Melbourne 1980 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Melbourne 1980 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Police are offering $1 million to anyone who helps crack one of Victoria’s most frustrating cold case murders. Maria James was stabbed to death at her Thornbury bookstore. Her family has never given up the hunt for her killer. On the morning of June 17th, 1980, a man drove to his ex-wife’s bookshop in Thornbury in the inner north of Melbourne after she screamed on the phone to him.

He found the shop sealed up tight when he arrived. By the time he could get inside, she was dead in the bedroom behind it, stabbed 68 times. More than 40 years later, nobody has answered for what happened in that bedroom. Most of the original physical evidence had vanished from police storage by the time anyone had the technology to test it.

Detectives later concluded that the killer was still inside the house when her ex-husband climbed through the window. Nobody knows how he got out. This is what happened. Celia Maria James, known to everyone as Maria, was the daughter of Italian immigrants. She was 38, divorced, and raising two sons on her own. The older boy, Mark, was 13.

Her younger son, Adam, was 11, and had cerebral palsy and Tourette’s syndrome. Maria supported the family by running a bookshop out of the house where they all lived. Friends described her as a close-knit member of the community devoted to her boys. The bookshop was at 736 High Street on a working-class strip of weatherboard houses, corner shops, and the occasional church.

Maria lived and worked at the same address. Her shop sat at the front of the building, and the family’s living quarters were directly behind it, connected by a doorway that was not locked during business hours. There was no reason to barricade the back of the building in the middle of the day. Her customers were regulars, the foot traffic steady, but never heavy.

A person browsing the shelves stood meters from the room where Maria slept. That Tuesday morning, Maria cooked scrambled eggs for her sons. As they ate, she told her older boy, Mark, that if something ever happened to her, she wanted him to promise he would look after his younger brother.

She packed their school lunches. Mark went to his weekly school excursion at the local bowling alley. Maria walked Adam to the bus stop and put him on the bus to his special school, where she waved him off. Back at the bookshop, she stopped to buy a cake, which was not part of her normal weekday routine.

At about 11:55 in the morning, she rang her ex-husband, John, at his office in Fitzroy, where he worked as a state clerk. John was not at his desk, so his secretary took the message. Maria did not say why she wanted to talk to him. She mentioned only that someone was in the shop with her and asked John to call back when he could.

He returned the call a few minutes later. Maria answered the phone, said, “Hold on,” and went back to whoever was in the shop with her. John, who had remained close to Maria after their divorce, stayed on the line. He could hear her speaking with someone else in the room, although he could not make out the words. Then the tone changed, and she screamed.

The line went silent. John drove from his office across the inner suburbs to the bookshop. When he arrived, he found the front door locked, the back door locked, and the shop’s “open” sign still on display. He forced his way in through a window. Inside, he went through the front of the shop, through the lounge room, and turned on the lights in the bedroom.

Maria was on the bed, on her back, her hands tied across her stomach with twine. The walls, the door, the carpet, and the wardrobe behind the bed were stained with her blood. She had been stabbed 68 times with three deep gashes to her skull. Her head and face had been beaten. After he found her, John noticed something that did not add up.

The phone she had called him from was off the hook on the floor. The front door, which had been locked when he had tried it, was now unlocked. He called the police. Detectives later concluded that the killer had still been inside the building when John climbed through the window. Victoria Police arrived within the hour, sealed the shop, and canvassed High Street and the parish at St. Mary’s.

More than 1,400 leads were generated, and the state government offered a $50,000 reward. The case landed on the desk of a young detective named Ron Iles, 25 years old, on his first homicide. While the scene was being processed, the parish priest tried to push his way in, insisting he needed to administer last rites. Former detective Cliff Hall later testified he had to hold the man back and that he was eventually taken away in a police car.

The kitchen had been used. Two coffee mugs sat on the bench. A cake Maria had bought that morning had been set out, ready to be served. The weapon was a knife from her own kitchen. The twine on her hands had been tied while she was still alive. There were no defensive wounds on her arms. She had been attacked from behind, possibly while trying to reach the bedroom, the one room in the house with a lock on the door.

Two witnesses saw a man running from the front of the bookshop, crossing High Street on foot and heading west along Hutton Street. A woman named Janette Hodson, driving past, had to brake hard to avoid hitting him. Peter Wilson, walking on the same street, saw him with blood down his shirt to his waist. The running man has never been identified.

Earlier that morning, a third witness named Jan Sharp had seen a man in priest robes in the bookshop doorway at 11:00 before the murder. Meanwhile, Maria’s two sons were being collected from school. Iles built a list of six main suspects, none of whom could be eliminated and none of whom could be charged.

His theory was that the attack had not been planned. The argument in the bookshop had escalated, and the knife had been grabbed off the counter. He transferred out eventually, but came back to the case repeatedly across the rest of his career. Iles closed more than 300 homicides over the next four decades and was eventually nicknamed Australia’s greatest detective.

The Maria James case sat in his file unsolved the entire time. The answer, he says, was always in it. In the days before her death, Adam had told his mother something that changed the way she looked at her parish. The local priest had been sexually abusing him. He was a trusted figure at St. Mary’s, the Catholic church a short walk from the bookshop.

The James family had welcomed him into their home. He had babysat the boys. The collar had been the family’s reason to trust him with their son. She had raised her children in the church and arranged her life around the parish calendar. The man Adam was accusing was not a stranger and not a distant authority figure.

He was inside her own parish, inside her own house, inside the closed circle of people she had trusted with her children. She did not go to the police. In Australia in 1980, parents who took allegations against priests to the police often found that the institution closed ranks around the accused. What Maria signaled to friends she planned to do was confront the priest directly.

She would tell him what Adam had said and demand that he answer for it. The confrontation was reportedly arranged for the day she died. St. Mary’s Presbytery sat on Rossmoyne Street, about 170 meters from the back of the bookshop. On a date he could no longer fix to a calendar, an electrician named Alan Herko was working on the front verandah of the presbytery when a short, stocky man walked across the grass toward him.

The man was dressed in black with a religious collar. One sleeve was pushed up his forearm. There was blood on his hands, and blood on his neck and near his ear. The electrician asked the priest if he was all right. The priest said he had cut himself either on the roses in the garden or on a fence. He could not seem to decide which.

Herko went to his truck for a first-aid kit. But when he turned back, the priest was gone. From inside the presbytery, he could now hear a heated argument in Italian, with a woman shrieking the loudest. He thought it a strange reaction to a man who had supposedly scratched himself on a rose. When he drove back to his workplace in Northcote, a colleague told him there had been a murder on High Street that day.

Herko put the two events together in his own mind and waited. He read in the newspaper that police had a suspect in a priest. Then he read that the priest had been cleared by forensic evidence. He assumed the police knew something he did not. The man on the verandah stayed in his memory for 33 years. In 2013, when he saw the priest’s photograph on television again as a suspect, Herko finally went to police.

The priest’s name was Father Anthony Bonjouro. He had been re-interviewed by detectives in 1998. A second priest at the same parish, Father Thomas O’Keefe, was also accused by Adam of abuse in the weeks before the murder. O’Keefe had a documented history of violent and abusive behavior. He died in 1984. Police never investigated him as a suspect in Maria’s murder while he was alive.

It was Bonjouro who broke the news of his mother’s death to Mark at school that afternoon. The 13-year-old was pulled from class. The man he later came to suspect of killing his mother told him she was dead and dragged him to the principal’s office without pausing to let him absorb what he had been told. The other man who came to dominate the case file was not a priest.

Peter Koïo lived in the area and worked night shifts. He hated women. In 1987, seven years after Maria’s murder, Koïo stabbed his ex-partner, Vicky Cleary, to death outside the kindergarten in Coburg where she worked as a teacher. Vicky Cleary was 25 years old. The attack happened in broad daylight in the street outside the building where she worked, in front of parents and children.

Before Koïo attacked her, witnesses heard him say something that sat in the Maria James file for decades. He told Cleary he would do to her what he had done to the woman in the bookshop. The Cleary attack and the Maria James murder had a number of features in common: a woman, a stabbing, a man she had been close to in a place connected to her daily routine.

The geography matched, too. Coburg is the next suburb north of Thornbury, a short drive from the bookshop. Koïo’s alibi for June 17th, 1980, was his then-girlfriend, Judy McNulty, who reportedly told investigators he had been with her. Her own sisters later rang Crime Stoppers and named Koïo as Maria’s killer.

Detectives did not pursue the lead with any urgency. The alibi sat in the file as if it still meant something, even after the woman who had given it had been contradicted by the people who knew her best. Koïo was convicted of Vicky Cleary’s murder and sent to prison. He died there in 2015.

Modern DNA testing did not exist when Maria was killed. The forensic team at the scene collected what they could: Maria’s clothing, two bloodstained pillowcases, the blood-soaked continental quilt from the bed, and the twine from her hands. The exhibits were logged and sent to police storage. In the decades that followed, items began to vanish from police storage. Maria’s clothing was gone.

So were the pillowcases and the continental quilt from the bed. Nobody could explain when those items had been moved or who had last handled them. The materials that a future forensic laboratory could have read for the killer’s profile were lost inside the system that had been built to preserve them.

In 2003, investigators located what they believed was a pillowcase from the Maria James crime scene. The lab pulled a male DNA profile from it, and that profile was used to rule out suspects. Bonjouro was tested against it and did not match. Other persons of interest were run against it as well, and all of them came back clear. The investigation moved on under the assumption that the killer’s DNA was on file and the men in the file were not him.

In 2017, Victoria Police disclosed that the pillowcase had been from a different homicide. It had been misfiled into the Maria James evidence collection at some point during storage and used for 14 years as a comparator that had no connection to the case it was supposed to be solving. The counsel assisting the coroner later described what was lost as 14 years of potential progress.

Father Bonjouro had died in 2002. For the last 15 years of his life, Victoria Police had been treating him as a man cleared by DNA evidence that it turned out had nothing to do with the case. In 2021, the blood-soaked quilt from the bedroom was rediscovered in police storage. It had been there the whole time, mislaid rather than lost, sitting in a box that nobody had thought to open.

Forensic scientists pulled hairs from its surface and ran them through modern DNA testing. The results were mixed and partial. One sample produced a profile that could have come from Peter Koïo, but the statistical match was weak. About one in every two people would have produced the same result.

It was not enough on its own to identify a suspect, but it was enough to keep the case alive. The twine that had bound Maria’s hands remained in storage untested. Forensic scientists at Victoria Police could one day run mitochondrial DNA testing on the quilt hairs and compare it against a sample taken from Bonjouro’s sister in 2014.

The comparison has not yet been done. The first inquest into Maria’s death was held in 1982, two years after the murder. It had no new evidence to work with beyond what the original investigation had collected, and it returned an open finding. For more than 30 years, the case sat. The investigation continued in fits and starts as new detectives took it on and put it down.

The file grew thicker, but the conclusion did not change. Then, in 2013, Adam James, now in his 40s, told his older brother, Mark, something he had carried alone since childhood: the priest had abused him. Mark later said he had asked his brother point-blank in the car whether Bonjouro had ever touched him inappropriately, and that when Adam said yes, he sat for a moment in silence and then started to cry.

The information made its way to an ABC journalist named Rachel Brown, who worked the case for two years and turned the result into a true-crime podcast called Trace. Trace aired in 2017. It triggered a public re-examination of the case and forced the failures inside it into daylight. The second inquest opened in September 2021, presided over by Deputy State Coroner Caitlin English.

It ran for 17 days across multiple hearing blocks. 37 witnesses gave evidence over 3,600 pages of police material, and all six of the original suspects identified in 1980 were re-examined. Ron Iles, by then a former detective, told the court that of the six men on the original suspect list, Father Anthony Bonjouro was the one with the motive, the means, and the opportunity.

Adam James told the inquest he believed the priest had killed his mother to stop her going public. Mark testified that the way Bonjouro had given him the news at 13 was brutal. He had spent the four decades since certain it was him. The inquest also heard about the failure that had cost the investigation 14 years.

An expert exhibit tracker told the coroner that the loss of crucial exhibits from the original crime scene still kept him awake at night. Counsel assisting the coroner, Sharon Lacy, walked the court through the pillowcase error and what it had cost the file. Vicky Cleary’s brother gave evidence on behalf of his family. Police witnesses were asked to account for what had happened to the missing exhibits across four decades of storage.

In March 2022, Coroner English delivered her finding. It was open. She named two significant persons of interest: Father Anthony Bonjouro and Peter Koïo. Her findings noted that Victoria Police had eliminated Koïo as a suspect without proper grounds. The coroner recommended further DNA testing and a review of police evidence management.

42 years had passed since the morning Maria was killed in the back of her bookshop. In June 2024, ahead of the 44th anniversary of the murder, Victoria Police announced that the reward for information leading to a conviction had been raised from $50,000 to $1 million. The case sits with the Victoria Police Cold Case Hub.

Homicide Squad detectives announcing the new reward said they remained as determined as ever to solve the case. They re-released images of the man who had been seen running from the bookshop in 1980 in the hope that someone, somewhere, could finally put a name to his face. Mark and Adam James are in their 50s and late 40s now.

Adam has lived with the abuse, the disclosure to his mother, and the murder that followed it for more than four decades. The James brothers had built a close bond with Ron Iles after their mother’s death and stayed in contact with him long after the original investigation went cold. “Maria is still much missed,” Victoria Police said in their 2024 statement, “particularly by her children, who remain hopeful of answers.”

Whether the men who abused his brother had anything to do with the murder, Mark told reporters after the inquest, the family was hoping the coroner could dig deep enough to find out what happened and why. Mark has called publicly for the priest’s body to be exhumed for further DNA testing and has asked Victoria Police and the Catholic Church to cooperate.

Neither has acted on the request. No one has ever been charged. The two men who might have been are buried. A secondhand bookshop on High Street in Thornbury. Two coffee mugs on the kitchen bench. A slice of cake on a plate beside them. A 38-year-old single mother stabbed 68 times in the bedroom behind the shop while her ex-husband listened on the phone.