IT was a happy family home. Right up until the moment a pot-bellied coward with a pistol killed Jane Thurgood-Dove in front of her children as they cowered in the family car. That was in November, 1997.
Weeks later the home was only a house, one of the plainest in a street of weatherboard houses as simple and tidy as its name. Muriel Street, Niddrie, less than half an hour from the city but, dozing in the spring sunshine, it could pass for a street in almost any country town.
Outside number five, the flowers had gone from the footpath. The flood of letters and sympathy cards delivered to the rickety letter box leaning over the wire mesh fence had been carefully filed away as a private memory to a very public death.
The family’s blue heeler dog barked and thumped its tail at passersby as it peered hopefully beneath the picket gates in the drive, where the yellow paint police use to mark crime scenes was already fading.
There remained one reminder of the awful thing that happened here at 3.50 pm on Thursday, November 6: a hole in the wall, ugly as a missing tooth, where police had taken a board to examine the bullets lodged in it. There were other, more subtle, changes. Muriel Street had become a place of stares and whispers. As locals drove past, their eyes flicked sideways at the murder house, fascinated and a little fearful.
When facts are thin, theories fill the void. Police admit, after thousands of hours of investigation, they are no closer to establishing a motive than they were the day Jane Thurgood-Dove died. But many of the people who live there believe the murder had nothing to do with the victim or her husband, Mark. They believe it was a case of mistaken identity. And they think they know who the real target was.
The circumstantial case for this is intriguing.
The Thurgood-Doves’ house is the third from the corner, on the left heading west from Hoffman’s Road. It is two doors from St John Bosco’s parish school, church and presbytery, which covers twelve house blocks. Then there is a cross-street. The third house from this corner – still on the left heading west – is number thirty nine. It belongs to a family that some locals suspect was the hitman’s target.
Most people in the street are original ‘settlers’ from the early 1950s, and are now grandparents. Jane Thurgood-Dove was one of few women in the street with school-age children.
One of only three young mothers living on her side of the street is Carmel Kypri, who has occupied number thirty nine with her husband Peter since the mid-1980s. Peter Kypri has renovated their weatherboard – making it one of the best houses on the street – and keeps it spotlessly tidy. But in some circles he is not popular.
The reasons for this are buried deep in muttered conversations. Muriel Street folk are a friendly lot, but Peter Kypri isn’t, they say.
But it’s not only neighbours who dislike Peter Kypri. Much heavier people have disliked him enough to plan his murder.
Enter Philip Peters, a greedy, crooked lawyer who claimed Kypri had cost him $200,000 in an insurance scam that went wrong. Peters was taped plotting Kypri’s abduction and murder ‘because the bastard has pinched $200,000 of stock’. Peters told associates he arranged for Kypri to steal computer equipment from his (Peters’) office so he could claim insurance, but then found the policy was void because he hadn’t paid the premiums. Peters was very unhappy.
In a police operation codenamed ‘Soli’ detectives foiled the murder plan and saved Kypri’s life. They succeeded because the man Peters recruited to kill Kypri became a police agent and provided evidence that resulted in the conviction of the former solicitor.
Peters’ plan was for his partner, known as ‘John’, to lure Kypri into a bogus $200,000 marijuana deal, drug him with a sedative, and take him to a farmhouse at St Arnaud in central Victoria, where he would be tortured in a hidden cellar, then killed. Peters ordered John, a butcher by trade, to cut Kypri’s body into pieces for easy disposal and to prevent identification.
The police transcript reads in part:
John: ‘Yeah, well, you said that the other day, and you know, it makes sense. How’s he gonna be killed? You said you were gonna do it.’
Peters: ‘Well, I thought you might do it, John. You know how to cut up sheep.’
John: ‘Yeah.’
Peters: ‘There’s no difference.’
Operation Soli revealed that Kypri had more than one enemy. Peters claimed, in one of many secretly-recorded conversations, that another gangster had taken a contract out on Kypri’s life.
Peters: ‘He was going to vanish totally.’
John: ‘As in totally dead, dead?’
Peters: ‘Dead, dead. Well, he has pinched so much from so many people that the world – you would get a medal … Yeah, well, Danny has, I believe – no, not has, had – put a contract out on him … I made some inquiries and Danny had apparently put a contract out on him two years ago.’
John: ‘Yeah.’
Peters: ‘The bloke took Danny’s money, then told Kypri.’
John: ‘They’re not going to find the body, are they?’
Peters: ‘Nuh, Nuh, they’re not gonna find anything.’
John, who later gave evidence against Peters, said in an interview with the authors that Kypri was an unpleasant man with many enemies and deliberately gave the impression he was connected with the underworld.
‘He always said he carried a gun. I didn’t see it, but he showed me the bullets. He was a calculating type, and a loner. He had the reputation that if you needed anything done, he could do it.’ When John visited Kypri’s home in Muriel Street he learned that the family had its own alarm code. If Peter Kypri saw a strange car in the street, he would give a particular whistle. This was the signal for his wife and children to lock themselves indoors immediately.
Kypri took other elaborate precautions. He always backed his vehicles into the drive, ready for a fast getaway, and insisted visitors not block his escape route by parking in front of his car.
John has since left the shadowy world of Peters and Kypri. But, when he saw the picture of Jane Thurgood-Dove, it reminded him a little of Kypri’s hairdresser wife, Carmel. ‘They had the same facial features and same hairstyle. Camel’s hair was more fawn than blonde, but they were very similar.
‘And when I saw her on Australia’s Most Wanted the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.’
A policeman who knows Kypri well says he ‘would have plenty of enemies’. Another said he would like to be known as a mover and shaker and would relish his local notoriety. ‘He’d be loving it.’
But neighbours claim the Kypris became even more cautious about the family’s security in the months before the murder. Whereas they once let their two children play in the street, the pair began to be driven to and from the local secondary school, were rarely seen outside and often taken away from the house for hours in the early evening.
Carmel Kypri runs a hairdressing business from a converted garage at the rear of the property. Her husband has dozens of brand new tyres stacked in the drive, in the spot where he once kept an expensive boat that neighbours say was stolen and burned.
The house has a heavy mesh security door through which a visitor can barely see the occupant. All that can be seen of Carmel Kypri when she comes to the door is the glint of large gold earrings through the grille.
Mrs Kypri agrees with her neighbours that Jane Thurgood-Dove’s murder was ‘probably’ a case of mistaken identity. ‘If it wasn’t meant for her it makes you wonder,’ she says. ‘It has made us wary. My husband says to watch out when we come into the drive, to look around the place.’
She volunteers that ‘it’s a pretty “old” street. There aren’t many young mothers here … me, her and Sue down that end.
‘They (the Thurgood-Doves) seemed like a close-knit family. When I first heard about it I thought it might be road rage, but then I heard they’d been watching her.
‘I keep the door locked. Maybe it was for us. Who knows? But you can’t let it stop your life. The kids still go to school.
‘If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, but we try not to worry. We are a bit more wary, that’s all.’
The puzzle facing police is this. If Jane Thurgood-Dove was the wrong woman, how could professional hitmen who stalked their quarry for two days make such a fundamental blunder?
The truth is that so-called ‘professional’ hitmen are often criminal misfits who will kill strangers for a few thousand dollars, risking a life sentence for no more money than a competent burglar can steal by breaking into a shop.
Homicide files contain many proven cases of incompetent killers who have hit the wrong person. In 1984 a harmless citizen called Lindsay Simpson was executed by career criminal Ray ‘Red Rat’ Pollitt at Lower Plenty. The target of the hit was drug dealer Alan Williams, Simpson’s brother-in-law.
Another criminal’s brother-in-law, Norman McLeod, was shot dead as he left his Coolaroo home on his way to work in July, 1981. The unknown gunman mistook McLeod for his brother-in-law Vincent Mikkelsen, one of three men charged and later acquitted of killing painter and docker Leslie Herbert Kane.
Meanwhile, investigators are striving to unravel a case that promised in the first hours to be another ‘domestic’ murder, but which now baffles them.
When Jane Thurgood-Dove was murdered, police acted within seconds of the first call that shots had been fired near the school in Muriel Street. The first officers on the scene called in the homicide squad. The on-call section, crew five, was sent.
The detectives’ first priority was to secure the scene and ensure the victim’s distressed children were looked after. It was two hours before they went to the Campbellfield packaging factory where the dead woman’s husband worked as a foreman.
Homicide detectives chose to deliver the message personally for two reasons. One was that they are experienced at dealing with shattered relatives of murder victims. More importantly, they wanted to observe first-hand Mark Thurgood-Dove’s reaction to the worst news he’d ever hear.
When a woman with no criminal connections is murdered, the first person police want to talk to is her husband, de facto or lover. Most murders are ‘domestics’, with people killed either by – or for – someone close to them. The most common motives are jealousy and greed.
Just before knock-off time at the factory, detectives went quietly to the boss’s office and made discreet inquiries.
Had Mark slipped out during the day? Had he been moody or distracted? The answer was no. Mark Thurgood-Dove was a man with no secrets.
The firm’s trusted foreman was then called into the office and told the terrible news. Police went to talk to the most likely suspect, but what they found was a devastated man who had lost the woman he loved.
Victims rarely take secrets to the grave. Detectives scour their personal history for any clue. In such cases, possible murder motives are often easily established. Was the marriage on the rocks? Was the victim’s life heavily insured? Were there financial problems?
But not this time. In the first few weeks, detectives found nothing to indicate that Mark and Jane Thurgood-Dove were anything other than the loving couple they appeared to be.
But police knew that if they dug deep enough there would always be secrets to be unearthed. Perhaps more than one.
It is the human condition.