Who killed Colonel Duncan? A swinging 60's murder mystery

revisit a very old crime. It dates back exactly fifty eight years from the time when we are recording this in the first week of September. It was a case that riveted Victoria, if not Australia. It was the murder of a man they call Colonel Duncan. Now he had been a colonel in World War II, John Norman Duncan. He'd served at the Brook in the Middle East. He'd come home to enjoy his peacetime life, and he'd become a prominent businessman. He was, by the nineteen sixties a

director of Clark Rubber, a large company. He was also the owner of many properties, ranging from a Chukah in the north to Gippsland in the east, and he lived in the nineteen sixties in a brand new architect designed house in one of the Blue Ribbon streets in then extremely fashionable Mount Elizer. Colonel Duncan, as people called him, was a bachelor. He had been married, but he'd been divorced back in the fifties. He lived with his labrador

dog in his house, which he called glen Burne. He drove a late model gun metal gray Jaguar, and he involved himself in business and in things to occupy his time, such as amaur theatricals. He was a keen participant in amateur theater in Frankston, where he was one of the few men involved in a troop of amateur actors who were mostly women. He got involved with his neighbors. In fact, he was conducting a long term affair with the woman

from around the corner. Her name was Sidnea Ferguson now Sidney Ferguson, was the wife of a very wealthy old man called James Ferguson, and in nineteen sixty six, James Ferguson was eighty four years old. He'd made a lot of money by selling out his family's bakehouses in Carlton.

They owned so much land in Carlton that when they sold it back in the twenties and thirties, that land was used to build what is now the car park of the Royal Women's Hospital, vast amount of inner suburban land, worth a lot of money, and it set James Ferguson up for life. James Ferguson's way of spending money was to get married. He married three times in his life, and the third time was to Sidna. Sidna was the

former Sidna Delile, well known family around Melbourne. She'd gone to St Catherine's Girls School in Tuak and one of her classmates, I think, or at least one of her schoolmates, was Cynthia Ferguson, the daughter of the old man that she married. Funnily enough, her brother, Gordon DeLyle, society photographer, had married Cynthia, and so it comes about that old Man Ferguson had a son in law and a brother

in law who were the same person. Rather complicated, what it really means is James Ferguson was about thirty years older than his third wife. They had one child in nineteen forty two, and in the fifties they retreated to Mentalizer, where they led a nice life at the local yacht clubs, local tennis clubs, drinking champagne, drinking Gin and Tonic, and

otherwise sitting around counting their money. This was the sort of setting which gave rise to all sorts of mischief, and Mount Eliza at that time had a reputation for being the wife swapping capital of the Mornington Peninsula. At

least and foremost among these was Colonel Duncan. Having his affair with Sidna Ferguson at the very least, he might also have been conducting affairs with other women, which opens up some interesting possibilities in this story, because when Sidna, He's lover, raised the alarm on September fifth, nineteen sixty six, it turned out there were several possibilities about who had the motive to hert John Duncan. This is what happened.

Sidna is expecting Duncan to come up to the Ferguson's house for pre dinner drinks and then dinner on this particular Monday evening, when the very punctual Colonel Duncan did not turn up at five o'clock or whatever. She knew that that was totally out of character. He would always come dead on time. She worried about it. She rang his house, there was no answer. She and a female friend drove down not far away, but they drove around to his house and she went and knocked on the door.

No answer. She walks around, looks through windows, no answer. She goes to open the laundry door and she can't open it. She's shoving against it, and she realizes that something is jamming the laundry door. It is only when she looked down at her feet and notice of blood running under the door or seeping under the door, that she realized there was something terribly wrong. She ran out of the house, out to her friend's car, and they went for help. Within a matter of maybe twenty minutes

or whatever, the police arrived. They called the police. The police arrived. When the police get there, there is no body in the laundry. They opened the laundry door and

there's blood, but there's nobody there. They quickly realized that the body in the twenty minutes previous has been dragged from the laundry out onto the patio, and so the spooky truth is that Sidna, who'd come to find Colonel Duncan, had actually come to the house while the killer or killers were still there, aiming to dispose of the body. When the police get there, the killer or killers DeCamp quickly.

They're already gone. The police find the body, which is all scruffed up, as if he's been dragged along which he had been. His clothes are racked up around his middle. We know that because we have a photograph of it. They find a pick and a spade nearby. Clearly the killers had intended to bury Colonel Duncan somewhere, you would think probably they intended to put him in the boot of his Jaguar and take him away and dispose of him.

The police looked around the place to look for clues and for likely motives, whatever it might be, and what they found was that Colonel Duncan's bedroom had been turned upside down. Somebody did search for something in there, which makes you think of thievery, either theft as a motive or someone making it look as if theft was the motive. They found in the living room a lot of possessions piled up as if ready to take Colonel Duncan's shotgun,

bottles of champagne, some clothing and some suitcases. It looked as if in a hell of a hurry the killer or killers had thrown all this stuff together as if they were going to take it with them. But of course when they were interrupted, all bets were Often they bolted what the police couldn't work out, and they veered from one theory to another over many months after this. Because this was a massive murder mystery at the time,

it received a lot of media attention. Because it was a society murder, it was rather like the Wales King murders of more recent times, similar social stratum. It had the whiff of scandal because it was clear in reading the newspaper coverage that Sidna Ferguson knew the colonel very well, and there were some fairly obvious hints that they were lovers. There were suggestions about the dead man that he was a playboy, that he was well known around and medalize

of Frankston area. Whether this was true or not, it's hard to know, but he had a reputation apparently for escorting younger women around a place interestingly in his will, he left his house, which was worth quite a lot of money. It'll be worth these days, probably worth three or four million bucks. Probably back then it was worth eighteen thousand and in the sixties. That was a lot of money. And he left that house to Sidna, to

his lover, married Moon from up the road. He left a large amount of money to another local woman who used the name Marjorie Unsworth. Now, interestingly, her name sort of alters a bit depending where you've read it, but at the time it was given as Marjorie Unsworth. She died at a very great age back in about two

thousand and seven. It was ever really explained why he left so much money to her, though he was friendly with her and purportedly her husband, and it was said that she used to do bookwork for him and so forth. But in any case, the colonel didn't have any children of his own. He did have brothers and nephews and nieces, but he left significant amounts to those two women. But of course there was also a very large estate elsewhere that would have gone to family members that were related

to him. This left the police with a thorny problem. They couldn't really be sure was it just an idiotic robbery where the idiot robber thief was armed and decided to kill the colonel, you know, because he then couldn't identify him or them, or because you know, he'd attempted to run away from them or attempted to grab them or something. People are killed, you know, every month for less. People are murdered routinely for very bad reasons and very

poor reasons. And it wouldn't surprise if Colonel Duncan died for one of those ridiculous, pathetic reasons that a thief decided to kill him on the spur of the moment. There were three bullets in him, two in his head, which is an execution, one in his shoulder, which makes you wonder whether he'd been shot first in the body

and then they finished him off. But the police discovered that they'd used a crude silence, meaning they jammed a pillow over what I think was probably a pistol, and the police knew that because they could see holes shot through the pillowcase. And that was something that almost anyone could have done because it was a thing commonly seen on television and films in those days. Guy produces a weapon, grabs a pillow or a cushion or a blanket and

uses it to muffle the shot. It was fairly well known and so they couldn't really get any traction on this case. It was said that Colonel Duncan had been seen earlier that day, that Monday, around the district with a couple of young people described at the time as youths plural. It was also said by someone who apparently knew the colonel's car, which was a fairly distinctive Mark ten Jaguar gun metal gray. Anyone who was around that

district probably knew the car. They'd seen it driving slightly erratically, a little bit ratic, but with its headlights on and a blinker flashing continually when it wasn't actually turning. And later it was speculated by some people that the colonel was driving the car at that stage was trying to attract attention of other motorists or other passers by to the fact that perhaps he was being held in the car against his will. Now that actually makes sense to me.

That sounds like a real thing. But of course, when he gets back to the house, he meets his maker, he meets his end. And so the man who'd survived to brook in the Middle East, and who had campaigned so successfully in his business life to make a large fortune, ends up shot dead like a dog in his own house. And the mystery lived on, and the mystery loomed large,

probably until deep into the seventies. It was one of those cases that the newspapers would return to every anniversary for several years, every newspaper covered to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, the more scandalous newspapers, like the late lamented Truth newspaper, covered it in great detail and

with highly colored speculation. And it was true that the police and everyone else around the district had theories about who might have wanted him dead, And if it wasn't just stupid thievery, it may well have been a jealous husband such as James Ferguson, or such as some other jealous husband, or possibly an angry debtor, an angry debta

in a sense that someone who owed Colonel Duncan money. Now, Colonel Duncan, apart from all his other business interests, was known to lend money to people rather like a private bank. In fact, in a sense he was a private bank, and he was scrupulously fair and he was punctual, and he was brisk and all that stuff. And when he lent money to people, he had a mutation for wanting to get the money back precisely on time. He didn't suffer people who wanted to extend the loan period and

who couldn't come up with the payments. And it was speculated, And it makes sense that it's conceivable that someone was angry at him for demanding a certain amount of money and not giving them any leeway or wriggle room. But I am thinking that the police would be able to scrutinize all his accounts and his affairs fairly accurately and have a fair idea who owed money and who didn't, and that they would be able to rule that out

reasonably quickly. There was certainly no stories ever written back in the sixties or the seventies that actually pointed towards any particular person or group owing the colonel a lot of money. And so the question that the police faced back then, this is, you know, half a century ago, still stands today. Was it a robbery gone wrong or was it a paid hit made to look like a robbery gone wrong? And that is the same question now,

as it's always been funny things happen. In the early nineties, a man who was well known around Frankston as a vicious footballer, a football thug. Will call him Dutchy. He'd grown up down on the Mornington Peninsula where he worked initially with his father, who was a builder, and this young fellow was apprenticed to his father and became quite a good builder. He was also a very fit, narcissistic young guy. Used to run a lot and do weights, and he supposedly used to box a bit golden gloves.

Someone said, I can't find records of him winning any bouts in the golden Gloves, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. And he was known, and this is a fact. He was known to do karate. He was a black belt in karate, and I've spoken to his adult step children who remember him coming back from the karate gym with his white gown on and his black belt and

all that sort of stuff. And he was certainly well known in the local football leagues on the Mornington Peninsula, not for his football skill, which was average, but for his viciousness on the field, because he could fight well and punch hard. He used his powers for bad ends, and he was well known in an era when football was rough and tough and pretty bad news. This guy stood out because he would hit people behind the play. He would hit young players, and he would often hurt

them badly. He put people out of the game by breaking their jaws and breaking their noses and bad things like that. And he was so vicious and so unpredictable and so bad tempered that even his own teammates even they didn't like him around the club. And when he finally got several year suspension from the league for a particularly vicious and unprovoked act on the field, his own team members and his own club president were quite pleased, because it was better not to have him around. This

man did his beers on the sidelines. He came back, he injured more players. He went to another team elsewhere and he injured a young player, and I think that young player didn't play again. He was sadistic, nasty man. It is said that he didn't drink much or at all, and that if he went to pubs, his big trick was to drink lemonade and hang around and wait for any sign of any sort of trouble, and when the other guys had loosened up because they were drinking beer

and alcohol, he would then belt them. It was sort of his idea of fun. So he didn't really have a lot of good men friends. Bar one who used to work with him, a guy that was sort of his partner in business in building. He stuck with him pretty well. But apart from that, men did not like Duchy. Duchy was narcissistic. Dutchy was nasty. Dutchy loved himself. Dutchy was the sort of guy that primped and preened in

the mirror when he was in the gym. Dutchy really fancied himself with women, and he was a serial womanizer. He was lecherous. He was really antless, and he was a good physical specimen who took a lot of pride in being fit and all that sort of stuff. And so at a time when a lot of people were not particularly fit, he was. He was sort of blonde and tanned and all the rest of it. And he used to cut a bit of a swathe around the place around Medalizer and Frankston and Kringle and those sort

of places. And he married someone will call L not her actual name, who migrated from the UK to Australia and lived in the Frankston area. She had at some point met and married a man down there and had three children. But either she broke up with that man or Duchy came along and swept her off her feet.

Either way, she ends up in a relationship, in a marriage with Duchy when they are in there, say early forties, because she produced a fourth child, her fourth child to him, and they married, and when that little boy, when he was four, Duchy attacked L with a hammer. Now there was a bit of a backstory here. L. I've gone home to visit her sick father that year, and when she returned after two months, she went home to Duchy and said, Duchy, I don't want to be married to

you anymore. I want to divvy up our possessions and take my thirty thousand dollars or whatever, and I want to take the kids, including his little boy, the youngest one, to be with my family over there because my father's dying at whatever. Apparently he didn't take kindly to this, Duchy, and they agreed to disagree. They agreed that they would break up so on, but they were still living in the same house. One night, according to what Elle later said,

she goes out. He says he's going up to his caravan and a gamby to move furniture and stuff because the river's rising. The Goblin River was rising, and he wanted to move stuff above the flood level. And she said, okay, well, I'm going to Someone says tonight my cousin's place, to a party or wherever it was. I'll see you tomorrow whenever you get back. However, when she gets home from her cousin's at ten thirty at night or eleven or something, he's there. He hasn't gone at all, and she said,

what's the story. You were going to the caravan. He said, oh no, I thought I'd wait till tomorrow morning. Anyway, that night, according to hers, she's in bed. She's had a couple of drinks, but she's in bed and he comes in and starts to bash her while she's asleep with an instrument, most likely a hammer. The guy was a carpenter, so a hammer would be easily obtained. He hits her very badly. In fact, there was blood all

over the bedroom. So he's assaulted her with the hammer and he's done some other stuff, and none of it's very good. She is so knocked about by this that she staggers out. She gets help. Police come, ambulance come. She's taken the hospital. They treat her for fractures to the skull. She's bled a hell of a lot. The police at three o'clock in the morning are looking around

to see what's what. Obviously it's domestic situation probably, and they ring up the caravan packet and a gambi where he's got his caravan, and the caravan pack guy at six am says, oh, he's just turned up now and he's lifting his furniture around. So it would appear that duchy who said he'd gone up there, you know, two am or something, or at midnight, he's actually gone up quite late, and so he's got up there just as dawn is breaking, which means he did have enough time

to have committed that crime before he left. His argument is that he left earlier and it wasn't him that a stranger is broken into the house and attacked his wife. He's a strange wife. Funnily enough, the police don't believe him, and they do believe l and he is charged He goes to the county court where he is convicted on two very serious charges and his sentence to a total effective total of twelve years with a minimum of nine

I think it was. He appeals and on appeal a learned appeal court decide that he should get for various technical reasons it should be cut back to seven year total with a minimum of five. And we know that because our researches for life and crime. That would be Sue Macbeth of Macbeth Genealogical Services. She discovered that Duchy I almost used his real name there. She discovered the Duchy married. He gets out of jail and he marries another one. That poor our wife dies in twenty ten,

and the executive of the will is Duchy. But Duchy moves on. He moves up in a Gambi direction, up that way somewhere, and he moves away from the peninsula. And it turns out that he leads a relatively quiet life. He's in no databases, no phone books, no one up there in the whole Goldwen Valley area from you know, yay Seymour all the way to Arawanga, that massive, massive area of the Golden Valley, No one sort of hears

about him or sees him much. He leads a quiet life and he might have a bit to be quiet about. You'd think he might have just about got away with anything he's done. But in two thousand and two, strange thing happens. The police have a sniff that Dutchy might

be the man that killed Colonel Duncan. Now who has told the police this, We can't be sure, but it seems fairly clear that it would come from El, mother of the little boy with him, because in two thousand and two, a well known Victorian homicide squad member, a man whose name most of our listeners will know, was going to the UK on other businesses. He had to go over there to see a witness or something for

some other case. And one of his colleagues from the cold case unit said, near, listen, while you're there, I want you to go and see l and take a statement from it. Now, our man, our hero, says, right, I will. So he makes an arrangement to meet her and they meet in a hotel and he assured me today actually that she was friendly. El was friendly and she was helpful. She was quite pleasant to meet. At

this stage two thousand and two. I think her youngest boy, the one whose father is Duchy, was about fourteen by then. He put her age in the low fifties at that stage, which means she's had the fourteen year old boy maybe around of forty mark perhaps, And she makes a statement

to him. Now, whether this is a full and frank statement, I don't know, but that statement to some extent implicates Duchy in the Colonel Duncan murder of nineteen sixty six, or the Colonel Duncan death or the Colonel Duncan homicide of nineteen sixty six, because she tells that it active that she can recall way back then. Clearly she knew him when they were young. In nineteen sixty six, Duchy was twenty two and Elle was younger. She might have

been nineteen or twenty or eighteen. Clearly she's known him, and he's always been a lady killer, and she was young and impressionable, and she was running around with him in perhaps a car that stood out a bit. The detective said he had something like a Ford custom Line, which in those days was what young blugs loved to have. They were a big, vight American car. The Ford custom Line and young guys, young tradees or jockeys, those sort of guys, footballers, boxes, people like that that had a

few dollars spare. They loved to buy a Ford custom Line because they were big, they were American looking, and the other vights. And that may well have been the sort of car that Duchy had at that time. And she remembered being parked in a street or backstreet in Mantalizer and looking up the drive while she waited for Dutchy to return to her in the car, and she could see this Jaguar up the drive. Whether her story is totally detailed or deliberately vague, I don't know. I

have no idea of knowing. But she apparently told the policeman about looking up a driveway and seeing the Jaguar car. That sounds very much as if it was Colonel Duncan's. The story she told did dovetail with the known facts to some extent that a young personal person's may well

have been with Colonel Duncan just before his death. It was enough that the police were motivated to have a good look at Duchy, and I know for a fact that they put out stories in the media in two thousand and two, and the stories they put out raised the distinct possibility that Colonel Duncan's murder was a paid hit and that the motive, the likely motive, was of the jealous husband variety, whether that's true or not. They

didn't have enough to make it stick on Duchy. That doesn't mean Dutchy did it, and it doesn't mean he didn't do it, but they didn't have enough to make it stick. And so that was thirty six years after the event. So the accuser, such as she might be,

is safely living back in the UK. Duchy is on a little property up the bush, somewhere in that vast Golbin Valley area, somewhere between Yay and Yarrawonga, which is I think that road between those two point is about two hundred kilometers long, so it's a big area that he's in there somewhere. We actually have a rough idea where, And the mystery of who killed Colonel Duncan is still a mystery. But who knows what might happen if someone were to talk to Duchy before he leaves the building.

Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun 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 the PF the coping