Unsolved The murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove

[MC Extra Dollop]

No was ruled out as a suspect. But still stuff like having Janes birthday as his passcode on his phone is pretty creepy.

Don't think this case will ever be officially solved as the 2 guys they need to speak with are dead.

Unofficially though, I think it's pretty open and shut, as the Silvester article quoted earlier in the thread outlines.

 

[JWS2019]

(from Presumed Dead in Underbelly 3 by Silvester & Rule)

A 'good crook', in police slang, is not a character reading. It's an assessment of a criminal's ability to commit crimes professionally enough to minimise chances of arrest. Maurice John Marion, like his contemporaries Stan Taylor and Paul Hetzel, is a good crook, but an evil man. And the closest thing Hetzel has to a best friend.

Marion's crime 'form' goes back to 1959, but in the 1970s, he was a 'stick up' man known as 'Bank Enemy Number One.' Marion liked sex with his violence. He was convicted of rape and associated offences in 1975 and later charged with eleven counts of abduction, two of indecent assault and of using a firearm to resist arrest.

Jenny Bird knew none of this when she met Marion through her mother's connection with Hetzel. She remembered Marion as the friendly man who ran the canteen when she and her mother, then known by her married name, Julie Finlay, used to visit an old boyfriend in Pentridge in the 1970s (incidentally, the same man that helped Chopper Read hack his ears off in the late 1970s).

Hetzel left jail in 1981. Julie was waiting. She was a compliant older woman who would do anything to please him. Even better, she was a 'cleanskin': she could legally hold shooter's licences, buy guns, open bank accounts, get credit and sign lease agreements.

Jenny often sent Prue to stay with the Hetzels. It wasn't until much later, after Prue had taken an overdose of tablets the year before she had disappeared that Jenny's mother revealed that Stan Taylor had once handcuffed Prue - then seven years old - to a naked boy of her own age in a shower.

It was an insight into the sickening behaviour Prue's gradmother tolerated from the criminals she lived among - men who raped as well as robbed. But Jenny didn't realise and her mother didn't tell her, and so Prue - and her cousin Natasha - continued to visit.

When Prue turned thirteen in 1991, she became increasingly rebellious, mixing with boys Jenny didn't approve of. (Prue) wanted to leave home. They agreed she would stay with 'Nanna' and Hetzel in Leonora, near Kalgoorlie. She flew weat in July, 1991, after agreeing to Hetzel's peculiar stipulation that she stay for twelve months. Later, when Jenny telephoned to see how she was, Prue was moody and withdrawn. Hetzel told Jenny not to ring her - and was backed up by 'Nanna' Julie. Jenny knew Marion was staying in a caravan near Hetzel, but didn't worry about it. Until later.

Six weeks later, in September, the Hetzels drove back to Melbourne to sell gold, with Prue. Marion followed in another car. 'Mum said Prue wouldn't be staying with me, but at her friend Melissa's,' Jenny recalls. 'But Prue just grabbed me, and stayed with me. Three days later she said "Mum, I don't want to go back - he's nuts." I was frightened of what Hetzel would say, but I decided Prue should stay home with me.'

Hetzel was angry. It wasn't clear why he was so perturbed by a teenager wanting to be with her mother. After returning to Leonora, Hetzel rang Jenny and told her Prue was 'nothing but a little s**t' and that she'd caused 'nothing but problems.'

Prue was an 'absolute angel' for a few weeks, but she became increasingly troubled. She switched schools twice, and resumed psychological counselling started in 1988, three years before.

Meanwhile, Hetzel called with an unusually friendly offer to Jenny to spend Christmas in Western Australia with him and her mother. But he stipulated that she come alone, while Prue stayed home with Isabelle Taiatini (Jenny Bird's partner).

This puzzled Jenny. Only later did she suspect it might have been an attempt to throw suspicion on Isabelle if Prue disappeared. If so, it didn't work. Jenny went west, but took Isabelle with her, while Prue stayed in Melbourne with friends. They returned late in January. Two weeks later, Prue was gone.

After checking times, faces and places, police quickly dismissed the possibility that Isabelle Taiatini was involved. Curiously, Hetzel later pushed this line, despite initially insisting that Prue must have run away. He ostensibly changed his mind again even later. From the start, Jenny says, Hetzel was strangely aggressive rather than sympathetic about the child he'd known since she was three. When a female relative rang him the first night to say Prue was missing, he paused, took a deep breath, then blustered 'What the hell do you expect us to do all the way over here?'

Despite Jenny's obvious anguish, it took her mother and Hetzel more than a week to get to Melbourne ('I thought Mum would have been on a plane that night.') When they finally arrived, Hetzel sneered at Jenny: 'What the f*** are you crying for?' Within two hours, he took Julie to the rented property at Yarck and left her there, while he went to stay with Maurice Marion for several days at Marion's place at Yandoit, near Daylesford.

This rendezvous later haunted the grieving mother. What were the two criminals doing there?

When Hetzel returned, he sneered to Jenny 'She's probably out getting the arse f***** off her.' It was a brutally offensive thing to say to the mother of a thirteen-year-old missing for two weeks, but that's beside the point - which was that Hetzel was insisting that she'd run away, despite evidence suggesting otherwise. Every day that passed made it more likely she was dead.

Jenny thought Hetzel's behaviour was weird. He tried to stop her having contact with her mother, as if he was afraid of what might be said.

Another thing nagged her. 'I had a photo of Prue and Maurice Marion taken in Western Australia. I was going to give it to the police because it was a good picture of Prue, but Hetzel and Mum insisted that I didn't, in case Maurie was pulled in for questioning.'

She did as they asked, and gave the picture to her cousin's wife to hide from police.

One 'fact' picked up, then repeated, slanted perceptions from the start. Prue was described as Hetzel's 'grand-daughter', an understandable but inaccurate simplification that bolstered the implication she'd been abducted in revenge by the bombers. The fact that Rodney Minogue was at large heightened speculation that he was involved. But, to Jenny Bird, the revenge theory didn't quite add up.

It was clear that Minogue or anyone else could easily have found the Birds. But would they abduct and kill a teenage girl six years after the bombing when they could just as easily get her uncle, James 'Kicka' Finlay, who lived in the same street - and who actively helped the police convict the bombers? Like Hetzel, he avoided being charged by co-operating with police. A bumbling petty offender, he would have been an easy target.

Other things didn't quite gel. The bombing mastermind, Stan Taylor, was obsessed with killing Hetzel. Two of Taylor's former jail-mates, went to Perth in 1991 on a fruitless mission to find Hetzel. Every member of Julie Hetzel's extended family - 'Kicka' Finlay, Jenny Bird, Prue, her cousin Natasha Evans, and others - knew where Hetzel was living. Any of them would have revealed it, if threatened. If Prue had been abducted by Taylor's friends, she would immediately have told them where Hetzel was. But nothing happened to Hetzel, and he didn't seem nervous. Why?

Jenny Bird started to ask herself that question as weeks passed without any break in the investigation. Meanwhile, her cousin's wife persuaded her to give the photograph of Prue with Maurice Marion to the police. If Marion was questioned then so much the better, she argued.

Jenny knew her younger sister had once been involved with Marion. She asked her about him privately, and was shocked by the answer. 'Maurie's an animal,' her sister began, and poured out her story.

The sister was much younger than Jenny. When marion had left jail in 1986 she was only twenty, but Hetzel and their mother had openly approved Marion's advances to her, despite the fact he was twice her age.

One night in the house at Birchip, Marion came into her bedroom and raped her. Hetzel and her mother must have known what was happening, because they joked about it the next morning, despite the fact she had been crying and upset about the incident. It was the start of a sordid twelve-month 'relationship' with the 40-year-old Marion in which he abused the frightened girl physically and sexually, making bizarre and obscene demands. She later told police: 'I noticed he does not show interest in women his own age...he would often comment about my younger friends and what he would like to do to them.'

Her sister's story hit hard. From that moment Jenny believed Prue had come back from Western Australia terrified because Marion had sexually assaulted her - probably with Hetzel's knowledge. 'Paul had been giving me a real bad time,' she recalls. 'He didn't want me to talk to mum, and I didn't know why. Suddenly it came to me...I wondered if he got Maurie to take Prue.'

Later, investigators spoke to the Hetzels and to Marion separately. Hetzel said Marion was 'eccentric', ha paedophile tendencies, and suggested he would make a likely suspect for a sex murder. But he didn't make any signed statements that could be used against his old jailmate. What he did say was that Prue had seemed afraid of Marion since she had been 'mushrooming' with him one day in Western Australia. When they had driven back to Victoria, Marion had asked if Prue wanted to travel in his car, but she had refused.

In a long, carefully-worded statement made six years later in 1998, Hetzel contradicts his early 'belief' that Prue had run away, saying he now believed she had come to harm because of the Russell Street bombing. He cited the two threats made by Craig Minogue in May, 1986, one of which referred to Prue by name.

Despite speculation about the Russell Street bomb link, a persistent underworld rumour suggested otherwise. A well-known criminal and jailbreaker who had known Marion and Hetzel for years, but had fallen out with them, told police that the two men had abducted the girl, killed her and dissolved her body in acid.

Hmmmm...

Now, bear in mind that this story was written 15 years ago and a quick Google search on Marion turns up nothing but his minor acting career. For all I know, he's been ruled out as a suspect. It always seemed kind of convenient that Camilleri ended up getting pinned to Prue Bird's murder. But I'm not sure how any of the bolded parts of the above have changed and therefore, I think there's still some reason to wonder whether it really was tied to the Russell Street bombing.

replying on a very old post but this is very interesting... I also can’t find much at all on Marion... trying to look into him given his background.

 

[Punk Rooster 16]

replying on a very old post but this is very interesting... I also can’t find much at all on Marion... trying to look into him given his background.

Oct 07, 1975, page 1 - The Age at Newspapers.com - Newspapers.com

View the digital scanned newspaper from The Age dated Oct 07, 1975, page 1.

www.newspapers.com

 

[JWS2019]

Oct 07, 1975, page 1 - The Age at Newspapers.com - Newspapers.com

View the digital scanned newspaper from The Age dated Oct 07, 1975, page 1.

www.newspapers.com

Thank you for sharing!!! curious and curiouser

 

[JWS2019]

Oct 07, 1975, page 1 - The Age at Newspapers.com - Newspapers.com

View the digital scanned newspaper from The Age dated Oct 07, 1975, page 1.

www.newspapers.com

Laverton near an army base and I would assume flight paths and plane noise not to high Jack Janes thread but interesting.

 

[Kurve]

Jane's case is featuring on the Victoria Police Cold Case Hub.

Cold case: Jane Thurgood-Dove

Learn about the murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove and assist Victoria Police with any information you may have to help solve the case.

www.police.vic.gov.au