Melbourne 1980 Cold Case – Arrest Shocks Community 

Four decades after the brutal murder of Maria James inside her Thornbury bookshop, police have offered a million dollar reward to help bring her killer to justice. Maria James was brutally murdered in 1980. She was discovered in the bedroom by her ex-husband, stabbed 68 times with her hands bound. >> On a winter morning in 1980, a woman was murdered in the room behind her own bookshop in the middle of the day on a street full of people.

 44 years later, Victoria police are offering $1 million for information that finally explains what happened to her. Her name was Maria James. She was stabbed 68 times, and by the time anyone found her, the front door was locked, the back door was locked, and the killer, according to the detectives who worked the case, was still somewhere inside the building.

Nobody has ever explained how he got out. To understand how a killer could vanish from a sealed house on a busy street in broad daylight, you have to start with the woman he left behind in it. Maria James was 38, the daughter of Italian immigrants. She’d been divorced for several years and was raising two sons alone above a secondhand bookshop on High Street in the workingclass Melbourne suburb of Thornbury.

 She ran the shop out of the front rooms and lived with her boys in the rooms behind it, separated from the browsing customers by nothing more than a doorway that stayed open all day. It was that kind of shop on that kind of street. Nobody thought twice about an unlocked door on a Tuesday. Her older son, Mark, was 13.

 Her younger son, Adam, was 11 and lived with cerebral palsy and Tourette’s syndrome. Friends described Maria as devoted to them both. the kind of mother who built her days entirely around getting her boys through theirs. On the morning of June 17th, that’s exactly what she was doing. She cooked scrambled eggs. She packed lunches. And at some point over breakfast, without any obvious reason to say it, she told Mark that if anything ever happened to her, she needed him to promise he’d look after his brother.

 He said yes, the way a 13-year-old agrees to something he doesn’t expect to matter. Then he left for a school excursion. Maria walked Adam to the bus stop for his special school and watched him go. On her way back, she stopped and bought a cake, which wasn’t something she did on an ordinary Tuesday. Whatever she had planned for that day, it wasn’t just another day of selling secondhand books.

At around 11:55 that morning, she called her ex-husband, John, at his office in Fitzroy, where he worked as a state cler. He wasn’t at his desk. She left a message with his secretary. Someone was in the shop with her and could he call back? Nothing in it sounded urgent. Jon returned the call a few minutes later.

Maria picked up, told him to hold on, and set the phone down to deal with whoever was in the room with her. He stayed on the line and could hear her talking to someone. The words weren’t clear, but the tone was ordinary enough that he didn’t think much of it. Then the tone changed. Maria screamed and the line went dead.

 John drove from his office across the inner suburbs to the bookshop. When he arrived, the front door was locked, so was the back. The shop’s open sign was still hanging in the window. He forced his way in through a window, moved through the front room, through the lounge, and switched on the light in the bedroom at the back of the house. Maria was on the bed.

 Her hands had been bound across her stomach with twine. She had been stabbed 68 times. Three of the wounds deep gashes to her skull and beaten around the head and face. The walls, the carpet, the wardrobe behind the bed. All of it was soaked in blood. Then Jon noticed two things that didn’t make sense. The phone he’d just been speaking to her on was lying off the hook on the floor, and the front door, the one he’d found locked minutes earlier, was now unlocked.

Detectives would later work out what that meant. Whoever had done this had still been inside the house when Jon climbed through that window. Sometime in the few minutes he spent searching room to room, the killer had let himself out the front door and walked away into a Tuesday afternoon on a street full of people.

 Nobody has ever worked out exactly how. Jon’s call to emergency services survives in the case file. “Please, quick, there’s been a murder. I got a distress call from her, he told the operator before his voice gave way entirely. Police arrived within the hour and sealed the property. Over the following weeks, they canvased High Street and the parish around St.

 Mary’s, generating more than 1,400 leads and a $50,000 reward, a significant sum in 1980. The case landed on the desk of a 25-year-old detective working his first homicide, Rondles. He would go on to close more than 300 homicides over the next four decades and be called, by the end of his career, Australia’s greatest detective.

 Maria James would remain the one that got away. While uniformed officers worked the street outside, the scene inside the shop was already offering its own clues for anyone who could read them. Two coffee mugs sat on the kitchen bench. The cake Maria had bought that morning was out on a plate, ready to serve for a guest she’d apparently been expecting.

 The knife used to kill her had come from her own kitchen drawer. The twine binding her hands had been tied while she was still alive, and there were no defensive wounds on her arms, which told investigators she’d been attacked from behind, possibly while trying to reach the one room in the house with a lock on its door.

 Whoever did this, she knew them well enough to make coffee, well enough to buy a cake. Not well enough, it turned out, to see what was coming. Outside on the street, two people caught a glimpse of him leaving. Janette Savage was driving along Hutton Street that afternoon when a man ran directly into the road in front of her car, forcing her to break hard to avoid hitting him.

A second witness walking the same street got close enough to see blood soak down the front of his shirt. Neither of them could identify him. For the next four decades, police would simply call him High Street Man. He has never been found. There was a third sighting that morning, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone for years.

 A woman named Jan Sharp had noticed a man in a priest’s collar standing in the bookshop doorway an hour before the murder. At the time, nobody thought a priest in a doorway was worth remembering. Investigators didn’t know that yet, either. Working with what they had, Idles built a list of six main suspects.

 None of them could be eliminated, and none of them could be charged. His working theory was that the attack hadn’t been planned, that an argument in the shop had escalated, and the knife had been grabbed off the counter in the heat of it. He transferred off the case eventually, the way homicide detectives do, but kept coming back to it for the rest of his career.

 Of everything he worked in 40 years on the job, this was the one file that never closed. He always maintained the answer had been there from the start, if anyone had known where to look. He wasn’t wrong. In the days before Maria was killed, Adam had told his mother something that changed everything she thought she knew about the people she trusted most.

 The local priest had been sexually abusing him. Father Anthony Bonjouro wasn’t a stranger. He was a fixture at St. Mary’s, the parish a few minutes walk from the bookshop, and trusted enough in the James household, that he’d babysat the boys. Maria had built her family’s life around that church and that community.

 The man Adam was accusing was inside all of it. Inside the parish, inside her home, inside the small circle of people she’d let close to her children. She didn’t go to the police. In 1980, a parent who reported a priest could expect the institution to close ranks around him, and Maria seems to have understood that. Instead, according to what she told friends, she planned to confront Bonjouro directly, to tell him what Adam had said and demand he answer for it.

 That confrontation, by her own plan, was set for the day she died. St. Mary’s Presbytery stood on Ross Moine Street, less than 200 m from the back of the bookshop. An electrician named Alan Hurko was working on its front ver that day when he saw a short stocky man in a black shirt and clerical collar walking toward him across the lawn, one sleeve pushed up, blood on his hands and near his neck and ear.

 Herko asked if he was all right. The man said he’d cut himself on the roses or maybe a fence. He didn’t seem sure which. Herko went to his truck for a first aid kit. When he came back, the man was gone. From inside the presbyteratory, he could now hear a heated argument in Italian, a woman’s voice shrieking louder than the rest.

 He thought it a strange reaction to a man who’d supposedly scratched himself in the garden. It was only later that afternoon, back at his own workplace, that a colleague mentioned there’d been a murder on High Street. Herko put the two things together in his head and waited. He read that police had a priest as a suspect.

 Then he read that the priest had been cleared by forensic evidence and assumed the police knew something he didn’t. The image of that man on the ver stayed with him for 33 years. In 2013, he saw the same face on television again, named as a suspect, and finally went to police. The priest’s name was Father Anthony Bonjouro. Detectives reintered him in 1998.

 And he wasn’t the only one Adam had named. In the weeks before the murder, Adam had also accused a second priest at the same parish, Father Thomas O’Keefe, a man with a documented history of violence toward children. O’Keefe died in 1984 and for reasons never made public, police never investigated him over Maria’s murder while he was alive.

Whatever he knew, if he knew anything, went into the ground with him. It was Bonjouro, the man Mark would come to believe had killed his mother, who broke the news of her death to him at school that afternoon, pulling him from class, walking him straight to the principal’s office with no pause given for a 13-year-old to absorb what he’d just been told.

 Bonjouro and O’Keefe were two of Idol’s six suspects. A third had nothing to do with the church at all. Maria, it turned out, had been having an affair with a man named Pekco Machki. Detectives investigated him alongside the others and 40 years later at the reopened inquest. He was the only one of the six still alive to be called. Excused from testifying due to his age and health.

 Whatever he knew about that Tuesday has, like so much else in this case, never been tested in public. One more of the six was a stranger to the family entirely and the most violent man on the list. Peter Kio lived locally and worked night shifts and by every account of the people who knew him carried a deep hatred of women.

 His connection to the case didn’t start with a dramatic confession. It started in 1982 when a woman named Dorothy Haynes called police and told them she believed her own sister’s boyfriend had killed Maria James. The sister was Judy McNelte, the same woman who had told police Kio was with her on the day of the murder, giving him his alibi.

 Haynes described Kio to investigators as a former butcher who liked knives and women in the same breath. Alleged he’d once attacked her sister with a knife and said something that should have stopped the investigation cold. That McNelte herself, the woman providing his alibi, privately believed he’d done it. The alibi stood anyway.

 Detectives did not pursue Kio with any urgency. And for decades, Dorothy Haynes’s call sat in a file unactioned. 7 years later, Kio gave police a reason to look again. In 1987, he stabbed his ex-artner Vicky Clearary to death outside the Coberg Kindergarten, where she worked in daylight in front of parents and children arriving for pickup.

 She was 25, but the courts didn’t convict him of murder. His defense argued provocation that clearly leaving him justified what he did, and a jury agreed. He was found guilty of manslaughter instead and served less than four years. He died in 2001. Vicky Clearary’s brother, Phil Clary, spent much of the rest of his life fighting that outcome.

 He wrote a book about his sister’s case and campaigned for years against the legal defense that let her killer serve under half a decade for stabbing her to death. At the reopened Maria James inquest, he told the court something he’d carried for two decades. that in the years before her murder, Vicki had confided in a later partner that Kio once told her at home in the middle of winter, “I’ll do the same to you that I did to the bookshop woman.

” It’s the kind of line that sounds like a confession from the outside. Ronles of all people wasn’t sure it was one. Testifying at the 2021 inquest, the same detective who considered Bonjouro the strongest suspect in Maria’s file, was surprisingly measured about Kio. He’d heard threats like it before in other murder investigations from men who never turned out to be involved.

 He called it male bravado. It was a strange moment in a strange case. The investigation’s most trusted voice, more certain about the suspect he couldn’t prove than the one everyone assumed was obvious. Two men, two very different kinds of suspicion, a priest with a motive everyone could see, and a violent stranger with a threat that might have meant everything or nothing.

 But while detectives argued over which of them deserved more attention, a much quieter failure was already underway, one that would end up costing the investigation more than either suspect ever did. Modern DNA testing didn’t exist in 1980. The forensic team collected what they could. Maria’s clothing, two bloodstained pillowcases, the blood soaked quilt from her bed, and the twine from her hands.

All of it went into police storage. Over the years that followed, most of it simply vanished, and nobody could explain when or by whom. In 2003, a blood stained pillowcase turned up among the case exhibits, one investigators believed had come from Maria’s bed. A lab pulled a male DNA profile from it. And for more than a decade afterward, that profile became the yard stick the investigation measured suspects against.

Using a sample from his sister taken in 2014, police compared it to Father Bonjouro. He didn’t match. Other suspects were tested against it, too. All of them came back clear. In 2017, Victoria Police admitted the truth. That pillow case had never belonged to Maria James’ case at all. It had been misfiled from a different homicide entirely, and for 14 years, investigators had been comparing suspects to a dead end.

Bonjouro had died in 2002, having spent the last years of his life cleared by evidence that had nothing to do with the crime he was suspected of. Council assisting the coroner would later sum up what those 14 years had cost the investigation in four words, 14 years of potential progress. Then in 2021, the missing quilt turned up.

 It had been in police storage the entire time, sitting in a box nobody had thought to open. Forensic scientists pulled hairs from its surface and ran them against modern DNA testing. The results were partial and far from conclusive. One profile was consistent with Peter Kio, but the statistical strength of the match was weak enough that roughly one in every two people would have produced the same result.

 It wasn’t enough to name a killer. It was enough to keep the case alive. The twine that bound Maria’s hands is still in storage and has still never been tested. A more precise comparison, the quilt’s hairs against Bonjouro’s sister’s DNA using mitochondrial analysis has, as of now, still never been carried out either. Maria’s case had already been to a coroner once before any of this came out.

 The first inquest, held in 1982, had nothing new to work with beyond what the original investigation had already collected. It returned an open finding, and the file went quiet for the next three decades, reopened occasionally by new detectives, closed again just as often, never solved. What broke that 30-year silence was Adam.

 In 2013, by then in his 40s, he finally told his older brother what he’d carried alone since childhood, that the priest had abused him. Mark asked him directly in a car whether it was true. Adam said yes. Mark sat in silence for a moment and then he cried. That conversation reached an ABC journalist named Rachel Brown who spent two years investigating the case and turned what she found into a podcast called Trace.

 It aired in 2017 and it did what 40 years of official investigation hadn’t. It forced the case’s failures into daylight and made a new inquest impossible to avoid. The second inquest opened in September 2021 under Deputy State Coroner Caitlyn English. It ran for 17 days, heard from 37 witnesses, and worked through more than 3,600 pages of police material.

 All six of the original 1980 suspects were re-examined, including the two who had died believing themselves cleared, and the one still alive to answer for himself if he’d been well enough to. Ron Idles, by then retired, told the court that of everyone on that original list, Father Bonjouro was the one with the motive, the means, and the opportunity.

Adam testified that he believed the priests had killed his mother to stop her going public. Mark described the way Bonjouro delivered the news of her death at his school as brutal, a word he’d been ready to use for four decades. An exhibit tracking expert told the coroner the loss of the case’s crucial physical evidence still kept him awake at night.

And Sharon Lacy, council assisting the coroner, walked the court through exactly how a stranger’s pillowcase had cost the investigation 14 years. It never got back. In March 2022, Coroner English delivered her finding. Like the one before it, it was open. She named two men as significant persons of interest.

 Father Anthony Bonjouro and Peter Kio and found that Victoria Police had eliminated Kio from the investigation without proper grounds. She recommended further DNA testing and a full review of how the force manages its evidence. 42 years after Maria James was murdered, nobody had still been charged with anything. In June 2024, ahead of the 44th anniversary of her death, Victoria Police raised the reward for information from $50,000 to $1 million.

 They re-released the composite image of the man once dubbed High Street Man, the same face two witnesses had described running from the bookshop 44 years earlier in the hope that someone somewhere could finally put a name to it. Mark and Adam James are in their 50s and late 40s now. They’ve stayed close to Ron Idols in all the years since, the young detective who took their mother’s case as his first and never fully let it go.

 Mark has publicly called for Bonjouro’s body to be exumed for further DNA testing and asked both Victoria Police and the Catholic Church to cooperate. Neither has acted on the request. Maria is still much missed, Victoria Police said in their 2024 statement, particularly by her children who remain hopeful of answers. No one has ever been charged.

 The two men most suspected of killing her are both dead and buried. And whatever either of them knew is buried with them. What’s left is a secondhand bookshop on High Street in Thornbury, two coffee mugs on a kitchen bench, a cake sliced and waiting on a plate, and a 38-year-old single mother stabbed 68 times in the room behind her own shop while her ex-husband listened helpless on the other end of a phone line.

 If you know something, anything about the man who ran from that bookshop in 1980, Victoria Police still wants to hear from you. And if this case stayed with you, let us know down in the comments what you think