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The Sunday Age
Sunday May 7, 2000
JOHN and Helen Magill packed the boot of the family car with two fold-up chairs, a portable wooden table, a Thermos and some fresh Christmas lilies picked that day from their neat suburban garden. They were off to see their youngest daughter - it was her birthday.
John didn't look at a map, they always travelled the same way every week in the 1982 white Ford Fairlane that had taken their daughter to church on her wedding day 14 years earlier.
It was a cloudless early autumn day when they parked and set up their picnic gear on the manicured grass in the shade of a tall claret ash.
They sat listening to the wrens that had been missing in recent visits and could hear the slight movement of the leaves directly above them. They could have been in the middle of the country if not for the slightly distracting noise of a motor mower in the middle distance.
It is a peaceful scene but the Magills are not at peace. They are at a cemetery and the daughter they have come to visit is dead - murdered by two men who have never been found.
Their daughter is Jane Thurgood-Dove and she was shot dead in the driveway of her Niddrie home in front of her three children on Oaks Day, 1997, two-and-a-half years ago yesterday.
The Magills sit, as they always do, next to the bronze memorial plaque in the Garden of Eternal Memories and ask why.
NOVEMBER 6, 1997 (Oaks Day)
It would have to be the worst day in the life of this family.
Around 3.45 in the afternoon I was watering the back garden and as I often do at that time, think of Jane picking the children up from school to bring safely home. Jane was a very caring mother, she was the mum who stayed home and took care of the kids and the house.
Being Thursday and pay day they would wait for Mark (Jane's husband) to come home from work and then as a family would do the weekly shopping at the supermarket and get fish and chips on the way home. They all looked forward to that.
Helen and I ate an early dinner and around 5.45pm there was a knock at the front door. There were two men in dark suits who identified themselves as homicide detectives.
The police asked to come into the house as they had some bad news to tell us. Sitting in the sunroom waiting to hear what the police had to say seemed to take an eternity, but in reality only seconds passed by.
It was Senior Detective Michael Baade who said: `Your daughter Jane has been shot and is now dead.'
Helen and I looked at each other stunned, searching for and asking why Jane? The outpouring of emotion and grief seemed endless.
With the terrible shock we had just suffered our first thoughts were for Mark at work and most of all, for the children.
From John Magill's diary
IN A society becoming increasingly conditioned to acts of senseless violence the murder of Jane Thurgood-Dove seems to have touched the broader community.
Here was a young mother who was stalked for days by two men in a stolen car as she went about her daily routine of taking her children to school, shopping and living a normal, productive life.
The then Premier, Mr Jeff Kennett, was personally touched by the case and intervened to double the police request for a $50,000 reward for information.
Two men in a silver-blue VL Commodore sedan had been spotted in the area over the previous few days and detectives now believe she was followed on her way to drop two of her children at the nearby Essendon North Primary School.
As she stopped in the driveway of her Niddrie home the stolen car pulled up, blocking in her four-wheel drive. A man, aged in his 40s and with a pot belly, chased her around her car before shooting her three times in the head with a heavy calibre handgun.
Her children were left cowering in the car as the killer sped off in the stolen Commodore, driven by a younger, thin-faced man. The stolen car was burnt a few streets away and the men have not been identified.
Nor has a motive.
Police now think the men were waiting for the perfect moment to kill her and may have been thwarted on several previous occasions because they spotted possible witnesses.
What they don't know is why two killers, possibly paid hitmen, were so determined to kill this suburban mother.
SATURDAY, 8 NOVEMBER
The phone today never stopped ringing, with calls from well-wishers for sympathy and support, and also throughout the day friends and relatives kept coming and going.
Ron Iddles (the homicide squad Senior Sergeant in charge of the case) called early, around 7.30am, had a cup of tea and told us how hard the investigation was going, being short of information. I don't know what it was but this hard-nosed cop did appear to be emotionally upset with what he saw in this family.
TWO-and-a-half years after Jane's murder the Magills are getting worse, not better.
The shock has long worn off. It has been replaced by bitterness and almost unbearable grief.
Most people simply cannot understand what this nice retired couple in their neat Niddrie home go through every day. From the outside all appears well. The garden is immaculate with a row of flowers adding color, they keep busy and push on as best they can. They try to be normal but both know they will never be normal again.
They have been brought up to keep these things private.
But this is not private. It is front-page news. Their friends and neighbors know they are the family whose daughter was murdered by a two-man hit squad.
Inside the house the Magills cry every day. They won't go on any long trips in case there is a breakthrough. The couple can hardly just go for a walk to escape as Jane only lived a few streets away and the getaway car was dumped around the corner.
John has started to read crime books to try to understand more about the underworld. He is looking for answers that, on the surface, don't exist.
Every day they look at the clock around 3.50pm and think that was the moment their youngest girl was being chased around her own car by a man with a gun. Every day they ask why.
Few can comprehend how their grief is doubled by not knowing why she was chosen as a murder victim.
RON IDDLES has been a policeman for 26 years. He is married with children. He has worked in the National Crime Authority, the drug squad, and has two stints in the homicide squad.
He takes policing seriously and once quit the force when he felt an investigation was sold out through corruption only to rejoin and then be fast-tracked to run a homicide team as a senior sergeant.
He remains determined to find out the truth about Jane Thurgood-Dove.
He is not prepared to say he knows who pulled the trigger but he believes that after more than two years of hard slog he is getting closer.
He has travelled down every orthodox path of an investigator and now is looking at the unorthodox. He has used a lie detector test on two men connected with the case. One is Mark, her husband. He passed every test.
The other was a policeman who lives nearby, a man who was (and remains) obsessed with Jane. He agreed to the polygraph test. He failed miserably.
The polygraph is not evidence. It is not foolproof, but it may be a start. It establishes when people are being deceitful. In short it can find liars but can it find a gunman?
Former Western Australian police commissioner, Bob Falconer, who introduced the use of a lie detector in the search for a serial killer in Perth, believes the use of a polygraph is a sensible way to reduce the number of suspects.
But the polygraph is by no means the last and only hope of a solution. There were two men who stalked Jane Thurgood-Dove and police believe there are others who know what happened.
One theory was that the handgun was a ``loaner" provided by a gangster from Ascot Vale, unaware it was to be used to murder an innocent mother.
Several times a major criminal has come close to passing on information. But each time he has walked away. The man, who has a terminal illness, has said he is prepared to make a death-bed statement but until then ... nothing.
There is no right way to deal with tragedy. Some people find talking a cathartic experience. Some who are close to a murder victim want to share their feelings in a prime-time, multi-channel wake.
But the Magills are not like that. Their natural reaction is to grieve behind their wire-screen security door. But they have had to learn to play the media game.
They talk, not because they enjoy it, but in the hope that publicity will prick a conscience and provide a new lead for police. It also helps provide a momentary release from their constant feelings of helplessness. They are prepared to cooperate with The Sunday Age for this story in the hope it may help provide a breakthrough. They have kept a scrap-book on what has been written.
THURSDAY, 13 NOVEMBER
It is now a week since Jane's funeral ... it leaves you with a feeling of emptiness knowing there are no answers as yet.
Ron Iddles was telling us yesterday that the police were going to do a media release ... the press will probably try to talk to us. The pressure on all of us is very hard to handle.
The children must be suffering dreadfully inside being without their mother. This morning's paper was on the kitchen table with a picture of Jane and a police report asking for any information about the two suspects in the photofit pictures. Ashley (Jane's daughter) was at the the table and very gently put her hand on Jane's picture as if to say hello (that moment will never leave my mind) and with two fingers, pointed at the suspects and said ``bad men". Holly saw the paper as well because Ashley said ``There's mummy".
SUNDAY, 23 NOVEMBER
I wanted to help Jane's cause, I wanted to get on the phone and ring people, anybody who might listen. I wanted to go to the TV stations to ask for help to assist the police to catch the two responsible for taking Jane from us.
It is only a short time since her parting but it seems like an eternity. I do miss her so.
27 DECEMBER
Nothing much today except Ron (Iddles) rang to say that the media wanted to speak to Mark or ourselves. They are desperate to try for a story, which they already have anyway. All they want to do is sell papers.
THE Magills are an attractive, loving couple who were looking forward to life without the pressure of running their own butcher's business. After 26 years at the Victoria Market and 20 at the Moonee Ponds this was supposed to be their time.
John is wiry and has the arms of a man who has been active all his life. He sometimes struggles with his breathing and requires constant medication for asthma - a legacy from smoking roll-your-owns that he gave up 10 years ago.
The house is always clean. Helen sips tea while he prefers coffee. They know each other's thoughts so well they can finish each other's sentences with the rhythm of speech peculiar to close married couples.
They have a daily routine that rarely changes. They can still laugh about the little things. It is a distraction from the almost constant ache.
They don't spend every day enveloped in a black cloud of grief - they emerge from it to talk about normal events - Essendon's great form in the football, stories about their grandchildren, reminiscence about family holidays - but the conversations always return to Jane.
Well-meaning people advise them to try to move on. Helen has kept a quote from Shakespeare she found in the paper: ``Everyone can master a grief but he that has it."
They should be spending these years travelling and enjoying their family. They are doing none of these things. The family will never be the same. When they gather it is a reminder not of what they have but what they have lost.
28 DECEMBER
I'm just thinking what a close family we were and all the work to keep it that way is taken away by one evil deed.
THERE are no more holidays in case they miss a development, and they are easily brought to tears. He is a tough man and his wife is stoic but their resolve is weakening. ``I just want to be alive when they catch these bastards," he says.
It is always with them. The paper says a man was caught with illegal guns, they wonder if it could be a breakthrough. They go to the local shops and see a man who vaguely looks like the description of one of the suspects and their minds race.
They ring the police for an update. They don't want false hopes. They are tired of well-meaning platitudes.
They want a breakthrough.
``Those who want to help us can't and those who can, won't," he says.
FRIDAY, 21 NOVEMBER
I am alone at the moment sitting at the table outside the back door, just listening to the birds, hearing the traffic on the freeway and quietly gathering my thoughts, looking at a family photo of Jane, Mark and the children, thinking what could have been.
It is very hard to accept that Jane is with us no longer and I expect her to walk through the door. I want to believe I feel her presence all the time, the feeling comes and goes. I think she is there with me.
RON IDDLES never met Jane Thurgood-Dove but he knows more about her than her best friend. He comes to the case with compassion but with a detective's eye for detail. He looks more for weaknesses than strengths of character because he knows from experience that identifying flaws in victims and suspects is the fast track to solving murders.
Jane was a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. She has been referred to as an ``ordinary mum" but there is no such thing.
Iddles had to break down all the little walls between roles to find out everything he could about this bright and energetic woman to discover why she inflamed someone to the point of plotting her death.
He has found her every secret. Or has he?
Rarely has a murder created such unsubstantiated gossip about the victim. There have been stories that she was a star witness in an armed robbery case, was a drug courier or was having a torrid affair with a gangster and was murdered by another underworld figure.
None are true.
It is as if we want to blame the victim for her own murder. If she is somehow responsible then we are somehow safer. If Jane was just a suburban mother stalked and killed then it could happen to anyone. Then none of us are safe.
SATURDAY, 22 NOVEMBER
I tried to have an early night, but while laying there all I could see in my mind was the terrible situation in which Jane was cast not knowing what was going on. The more I think about it and what happened to our Jane the madder and more disillusioned I am becoming of the law not looking after its citizens.
I am so angry at the moment I just wish I could get out there and find these arseholes myself, but I would not know where to start.
It is now 10.10pm. I can't believe the information trail has stopped. It is constantly on my mind what that girl suffered and neither Mark nor myself could do anything to help her.
I am trying to stay on top of things but finding it hard.
Nobody needs to die the way she did and I look forward to the time when the police catch these evil bastards for what they did to Jane. I look at Mark at the moment and all I see is despair.
6 NOVEMBER
Another hard day ahead. Even though it is 12 months on the heartache, the despair and the pain never leaves.
31 MAY, 1999
Nothing, not a damn thing we are hearing.
I think of all the good times and the best things the family was involved in. Then my mind will take me to the moment of Jane's death and I will be filled with revulsion for the two individuals who took Jane's life. Who gave them the right to make that decision? I will never give up thinking the police will get whoever is responsible. We gave Jane life, what gave them the right to give her death?
6 NOVEMBER, 1999
Two years to date and still no further ahead, no substantial news to get our hopes up, we patiently wait with utter frustration, meanwhile the pain goes on.
IDDLES and his team have had to investigate many murders since Oaks Day 1997 but they keep coming back to the Thurgood-Dove case, refusing to believe it is unsolvable.
They have had other detectives review the case to see if they have missed anything. They have travelled around Australia, interviewed more than 1000 people and chased down 900 tips. They believe the answer is somewhere within the material they have already gathered.
Now the polygraph test has added some hope. It is not a breakthrough, it is just a lead and there have been leads before that petered out to nothing. But it is a hope.
EVER polite, the Magills show you past the front door and out through the covered porch. Helen points to new shrub still in its black, plastic pot, a camellia they will plant later that week.
``We had to get that one," she says with a tired smile. ``It's a Sweet Jane."
Anyone with information on the murder should contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
© 2000 The Sunday Age
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