This is only the second time we’ve met. Earlier in the year I’d called Mark, asking for his blessing to do a journalistic deep-dive into the cold case of his mum. Because in 2014 a best mate and colleague, Kerri Ritchie, told me that a witness had made an explosive police statement. ‘You should keep in touch with Ron Iddles,’ she told me, as she headed off on maternity leave. ‘It could be big’. So I did. And nothing came of it. Ron Iddles was at the Police Association by then, so he was off the case that had frustrated him for all those years, and he was stumped as to why this witness’s statement had never seen the light of day. This also niggled at me – enough for the Iddles baton change that’s now landed me in Mark’s sparse lounge-room. I don’t know it yet, but it will become all-consuming. There’s the murder, and then things get dark.
I don’t know it yet, but it will become all-consuming. There’s the murder, and then things get dark.
I want to review his mum’s case through a podcast. I feel this intimate medium will allow for sensitive treatment. But some true-crime podcasts treat crime like a spectator sport. Maria James’s story should be both forensic and respectful, so my early caveat was getting Mark’s blessing. Had he said no, I wouldn’t have pursued the case. That was the line I drew. I’d imagined that, after all the news stories over all the years, Mark might be lugging around fatigued surrender. He’d most likely be wondering whether he’d be let down all over again. But he’s on board. So here we are.
‘Even though it’s been so many years – I mean, we’re talking about 36 years – given modern forensic techniques, including DNA, I’m certain that if enough resources are thrown behind it [the cold case], they could definitely find the killer,’ Mark says.
He’s confident that an ABC podcast could revive interest in dusty files about his mum, which sit in boxes in a police storage room alongside the unfinished stories about another 280 Victorians. Mark has a desperate hope about him, the sort of hope that either fuels people or breaks them. But, like Ron Iddles, he has an unwavering conviction that there’s someone in the community who holds the missing puzzle piece. It’s just a matter of finding them, and tugging on their conscience.
Mark James speaks so fondly of Ron, whom he met as a 13-year-old when he was getting under the heels of those detectives at his dining table, throwing questions at them.
‘I wasn’t upset that they were there. I was encouraged that something’s happening, they’re doing their job, and gee, wow, there’s a lot of police here, they’re taking it very seriously. I was probably a bit annoying to them sometimes, coming up and talking, [while] they were trying to do their job.’
[Mark] has an unwavering conviction that there’s someone in the community who holds the missing puzzle piece. It’s just a matter of finding them, and tugging on their conscience.
Ron’s been a constant in Mark’s lifetime of upheaval.
‘Ron stayed in touch, and how he kept in touch with me, I don’t know. I mean, I moved address and always would forget to tell Ron, but Ron would find me and stay in touch, and he would say, “We are still looking at certain suspects.” And he was the source of encouragement for me – I guess probably the only source of encouragement, that maybe one day there could be a solution.’
What a thing to carry from your teenage years. When I was a kid, I remember dressing up with my best mate, Sarah, for a school-costume day. Detectives Brown and Puttick we were, with trench coats and crudely made cardboard name-badges. We used to patrol the local neighbourhood for mysteries to solve. But when we saw a knife lying in someone’s garden one day, we decided the job might be over our heads. I think that’s about the time all the girls changed their career ambition to dolphin trainer. But here’s Mark, his trajectory severed so cleanly from mine with 68 flashes of a blade.
He revisits that day all the time. He’s just back from his daily paper-round for the local newsagent, Terry Gannon. His mum’s at the stove, cooking the boys scrambled eggs, their favourite breakfast. She turns from the stove and asks something strange.
‘She said to me in a very kind of solemn and unusual way, “If anything happens to me, make sure Adam is looked after.” She actually made me promise. And she was looking anxious and worried. And that was the second time. She’d said it to me on the weekend as well. It was something out of character. Mum cared about us very much, and she would never put that kind of burden on us.’
Now, in hindsight, her plea chimes ominously. ‘She would do anything for her children, and she was quite perceptive. If something was wrong with Adam or me, she would know about it before we even said anything.’ But at the time, Mark just thought she was being a bit weird. So he promised, scoffed his breakfast, and headed off for his weekly school excursion to the local bowling alley. His mum, as she did every day, walked his 11-year-old brother, Adam, to the bus stop. Because he had cerebral palsy and Tourette’s, he went to a special school. Maria put Adam on the bus and waved him goodbye.
Trace: Who killed Maria James? is available now at Readings.
