ROCKY Iaria’s mamma believes in miracles. Long after giving up hope her boy will turn up alive, she prays his body will be found so she can lay him to rest properly, with tears and wreaths, a headstone of Italian marble and all the rites of her religion.
She waits more than six years from the night Rocky disappears, never losing faith. Then, on 19 February, 1998, Mrs Iaria gets her miracle …
It’s a Thursday morning, cloudless and still, another in the endless succession of fine days in the drought-stricken countryside, but perfect for weddings and funerals.
The gravedigger at Pine Lodge lawn cemetery, a peaceful spot on the Benalla road in the flat country east of Shepparton, trundles through the cemetery gate in a tip-truck. There’s a funeral later that day; he has to open a grave so that the recently-deceased Derwent Phillip Pearson — known all his life as Jim — can be buried with his wife Dulcie, who left him behind in early August, 1991.
He reverses the truck to the Pearson grave, which is near a tree at the rear of the cemetery, well away from the road. Then he starts the yellow Massey Ferguson tractor with its front-end bucket and backhoe, and begins work, the rattle and hum of the diesel motor echoing across the flat paddocks.
The soil has settled a little in the six-and-a-half years since Dulcie Pearson left her Jim, but it’s easy digging with the backhoe. The operator knows from practice just how deep to go without hitting the coffin below. It’s all worked out: the first coffin into a double grave is buried two metres deep, leaving plenty of room for the second to sit above, with a few centimetres of earth sandwiched between the two.
That’s the way it’s supposed to be, anyway. Which is why the gravedigger is surprised, he later tells police, when the jaws of the backhoe strike something odd only ‘a couple of feet down’. He gets off the tractor and peers into the hole.
He works the levers, then stares and feels a flutter of apprehension. Poking through the loose earth is something swaddled in black plastic. The steel jaws have torn the plastic, and stinking slime oozes from the tear. For a moment, he thinks there’s been some ghastly mistake: perhaps someone has buried a baby in the wrong grave.
It’s the wrong grave, all right. Whoever buried the thing wrapped in plastic made a mistake. They picked a fresh grave where the ground was already disturbed, but they didn’t realise — or didn’t care — that one day it would be reopened. Otherwise, it could have been the perfect crime.
The gravedigger doesn’t know any of that yet. He calls a supervisor, who tells him to proceed carefully. He does. He jiggles the foul-smelling thing into the bucket of the front-end loader and places it gently on the truck.
As he does, the plastic tears some more, and he sees the leg of a pair of beige-colored jeans. It’s then he knows it’s a job for the police. He kills the motor and reaches for his mobile telephone again.
ROCKY Andrew Iaria would have turned twenty-seven in 1998, as his father, Antonio, recalls sadly when asked about the fourth of his six children.
Iaria senior is a leathery little man with the marks of many seasons on his face.
He speaks fractured English, learnt after arriving from Calabria at age fourteen, and doesn’t say much. His wife, Raffaela, says little more, but her eyes glisten with tears as she spreads on the table a handful of photographs marking milestones of her boy’s short life.
Here’s Rocky the toddler. Then the cheeky schoolboy, the cocky teenager, and the sharply dressed best man at a cousin’s wedding, his curly hair short at the sides, shoulder length at the back, tumbling over the rented tuxedo as he looks at the camera with a faint smile on his angular young face.
The wedding picture is the one his mother chooses for the memorial cards given to mourners at the Requiem Mass when they re-bury Rocky — in his own grave, this time — at Myrtleford on 3 March, 1998.
In another snap, taken when Rocky is about seventeen, he sports a windcheater with the words ‘Already A Legend’ on it, a gold ring on his index finger, a cigarette, and a nonchalant look. He looks like a kid who wants to be a tough guy.
The impression is reinforced in another picture, released by police. Eyes narrowed, he’s blowing out a plume of smoke and wearing a sharp checked bomber jacket. The same one he wears the night he goes missing in September, 1991.
By that time Rocky’s twenty, and in big trouble, just like a real tough guy. But he isn’t that tough, he isn’t that smart, and he doesn’t realise the trouble is big enough to get his head blown off with a shotgun. How can he? He’s only a kid.
Rocky Iaria was born and bred in Shepparton, where his mother moved from Myrtleford after she married Antonio in 1966.
Raffaela Iaria will never forget the day she bought her bridesmaids’ dresses for the wedding. It’s the day Shepparton closes down for the funerals of two local teenagers, Garry Heywood and Abina Madill, abducted on 10 February, 1966, and found, murdered, sixteen days later. It’s a crime that shocks Australia, and is to echo down the years until the killer, the man they call ‘Mr Stinky’, is caught almost two decades later.
The young bride can hardly guess that she, like the dead teenagers’ parents she pities that afternoon, will later also suffer the agony of not knowing a child’s fate.
Not just for sixteen days, but for more than six years. In the 1990s, however, neither her son’s disappearance nor the discovery of his body is to rate much more than local headlines.
One reason for this is that as violent death becomes more common, reaction to it wanes. Another is that for a long time Rocky Iaria’s disappearance is only that: any public interest in the mystery fades with time and the lingering suggestion that he might have run away. Third, the taint of a criminal connection hangs over the case. And, finally, the missing man belongs to people who tend to keep their tragedies private — and to settle grievances their own way.
The Iarias live, for a while, on a small orchard at Shepparton East, before moving into the town when the children are small. They work hard but keep, in many ways, the peasant mindset of their forebears. They belong to a tight-knit local Calabrian community which, by the 1960s, dominates the Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
Some families flourish more than the Iarias. Such as the Latorres, who work hard and become well-known and relatively prosperous figures in the market scene.
By the late 1980s, Mario Latorre, born in 1942, has a fruit business at Epsom, near Bendigo. His brother John Latorre, born in 1959, is a stallholder at the wholesale market in Melbourne. Their younger brother, Vincent Paul Latorre (not to be confused with an influential relative, also Vincent Latorre, now of Werribee) stays on the farm at Shepparton.
Vince Latorre loves fast cars and he finds the money to buy them. In the late 1980s he owns, according to local police, two customised ‘Brock’ Commodores, instantly recognisable to anyone interested in cars. It’s hardly surprising that Rocky Iaria — ten years younger, also car crazy, and a seasonal farm worker — gravitates towards Latorre, a fellow Calabrian who hires farm workers he can trust in a business where edible fruit and vegetables aren’t the only produce.
Rocky not only works for Latorre. He hangs around with him and another colorful Shepparton East identity, Danny Murtagh, who has married into a local Italian family.
Keeping such company isn’t wise for young Rocky, according to police intelligence, which in 1989 puts some of the locals high on a list of suspects for a series of burglaries and robberies of wealthy Italians. They don’t come much wealthier than Stephen Monti, a millionaire tomato grower from Bendigo, who returns to his home in Napier Street, White Hills, on the evening of 16 May 1989, to find his back door blocked, his front door open and the house ransacked.
Gone are a clock radio, a camera, a video recorder, watches and leather jackets — but what really hurts is that Monti’s open fireplace is smashed and the safe that had been bricked into it is gone. Few people know the safe exists, let alone what’s inside, but Monti tells police there was about $300,000 cash, 110 ounces of gold and expensive jewellery. Estimates of the total value of the haul range from $500,000 to $700,000.
For several reasons, the best being a tip-off, police suspect the Shepparton crew for the Monti heist. One reason for this is that Vince Latorre’s distinctive Brock special is seen near Monti’s house. In fact, a truck driver with a keen eye for cars notices it four times on the day of the robbery.
The truckie, one Stuart Andrew Young, is later to testify in court to seeing the car at Goornong (between Shepparton and Bendigo) early that morning, then at a McEwans hardware store about 11.30am; there are two men in the car and a third getting into it after buying some ‘jemmy’ bars, the house-breaker’s tool of choice. Later, Young sees the car in a side street near Monti’s home. And, about 3.30pm, he sees it turn into the Epsom Fruit Works, owned by Mario Latorre.
Young isn’t the only witness. It seems to others that Rocky Iaria, or someone very like him, is keeping lookout in Napier Street around the time of the burglary. Unfortunately, he tries hiding behind a post that’s thinner than he is, which makes him look both ridiculous and suspect.
If it is Iaria dodging guiltily behind the road sign — as the Crown later claims — then as a crook the boy makes a good fruit picker.
THE execution of the Bendigo burglary might be amateurish, but there’s nothing amateur about the information that prompts it, nor the size of the prize. It is deemed a major crime and therefore a job for the major crime squad, a group later disbanded amid official misgivings about the activities of a few of its members.
The official line on what happens next is, in the words of one policeman, that the squad ‘commenced an investigation that identified two suspects at Shepparton’. Meaning that at dawn one morning soon after the Monti job a crew of major crime detectives uses a sledgehammer to open the door of the unit Latorre then lives in with his wife, Angela Robinson, and their small son. It’s a heavy-handed affair, and Latorre later complains about the detectives frightening his family. Meanwhile, at the Iarias’ house in Orchard Court, Rocky also cops a rude awakening.
The pair are questioned in separate rooms at Shepparton police station. Latorre is twenty-nine, heavily built and quiet. He agrees he was in Bendigo on the day of the burglary, but says he was visiting his brother.
In the next interview room his employee and alleged accomplice, barely nineteen, has a little more explaining to do; the police have found goods that look suspiciously like Monti’s at his house. Rocky claims he bought them from a stranger selling ‘hot’ stuff.
Despite the denials, the detectives put together what they judge is a strong case, which is set to go to court in early 1991. But a funny thing happens on the way to trial. The police, it seems, aren’t the only ones doing their homework; someone else believes, or is told, that Vince Latorre might know where the Monti loot is.
This is why — about 1.30am on Thursday 20 July 1989 — Latorre is abducted from his flat by two men wearing masks, caps and overalls. They tie and gag his wife and leave her in the flat, bundle him in a car, bound and blindfolded, and drive into the bush. There they bash and interrogate him for more than an hour.
Latorre doesn’t talk. Either he is brave, or it’s true he doesn’t know what’s happened to the loot because he didn’t do the burglary, or he’s even more frightened of someone else than he is of the thugs working him over. Whatever the reason, the abductors get nothing from him.
Bleeding and battered, he’s driven back to Shepparton and shoved out the door near his unit, still tied and blindfolded. He has to be taken to hospital.
Local police soon hear of two men who’d been staying at a Shepparton motel the night before. An alert receptionist tells them she assumed the pair were police special operations group members because they were dressed in dark blue overalls and baseball caps, and acted as if they were planning some sort of raid.
Local police trace calls the men made from the motel room. Curiously, some of the calls are to detectives — one in Melbourne and one in Bendigo. The local police aren’t sure if this is linked with Latorre’s idea that a third person was lurking in the background where he was bashed. Latorre thinks his assailants stopped working him over to consult someone else, but he can’t be sure.
Like the mysterious telephone calls, Latorre’s suspicions of a third person being involved in his abduction come to nothing. What does happen is that two standover men, Chris Dudkowski and Robert Punicki, are arrested, charged and convicted of the abduction and assault of Latorre, among other offences.
The pair, who have been well-known bouncers at Shepparton hotels, are described by police as ‘opportunists’ acting independently to find the Monti money. Dudkowski and Punicki go along with this. They are especially discreet after one is warned in jail he’ll be ‘knocked’ (killed) and an inquisitive lawyer ‘loaded up’ with bogus drug charges if there is any loose talk about anybody else being involved.
Allegations of such activities have no bearing, of course, on the subsequent disbanding of the major crime squad, despite speculation to the contrary. If there is any background involvement by rogue cops in the abduction and bashing of Latorre, it is unclear who they are.
Not all police work is as surefooted as the Dudkowski-Punicki arrests. Surveillance police working for the major crime squad waste several days watching the wrong Vince Latorre, an uncle of the wanted man who then lives in Doyle’s Road, Shepparton, some distance from his nephew.
Despite such bumbling, the major crime squad is confident when Latorre and Iaria finally face the Bendigo County Court on 11 February 1991. But not all jury members, after a hearing that stretches into early March, are so sure of the police case. Result: a hung jury.
At the time, Rocky Iaria is happy enough to avoid a conviction, even if it means facing another trial later that year. But the truth is, if he’d been found guilty and gone to jail he’d probably be alive today.
It’s a tip-off — allegedly anonymous — that gets Rocky killed.
The official version of events is that someone telephones Bendigo police to say a relative of Iaria’s, a tobacco farmer near Myrtleford, has a video recorder stolen in the Monti burglary. A detective goes to the farm and identifies the machine as Monti’s. The relative says he bought it for $150, while Rocky was present. It’s the link the prosecution needs to tie Rocky to the burglary.
Which it does. On 6 September 1991, just seventeen days before the second trial is set to start.
ROCKY is driving around that Friday afternoon, in his white XW Falcon. About 3pm he ferries cold drinks to his older brothers, who are pruning fruit trees, then comes home to the house in Orchard Court his parents have put up as surety for the $50,000 bail to guarantee he will front at the new trial.
In the lull before the evening meal, he kicks a football around the back yard with two of his brothers, Nick and Fiore, still schoolboys.
His mother calls out to ask him if he will be home to eat with the family. He asks his brothers to tell her he’ll be home ‘about 8 or 9 o’clock’. Then he gets into the Falcon and drives off. They don’t see him again. Ever.
He doesn’t meet his brother, Paddy, at a parking spot near the lake where young bucks gather on Friday nights. It’s not the first time Rocky has stayed out all night. But it is the first time he doesn’t telephone early next morning to tell his parents he’s all right.
They’re worried. On Sunday they visit a local detective at home … accompanied by Vince Latorre. The detective is wary; he suspects they are trying to use him to make it look as if Rocky’s disappearance is not just jumping bail. He soon changes his mind.
He talks to Latorre and the Iarias separately. Latorre, he is to recall, shrugs off Rocky’s disappearance, saying he doesn’t know where he is, and suspects Rocky has ‘pissed off because he’s shit frightened of the second trial coming up’.
But Antonio Iaria is ashen with fear for his son. He thinks the boy is dead, that he would never run away without telling the family, and in any case he wouldn’t jump bail because it would cost the family their house. The father’s distress is convincing.
The detective sends the family to the police station to file a missing person’s report. Iaria’s disappearance isn’t made public until two days later, when the Shepparton News runs a small story saying police ‘fear for the safety’ of a local man after discovery of his car the day before in the carpark at Benalla railway station.
There’s speculation Rocky has fled the district on the train, but his family knows it’s not true, as much as they would like it to be.
Two weeks later, on 23 September, the new trial begins at Bendigo. Latorre, facing the jury alone, is quickly acquitted. Evidence involving Iaria is inadmissible, and so the case against Latorre doesn’t stand up, just as predicted.
Latorre returns to the vast, white ranch-style house built on the orchard he has bought in Central Avenue, Shepparton East, near the old place where he and his brothers grew up. Close, too, to his friend Danny Murtagh, who has come under police notice for stealing farm machinery and other offences.
For the Iarias, there is an appalling silence that is to last more than six years. Grieving for their boy, but not knowing what has happened, they hire a lawyer for court hearings to lift the $50,000 bail surety on their house. Eventually, they sell out and move to Myrtleford, away from cruel rumors in Shepparton that they have hidden Rocky interstate or overseas.
Now, at least, they have a grave to tend. But will it end there?
SUSPICIONS linger in Shepparton about who killed Rocky Iaria. When the autopsy showed he died of a shotgun blast, it made some people think hard about a gun handed anonymously to police in 1993.
It was a sawn-off single-barrel shotgun, found in an irrigation channel at Shepparton East. It was identified as a Stirling … registered to Danny Murtagh. Questioned, Murtagh asserted the gun had been damaged in a fire, then given to an unknown person, who might well have sawn it off and thrown it in the channel.
Police have not proved the gun is linked to Iaria’s murder, but believe it could be a vital clue in any future trial. Unfortunately, they don’t know who handed in the weapon — and it has since reportedly been destroyed in a clean-up of Shepparton police station.
Chances of finding who handed in the shotgun faded when the officer in charge of Shepparton CIB, a Detective Sergeant Barry Stevens, made a public appeal on local television in which, inexplicably, he described the weapon as a ‘long-barrelled firearm’ handed in during a gun amnesty. Meanwhile, strange things happen in the orchards and farms around Shepparton.
Police were set to move against a local gang suspected of stealing irrigation equipment from an Italian farming family at Tatura in 1997, when a neighbor talked of giving evidence.
Days later the neighbor’s entire tomato crop — a year’s work worth tens of thousands of dollars — withered and died. It had been poisoned. The theft case collapsed through of lack of evidence. ‘I don’t want a bullet in the back of my head,’ a potential witness told police.
The thieves are feared, but they have their own fears, too. Especially one, a man many in the district believe was behind the Monti burglary — and consequently, the murder of Rocky Iaria.
The old Calabrian way of seeking revenge, says a man who knows the main players, would not simply be to kill the person suspected of murdering Rocky Iaria.
It would be to kill that person’s son, when the boy turns the same age Rocky was when he died. It has already been decided, he says.