It wasn't that there were no suspects. The problem for the police was this, there were too many suspects. There were far too many potential suspects. They obviously couldn't all be guilty, but there were too many men who could conceivably have done this crime. And he went to the people next door and said, if you've seen Shawna and they said no, no, And he said, oh no, And he rushed back to the house and went to Shawna's room and there was Shawna getting her ben. I'm Andrew Rule.
This is Life and Crimes today. We are going to revisit a case that was I think the first podcast that we recorded. It wasn't the first one we put out, but it was the first one we recorded back in a dim, dark, distant past of either twenty seventeen or twenty and eighteen. It's a long time ago, about four hundred episodes ago. That was the double murder of Margaret Tap and her young daughter, Shauna Tap at their house in Kelvin Drive, fern Try Galley in August nineteen eighty.
Four, which is exactly forty years ago.
It was in fact, during the Los Angeles Olympics, which dates it pretty well. The neighbors can recall listening to the Olympics that night before they went to bed. They can recall that before one neighbor went to bed at midnight, they noticed that their own.
Dog growled at their back door.
Which was unusual for their dog. It was fairly quiet, and they wondered later whether someone was hanging around or some intruder was around. Another set of neighbors on the other side of the road heard Shawna Taps little Cocker Spaniel, a very meek, quiet little dog who never really barked or howled or anything much. Those neighbors know that just after midnight on this particular Tuesday night Wednesday morning, that Shauna's little dog had barked and howled in a way
they'd never heard before. And so it was that next morning, Wednesday, the eighth of August nineteen eighty four, when the neighbors girl Karen Karen Bomford her name was, when she came out to see if Shawna next door wanted to walk to school, she noticed that there was no sign.
Of life at the Taps house.
At number thirteen. She noticed that Margaret Taps green Corolla sedan was still in the driveway. She noticed that the newspaper that was delivered each day was still in the driveway. She noticed that the blinds were still down. There was no sign of life. It looked as if the taps had not got up. Now this wasn't so shocking to the child because sometimes people sleep in, and she walked off to school by herself, just thinking, oh, well, Shanna and a mum have slept in. But later other people
turned up at the tap house. Margaret taps sister's boyfriend. Would you believe So this is sort of Margaret taps putative brother in law. He turns up. His name is Tony Blackwell. Not sure why he turned up, but anyway, he did it. You know, people drop in for whatever reason, and he's dropped in. He as he told police later exhaustively, I imagine, he picked up the newspaper, took it up to the front step, put it on the step, knocked on the front door. There was no answer, no sign
of life. He tapped on a window, no answer, no sign of life.
So he left.
This is what he told the police, and there's no reason not.
To believe him.
Okay, the day proceeds, The car doesn't move. Nobody picks up the newspaper. There's no sign of life at the house at thirteen Calvin Drive, fern Tree Gully. That evening a former neighbor of Margaret Taps turns up. Now his name is Jim Rowlands. Jim Rolins was a forty four year old carpenter at that stage, which means if he's still with us, Jim is eighty four. So if he's still he's an old man out there somewhere. Jim was
regarded as a very nice man. He had lived next door to Margaret previously when Margaret had lived in a different suburb, and Jim's wife had contracted cancer and had died of cancer. And it was typical of Margaret Tap, who was a nurse by profession, that she was so generous. She was kind, and she was generous. She did have her faults, but she'd liked to help people, and she had helped nurse Jim Roland's wife when she was dying of cancer. And Jim Rowlands and Margaret had a sort
of a platonic friendship. And the night before the Tuesday night, the night before Margaret had called Jim and said, look, I've got opera tickets. Do you want to go to the opera with me? Come around tomorrow night. Margaret had then arranged for a babysitter to come around and look after Shauna while at the opera. And so Jim turns up as invited on a Wednesday evening, just after dinner, six point thirty whatever it was, and he knocks on the door, no answer, So he goes around to the
back door, which he knew. He knew the house quite well. The back door locke didn't work properly. It had been broken by one of the kids playing and it didn't really lock well. And Jim let himself in, which was fine, and he walked into the house called out, no sign of life. He goes into Margaret's bedroom and sees Margaret and Margaret's body in bed, and he went close enough to realize that she was dead.
I think he saw the.
Strangulation marks on her neck. And he bolted outside worried about Shauna. And he went to the bomft's next door the people next door and said, have you seen Shawna? Have you seen Shauna? Is she staying with you? And they said no, no, and he said, oh no, and he went rushed back to the house and went to Shawna's room and there was Shawna dead in her bed. She also had been strangled. And so it was Jim
Rowland's former neighbor, old friend who contacted the police. Well, he and the neighbors contacted the police, and then the local police come and they call the homicide squad. First two homicide squad detectives on the scene were an old senior sergeant or relatively old, a middle aged senior sergeant, and a very young and bright detective.
The older guy was called.
Jack and the young woman was called Rod, and they lived out in that direction, and so they came there sort of basically diverted there on their way home from the city from Russell Street.
They go to the scene.
Jack goes into the bedroom and it goes into Shawna's bedroom. He sees Shorna dead on the bed and it really affects him because he had a little girl the same age, and tears sprang to his eyes and he was very sad about it. The sort of stuff that upsets detectives is seeing murdered children, of course, and that was the start of a long, patchy and protracted investigation that actually
has got nowhere in forty years. The police had the same problem at the Tap scene, at the Tap case as they had a decade before at Easy Street in Collingwood when the two suits were murdered. Susan Bartlett and Susan Armstrong had been murdered in Collingwood at Easy Street. Easy Street was a big, notorious case, which we've discussed here before, very famous thing, but the Tap case is equally awful. Mother and daughter killed, terrible thing. They shared
one thing in both cases. It wasn't that there were no suspects. The problem for the police was this, there were too many suspects. There were far too many potential suspects. They obviously couldn't all be guilty, but there were too many men who could conceivably have done this crime, who were known to Margaret or the family, or the neighbors or whatever it might be. And the police soon discovered that.
When it turned out that it wasn't Jim Rowlands who discovered the bodies, of course he got a nice old grilling for the first twenty four hours until they decided that he was totally innocent, which he was, and then they will have grilled. You would think Margaret's sister's boyfriend, Tony Blackwell, you'd imagine that he had a few questions to answer, alibis and all the rest of it. Then
they would look very hard, maybe or maybe not. They looked at a policeman or recently he retired policeman called Ian Cook. We mentioned his name now because he's died in recent years, so we can mention his name. I think he died in about twenty sixteen. Ian Cook was a policeman who had retired at around that time in
the eighties. He was probably in his fifties. Then. He had not been a detective or in the crime squads, but he was a very good friend of a serving homicide detective called Jimmy Frye real name Albert Frye, but known as Jimmy and Jimmy Frye was a pretty average detective, but very well known and well liked by some people, not by me. And he apparently was a friend of this Ian Cook for reasons that are not obvious. And it turned out that Ian Cook came to the murder house in the.
First day or so and he said to the police.
They were looking after the murder house, and I had it sealed off with tape and everything. He said, Look, I'm an cook and I used to be in the job, and you know he's here's Marl freddie yead he had, and I'm made of Jimmy Fryes, whatever it might be. I need to get in here. I'm an old friend of the family. I know Margaret's father, which he did. I think they were members of the same Masonic lodge, which was a very powerful connection back in those days
with some people, particularly with homicide squad members. It was a big thing, the Masonic Lodge in that era, and it would stay a big thing for a fair while. Strangely enough, whatever the reason, Anne Cook was allowed into the murder scene, he was allowed into the house and he told the police there, I have to get some letters or a book that I lent Margaret. I want to take it out, and I don't want to be mixed up in all the inquests and all that. No
need to drag me into it. I just want to take that stuff and not have anything to do with this. And so they let him in and he took his.
Papers or his letters or his book or whatever it was.
Now that was an interesting decision. It breaks all sorts of rules that probably these days wouldn't never be broken because you've allowed a crime scene to be permeated and to be potentially contaminated. And what it did rightly or wrongly, I mean, there might have been absolutely nothing in this except he'd maybe written letters to Margaret that he shouldn't have and he wanted to retrieve them.
But what it effectively did was it allowed.
Him into a crime scene where he could then put his fingerprints on things by handling them, and it automatically covered him off. If later his fingerprints were found there, he could say, well, yeah they were because I went in to pick up this book and while I was put my hand on the kitchen table and I picked up a cup and whatever, and so it was an intriguing thing. Now, Ian Cook retired early from the force, as I said, under what they used to call boarded out.
That meant you retired for health reasons. And it was a way in the police force that they got rid of people. If they wanted to get rid of them without sacking them, they could be boarded out under a medical excuse.
They'd say, oh, he's stressed, or he's.
Having a nervous breakdown or whatever he's got asthma, whatever it might be, and they would board them out and they would go out on their pension money or whatever it was. And what it meant was nothing to see here. What it meant was that a lot of people were removed quietly from the police force by being boarded out with a body medical excuse because the police force no longer wanted them there. It's interesting to speculate whether Ian Cook fitted that description. It seems to me that probably
he did. For whatever reason, Ian Cook was well known to the Taps. Tap being Margaret's married name. She had been married to a man called Don Tap. They'd have an amicable divorce, and of course the police had to drag him in Parol. Don Tap had to be brought in and questioned, and he had the perfect alibi. He was with his new wife that night and wasn't a problem alibi like crazy. Margaret also had a fourteen year old son, interestingly called Justin, and Justin was not living
there at the time. He was staying with his grandparents, with Margaret's parents, Mister and Missus Nelson. The Nelsons were a family that had always lived out in that direction, out east of Melbourne, and the far eastern suburbs, and I think dated back to the old days post war when that area was all orchards and stuff like that. So the Nelsons were a respected old local family. Mister Nelson,
I think member of the Masonic lodge. The mother, Margaret's mother was a teacher and very religious, and they were people that were highly respectable and hated the wiff of scandal that hung over this murder because clearly it would be, you know, clearly apparent to them that the fact that Margaret knew a lot of blokes and tended to entertain blogs at her home made it difficult for the police to navigate the case because there was so many potential suspects,
and that whiff of scandal meant that the Nelsons, rightly or wrongly, did not want to encourage any extra coverage of the case. Now, often when there's an unsolved murder over the years, we see this, the police will bring out the relatives, friends, family, and they put them on a stage and the cameras on them, and the family say, you know, I really.
Miss X, or why if they're out there, please.
Come home, or if you know anything about the murder of my beloved daughter, son, sister, wife, please come in and tell the police, ring crime stoppers, etc.
Etc. Etc.
In this case that didn't happen. One of the reasons was, of course Margaret and Shawnan were dead. They hadn't disappeared. They were dead, so nothing that the family could do would bring them back. The other thing was that, without doubt, the family did not want scandalous publicity. And I'm sure
that they feared scandalous publicity. And I suspect that there was a bit of complicit behavior with certain high ranking police, probably mister Nelson, Margaret's father, was able to pull the odd string and this story, this shocking double murder, which in many respects was as serious as the Easy Street murders or any of the other big cases, it went through to the keeper. Now, I was a young police
reporter at this time. I was a chief police reporter for a Melbourne Daily newspaper, and I can only just remember this case happening. And when I look back through the files, I see why I don't remember much about it. There were only five stories written about it in Toto. There was in our files at the newspaper office, there's one page with five relatively small stories stuck to it because there was just nowhere for this story to go.
The family weren't making themselves available, the family weren't making available photographs, and it just faded from view so very quickly, and so many years later, in the year two thousand and one, I was in Perth on another story. A policeman over there, ex policeman had been blown sky high by a bomb sept by the bikies, and very good story.
And I was over there covering that. And while I was there, I looked up a former Melbourne crime reporter called rex how rex Haw, good bloke used to work at three out Double in the good old days, and he knew a lot of police. And when I was in Birth I had a chat to him. He is Melbourne guy originally and he was married to a woman who was related to a Melbourne policeman. And he said, while you're here, is something I want to ask him.
Do you remember the tap case? And I said, oh, yeah, bit he said, well you should look into it and I said why. He said, well, my relative, my brother in law or whatever. The policeman you know, Joe Bloggs he named him. I know who the guy is. He said, he's a very honest copper and a very good one, and he has big concerns.
About that case. And I said why.
He said, well, he's told me that this old copper and Cook, ex copper Ian Cook, was let into the crime scene, into the murder house, and he's been some sort of cover up. And he said, I don't know what it means, if it means anything at all, but
I reckon it's worth a look now. That alerted me to this story, and a couple of years later, on the twentieth anniversary of the Tap case, I actually did what was really the first serious long form piece of journalism about the whole case, and I did I think five thousand words that was published in a national magazine about the Tap case, and it was an exhaustive study of the whole thing, with as many facts as I
could bring to bear on it now. At that time, obviously, I was very keen on the idea that this old ex copper and Cook, who I couldn't name at that stage, was a person of great interest, and I think he legitimately was a person of interest. In fact, he told a former homicide squad detective years later up in Painsville he retired that you know, the case had sort of really upsetting, really wrecked his life because there was so much pressure put on him over it and so on
and so forth, and you know, fair enough. The funny thing was, Rexhare said to me that he and his wife had visited gipps Land at one time and they were friendly with this old homicide copper Jimmy Fry. The when I mentioned earlier, and Jimmy Fry said, oh, you better come up to Ian Cook's place.
Cookie's place up at Swiss Creek.
Swiss Creek is a tiny little town up in the mountains, and it's a big district full of farms. And Ian Cook he'd done it right for a middling policeman. He had a house at Painsful and he had this farm up at Swiss Creek. And he said, rex said, we went up there. My wife and I drove up and we had a barbecue lunch with mister and missus Cook and Jimmy Fry and his wife and had a couple
of beers and lots of steak and all that. And he said, My wife, who's a very good judge of character, said to me later, I really don't like that Ian Cook. He's a very spooky man, really creepy, and that of course amounts to nothing. You know, who cares if someone's creepy. But it was an interesting observation from a neutral source, from a woman who found that he wasn't very nice. And that's one of the reasons that Rexhaw encouraged me to look into Cook and write the story, which I
did on the twentieth anniversary. Now, essentially that story came and went, but I never really let it go. Every time there was a chance to look into it again, I would try and add a little bit to the whole thing, and I would gradually pull together more material. Well, so much for Ian Cook, former policeman, someone who early
doors was an interesting candidate for the tap murders. Next episode, we're going to look at a lot of other people won As a PostScript to this story, the police didn't find many useful clues at the murder house at the scene. In fact, I don't know that they searched the place that well. Because when Margaret's son, justin four the end at the time, when he got to the house, rushed
in to check things very anguished. He pulled out his mother's mattress, tipped it up and put his hand on her jewelry, just to make sure it hadn't been stolen. You know, he was very upset, and that's the first thing he did. But that showed that the police had not tipped the mattress over and had not found the jewelry, So you would wonder how tharah a job they'd done. One thing they did find that probably is the only strong clue to the killer's identity were some footprints, some
unidentified footprints left by a dunlop volley sanchu. In all these cases, it's not just those who are murdered, it's those who are left behind. Margaret Tap left behind a grievously wounded boy of fourteen years old. He had moved out of his mother's house to live with his grandparents. He undoubtedly blamed himself for the rest of his life because he hadn't been there, and he would have tortured himself. He told friends, if I'd been home, it wouldn't have happened.
If I'd been there, it wouldn't have happened. And you know what, that's probably true. If there'd been a fourteen year old boy in the house that night. There's every chance it would not have happened. It would have changed things. And so this boy, Justin blamed himself. He could never get away from it. He was a keen amate, a cricketer. He used to play cricket in social and suburban teams. He had an English passport. I think he was a dual passport holder because I think perhaps his father, Don
Tap was English. And later on, as a young adult, he went to England. He left Australia to sort of get away from all this, and he lived at high Wickham in Buckinghamshire. I think it is, I've been there. I think it's buckingham Share. It's a good hour out of London by train. It's a fair fair distance. And I went there hoping to talk to Justin. But by the time I got to England and took the train to high Wickham, Justin was no longer with us.
He was dead.
And I met instead his long term partner. He had a female partner, a lovely lady called Wendy, Wendy O'Donovan I think her name was. And she met me at the station and she took me home to her place, and I met a daughter and we talked, and she explained to me that Justin was a lovely guy and that she really loved him, but in the end his demons didn't allow him to live with them. He used to drink heavily to blot out the dreams. He had bad dreams and he'd scream or whatever, and he drank
heavily to try and blot it out. And in the end he had removed himself from her place and gone and lived in a rented flat somewhere, and they'd split up amicably. But they'd split up, and she realized, she said that she hadn't seen him for a while, and she went around. It was summertime in England, and she drove around to where he lived and she went to the door and she noticed that all these flies and everything, and I think she got some good letter in or
broke the window or whatever. They got into the place and there was his body, and he'd been dead so long that it was actually impossible for the authorities to tell what it actually killed him. But she believed that he drank and drank and drank until he died. Tragic
and to that part of the Margaret tap story. So the killer, the killer, we don't know who it is killed Margaret Tap thirty five, killed a nine year old daughter, Shauna, and eventually you know, thirty odd years later killed Margaret's son justin a complete tragedy.
Thanks for listening.
Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald's Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Haroldson dot com dot au, forward slash andrew rule one word.
For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description