The Crime that Shocked Victoria

The Assassination of Jane Thurgood-Dove

John Magill wants to live to be over 100 years of age so that he can see the men involved in his daughter’s brutal murder brought to justice.

Mr Magill’s youngest daughter Jane Thurgood-Dove, 35, was executed in the driveway of her suburban Melbourne home – in front of her three children – after she had picked them up from school on 6 November 1997.

Until that moment, Jane was an ordinary mum and wife. She shared a weatherboard home with her husband Mark in a quiet street just minutes from where she grew up in Niddrie, 13 kilometres northwest of Melbourne’s CBD. You couldn’t get more typically suburban than the Thurgood-Doves. They quietly and lovingly went about their daily lives like hundreds of thousands of other Aussie families. Mark was a factory foreman, and Jane had stopped working when her first child was born, her days busy with the school run and the endless tasks that make up family life.

Police know a great deal about the crime after thousands of hours of investigations over the years but they have not been able to bring the killers to justice … yet.

The murder of the suburban wife and mother shocked Victorians and to this day remains one of the crimes that haunt police. Mention the name ‘Jane Thurgood-Dove’ and most Victorians who were old enough to remember the news coverage immediately recall the front pages of the newspapers that ran the photo of the naturally pretty woman, with blonde-and-caramel-highlighted hair and bright eyes. A much-published photo, taken earlier in 1997, shows Jane, with her three children. Her son, 10 when his mum died, smiles broadly for the camera. Her daughters aged two and five, cuddle up close to their mum. The horror of the murder – a woman gunned down in front of her children – sickened the state and seemed to baffle police.

I met the Magills at Niddrie Village Shopping Centre in April 2013 and as we headed towards the car park, they greeted at least five people along the way in the few minutes it took.

The family is well known and respected in the area. Mr Magill, 79, was a butcher and for many years managed a popular butchers shop in Moonee Ponds, a few suburbs away from Niddrie. He had only just retired in 1996, the year before the murder.

‘The community, the people we’ve known for years, closed in around us and protected us,’ Mrs Magill, 78, said.

I was invited to the Magills’ home and we spent several hours speaking about Jane’s murder and what life has been like since. The couple raised their three daughters there – Jane was the baby of the family – and on the door frames of the kitchen there are pencil markings noting the heights of the girls over the years.

The Magills have been married for 58 years and moved into their home the day after their wedding.

Sitting at their dining table – the same one that held countless family dinners over the years – I wondered about Jane’s children, who are now young adults. Their smiling faces beam out from photos on the walls and shelves.

Jane’s murder was a professional hit gone wrong. In the same street lived a convicted criminal and his wife, Peter and Carmel Kyprianou.

Police believe that the wife, who was said to resemble Jane and also drove a four-wheel drive, was the real target of the hit, which was a payback from underworld figures who had a grudge against her husband.

The couples did not know each other and the Kyprianous moved away from the street not long after Jane’s murder.

Mr Magill said he had been told that in the days after the murder, neighbours told the police canvassing the area that the Kyprianous would have been the intended target of a shooting, not Mrs Thurgood-Dove.

At least four men were involved in the fatal shooting – the gunman, the driver of the getaway car, the person who stole the car and the organiser of the cold-blooded hit.

The gunman, described as ‘pot-bellied’, chased Jane around her four-wheel drive, as her three children looked on from inside the car. The gunman callously shot Jane when she tripped and fell, then he ran to a silver-blue Holden Commodore, which sped away. The burnt-out wreck of the car, stolen from inner-city Carlton a few days prior, was found in nearby Farrell Street. It is believed that the men switched to a white Commodore.

The gunman undoubtedly stalked Mrs Thurgood-Dove in the days before her murder. Several witnesses had seen the car that carried the men to the murder the day before near the school attended by two of her three children. Mr Magill said he thinks the men were watching his daughter the night before her death – when she was at their home to celebrate his birthday.

The Magills said there is not a moment that goes by where Jane is not in their thoughts.

Mrs Magill recalled the horrific moment they found out that their daughter had died. The night before, the whole family had celebrated Mr Magill’s birthday and they shared what would become their last goodnight kiss to their daughter as she left for her Muriel Street home, just minutes away. His birthday has ceased to have much meaning for Mr Magill since then as each one reminds him of his precious daughter’s murder and the fact that those involved are still unpunished.

Mrs Magill said she was pottering around the kitchen and preparing dinner when she heard the police helicopter flying loud and low. The couple went out to the street, as did other residents, to see what was going on. Little did the Magills know that the police activity was to do with their family just streets away.

‘We’d had dinner and there was a knock at the door,’ Mrs Magill said.

‘John had answered the door and he said it sounded serious and we asked the police inside. They asked if we had a daughter Jane and then we were told she had been shot and had died,’ she said.

‘It was just like that, so blunt, though I can’t imagine how you would ever deliver that sort of news to anyone.’

The couple are angry and frustrated and worried that justice will never be done.

‘I’ve thought of nothing else but Jane’s death and going for the person who is ultimately responsible for it,’ Mr Magill said. ‘That’s why I want to live to well over 100. Under normal circumstances, situations like Jane’s death doesn’t happen with families like ours.’

Mrs Magill added, ‘But it does – look what happened to us.’

Another murder, with some connections to Jane’s, occurred in 2000 and showed that though rare, innocent people can get caught in the web of the underworld with fatal consequences.

Keith Allan was a suburban solicitor who was murdered in 2000. Though his body had not been found, three men, including Keith’s law clerk, Julian Clarke, were convicted in 2007 of his murder and sentenced to jail terms in excess of 20 years. Clarke had stolen at least $420 000 from the law firm’s trust account. Keith had eventually discovered the fraud and Clarke organised to have his boss killed.

Peter Kyprianou’s cousin, Costas Athanasi was one of Keith’s killers and he is currently serving 25 years for his main role in organising the murder. Mr Allan had represented Kyprianou in a 1999 assault case.

Mrs Magill said Jane was a devoted mother and wife. ‘She would help at her children’s primary school doing reading with students and they loved her,’ Mrs Magill said. ‘Jane was always thoughtful.’

Mrs Magill shared one memory of Jane’s thoughtfulness: In mid-1997, the Magills embarked on a dream six-week tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. The couple arrived in Paris on Mrs Magill’s birthday and waiting for her at the hotel reception was a card from Jane.

‘Jane had contacted the tour operator and found out what hotel we would be staying in. That was her all over.’

Jane would have been 50 on St Patrick’s Day, 2013.

Mr Magill pulled out a thick binder of news clipping on the murder and recalled the battles they have had to get the police to increase the reward for information that could lead to a breakthrough in the case. He has painstakingly kept a diary of events since 6 November 1997.

Mr Magill said he was always of the opinion that a large reward was a key factor in getting people to talk about who was involved in his daughter’s assassination.

Mrs Magill said in the late 1990s, the then Victorian premier Jeff Kennett rang them directly to offer his personal and government’s support in whatever they needed.

She said when the couple mentioned that there seemed to be some issues with getting a reward approved, Mr Kennett told them he would see to it. Not long after, a reward of $100 000 was offered. But Mr Magill always felt the money needed to be more to get serious intelligence.

Now, there is a $1 million dollar reward on offer for information that leads to a conviction. In fact, if didn’t take long for greed to motivate someone with information because the day the unprecedented reward was first announced in 2003, police received a vital tip on the identity of the gunman.

That gunman was allegedly ex-Rebels Motorcycle Club member Steven John Mordy. He had died from heart disease, aged 39, in 2000 after years of abusing his body and mind with amphetamines and booze. His close associate Jamie Reynolds was believed to have stolen the getaway car. He is also thought to have been waiting at the spot where they torched the vehicle and then drove Mr Mordy and another man away. Police had been on the verge of questioning Mr Reynolds for his part in the murder when he drowned in a boating accident in 2004.

Such is the police’s determination to solve Jane’s murder that they have also offered immunity to a veteran criminal with bikie connections if he testifies against the person who ordered the execution. The man they want to speak to was the driver of the car that drove the killer to and from Muriel Street.

The Magills are angry about the length of time it took to definitely establish that the murder was a mistaken-identity killing. The hope that they held, even a decade on from their daughter’s death, is fading fast.

In the early years after Jane’s death, police focused on a theory that a police officer was involved in the murder of the Niddrie mum. The policeman – who lived just streets away from the Thurgood-Doves and was interviewed several times over the murder (he reportedly failed a lie detector test) – was for a time the prime suspect who police theorised had ordered a hit on Jane because of thwarted romantic feelings.

The man, who was known to the family and moved in some of the same circles, was reportedly obsessed with Jane.

Mrs Magill said she knew the policeman in question and had even met with him a few months after her daughter’s death.

‘He was infatuated with Jane and he was probably in love with her,’ Mrs Magill said. ‘But she was happily married and had the kids.’

‘After I’d sat down with him to talk, I knew he had nothing to do with Jane’s murder,’ she said. ‘I straight out asked him if he had anything to do with it. [The police] zeroed in too much on this man as the suspect.’

It was also reported that Jane had a ‘dark secret’. When I brought this up for discussion, Mrs Magill shook her head and scoffed. ‘That was absolute rubbish,’ she said. She feels it was a diversion that stole precious police investigation time from finding the true culprits.

A teacher at the kindergarten the children had attended came forward to police with information that a year prior, Jane had said ‘everybody has secrets, even me’.

‘We didn’t even know her and she was speaking on our family’s behalf,’ Mrs Magill said. ‘It was most probably a throwaway comment by Jane.’

Mrs Magill became a volunteer in the court system as a support worker after Jane’s death. She wanted to help other families who were victims of crime and assist in navigating the confusing and painful twists and turns of the legal process. Nowadays, she volunteers one day a week at the Victorian Coroner’s Court.

Through their painful experience, the Magills have become friends with other parents of Victorian homicide victims such as George and Christina Halvagis, whose daughter Mersina was stabbed to death as she was tending to her grandmother’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery in October 1997. Serial killer Peter Dupas is serving three life sentences and is never to be released for the murders of Mersina and two other women. They also got to know Roger and Joy Membrey through their shared pain of losing their daughters. The Membreys’ daughter Elisabeth, then 22, vanished from her Ringwood home in 1994. Elisabeth’s body has never been found. Shane Bond was found not guilty of her murder and manslaughter in 2012.

Victoria Police detective Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles is now the head of the state’s newly reformed Cold Case Unit. The Magills said his dedication to solving the case was unquestionable, but they felt angry about why it had been so hard to try to get justice.

‘I always say, you can do anything in Victoria because you won’t be punished,’ Mrs Magill said.

The Magills showed me a home video, filmed on Easter Sunday, 1997. It is a much-cherished memento of their life before Jane’s cold-blooded assassination. Jane would be dead by the end of the year.

‘That was when we were happy,’ Mrs Magill commented to me as she lovingly watched her family laugh and talk and help Jane and her husband Mark’s children find Easter eggs hidden around the house and backyard. It was such a picture of normal family life. I couldn’t stop thinking that the beautiful young mum I was watching in the video would be on the front pages of newspapers just months later, an innocent victim of Victoria’s underworld.

In the video, Jane is revelling in her children’s delight at their Easter egg hauls. There are playful scenes of Jane and one of her sisters re-enacting the Irish dancing phenomenon of the late 1990s Riverdance and of Jane making paper hats for her kids.

Later on in the night, Mr Magill captured his three daughters dancing to the Crowded House song ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’. Jane is swaying to the song and then cheekily arching her back out of the frame of the video camera.

‘For a long time after if I heard that song anywhere it would reduce me to a tearful mess,’ Mrs Magill said. ‘Then a while ago I was in a clothes shop and thinking how much Jane would have liked some of the things in there and the song came on. That was my daughter who I carried and bore and protected for all those years.

‘I’ll never forget and I will never forgive.’

Driving me to the tram stop, Mr Magill said, ‘People talk a lot about “moving on” but how do you do that after your child is murdered? Until people become a victim of the homicide of a loved one they will never, ever understand. We can never move on.

‘I can’t die before I see justice for my Jane.’