Priest seen covered in blood on day of Maria James’s murder, man claims
On the day Maria James was murdered behind a Melbourne bookshop, one witness recalls seeing a priest covered in blood.
A paedophile priest was seen covered in blood the day a single mother was brutally murdered, according to a witness account unshared for decades.
Maria James’s young son, Adam, told her before she was killed that local priest Father Anthony Bongiorno had sexually abused him, the Coroners Court of Victoria has heard.
She planned to confront the parish, he said, and then her body was found stabbed 68 times on June 17, 1980.
The shocking crime remains unsolved.
The inquest into Mrs James’s death on Monday heard from a woman who said she saw Father Bongiorno standing outside Mrs James’s bookshop about 11am, before the 38-year-old was killed about 12pm.
It then heard from retired electrician Allan Hircoe, who said that while he was working at the church presbytery on the day of the murder, he saw Father Bongiorno with blood on his hands, neck and head.
Mr Hircoe said he arrived at St Mary’s church in Thornbury to do some electrical work and had a brief conversation with an immaculately dressed woman in a white pinafore.
He then saw a man dressed in black with a white priest’s collar appear about 10 metres away on the church’s grass, he said.
“He had one sleeve pushed up high on the forearm, and he had blood on the hands,” he said.
“He had blood on both hands, and he had blood up near his ear and on the side of his neck.”
Mr Hircoe assumed the priest had been injured.
He asked if he was all right and offered to go and fetch a first aid kit from his vehicle.
When he turned around moments later, the priest had gone.
He then overheard a loud conversation in what he thought was Italian before he left, he said.
Mr Hircoe said there was “a lot of blood” to believe the man’s story, which was that he’d cut himself on a fence or some roses — but he said he didn’t connect the incident with the nearby murder until he saw a photo of Father Bongiorno in a newspaper more than 30 years later.
“A priest is held in high esteem, the same as police officers and ambulance officers and school teachers … you’ve just got to believe in somebody doing the right thing,” he said.
“So I just didn’t put two and two together.”
He said he was “100 per cent positive” the man he saw 41 years ago matched photos of Father Bongiorno, who has since died.
Jan Sharpe was stuck in traffic on High Street when she locked eyes with a priest standing outside Maria James’s bookshop the same day Allan Hircoe saw a priest covered in blood, she told the court on Monday.
The man she saw about 11am was squat with a thick neck, wearing a black overcoat with a white collar, and was frowning with thick lines on his forehead, she said.
“My eyes met his eyes,” she said.
“We both looked at each other. Just for a few seconds. It sort of freaked me out a bit.”
She heard about the murder when she watched the news that night but didn’t think her sighting was relevant until her partner heard on ABC podcast Trace that Father Bongiorno could have been involved.
“Back then, we could all trust priests,” she said.
She also said she was “100 per cent” sure the man she had seen matched photos of Father Bongiorno.
Later on Monday, a man who was in grade six at the time of murder said he saw Father Bongiorno with his arms covered in semi-healed cuts that year in an unusual sighting where the priest wasn’t wearing long sleeves.
“They were cuts that I just went, ‘wow’,” he said.
He asked the other priest, Father Thomas O’Keeffe, what had happened, and was told Father Bongiorno had cut his arms on roses.
“They weren’t roses cuts; they weren’t cuts from the garden,” the man said.
The man said he always hoped as a child that police would ask him about the murder, so he could tell them about the two priests.
But he never told anyone about the cuts, because he was “really scared” of Father O’Keeffe, who has also since died.
“They were both evil, but very different people in terms of their personalities,” he said.
“(That’s) what I’ve been trying to say since 1980, they’re evil people.
“(Father O’Keeffe) was like an animal, he would just lose it and get wild.”
He said Father Bongiorno used to “take boys upstairs” and no one would talk about what happened.
Another witness told the court Father Bongiorno abused him when he was aged 11 to 13, from 1981 after the priest had moved away from the Thornbury parish.
He said when he asked Father Bongiorno why he was doing those things to him, the priest said it was “because he loved me”.
“He could have done anything to keep his secret,” he said.
Father Bongiorno and Father O’Keeffe are two of six persons of interest in the inquest, which will try to determine what happened to Maria James.