his mother was that Adam had told her about Fr Bongiorno sexually abusing him and she confronted the priest about it on the day she was murdered.
“Given the circumstances, it appears very much like Bongiorno knocked off my mum,” he told the Herald Sun.
“If you had asked me maybe 25 or 30 years ago if a Catholic priest could have done this of course I would have said no way.
“Now, at best, these two monsters Bongiorno and O’Keefe have sexually assaulted my brother and absolutely terrified him for years.
“At worst, to perpetuate their activities, facing exposure, they have either murdered my mother or arranged for my mother to be murdered.”
In 2017, Mark James appealed to Victorian State Coroner, Judge Sara Hinchey, to hold a second inquest to examine all the compelling new evidence in the case.
“A lot has happened since the 1982 coronial inquest,” he told the Herald Sun then.
“Coroner Mason did the best he could at the time with the information he had, but he wasn’t privy to all of the information that has come out in recent years.
“I am asking the coroner to consider these new facts and circumstances and I am requesting her to put aside the findings of the original inquest.
“Down the track, when police have picked through more of the investigation, I would like the coroner to take a lead role in directing the police in certain areas and holding a further inquest.”
Mark James said he also hoped the coroner would investigate the circumstances of the DNA bungle in his mother’s case.
His plea didn’t fall on deaf ears, with acting State Coroner Iain West revealing in November last year that he had ordered the reopening of the coronial investigation into the death of Maria James.
“On 25 November 1982, Coroner K.G. Mason held an inquest into the death of Ms James and found that her homicide was committed by a person unknown,” a November 30, 2018, statement from the Coroners Court said.
“In July 2017, the Coroners Court of Victoria received an application from Mark James, Ms James’s son, requesting that Coroner Mason’s finding be set aside and the coronial investigation into his mother’s death be reopened.
“Following the introduction of legislative amendments to the Coroners Act 2008 on 28 October 2018, His Honour is empowered to set aside findings made under previous Coroners Acts of 1958 and 1985 and re-open investigations if new facts or circumstances make it appropriate to do so.
“Having considered the application, His Honour has determined to set aside the 1982 finding and re-open the investigation.”
THE LIST OF OTHER SUSPECTS
Other suspects expected to be examined during the current new coronial probe, apart from Fr Bongiorno, Fr O’Keefe and Peter Keogh, include:
MARIO
One of Maria James’s customers told police that on the Saturday morning before the murder she was in the shop talking to Maria and Maria said a man called Mario had tried to chat her up and had asked for her phone number. The woman said Maria told her she had given Mario “the brush off”. Police identified Mario and interviewed him.
He admitted he had been in Maria James’s bookshop on the morning she was murdered. He told police the shop was closed when he got there but Maria had let him in after he knocked on the door.
He said he tried to sell her some magazines and that they argued after she refused to take them. He told police he left the shop after the argument. Police later received information that Mario went back to the shop later that morning. He was a keen tomato grower and used twine similar to the twine used to tie up Maria James. He remained a strong suspect until he was eliminated in 2004 when his DNA didn’t match the DNA police believed at the time was the DNA of the killer — the DNA bungle puts Mario back high on the suspect list.
PETER
Police identified Peter, who was a local real estate agent, and interviewed him, but didn’t find any evidence to implicate him. Police were told Peter was married with two children at the time he attempted to form a relationship with Maria James. Peter’s wife, who was 22 at the time, told police she had lived with Peter since she was 13 and that she didn’t think her husband, 30 at the time, was having an affair.
One theory is that Maria discovered Peter was married and became angry with him for trying to deceive her. A fellow real estate agent provided Peter with an alibi, saying he was with Peter visiting properties elsewhere at the time of the murder. Maria’s former husband, John James, told police in 1980 he was aware Maria had a boyfriend.
“I know she was seeing a chap. She’d changed recently, she’s become chirpier and happier, more relaxed, he said. Mr James told police Maria had also recently become obsessive about finding out exactly when he would be coming to her house to drop off the kids. He said he presumed it was so he wouldn’t see her with her man. “Obviously somebody is coming in,” Mr James told police. “I know she was seeing the estate agent guy on the corner, Peter. Never met him though. Kids pointed him out to me once. Kids didn’t seem to mind him.”
THE FIRST TELECOM MAN
He was identified by police and questioned. They discovered he had lots of freedom in his Telecom job to travel wherever he liked and that he was in the area on the day Maria James was murdered. They were told he frequented second hand bookshops.
The Telecom employee left Melbourne for Queensland on August 1, 1980, just a few weeks after Maria James was murdered. He picked up two female hitchhikers on August 6, 1980, and attempted to rape them at gunpoint. The women fought back and managed to escape after one of them wrestled the gun from him. Police caught him and searched his vehicle, finding two rifles, a fake pistol, handcuffs, thumb screws, ether, nylon cord, white adhesive tape and a knife.
The knife was of the same brand and size as the one missing from Maria James’s kitchen and which police believe was the weapon used to stab her 68 times. Maria James’s hands were tied. A witness in the Maria James case told police she saw a man running out of the bookshop at the time of the murder as she was driving past and had to brake heavily to avoid hitting him as he sped across the road in front of her. Her description of him fitted the Telecom man so police flew her up to Queensland so she could take part in a line-up of several men. She identified the Telecom man as the person she saw running out of Maria James’s bookshop just after the murder. Although Telecom records suggested the man could not have been in Thornbury at the time of the murder he remained a suspect as it was possible the records were falsified.
Police also discovered the female motorist who told police she saw a man running out of the bookshop at the time of the murder was an unreliable witness as she also picked suspect Peter the real estate man out of a police line-up as the man she saw fleeing the scene — and he looks nothing like the first Telecom man.
THE SECOND TELECOM MAN
A prostitute nominated one of her regular clients as being the murderer. She told police he often talked about violence towards women and how he liked inflicting it. She told police he discussed the Maria James murder with her and said “the cops are stupid if they are looking for straight B and D (bondage and domination) because they are wrong”.
Maria’s hands were tied and she had been subjected to a very violent and prolonged attack, including many stab wounds in the chest area. Police believe the killer also held her face down with a potato masher because imprints on Maria’s face matched one found in her
kitchen. The prostitute said she didn’t know her client’s full name, but he called himself Ross and told her he worked for Telecom. She said he asked her to do “weird” things, but she wouldn’t expand on what the weird things were. Police never found him.
THE 5AM MAN
A garbage worker told police he regularly saw a man letting himself out of the front door of the bookshop about 5am in the three months before the murder. He described him as between 172 and 178cm tall, aged 30 to 35, of medium build with fairly long dark hair and having a Charlie Chaplin type moustache. Police were told he sometimes caught a taxi and a taxi was reported as seen waiting in the vicinity of the shop about 5am on several occasions in the weeks before the murder. Police appealed through the taxi industry journal for taxi drivers who might have picked him up to come forward, but police never identified the 5am man. In a first for Victoria, police had the garbage worker hypnotised and produced an identikit picture of the 5am man from what the garbage man said about him while under hypnosis. Police never found the 5am man.
THE TRAFFIC OFFICER
He had known Maria James for decades and sometimes took her out socially, not romantically. Was questioned and while he had an alibi he remained a suspect as police were not 100 per cent sure it was watertight. He was convicted of sex offences committed against people known to him more than a decade after the Maria James murder.
Watch Ron Iddles: The Good Cop on Foxtel at 7.30pm.
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