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