September 2017

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Police Outside Bookshop

 Police Outside Bookshop
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Victoria Police Outside Bookshop

Victoria Police Outside Bookshop
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The Maria James Murder: The Golden Greek - Paul Delianis

If you haven't already, go read the three excellent posts in our 'The Maria James Murder' series. Author and WPC Blogger, James, presents proof based on the readily known facts of this case that Thomas O’Keeffe and Anthony Bongiorno brutally committed the murder of Maria James. He introduces the crime, analyzes and solves it and recreates the logistics of a likely crime scene - here, here and here.

After having read these posts you may find it puzzling that in 37 years, the investigation of this murder by Victoria Police has produced little to no results. And you may find it even more than suspicious that the investigation was recently sent back to square one after revelations of a missing bloodied quilt and a ‘DNA bungle’ involving a bloody pillowslip used as DNA evidence that police say was only recently discovered to be from a different crime scene. How could this be?

Early police reports described the brutal murder as ritualistic. It was reported to Victoria police in 1997 that the pedophile priest Fr Thomas O’Keefe was a member of a satanic cult and that he had been witnessed participating in four ritual murders. At the time of the Maria James' murder, he was the Parish Priest at St. Mary’s and Fr Anthony Bongiorno’s boss. O'Keeffe was never considered a suspect by police nor even a person of interest. He should have been when Bongiorno was questioned as a suspect in 1998. By then, evidence of O'Keeffe's murderous past was in police files. As far as we know, he was not even on their radar until after the ABC Trace broadcasts in 2017 - and notably, just before the official announcement of their missing evidence and incorrect DNA sample. [In a later instalment, we will show how this 'DNA Bungle' could not be the result of "human error" as the heads of Victoria Police have asserted at every opportunity. The latest example is here.]

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Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana announcing the 'DNA Bungle'
Photo: Joe Armao
13 July 2017 The Age

This post is being included in our series to lay out the background to the Victorian police investigation at the time of the murder. It is a brief look into allegations of crimes and improprieties surrounding the force and specifically the questionable behaviours of Paul Delianis, then chief of the Homicide Squad, in the years around the time of the murder. Delianis was known amongst his colleagues as 'The Golden Greek'.

It follows on from James’ bonus post on the role that psychopathy played in the murder of Maria James as well as the role it played in the institutionalized corruption surrounding the crime.

As you will read below, corruption was endemic within the Victorian Police in 1980. Indeed, corruption within institutional environments was rampant Australia wide. Not only was it endemic in law enforcement but within government itself and within religious, educational and governmental institutions. It is not possible to convey in this short blog post it’s breadth and scope but as an example I was able to find 22 official investigations into crime and corruption that were held in Australia between 1970 - 1989 [see the table at the end of this post]. These included, Royal Commissions, Boards of Inquiry, Ombudsman’s Inquiries, Police Task Forces and Internal Police Investigations into institutional corruption as well as organized crime. And yet, for all these inquiries, nothing seemed to have been achieved in terms of reforming corruption within the Victorian Police. The most notable achievement during this time may well have been the strengthening of the power of the Police Association to protect and support officers charged with crimes or corruption and in the association's ability to put pressure on government NOT to institute reforms.

In further posts, we will show how the widespread corruption within the Victorian police force provided a fertile ground for a group of corrupt catholic policemen, known as the Catholic Mafia, to flourish and how this, in turn, allowed criminal behaviour within the Catholic Church clergy to flourish. The church hierarchy and their Catholic Mafia within the police protected pedophilic priests including Anthony Bongiorno and Thomas O’Keeffe.

The Maria James Murder: the role of psychopathy

The previous instalment in this series can be read here

  • SOME POINTS ON PSYCHOPATHY
  • For the reader who has been following this series of articles on the Maria James murder, and whom I would not expect to know much about psychopathy, I will briefly outline some major points of this condition.

    My intention is that this "Bonus episode" will help in understanding the brutal murder itself and in understanding the systemically corrupt institutional environment (subject of the next instalment) in which it happened and facilitated the covered up.

  • Dealing with professionals who have no clue
  • For the last year or so, I have been dealing with professionals whom, in turn, deal with corruption in varying ways and in varying occupations. I have been staggered at their lack of knowledge of psychopathy and their disinterest in the subject. A knowledge of psychopathy is essential to understand the corruption, the criminals and their networks. It is also essential to know about to guard against being continually 'blind-sided'.

    "Know your enemy" is the first rule in any contest.

    Understanding psychopathic prevalence is also necessary to understanding our society and its institutions and to have a chance at successfully navigating your way through them. The estimates of the prevalence of psychopaths vary depending on the researcher and their criteria, but there is a consensus around 5% of the adult population. 1 in 20 will be a psychopath of one sort or another.

    The odds shorten considerably from there when dealing with a power organisation and shorten further still when dealing with a person high up in that same organisation. So you are going to meet and deal with them whether you know it or not and whether you like it or not.

    It is this 5% that creates 95% of societies' problems. They are our only true enemy. Therefore, it is essential to know and understand them.

    Bongiorno-Police4

    Bongiorno-Police4

    Bongiorno Newspaper Article

    Bongiorno Newspaper Article

    Bongiorno-Police

    Bongiorno-Police

    Bongiorno-Police

    Bongiorno-Police

    The Maria James Murder: Two Murderers - Part 2 UPDATED with Epilogue and Addendum

    "The rules of logic are like the rules of mathematics. They are an inherent and immutable property of existence, not opinions." The Rules of Logic

    THE MARIA JAMES MURDER: TWO MURDERERS - PART 2

    That headline should read "Police Centimeters Away From Murderer"

    Yes, that is one of the murderers talking to police within a couple of hours of murdering Maria James inside. He got away with it through a cover-up and an extraordinary run of luck.
    The article below from The Age June 18th 1980 accompanied the photograph above-

    In Part 1, we introduced the fact that Allan Hircoe's testimony to Victoria Police in 2014 made 3 conclusions logically clear:

    1. Fr Anthony Bongiorno was guilty of the murder of Maria James.
    2. There were two murderers.
    3. Given the first two facts, Fr Thomas O'Keeffe was far and away Bongiorno's most likely accomplice.

    The fact that Victoria Police since 2014 could not or would not put these conclusions together and present them to the public raises some important questions. We will be addressing these questions in the following instalments.

    This instalment will look further into the logistics of how the murder took place and the movements of the principal characters before and after the murder and what these movements mean. The logistics and the logic behind them will also shore up the case for the three conclusions listed immediately above and that were established in Part 1