Winter Patriot Community Blog

The Maria James Murder – The Cover-Up.

The previous instalment in this series, The Catholic Mafia" can be viewed by clicking on this live link.

Maria James' Bookshop circa 1980


Source

It is often the case in history that the crime that brings an institution down is not the original transgression but the subsequent cover-up. The initial crime is often perpetrated by one or more individual members of an organisation but the cover-up, usually rushed and ad hoc, exposes the whole hierarchy as complicit in criminal activity.

Over the last twenty or so years, we have been watching the ongoing exposure of the cover-ups engaged in by that slow-motion-train-wreck otherwise known as the Catholic Church. The Church's co-conspirator organisation in what has become known as The Catholic Mafia, Victoria Police, is now undergoing its own not-so-slow-motion-train-wreck.

The Maria James murder has remained unsolved for nearly 38 years now because of police cover-ups on at least three occasions starting in 1980, then again in 1998 and finally in 2017. It might be argued that all the evidence pointing to multiple cover-ups could be due to incompetence but the incompetence would be so spectacular and so consistent that the odds of it being so approach impossibility.

We will cover only some of the peculiar events and failures that point to a massive cover-up . There are so many things wrong with this investigation that it would take a book to list and explain them all.

We will also briefly look at what the point of all this cover up is: the clear and obvious guilt of two Melbourne Catholic priests of murder.

All the following information comes from the Trace podcasts except in a couple of instances where links are given. It is presumed that the reader has listened to the podcast series and has read the previous instalments of the Maria James Murder on this blog. (Start here)

The ABC's Rachael Brown has done an excellent job of digging up and bringing together a lot of valuable information. The opinions and conclusions from that now publicly available information in the following article are those of this writer.

1980 - Murder Investigation 101

John James arrived at Maria's shop minutes after she had been murdered and called the police. The homicide squad duly arrived and one of the first things that happened is that Sen-Sgt Rowland Legg took himself off to interview the assistant parish priest, Anthony Bongiorno, at the presbytery around the corner from the shop.

This is the strangest thing. No explanation for this has ever been offered except that Legg thought that the priest might know something about the murder from a confession from Maria or another parishioner. But that does not explain why it was the first thing Rowland Legg thought to do. Did he know Maria was a Catholic? You might think to do that days or weeks after if you have no leads but to seek out a priest straight away, as the Trace program remarked on, is very odd indeed.

It is especially odd when you understand that Legg only sought to interview one of the two priests resident in St Mary's Presbytery who ministered to the Thornbury Parish.