‘He’s a monster, you don’t know what he’s like.’
IN HIS 22 years as a fireman, Brian Thompson had attended many tragic accidents, but there was something about the scene that day – where a young mother was crushed under her own car – that left him with a lasting sense of unease.
At first Thompson was too busy looking for signs of life to worry about the cause of death. But when he couldn’t find a pulse and the victim’s skin was cold to the touch, he told a neighbour frantically trying to use his own jack to lift the car that it was too late. She was gone.
Anne Louise Crawford, former primary school teacher and mother of two young children, lay dead under her 1983 brown Ford Fairlane. The car had apparently slipped off the jack as she scrambled for a wheel nut under the sedan while trying to change the driver’s side front tyre on the morning of May 6, 1988.
The sedan dropped, crushing her skull and killing her instantly – the momentum was so powerful that it flattened the bottom of the metal front disk on impact with the concrete floor. When he realised there was nothing he could do, Thompson glanced around the carport of the neat suburban home in De Havilland Avenue, Strathmore Heights. He saw a stray wheel nut near the sump, a tyre on the ground next to the car and a second leaning against the house. It fitted perfectly the theory that the victim, 35, was changing a tyre when the car slipped.
He also noticed the jack was poorly constructed and covered in what he described as ‘oriental writing’ – not the standard issue for the Australian-made Ford.
It looked like a straightforward case of a momentary lapse of judgment combined with unimaginable bad luck. That is, until the veteran fireman walked over and felt the two tyres. ‘They were both obviously flat,’ he would later recall.
Why, he wondered, would someone struggle to change a tyre with a dodgy jack when the spare was also useless? It didn’t make sense and quickly became the talk of some of the emergency workers at the scene.
‘This was the subject of discussion between myself and other people,’ he said.
Another man used to trying to find order in chaos was ambulance officer Greg Sassella, who would rise through the ranks to become chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Ambulance Service.
After the firemen used emergency airbags to gently lift the car to free the body, he immediately saw the crushing injuries that ended Anne Crawford’s life.
He escorted the body to the Coroner’s Court, where he noticed an unexplained injury. Four small bruises at the back of her left bicep described as ‘in the shape of four fingertips’.
It was as if a right-handed attacker had grabbed her roughly by the arm. It could have been a vital clue if police were looking. But they weren’t.
A cursory examination of the scene by a trained detective would have raised further suspicions – such as why a woman with a reputation for neatness would choose to change from the tracksuit she wore during her morning walk into freshly laundered camel slacks and white shirt before attempting to change a filthy tyre.
And why, if she was under the car searching for a wheel nut when she was crushed, she was found flat on her back.
Or how the safe Ford-issue jack had mysteriously gone missing and would never be recovered. Or why two photographs in the hallway inside the house had been displaced as if knocked in a struggle.
An expert may have noticed that the victim’s perfect set of pinkish-brown false fingernails had been damaged, leaving the right index one missing.
A homicide investigator may have considered that the nail could have been lost while Anne Crawford fought for her life before she was placed unconscious under her own car and then crushed.
The area would have been declared a crime scene and a search would have been ordered to look for evidence, including the missing false fingernail and the Ford jack.
Perhaps the search would have found the pillowcase carelessly tossed on a pile of clothes in the laundry by a killer who used it to cover her face when he bashed her unconscious before he positioned her under the car to make murder look like misadventure.
But there were no detectives called. Local uniform police attended and declared it an accident. From the day of the tragedy the case seemed as dead as the unfortunate victim.
Perhaps they were swayed by the superficial. This was a nice family, living in a nice street in a nice neighbourhood. Best not to pry too deeply and further upset the family and friends of the poor woman who lost her life. There were no pictures taken, no search ordered and no forensic examination undertaken. The car was removed to be sold just weeks later to an air force officer in Canberra and the fire brigade hosed down the concrete carport floor to remove any sign of blood that would disturb and traumatise Anne Crawford’s husband and children.
Later, when police decided to take another look, they found the crime scene was hopelessly compromised.
From the beginning, there were many clues that this was no accident.
But it would take police eighteen years to prove it was murder.
THE only witness who could explain to police the events that led to the death of Anne Crawford was her husband, Ron. A chemist with a strange nature, an entrepreneurial flair and a wandering eye, he was building a growing business of retail pharmacies.
According to Crawford, his wife was backing out of their long drive with their two children about 8.10am when he noticed the car was scraping on the ground from a flat tyre.
Anne slowly drove back into the carport and, according to his version of events (which would later change), he opened the boot and removed the spare tyre. He then looked for the jack and found it to be missing.
‘I asked Anne where the jack was, and she wasn’t able to remember what happened to it.’
He then planned to change the tyre so he grabbed the jack from his Toyota Landcruiser. But realising he was running late for work he decided to return to the job later. They took their young son to school and their daughter to kindergarten in the Toyota.
He dropped Anne home after she bought some milk, kissed her goodbye and told her, ‘I will be home before lunch so just leave everything and I’ll fix it’.
Later Crawford’s story subtly changed. When he was questioned, rather than just being allowed to tell his story, he wouldn’t be able to recall who opened the boot and who removed the spare tyre – avoiding the sticking point of why he did not notice the second tyre was flat and unusable.
In his second version, he claimed his wife declared she wanted to change the tyre, although he insisted he would do it by lunchtime. He said that when she had replaced a wheel two months earlier (implying she lost the Ford issue jack in the process), he had chastised her, stating he felt it was his job.
The subtext was obvious: the dutiful husband was available to fix the problem while the headstrong wife took on a job beyond her capabilities, with tragic consequences.
While stopping short of declaring it was her fault, he made it clear it certainly wasn’t his.
When he drove up his street around 11.45 to change the tyre as promised, he saw the fire brigade and ambulance outside his house.
As he approached, Thompson gently placed a hand against his chest and guided him away. No husband should be allowed to see his wife in such a devastating scene.
Crawford would tell sympathetic police they had been happily married for thirteen years and were busy planning for the future with their son, seven, and daughter, four. They had bought a large block and were planning to build their dream home.
It would be nearly a month before police started to think that perhaps Anne Crawford’s death was more sinister than first thought.
While some close to the Crawfords had their immediate doubts and the death had become the gossip of the neighbourhood, the reason for the police re-examination came from a seemingly unlikely source.
It was when a notorious armed robber tried to cut a deal by providing police with information on unsolved crimes and began to talk about the death of Anne Crawford.
The armed robber said Ronald William Edward Crawford, successful chemist, devoted family man and now grieving widower, had effectively put his wife’s life out for tender and had been trying to find a violent criminal to take the contract for years.
The armed robber would claim he had been offered (and refused) the contract for $25,000.
The new information was passed to Detective Sergeant John Johnstone, an experienced investigator who could smell a rat and was trained to deal with them.
Police investigations would find the middle-class chemist had several unexplained links to the underworld. His connections were intriguing. He was an associate of bandit Frankie Valastro (who was shot dead by police in 1987), the armed robber talking to police, and another violent criminal who can only be identified as PS.
The armed robber told detectives that he’d been shot in 1984 and Crawford had provided him with drugs and arranged medical treatment through a Moonee Ponds doctor who would not report the incident to police.
Crawford was a shooter who kept several firearms at home. The armed robber-turned-informer claimed the chemist provided him with a .38 revolver for a stick-up in 1984.
Johnstone was able to establish that the chemist drove to Bendigo Prison twice to visit PS, signing in using the alias Jonathan Hart from his favourite television show, Hart to Hart.
In the series, self-made millionaire Hart and his beautiful wife are amateur detectives who are in constant danger from serious criminals. When asked by Johnstone why he had visited the notorious prisoner, Crawford replied: ‘He was lonely.’ Prison records show the middle-class chemist visited the career criminal in jail at least four times.
The prisoner told police the chemist had bought him a new pair of runners on each visit. Such acts of generosity seemed out of character for a man who was known to be careful with his money.
PS told police Crawford was well known in the underworld and provided drugs for some of his criminal contacts, but he said he had no knowledge of a murder contract on Anne Crawford.
There was another point that interested Johnstone about the prison visits. The seemingly happily married man turned up at jail with his mistress – or at least one of them.
He would tell Johnstone that while he had multiple affairs, he was happily married. ‘He stated that at times he had the best of both worlds,’ the investigator said.
Johnstone dug deeper and found Crawford had hired a car from Hertz the day before the death but did not return the car to the Tullamarine depot. It was collected the day after Anne’s death from the rooftop car park of the Westfield Shopping Centre in Airport West, where Crawford had a chemist shop.
The keys were in the car and the doors were unlocked – it was another action out of character for Crawford, who was known to be security conscious. It had travelled 301 kilometres.
Much later, police would speculate Crawford drove the car 150 kilometres to Euroa, where he paid PS $10,000 to kill his wife, before returning to the shopping centre.
As part of the investigation, a police expert from the accident investigation squad used a police car and the Toyota jack to reconstruct the death.
He found the jack stiff to use and suggested ‘a female could have trouble raising the vehicle sufficiently to clear the wheel for removal’.
He also found the jack, designed for an off-road vehicle with a higher wheelbase, could only be placed under the Ford at a point where it did not fit safely. While it initially remained stable, once Senior Sergeant Robert Le Guier rocked the car sideways, it immediately slipped from the jack.
Certainly, Crawford was deeply disturbed about Johnstone’s investigation. So much so that he hid in a friend’s house to eavesdrop as the detective interviewed the potential witness. Certainly, at times, he behaved like a man who expected to be charged with murder.
Some of the initial actions of the grief-stricken husband started to take on sinister overtones. Such as why he fought against an autopsy, why he refused to allow family members to view the body and why he demanded a cremation when other members of his family were buried.
Johnstone’s 27-page statement, which included a record of interview with Crawford, was a damning document that would have exposed the husband as a womaniser who was suspected of organising his wife’s murder.
But it didn’t.
Coroner Harley Harber – no doubt concerned that the allegations against Crawford were not corroborated – ordered the court closed when Johnstone gave evidence. Harber made a finding that Anne Crawford died when she was crushed under her car while changing a tyre after she crawled under the vehicle to retrieve a wheel-nut. ‘I further find that the deceased contributed to the cause of death.’
Officially Anne Crawford was to blame for her own death – at that stage there was no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Crawford left the court in 1989 with his reputation intact. For the moment.
CRAWFORD was an unhappy child who grew from a painfully shy, hardworking adolescent into a brooding adult driven by the need for financial success.
Born with no pectoral muscles on the left side of his chest and a wasted left arm, he was teased as a child growing up in Pascoe Vale and was self-conscious about his disabilities. ‘Kids can be cruel,’ he would reflect.
But there was one girl, Anne Bravo, three years his junior at Hadfield High School, who could see beyond his disability. ‘Anne and I met at high school. We were high school sweethearts,’ he told his Supreme Court murder jury in 2006.
They married on December 28,1974, and had their first child nearly six years later.
Sexually inexperienced when they married, he would later admit to three affairs during his marriage, but he maintained he was hardworking, loved his wife and children and believed his infidelities would not damage his marriage if Anne remained none the wiser.
But when one girlfriend learnt of another, the results were catastrophic. In November 1985, she rang his wife. Crawford would tell the jury: ‘Anne was very, very upset; she was devastated because she had no idea of my relationship with Pauline. She didn’t suspect it.’
Perhaps she would have been even more upset if she’d known how he referred to her (according to one of his lovers) as ‘horse head’ and ‘boot face’ – never Anne.
The man who was mercilessly teased at school over his disabilities had apparently forgotten the venom of harsh words.
He would later say he and Anne were battling through the tough times and were emerging from the darkness when she died in the accident. He claimed that in her final three days they talked about their problems, staying up late the night before the ‘accident’.
When asked by his lawyer: ‘Did you resolve your issues?’ Crawford responded: ‘I thought we did. I thought we covered everything.’
He claimed he agreed to join her in counselling (she was already seeing an expert through the Catholic Church), promised to end his ‘friendship’ with his lover and began to plan an overseas holiday for that September. In fact, he said, she was to have passport photos taken on the day she died.
Of course the only person who could verify the chemist’s claims was his wife – but she had been silenced eighteen years earlier.
There was another version. According to the prosecution, Anne Crawford was on the verge of demanding a divorce – a move that would cripple her husband’s expanding chemist business. The prosecution claimed she confided to a friend that her unfaithful husband was ‘a bastard’ and she intended to leave him.
She would never have the chance.
When one relative urged her to stay in the marriage for the sake of the children she said, ‘He’s a monster, you don’t know what he’s like’.
For a man who claimed to be shattered by the death, Ron Crawford made a remarkably quick recovery. Within days of the funeral, he rang the woman he promised his wife he would never see again and asked her to go shopping to buy some clothes for his daughter.
He would not remarry, although he would father a child with another woman.
He would buy a country farm, rent the De Havilland Avenue house and own an Essendon home valued at $1.5 million.
He eventually sold his chemist shops for a total, police estimate, of around $10 million.
On a school reunion internet site, he portrayed himself as part-mogul and part-martyr, declaring he had ‘entered the world of retail pharmacy at Ravech Pharmacy in North Coburg, then expanded the retail “vision” with sites in Airport West, Wantirna, Vermont South, Reservoir, in between raised my children after Anne’s tragic death. Now still working five days and two days on the farm’.
The boy who had been teased at school seemed to be saying that he had beaten the odds.
Aged in his 50s, he was able to afford the dream of many middle-aged men – a high-performance imported car with personalised plates. He chose RC-88: his initials, curiously added to the year of his wife’s death.
Some detectives suspect the letters were a dark, phonetic private joke about him getting away with murder – Arsey 88.
But while Crawford was getting on with his life, a woman connected with the underworld knew the true story and was quietly stewing.
She knew it was no accident because she also knew it was her ex-husband who all those years ago had accepted the contract to kill.
In 2003, fifteen years after Anne Crawford’s death, when it seemed destined to remain the perfect murder, she made a call to the homicide squad. Eventually the information was handed to the specialist cold case crew and finally murder investigators began to examine the case.
The cold case crew of the Melbourne homicide squad (since disbanded in a police reshuffle) was used to spending years reconstructing murder investigations.
Using new methods, such as DNA testing, on old crimes, the detectives’ aim was to time warp buried cases into modern investigations.
But when Detective Sergeant Mark Colbert and Senior Detectives David Butler and Wayne Newman were assigned the case, they must have thought it was destined to remain a mystery.
What they had was the ex-wife of a career criminal declaring her ex-husband had been contracted to kill Anne Crawford.
But what they didn’t have was a body, as the victim had been cremated, nor did they have forensics from the scene, as the area was never treated as a crime scene, or even officially a murder, as a coroner had declared her death accidental.
They knew that if Ron Crawford had organised the murder, he was unlikely to confess. But they also knew that allies drift apart, friends grow distant and discarded lovers can become ferocious enemies.
They approached one of his old girlfriends, who opened up, saying, ‘He’s gotten away with it for too long. Anne didn’t deserve it … I know that Ron Crawford did it’.
She had worked in one of his pharmacies from 1979 to 1985 and at first she’d found him cold and rude.
The female staff members called the tall and cold chemist ‘Lurch’ after the near-silent butler in the 1960s Addams Family television series.
But despite her initial judgment, she started to see a softer side in him. When she was sick in 1982, he sent her flowers and they soon became lovers.
She told police that over the next three years, he spoke constantly of getting rid of his wife. She said he estimated it would cost $5000 to have her killed or $10,000 to make sure her body was never found.
She gave sworn evidence that he told her of several plans he had considered, such as rewiring the toaster so she would be electrocuted, dropping the hairdryer in her bath, having her run over by a truck or tossing her from a balcony of an apartment building in Queensland.
When she suggested the less radical approach of a simple divorce, she claimed he responded that he’d ‘worked too hard to lose anything’.
‘Why should she get half of his money when he’s worked so hard and why should she get the kids?’ the ex-lover described Crawford’s rhetorical question.
In January 1985, he took out an MLC life insurance policy to update the $20,000 they had taken out two months after they married. With interest, he received $79,029 when she died.
His half-baked plans could have appeared to be the rantings of an angry man and not the thoughts of a ruthless one.
After all, the hair-brained murder schemes appeared to have all been borrowed from B-grade Hollywood thrillers.
But Anne Crawford didn’t die in any of the ways her husband discussed – she died in what would appear to have been a one-in-a-million accident.
But in Strathmore lightning does appear to strike twice. Eleven months to the day before Anne Crawford died, a young man, aged just twenty, was killed when the car he was working under slipped off a ramp in the carport of his home.
It was in Boeing Street, which joins De Havilland Avenue about 200 metres from the Crawford home.
It had been the talk of the area, particularly since Anne’s best friend lived opposite the house.
It was an obvious and graphic warning to locals to remain rigidly safety conscious when working under cars.
But, according to police, it was more than that. They claim that for Crawford, it was a light bulb moment – the beginning of a plan that almost worked.
FOR the cold case crew, the former girlfriend’s recollections may have been graphic but they were uncorroborated. In the eyes of the law, Crawford was still the grieving widower.
So rather than rely on hard evidence, they slowly began to build the pressure on the main players, hoping the targets would implicate themselves by their present actions to a crime committed fifteen years earlier.
While at first they gathered information and slivers of evidence in secret, by 2004 they were ready to run an open campaign. They began to contact friends and relatives of Crawford, making it clear they were reinvestigating his wife’s death.
It was a case of firing a shot just to see which way the rabbits would run.
Police spoke to PS’s father, saying they wanted to speak to his son about an old case but stop short of providing any details. The father rang the suspected contract killer to say detectives were looking for him and within 25 minutes PS rang Crawford to talk.
He obviously had no doubts about which case was important enough to reopen so many years later.
As the pressure built, Crawford spoke to confidantes, declaring he didn’t want to be subjected to another investigation.
But why would a man who believed his wife died accidentally, be worried about a new investigation and why didn’t he wonder why police thought there was a link to PS and the death?
A go-between rang PS to tell him that Crawford intended to refuse to answer police questions when he was interviewed. The message was clear to the career criminal. Everyone should remain silent and the investigation would probably die.
But PS was not the same man who coolly took a contract to kill a woman he didn’t know. He had become a police protected witness who had given evidence against some of the most vicious criminals in the state as part of the Walsh Street trial where four men were charged and acquitted over the 1988 murders of police constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre. He had been given a new name and a new life, declaring he was finished with crime.
Now he knew that if he was charged and convicted of the murder, he faced a life in prison and Crawford could walk.
He decided, not for the first time, to get in first.
Just ten weeks into the pressure cooker phase of the operation, PS was interviewed by detectives and admitted he killed Anne Crawford for $10,000 in cash.
He claimed to police that when he walked up the drive, Crawford had already left the car jacked up, with the front tyre removed as arranged.
(Police allege Crawford deflated the second tyre to make sure the vehicle couldn’t be fixed before the hit man arrived.)
He rang the front door bell and when Anne answered he grabbed her by the left arm (leaving the four bruises) and forced her back to the lounge room.
He said he placed a pillowcase over her head, punched her in the jaw, knocking her unconscious. He then carried her to the car, placed her under the chassis and just pushed the side of the car so the jack would slip out – exactly as the police reconstruction in 1988 showed.
According to the prosecution, PS rang Crawford from a phone box with the coded message that the murder was complete, saying he couldn’t catch up that day because his car was ‘stuffed’.
PS pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to a minimum of twelve years jail. It was a light sentence for such a cold-blooded hit but he received a discount because he pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Crawford.
According to one of Crawford’s former girlfriends, when he was considering killing his wife he bragged that his friends inside the police force would protect him.
He told one of his girlfriends, ‘I could do it and get away with it. I’ve got plenty of copper mates who would help me out and cover it up.’ His relationship with ‘copper mates’ resulted in his first trial being aborted on August 23, 2006 as a result of a former policeman friend approaching a member of the jury the previous night in a suburban pub.
The former policeman, an ex-boxer, had been in court watching the case and supporting his mate. He left the police force in 1988 – a few months after Anne’s death.
For a man trained in court proceedings to approach a juror was – at the very least – an act of breathtaking stupidity. The approach was made just as PS was being cross-examined by Crawford’s lawyers. It was a crucial time in the trial.
The former policeman had always maintained Crawford was innocent. What the jury would have concluded we will never know because Justice Tim Smith had no choice but to abort the trial and immediately set up a new hearing.
A second trial was also aborted and a third was needed. In an unusual move Crawford, 55, chose to give evidence before the jury.
Usually an accused in a murder trial will remain silent as the onus is on the prosecution to prove its case. Put your client in the witness box and you open him up to cross-examination and you lose control of your defence. The move to put the chemist in the witness box smacked of desperation – as if the defence could hear the cell-door closing behind their man.
The widower told the jury he no longer believed his wife was the victim of a horrible accident. Faced with the evidence he now accepted it was murder but he swore he had nothing to do with the crime.
Crawford may have been unfaithful, he may have been callous and he may have been a liar but the defence stressed that did not prove he was the killer.
Crawford’s heavyweight barrister, Con Heliotis QC, argued that PS must have gone to Crawford’s home to commit a burglary expecting the house to be empty.
Mr Heliotis, perhaps wisely, did not address the puzzling question of why an experienced criminal would believe a house was empty when there was a car with a flat tyre sitting in the drive.
The defence theory was that when he was Anne Crawford he killed his victim and then made it look like an accident.
No, Crawford was not a killer – he was a victim. His wife was killed and now, so many years later, he was accused of a crime he did not commit.
Court observers say Heliotis’s closing address to the jury was masterful and persuasive. It had to be – as some close to the defence thought they were sunk.
Justice Smith dutifully warned the jury to be wary of the uncorroborated testimony of co-accused offenders. PS was a career criminal with a history of dishonesty and violence. By implicating Crawford and pleading guilty, he received a sentence discount. The self-confessed killer was not motivated by conscience but by self-interest.
In contrast Crawford was a middle class family man who had brought up his two children after their mother’s death. Even some (but not all) of Anne’s family were behind Ron Crawford, refusing to believe he was involved.
In late September, after deliberating for four days, the jury of eight men and four women acquitted Crawford. He left court a free and clearly relieved man. Many were surprised by the verdict and at times his legal team seemed resigned to a guilty verdict. One legal expert present at the trial told the prosecution team, ‘You were robbed’.
PS returned to prison to serve his sentence. He deserves no sympathy. He killed a woman he did not know for personal gain.
But the intriguing question is why would a career criminal who knows the system confess after so many years of remaining silent? There was no forensic evidence, no body and no eyewitnesses.
He was convicted purely on the basis of his own confession and he did not make it to clear his conscience.
Police say he did a deal because he was frightened Crawford would get in first and make a statement. But if the chemist was not involved then PS was in the clear – so why talk?
There is no doubt the hit man is guilty, but is he the only one?