Speaker 1: She was shot first in the body it would appear
Speaker 1: with a heavy caliber handgunner three point fifty seven caliber handgun,
Speaker 1: and then in the head. Now, this to almost anybody
Speaker 1: would signify a hit. She remembers very clearly what Clifford
Speaker 1: Jones said. He looked sort of dead, panned, but gloating,
Speaker 1: let's say. And he said, the other Missus Jones is
Speaker 1: no longer with us. I'm Andrew Ruhle. This is life
Speaker 1: in crimes. Sometimes we know stories that we can't tell.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we don't know them at all. But this is
Speaker 1: one of those where we've found out more information and
Speaker 1: that enables us to tell the full story that could
Speaker 1: not previously be told. It's a terrible story in many ways.
Speaker 1: It's the murder of a young mother in a Melbourne
Speaker 1: house in nineteen eighty one. Her name was Anchie Jones.
Speaker 1: Anchie is a German first name. She was commonly called
Speaker 1: Angie as in Angela, but her German name was spelt
Speaker 1: slightly differently. She was born to German migrant parents. She
Speaker 1: grew up in Saint Alban's area, and she married young
Speaker 1: to a nice German seaman who'd come to Melbourne on
Speaker 1: a ship. His name was Wolf Alt, and she married
Speaker 1: Wolf and happy for a while. Wolf went off working
Speaker 1: on ships, and that meant he'd be away from home
Speaker 1: for a month at a time. And Angie meanwhile got
Speaker 1: a new job. She switched jobs, and she got a
Speaker 1: job at ZF Transmissions. They were a gearbox and transmission
Speaker 1: factory out in the western suburbs at past Footscray. She
Speaker 1: got a job there, I think in the office. It
Speaker 1: was there that young, anchie young wife of the seaman
Speaker 1: Wolf Alt, met the man who would ruin her life
Speaker 1: and eventually ended. His name was Clifford Jones. For those
Speaker 1: listeners who have been around a while and they think
Speaker 1: some of this is familiar, they're right. We did an
Speaker 1: episode some time ago called The Suspect, and the Suspect
Speaker 1: was the name we used for Clifford Jones. And because
Speaker 1: Clifford Jones died relatively recently, just last September, we can
Speaker 1: now tell the true story of what happened, a story
Speaker 1: that I have known for some years, but which we
Speaker 1: could not publish in its entirety before this for various reasons,
Speaker 1: various legal reasons. Clifford Jones had also come This is
Speaker 1: in many ways a migrant story a story of modern Australia.
Speaker 1: Clifford Jones had migrated from the UK. I think he
Speaker 1: was born in Bristol. He was sort of of Welsh extraction.
Speaker 1: He had worked as a mechanic in the military in Britain.
Speaker 1: As far as I can tell, he often boasted that
Speaker 1: he had worked on aircraft I think that were used
Speaker 1: by the Sas over there. That may or may not
Speaker 1: have been true, but he certainly was a skilled mechanic.
Speaker 1: And he came to Australia in nineteen sixty five with
Speaker 1: his English wife Rita, and two children who grew up here.
Speaker 1: And then they had a third child. And so by
Speaker 1: the time Clifford Jones met Anchie at zedf automatics or
Speaker 1: ZEDF transmissions, she was in her twenties and he was
Speaker 1: in his late thirties, and his three children were almost
Speaker 1: grown up. He has an affair with Anchie, He leaves
Speaker 1: his wife, he takes up with Anchie, He marries Anngie
Speaker 1: and they have a little board, a little boy that
Speaker 1: she later called Christopher, although Clifford Jones, being the strange
Speaker 1: man that he was, he would call that child Aaron
Speaker 1: for his own reasons. Antie soon worked out that she'd
Speaker 1: made the wrong move. She'd left a nice, kind German
Speaker 1: seaman who admittedly wasn't home all that often, to go
Speaker 1: and live full time with a very nasty older man
Speaker 1: who treated her very badly, her former husband, Wolf Art
Speaker 1: I tracked down in the year twenty eighteen. By this
Speaker 1: stage Wolf had gone right through his career to become
Speaker 1: a sea captain. He was living in Hamburg in Germany,
Speaker 1: and I found him there on a telephone and took
Speaker 1: to him for a long time, and among other things,
Speaker 1: he told me that he stayed friendly with Anchie's parents,
Speaker 1: Eric and Tilley because they liked him like them, and
Speaker 1: when he used to come into port in Melbourne on
Speaker 1: his ship, I think he used to work around the
Speaker 1: Pacific at that stage, they would tell him what was
Speaker 1: going on with Anchie. And at one point they said
Speaker 1: they were very worried and upset, and they said, can
Speaker 1: you please drive with us over to some other suburb.
Speaker 1: I think Clayton was to pick Angie up because Clifford
Speaker 1: Jones has bashed her and she's telephoned us. So Wolf
Speaker 1: drove them over and he said it was awful when
Speaker 1: they got there, and she he said was green and blue.
Speaker 1: I think he meant black and blue, but green and
Speaker 1: blue's okay. With bruises on a face and on a body,
Speaker 1: he said she'd been belted unmercifully, and she told him
Speaker 1: that Clifford Jones had also thrown knives at her, so
Speaker 1: he's a very bad man, very cruel man, and wolf
Speaker 1: and Ankie's parents took her back to their house s
Speaker 1: at Alban's, and she subsequently decided she would leave Clifford Jones,
Speaker 1: who she had married, and she had the child and
Speaker 1: so on. Now her parents opted to sell out and
Speaker 1: go to Queensland, possibly because of all this drama, and
Speaker 1: she followed and she went up there with the little boy, Christopher,
Speaker 1: and she lived with her parents, I think in perhaps
Speaker 1: a granny flat or similar at the back of their
Speaker 1: house out of Brisbin somewhere, and life went on except
Speaker 1: for this, and she wanted a property settlement from Clifford
Speaker 1: from Clifford Jones, and Clifford Jones was much opposed to
Speaker 1: selling the house that they'd owned together in order to
Speaker 1: pay her out her half, and in fact he was
Speaker 1: very vehement about this. He was most upset at the
Speaker 1: idea of having to pay her any money, which is
Speaker 1: one of those real life situations that happens when people
Speaker 1: get divorced. There is often a lot of anger about
Speaker 1: financial matters because in the end, the two people trying
Speaker 1: to get blood out of a stone and there's not
Speaker 1: enough blood in the stone, and mont has split everything up.
Speaker 1: No one's got enough money, so it's tough stuff. And
Speaker 1: she stuck to her guns. He briefed a lawyer and
Speaker 1: she said, I want what's mine now. Had she stayed
Speaker 1: in Queensland, I don't know what would have happened, but
Speaker 1: possibly she may not have been killed. But as luck
Speaker 1: would have it, fate had it that she'd been involved
Speaker 1: in a very minor traffic accident in Victoria, or a
Speaker 1: friend of hers had and she was some sort of
Speaker 1: witness and she had to come back to Victoria to
Speaker 1: give evidence in a fairly minor traffic matter in court.
Speaker 1: So she came down to Victoria from Queensland. She left
Speaker 1: a little boy, Christopher, with her parents and she came
Speaker 1: down and stayed with her brother, Eric Eric Jr. At
Speaker 1: his house in Saint Albans. And there it is its
Speaker 1: old homework. She's staying with a brother and his daughter,
Speaker 1: and she's niece who's a school age teenager. She's down
Speaker 1: for two weeks, and while she's down, she pushes through
Speaker 1: her lawyer her claim for money from Clifford Jones. And
Speaker 1: this enrages Clifford Jones, and Clifford Jones clearly saw an
Speaker 1: opportunity to do something about it. Now we know that
Speaker 1: he was planning bad things, because it transpires that before
Speaker 1: all this he had been in a meeting with a
Speaker 1: bank manager in St Albans or similar and the bank manager,
Speaker 1: even a year later, remembered clearly the tenor of that meeting,
Speaker 1: and he must have mentioned to Clifford Jones that look, really,
Speaker 1: in the real world, when you get divorced, if you
Speaker 1: own a house together, you really have to pay out
Speaker 1: the other party, either by selling the house or by
Speaker 1: coming up with the required amount of money. And this
Speaker 1: enraged Clifford Jones so much that he turned very high
Speaker 1: style towards the bank major and said, she won't dare
Speaker 1: take it as she does, I'll get her. And the
Speaker 1: bank manager couldn't help noticing how hostile that statement was,
Speaker 1: and he took it to mean, as he later told
Speaker 1: police that this man Clifford Jones was so angry and
Speaker 1: so nasty that effectively he was making a very serious threat.
Speaker 1: And he was right, because what happened was this, during
Speaker 1: that fortnight that Angie's in Melbourne, she's staying with her brother,
Speaker 1: As we said, she's sleeping on a couch in the
Speaker 1: back room at her brother's humble house in Theodore Street
Speaker 1: in Saint Orban's I think a Tuesday morning. It was
Speaker 1: September the fifteenth, it's an anniversary this month. Angie's brother
Speaker 1: Eric goes to work early. Angie's niece, whose name I
Speaker 1: know but no need to use it, she to school
Speaker 1: at you know, eight thirty whatever. And at some point
Speaker 1: after that, Angie is either asleep or lying on the
Speaker 1: couch where she's been sleeping, and someone, a gunman, come
Speaker 1: through the back door. He might have had to force
Speaker 1: the door, which probably wasn't hard to do, and that
Speaker 1: probably woke Angie. She was shot first in the body,
Speaker 1: it would appear, with a heavy caliber handgunner three point
Speaker 1: fifty seven caliber handgun, and then in the head. So
Speaker 1: she took two bullets from a heavy caliber handgun. The
Speaker 1: second one was to the head and at very close range.
Speaker 1: Now this to almost anybody would signify a hit. There
Speaker 1: was nothing stolen, There was nothing broken apart from forcing
Speaker 1: the back door. There was no sign of theft of
Speaker 1: any sort. Only the death of this woman. A very
Speaker 1: clinical execution, is the way you'd put it. With the
Speaker 1: sort of weapon that the average burglar is not carrying,
Speaker 1: that is a heavy caliber handgun. No sign of panic.
Speaker 1: It just had all the hallmarks of a cold blooded execution,
Speaker 1: which is the conclusion that the homicide detectives drew when
Speaker 1: they got there. There these two detectives who got there.
Speaker 1: One was a sergeant called mcfriend who died last year
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. He's no longer with us. The other
Speaker 1: one was a very young detective called cel Purna. And
Speaker 1: cel Perna would later become quite well known in Victoria,
Speaker 1: and many many years later he left the police force
Speaker 1: and he became an integrity commissioner of something like that
Speaker 1: with the racing authorities, and to this day he still
Speaker 1: has a senior integrity role in the racing industry. And
Speaker 1: sell Perna is much liked and much respect by everybody
Speaker 1: who knows him, or as far as I know he is,
Speaker 1: And he in nineteen eighty one was a brand new
Speaker 1: homicide detective, and this was his first ever case, and
Speaker 1: when he and his experienced sergeant got there, they drew
Speaker 1: the conclusion this was a murder until proven otherwise. And
Speaker 1: their first thought, of course, is well, someone close to home. Now.
Speaker 1: They don't see the body until the alarm is raised
Speaker 1: in the afternoon by the niece getting home from school.
Speaker 1: So the girls come home from school at you know,
Speaker 1: say three point forty five or thereabouts, sometime before four
Speaker 1: o'clock and raises the alarm, rings, the police brings the ambulance.
Speaker 1: Whatever the police get out there does make the evening news.
Speaker 1: It was a late breaking story for the evening news
Speaker 1: at six o'clock. Meanwhile, the two policemen, the two detectives,
Speaker 1: heads straight to Clifford Jones's garage, which was only one
Speaker 1: postcode away. It was in Maidstone, which is part of
Speaker 1: Foods Gray and s. A. Alburn's is only you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of neighboring postcard more or less. So it
Speaker 1: might have been a twelve minute drive or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: And so they get to this garage and so by
Speaker 1: this stage it's late afternoon, might have been between five
Speaker 1: and six or whatever. And they go to the garage
Speaker 1: and they say, are you Clifford Jones. Yes, and Clifford
Speaker 1: Jones face is elaborately neutral, And they told him the
Speaker 1: bad news, which is what homicide detectives like to do.
Speaker 1: They like to tell people the bad news and see
Speaker 1: what their reaction is and to judge whether it is
Speaker 1: a sincere, an authentic reaction, or a rehearsed and fabricated reaction.
Speaker 1: And their assessment of this man's reaction was that it
Speaker 1: was not sincere, and it was very fabricated. He threw
Speaker 1: himself down on a pile of tires that was there
Speaker 1: and buried his head in his hands, and wild and
Speaker 1: wept and said how sad it was, this inexplicable death
Speaker 1: of the woman that essentially he was fighting with over
Speaker 1: the price of half a house, and who had, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, made a fairly direct threat when he
Speaker 1: was talking to the bank manager about it. So the
Speaker 1: police formed a view that unless another suspect turned up,
Speaker 1: this man was the obvious suspect. They were so taken
Speaker 1: with him as a suspect that they thought, well, he
Speaker 1: might have done it. He doesn't work that far away,
Speaker 1: And so they drive from the garage to the crime scene.
Speaker 1: That's the orbits. And they go this way down Ballarat Road,
Speaker 1: and they go that way down another road, and they
Speaker 1: check the fastest ways and the backways and all the
Speaker 1: rest of it, and they're trying to work out if
Speaker 1: you could drive their and back in a certain time,
Speaker 1: could he have driven left, you know, nine am, and
Speaker 1: got back at nine point thirty two or something and
Speaker 1: done the murder. Their conclusion was that it was faintly
Speaker 1: possible but highly unlikely. They actually ruled Clifford Jones out
Speaker 1: as the shooter pretty well because they thought, a it
Speaker 1: was very hard to get there, do it and get
Speaker 1: back in the time available without being obviously driving at
Speaker 1: crazy speeds. And the other thing was there was something
Speaker 1: like eight witnesses who dropped into the garage or were
Speaker 1: at the garage or bought petrol at the garage who
Speaker 1: had seen Clifford Jones that morning at the garage, and
Speaker 1: there didn't seem to be a gap when you added
Speaker 1: all the witnesses statements together, they didn't seem to be
Speaker 1: the right gap for him to get away. So what
Speaker 1: they concluded was he didn't leave the garage. His alibi
Speaker 1: was solid and substantial. In fact, you know elaborately solid.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of witnesses, and that forced them
Speaker 1: to the conclusion that if Clifford Jones had something to
Speaker 1: do with it, that he paid someone else to do it,
Speaker 1: or he got someone else to do it. And they
Speaker 1: formed that view, and nothing that happened for the next
Speaker 1: forty years altered that view. The reality was that it
Speaker 1: was a busy week, as sometimes happens in policing. One
Speaker 1: of the Royal Show daredevil riders of that era a
Speaker 1: guy called Dale Buggans, who was very famous when I
Speaker 1: was young. He used to ride motorbix over the top
Speaker 1: of double decker buses and amazing stuff. He was a
Speaker 1: daredevil evil Canevil type figure, homegrown evil Caneval and Dale
Speaker 1: Buggins I think shot himself with a gun in an
Speaker 1: Essendon motel that same week or that same day, even
Speaker 1: something like that, and that threw the homicide squad into
Speaker 1: a bit of a state because they weren't sure whether
Speaker 1: he'd killed himself or whether it was murder, and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. There was a lot going on,
Speaker 1: and so the death of Angie Jones somehow fell a
Speaker 1: little bit between the cracks. One reason for that perhaps
Speaker 1: was that it wasn't taken that seriously. Further up the chain, now,
Speaker 1: these two homicide guys, they took it very seriously and
Speaker 1: they knew it was a murder. But when the media,
Speaker 1: who were more obsessed with the Dale Buggins, talked to
Speaker 1: the head of the CIB or the crime department, a
Speaker 1: man that we used to call Fat Harry, Phil Bennett.
Speaker 1: His name was Commander Phil Bennett, known universally as Fat
Speaker 1: Harry or just Fat. When they took to him, Fat
Speaker 1: Harry said something bizarre like, oh, well, we think it
Speaker 1: could be a burglary gone wrong. You know, he's a
Speaker 1: burglar there and he's disturbed this woman and killed it.
Speaker 1: Now that was a joke because nothing was taken, as
Speaker 1: we said, and she'd been killed very specifically, shot in
Speaker 1: the head with a heavy caliber pistol, which would to
Speaker 1: most people be the sign of a contract killing, or
Speaker 1: at least a very deliberate killing, nothing to do with burglary.
Speaker 1: I've tooked to sell Perner about this as recently as
Speaker 1: this week, and he said, look, Phil Bennett was a dial.
Speaker 1: You know, he was basically stupid. He was so stupid
Speaker 1: that his own men took the Mickey out of him
Speaker 1: by giving him a potted plant to keep in his office,
Speaker 1: and it was actually a marijuana plant, a cannabis plant,
Speaker 1: but he didn't know. He just thought it was a
Speaker 1: nice green plant. He was the butt of jokes because
Speaker 1: he was thick. Well, that might be so, but I
Speaker 1: wonder about it. I've always wondered whether Bennett was a
Speaker 1: little bit mixed up with some unsavory police in the
Speaker 1: Western suburbs who were running bits of scams and bits
Speaker 1: of wroughts and corrupt stuff over in the West. And
Speaker 1: that is conceivable, and it fits in with some other
Speaker 1: knowledge that we have of that era, which we weren't
Speaker 1: go into here, but you know, there were abortion rackets,
Speaker 1: and there were stolen car rackets, and there were all
Speaker 1: sorts of rackets, and there's a suggestion that some police
Speaker 1: were in on the joke with some things. And it's
Speaker 1: conceivable that someone somewhere had a bit of an inn
Speaker 1: with some crooks from over in that area. Because if
Speaker 1: this is a contract killing, it has to be carried
Speaker 1: out by someone who's capable of doing it and he's
Speaker 1: willing to do it, and that is going to be
Speaker 1: a real bona fide a crook, not just some burglar
Speaker 1: with a sawn off twenty two, and there weren't really
Speaker 1: that many of those sort of people available, available and
Speaker 1: willing to kill an innocent young woman, a young woman
Speaker 1: who's got a child, who's never done anything wrong. She's
Speaker 1: not a crim herself. There's not a lot of hit
Speaker 1: men around in nineteen eighty one who are up to
Speaker 1: do such a job and willing to do that particular job.
Speaker 1: It cuts down the numbers to a handful. Interesting in
Speaker 1: itself that Clifford Jones was able to reach out and
Speaker 1: find such a person. Now, the story we can now
Speaker 1: tell is the full and frank version of what actually
Speaker 1: went on. Clifford Jones was a serial husband. He'd moved
Speaker 1: on from his original wife to Anchie, if not to
Speaker 1: somebody else in the interim even and he moved from
Speaker 1: Anchie to another even younger woman. So Clifford was in
Speaker 1: his late thirties or whatever when he gets with Angie
Speaker 1: in her twenties. He's a decade or years older than Ancie.
Speaker 1: The next one is the girl that he hires to
Speaker 1: work at his garage, to sit at the console and
Speaker 1: take the money from the motorists. She's eighteen years old
Speaker 1: when she gets to work for him. She's just basically
Speaker 1: come out of school. She was originally from Romsey and
Speaker 1: her name in those days, her name was Arlene Tracy, Scotland,
Speaker 1: Scotland as in the country. And Arlene was a nice
Speaker 1: young woman, long dark red hair. She was young, and
Speaker 1: she was naive, and she fell for the blarney and
Speaker 1: the bullshit that Clifford Jones provided. He was by this
Speaker 1: stage in his forties. He was a sharp looking, sharp dresser.
Speaker 1: He actually looked a lot like Charlie Wats, the Rolling
Speaker 1: Stone drummer, who'd be about the same era, roughly very similar.
Speaker 1: And you know, sharp dress cars always had a pocket
Speaker 1: full of money because he had these stolen car parts
Speaker 1: rackets that he was involved in back at the ZF
Speaker 1: transmission place when he first met anchie. He had this
Speaker 1: racket going inside this big factory where they were taking
Speaker 1: all this German made ZEDF gearboxes and all that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. Clients would send in a car with a
Speaker 1: gearbox that was blown up, and they would be supposed
Speaker 1: to fit it with a brand new gearbox and then
Speaker 1: send it back to the people and either under warranty
Speaker 1: or to sell it to them for the full price.
Speaker 1: And what he used to do, being a cunning reptile,
Speaker 1: he would patch up people's gearboxes. He would just repair
Speaker 1: the existing gearboxes with a few secondhand parts, get the
Speaker 1: car running. And of course it's impossible to look at
Speaker 1: a gearbox once it's all together and running, so most
Speaker 1: people would just say oh, thank you and take it
Speaker 1: away and drive it. Meanwhile, they would be charged for
Speaker 1: the full new gearbox, which was a considerable sum, but
Speaker 1: they didn't have it. They wasn't in their car. They
Speaker 1: just had the brummy patch up job. And he would
Speaker 1: take the new gearbox and he would sell it on
Speaker 1: the black market. He would sell it through his garage
Speaker 1: or whatever, and he'd run this fairly sophisticated, fairly organized
Speaker 1: racket which was stripping money out of this relatively big
Speaker 1: international firm with its big factory that was out there.
Speaker 1: Passed foot scrape and so he had a bit of form.
Speaker 1: I mean, Clifford Jones. He ran around with crooks, He
Speaker 1: cultivated crooks and coppers and having his garage was part
Speaker 1: of that. People who wanted a new V eight motor
Speaker 1: for their Manaro or whatever it was, hot motors flash gearboxes.
Speaker 1: Death saw that good gear, he would be the man
Speaker 1: to supply it and fit it. And so among his
Speaker 1: clients and his customers and his friends were the local heavies,
Speaker 1: including a family, a big family of brothers who were
Speaker 1: all very tough guys Italian brothers, and including some local police,
Speaker 1: and he cultivated both groups. Now we know this is
Speaker 1: true because Arlene, the eighteen year old girl who went
Speaker 1: to work for him, saw it all firsthand. And while
Speaker 1: she's sort of falling for Clifford Jones's dubious charms because
Speaker 1: he was obviously a bullshit artist and a conman and
Speaker 1: a very seductive operator with some form of charisma, she
Speaker 1: is observing what goes on, and at first, of course,
Speaker 1: she doesn't really realize the full significance of what goes on.
Speaker 1: It was only later that it hit her. But a
Speaker 1: few things she couldn't really ignore, although she tried. She
Speaker 1: realizes that, and she is shot dead after Clifford takes
Speaker 1: on with her that the old wife has been killed
Speaker 1: now that he's on with the even younger one. The
Speaker 1: second thing is this, and she told me this in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen in confidence, But I can break that confidence
Speaker 1: now because since then she's died, and she won't mind.
Speaker 1: She was scared in twenty and eighteen. She was scared
Speaker 1: of recriminations. She was scared that she be a target,
Speaker 1: and I was scared of the defamation laws. But neither
Speaker 1: of those things now apply, really, And she told me
Speaker 1: that at ten point thirty on that Tuesday, on that
Speaker 1: fatal Tuesday, September fifteenth, nineteen eighty one, she as she
Speaker 1: always did, went down to the corner shop three doors
Speaker 1: down or whatever it was, and bought the morning tea,
Speaker 1: you know, coffees and sausage rolls or whatever, and she
Speaker 1: brought them back to the workshop in the garage, and
Speaker 1: she'd be gone fifteen minutes or whatever. And those days,
Speaker 1: of course, there were no mobile phones. There'd be a
Speaker 1: phone at the garage, might have even been two phones
Speaker 1: at the garage, but there were landlines there. And when
Speaker 1: she got back, she remembers clearly what Clifford Jones said
Speaker 1: to her. He looked sort of dead pan, but gloating,
Speaker 1: let's say, And he said, the other missus Jones is
Speaker 1: no longer with us, And that was a reference she
Speaker 1: later realized to anchie Jones. Now this is ten thirty
Speaker 1: in the morning, and sheie Jones has only been dead
Speaker 1: for half an hour, forty five minutes, maybe an hour.
Speaker 1: She's only been dead that morning. And it wasn't until
Speaker 1: later that Arlene realized. When that story broke on the
Speaker 1: news that night, she realized that he knew ahead of
Speaker 1: the general public. The only people that could have known
Speaker 1: at ten o'clock in the morning would be the killer.
Speaker 1: Then at three point thirty four o'clock, the niece comes
Speaker 1: home and finds the body in calls the police, and
Speaker 1: then it starts to be disseminated. But there's only one
Speaker 1: way that Clifford Jones would know in the morning, and
Speaker 1: that is because he knew ahead. He was in on
Speaker 1: the plan, and presumably while she was getting morning tea,
Speaker 1: he had made a call or received one or some
Speaker 1: other form of communication which confirmed that his evil plot
Speaker 1: had come off and that his second wife, Annie Jones,
Speaker 1: mother of their three year old child, had and shot
Speaker 1: dead in cold blood. This gradually sunk in Arleen's young
Speaker 1: So by the time this happens nine eighty one, she's
Speaker 1: actually about twenty one. She's known Clifford for three years
Speaker 1: and she's married to him, and she realized looking back
Speaker 1: on it, she was able to join the Dots and
Speaker 1: around that week, around that time, she recalls, she told
Speaker 1: me many years later, going to a meeting, a dinner,
Speaker 1: a meeting, but a dinner at a Footscray restaurant. I
Speaker 1: think she said it was upstairs, this Footscray restaurant. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure which one it was now doesn't matter which.
Speaker 1: And she said it was a place that was frequented
Speaker 1: and she must have been there before, was frequented by
Speaker 1: some local coppers and some local crooks. It was one
Speaker 1: of those sort of places. Only how that happens in
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, there used to be nightclubs
Speaker 1: in the city of Melbourne, same thing, the heavy crooks
Speaker 1: that get there, and so did detectives to sort of
Speaker 1: have a bit of a look at the crooks. And
Speaker 1: she recalls this particular week this happening, and she recalls
Speaker 1: that in attendance was a local Italian bog who was
Speaker 1: tough and mean and scary, had an unwavering stare and
Speaker 1: was a very frightening man. And he had brothers who
Speaker 1: were not much different. And he sat near her husband,
Speaker 1: Clifford Jones, the forty something well pome mechanic, and that's interesting.
Speaker 1: And then she saw they were having a bit of
Speaker 1: a whisper, a bit of a talk, the two men,
Speaker 1: and she saw her husband pass a bag I think
Speaker 1: a paper bag type bag, not a sports bag, under
Speaker 1: the table and handed off to this fellow we will
Speaker 1: call him the shooter. And she saw that and thought, well,
Speaker 1: what's funny, but later realized the significance of it. The
Speaker 1: significance of it was her husband was paying him for
Speaker 1: services rendered, and it was done very discreetly, but she
Speaker 1: was sitting right there and was taking notice, and she
Speaker 1: formed the view, particularly once she got to know more
Speaker 1: about the shooter and his brothers, she formed the view
Speaker 1: that they were a very very dangerous slot. And she
Speaker 1: formed the view that the shooter had shot and she
Speaker 1: jones in return for money. And that actually fits all
Speaker 1: the facts. When the police went to the house the
Speaker 1: crime scene, apart from the rear door being forced, it
Speaker 1: didn't need a lot of forcing. There was only one
Speaker 1: other thing that the trellis on the fence had been
Speaker 1: broken a little bit where some athletic intruder had got
Speaker 1: over the fence. Now this wouldn't be a little old
Speaker 1: man or a little old lady or a kid, somebody
Speaker 1: fairly athletic has had to climb over the fence and
Speaker 1: over the trellis and broke a bit of it and
Speaker 1: then walked to the back door and forced it. And
Speaker 1: this tallied with all the facts, we know someone next
Speaker 1: door or two doors away heard a bang or bangs,
Speaker 1: but thought it was a garage door, you know, the
Speaker 1: old metal garage doors that people just clang together or
Speaker 1: clang down. She thought it was just a garage door banging,
Speaker 1: when in fact it was a heavy caliber pistol. And
Speaker 1: so because the neighbor heard that banging, we know that
Speaker 1: it was in the morning, and that makes sense. When
Speaker 1: the doctors got there and the crime senate analysts got there,
Speaker 1: they could tell by the state of the blood and
Speaker 1: all the rest of it that the shooting had certainly
Speaker 1: happened well before lunchtime, in fact, just after breakfast time.
Speaker 1: That mystery lived on. Those two policemen, two homicide detectives
Speaker 1: essentially knew that there was a murder that wasn't solved.
Speaker 1: They knew in their hearts that the husband had got
Speaker 1: away with it. They didn't know who actually pulled the trigger.
Speaker 1: They just knew that the husband must have organized it.
Speaker 1: They didn't know what we've just said about Arlene and
Speaker 1: the shooter. They knew none of that back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one or nineteen eighty two or all the other
Speaker 1: years in between. They just did not know. And this
Speaker 1: went on for decades. Really, there was just a cold
Speaker 1: case gathering cobwebs and dust in a homicide squad. And
Speaker 1: then one Christmas a few years ago, probably two thousand
Speaker 1: and sixteen or seventeen, I attended the annual Christmas Drinks
Speaker 1: with Jeff Wilkinson, hosted by Jeff Wilkinson, former Herald's Son,
Speaker 1: crime writer, former Victoria Police media liaison boss. Very trusted
Speaker 1: and well liked media operator in a police and crime scene.
Speaker 1: And at that function at Jeff's place, where we're having
Speaker 1: a few beers and some finger food and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: I get talking to Cel Perna and Cell was always
Speaker 1: friendly with Jeff Wilkinson. I didn't really know Sell, but
Speaker 1: he was very easy to talk to and he was
Speaker 1: interested in racing. And we had a chat and he
Speaker 1: said to me, there's a story you should look at.
Speaker 1: And I said, what's that? He said, My first job
Speaker 1: as homicide schood detective. I was called to this house
Speaker 1: in Saint Albans, in Theodore Streets and Albans, and it
Speaker 1: was this girl, anchie Jones, and he told me the story.
Speaker 1: And that's basically where I first really took notice of it.
Speaker 1: Of course, I had seen the stories back in nine
Speaker 1: to eighty one, but had forgotten them. It had sort
Speaker 1: of faded, and it never really made big, big news
Speaker 1: because it didn't go anywhere. There were no ongoing clues.
Speaker 1: And he said, the husband will have organized it and
Speaker 1: he's got away with it. And all I can say is,
Speaker 1: why don't you look at it? Well, a while later
Speaker 1: I did, in twenty eighteen, I did look at it,
Speaker 1: and I think it was probably an anniversary piece. But
Speaker 1: I looked into it and I was able to get
Speaker 1: someone who's a big help to us here. This person
Speaker 1: is a genealogist and she has databases and she can
Speaker 1: trace people with uncanny skill. She can find them. She
Speaker 1: can work out where they moved from A to B
Speaker 1: to sea, and you know who they were married to
Speaker 1: and when they were born, and she can match up
Speaker 1: records from different states and different countries and work out
Speaker 1: that you know William Smith born in Wales, it becomes
Speaker 1: William Jones, who's living in Sydney or whatever. She knows
Speaker 1: all that stuff, and she, through some rather brilliant checking,
Speaker 1: was able to work out that there's a woman in Adelaide.
Speaker 1: She told me called Arlene Tahany to e a h
Speaker 1: e n Y, and that Arlene Toheny was originally Arlene Jones.
Speaker 1: When I say originally, her previous married name ed Ben Jones,
Speaker 1: her original name was Scotland her first name, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's good. That's a nice rare name. So we love
Speaker 1: rare names in our business. Jones is a very bad
Speaker 1: name because it's very common. Williams is an even worse name,
Speaker 1: because it's even more common. That's worse than Smith, I think.
Speaker 1: But Tahini tah e n Y, which I think is
Speaker 1: probably Irish, but I'm not sure it is a rare name.
Speaker 1: I've never met anyone called that. And I was able
Speaker 1: to wring a handful of to Heeni's in Adelaide, and
Speaker 1: I lucked in I think the first or second call
Speaker 1: I got this woman Arlene, and she was very surprised
Speaker 1: and not overly delighted and probably fearful when I spoke
Speaker 1: to her, but I put her mind at rest, and
Speaker 1: we had a long conversation. And the more we talked,
Speaker 1: the more we talked, because she was getting stuff off
Speaker 1: her chest. Now, she'd been eighteen when she met Clifford Jones,
Speaker 1: the guy that's in forty something. She's been nineteen or
Speaker 1: something when she married him. She's been with him rapidly
Speaker 1: become a complete monster and ogre. She realizes fairly early
Speaker 1: on that probably he's involved in killing his first wife
Speaker 1: or his other wife, the previous wife, not his first wife,
Speaker 1: his second wife, because Arlene is the third one. And
Speaker 1: she told me basically everything about him, and she told
Speaker 1: me how they'd ended up in Adelaide together, and she
Speaker 1: told me of the escalating tension between them, and she
Speaker 1: told me how he'd stood over her and terrified her
Speaker 1: and treated her the way that a lot of these
Speaker 1: sort of psychopathic, crazy, domestic violent husbands do treat women
Speaker 1: really bad stuff. And she said, finally, she said, when
Speaker 1: I was about twenty five, I grew a brain and
Speaker 1: I realized that I didn't have to cop this and
Speaker 1: I would be able to get out of it some way.
Speaker 1: And she had enough in the parent spirit and grit
Speaker 1: to extricate herself from that relationship. And during that process
Speaker 1: she was pretty nervous of him because he had a
Speaker 1: pump action shotgun and she could tell that he could
Speaker 1: be dangerous if he got an opportunity. And I'm not
Speaker 1: sure exactly how she I think, whether she bolted and
Speaker 1: just left him to it, or whether he left her
Speaker 1: to it or what. But at some point there was
Speaker 1: a confrontation between them where she brought up the death
Speaker 1: of Annie Jones, and she raised it with him and said,
Speaker 1: you killed her. I know about you. You killed her,
Speaker 1: you got to kill and gave him the reasons why
Speaker 1: she knew. He clearly knew that she knew, and decided
Speaker 1: that he would withdraw and he went back to Victoria
Speaker 1: or went away. Now, there are a few postscripts to
Speaker 1: this story, none of them make Clifford Jones look any better.
Speaker 1: One is that that little boy, Christopher Jones, he's with
Speaker 1: his grieving, grief stricken grandparents in Queensland because his mother
Speaker 1: has been shot dead in Melbourne. They of course want
Speaker 1: to keep him there and you know, look after him
Speaker 1: and become his guardians and all that. But Clifford Jones
Speaker 1: wasn't having any of that. Oh no, having killed the
Speaker 1: boy's mother, he wants to get the boy just to
Speaker 1: prove a point, just because he's a sociopath. Essentially, the
Speaker 1: grandparents are so concerned about him that they go on
Speaker 1: the run. They packed up everything they owned. I don't
Speaker 1: know if they sold their house on the quiet or
Speaker 1: rented it out, but they went on the run in secret,
Speaker 1: and they went right out into New South Wales, somewhere
Speaker 1: the rural areas, and they rented a little house or whatever,
Speaker 1: and they were under the radar with that little boy
Speaker 1: who was you know whatever, he five six, seven years old,
Speaker 1: And eventually Clifford Jones, he was able to enlist the
Speaker 1: official help I think the police or whatever. Anyway, he
Speaker 1: was able to trace the child and probably through medical
Speaker 1: records or educational records. Anyway, he was able to trace
Speaker 1: the child and get there and take the child away
Speaker 1: from the grandparents who loved him. Essentially, they were parent figures,
Speaker 1: that little boy, and this man he couldn't even remember him,
Speaker 1: was taking him away to live with him and with Arlene,
Speaker 1: the young stepmother. And he's an insight into Clifford Jones.
Speaker 1: He didn't call him Chris or Christopher. He called him Aaron.
Speaker 1: He gave him a completely different name. And why that
Speaker 1: is we're not sure, but it was an example of
Speaker 1: him wanting to have his own way in all things,
Speaker 1: even if it caused enormous grief and shock and all
Speaker 1: the rest of it to everyone, including his own small
Speaker 1: son and that poor kid. After Arlene left or got
Speaker 1: rid of Clifford, the kid is stuck with dad. He
Speaker 1: takes the boy with him to Melbourne and they live
Speaker 1: in Craigieburn and a little boy is a pretty miserable life.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was fed, and he was watered, and
Speaker 1: he was clothed and all that stuff, but it's a
Speaker 1: pretty miserable life. And of course he doesn't see much
Speaker 1: of his mother's people. And eventually, in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: when he's eleven and he's due to go to secondary school,
Speaker 1: Clifford Jones has a change of mind. And I don't
Speaker 1: know because he took up with another woman, or whether
Speaker 1: he didn't want to pay school fees or just what
Speaker 1: it was, but he said to the grandparents, well, if
Speaker 1: you're so keen to have him, you have him. And
Speaker 1: he handed this boy, who's eleven by now, back to
Speaker 1: the grandparents who were getting quite old, and then he
Speaker 1: grew up with them back in Brisbane and he never
Speaker 1: saw his father again. And when I got in touch
Speaker 1: with Chris Jones in twenty eighteen, he was forty years old.
Speaker 1: He was a successful computer programmer. He was with a
Speaker 1: firm called Pronto. He was quite well known and quite
Speaker 1: successful in his field, I think, quite well paid. On
Speaker 1: the surface, had everything going for him. But under the surface,
Speaker 1: he was disturbed by what had happened to him and
Speaker 1: to his mother, disturbed by his father's bizarre behavior, and
Speaker 1: he was quite confused. When I talked to him, I said,
Speaker 1: where's your father? And he said, isn't he back in
Speaker 1: the UK? Isn't he online? A guy that's teaching at
Speaker 1: such and such a university? And there was somebody online
Speaker 1: called Clifford Jones. Because there's so many of them, it's
Speaker 1: a very common name, particularly over there in Wales, there's
Speaker 1: one hundred of them. There was a Clifford Jones who
Speaker 1: looked a bit like this fellow teaching some course at
Speaker 1: some uni over there. I said, no, that's not him,
Speaker 1: and he goes, oh right, I thought it was. He
Speaker 1: had no idea where his father actually was or what
Speaker 1: he did or what he was doing, who was totally
Speaker 1: ignorant of it. He was in this intelligent forty year
Speaker 1: old man who I think had a wife and kids himself,
Speaker 1: and everything was going all right, but part of him
Speaker 1: was still that bewildered small boy, was very damaged by
Speaker 1: what had happened to him. Now, I left him alone,
Speaker 1: and I wrote a story in twenty eighteen that did
Speaker 1: not have nearly the number of facts in it that
Speaker 1: we've just discussed today, because A I didn't know them all,
Speaker 1: and B I couldn't use them because Clifford Jones was
Speaker 1: still alive. Arlene was still alive and very frightened of
Speaker 1: the potential ramifications, and Christopher Jones was alive and I
Speaker 1: didn't want to upset him. Since then, a few things
Speaker 1: have happened. Clifford Jones died a year ago. Arlene died
Speaker 1: four years ago, that is, two years after I spoke
Speaker 1: to her, after she told me all these gave me
Speaker 1: all these hand grenades essentially of information. She died of
Speaker 1: quite young, relatively young, at about fifty nine years old,
Speaker 1: of cancer, I think, and I just found out before
Speaker 1: we did this that Chris Jones, the youngish son who's
Speaker 1: the son of the murder victim, who's in his early forties.
Speaker 1: He committed suicide. He took his own life early this year.
Speaker 1: And so the death of Antie Jones in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: the murder of Antie Jones has really ended in misery,
Speaker 1: death and destruction, the reverberations of which are still being
Speaker 1: felt today. And when I rang Anchie's niece, the schoolgirl
Speaker 1: who discovered the body in nineteen eighty one, she's now
Speaker 1: obviously a middle aged teacher. I think she's a secondary teacher.
Speaker 1: And she said to me yesterday, it's all over for us.
Speaker 1: I just don't want to know anything about it. With
Speaker 1: Chris gone, it's over. We just don't want to know
Speaker 1: any more about it. End of story. The obvious question,
Speaker 1: of course, is where's the shooter. Well, we're not going
Speaker 1: to name him here, but he is serving a very
Speaker 1: long sentence for a very big robbery and he won't
Speaker 1: be on the streets for a long time, which is
Speaker 1: a good thing. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is
Speaker 1: a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Johnny Burton. For my columns, features and more,
Speaker 1: go to Harold's Sun dot com dot au forward slash
Speaker 1: Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news
Speaker 1: Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is
Speaker 1: all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want
Speaker 1: further information about this episode, links are in the description.