Unsolved Australia by Justine Ford

Author:Justine Ford [Ford, Justine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2015-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Busted: the fingerprint that led police to one of Marlene’s kidnappers

Photo courtesy Victoria Police

But the following month, damning evidence which McDonald had been trying to keep from the investigators started coming to light.

Remember those fingerprints on Marlene’s car? Over the years, the national database had repeatedly been searched without finding a match. Then, in the twelve months before McDonald was charged, the detectives asked for the fingerprints to be run again so they could include the results in their brief of evidence.

It was a request which, more than two decades after Marlene’s disappearance, would justify Sol Solomon’s decision to have the car dusted for prints in the first place, because one of the prints was ultimately matched to a man called Gregory David Bone, who had not previously come to police attention. ‘He’d been picked up in the street for possessing cannabis, fingerprinted and processed on Livescan [the police fingerprint database],’ Dustin reveals.

‘Now, we had an alternate suspect.’

‘If it wasn’t for the initial action Sol undertook with his partner on the night Marlene disappeared, we would never have identified Greg Bone,’ Julian reiterates.

But having another suspect didn’t mean John McDonald was off the hook. Rather, it raised the question: Had Greg Bone been an accomplice?

‘If we’d gone to Greg Bone straight away, he’d most likely have said, “It was twenty years ago, I broke into many cars when I was young, I don’t remember this one,”’ Julian surmises. So Julian approached his superiors and sought permission to conduct another covert operation, and they agreed.

‘The undercovers involved in befriending Greg Bone over an extended period did a fantastic job to the extent that they were able to elicit an admission from Greg that I believe he’d kept secret for twenty years,’ Julian says. ‘It was brilliant.’

Once Bone had confessed to the undercover operatives, the next step – in June 2009 – was for Julian to arrest him. ‘I had a conversation with Greg in which I told him, “The people you’ve been associating with over the last few months are actually police officers,”’ Julian says. ‘He laughed at me. He said, “There is no way they were police officers.” They had him completely fooled.’

Eventually, Julian had to show Greg Bone a video of the undercover officers in which they talked about being police. ‘And that’s when he realised they were coppers,’ Julian says. ‘He said, “Make sure you tell Mick [the main UC] that he did a great job on me!”’

‘He ended up making a confession,’ Dustin says. ‘He said to Julian – and later me – that Stuart Donald Binion and Andrew Neil Ardley had been approached by McDonald to take Marlene to a mental asylum, and that McDonald had said he would pay them for it.’

‘Once Greg Bone admitted to being involved, we had to act pretty quickly,’ Julian says, recalling how he returned to Sydney the next day to arrest Stuart Binion, who was at work. ‘His first words were along the lines of, “I did not murder her.

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