In early November of 1997, in a suburb of Victoria, Australia, a woman would be coldly gunned down in her driveway in the middle of the afternoon, in a shocking crime that is now suspected to have been a case of mistaken identity.
It was just after three-thirty p.m. on Thursday, November 6th, when thirty-four-year-old Jane Thurgood-Dove pulled her four-wheel-drive vehicle into the driveway of her home on Muriel Street in the Melbourne suburb of Niddrie. She had just returned from picking up her three children—eleven-year-old Scott, six-year-old Ashley, and four-year-old Holly—from school.
Suddenly, a blue Holden Commodore squealed into the driveway behind her, and a heavyset masked man jumped out. Jane attempted to run from him, but tripped and fell, at which point the assailant shot her several times in the back of the head with a large caliber handgun. The killer then jumped back into the getaway vehicle, driven by a second, slimmer man, and both perpetrators sped away. The horrified children, who had witnessed the entire incident, ran down the street to a local milk bar for help.
Jane Thurgood-Dove was pronounced dead at the scene. Because of the ruthless efficiency of the crime, authorities surmised that it was a professional hit. Initially, they focused on Jane’s husband Mark as the mastermind behind his wife’s killing, but the couple—who had been high school sweethearts—did not appear to be having any marital difficulties, and there seemed no reason for Mark to want Jane dead. After passing a polygraph test, he was dismissed as a suspect.
The next person of interest to capture investigators’ attention was a police officer who was known to be obsessed with Jane, to the point where he had directly asked her to leave her husband for him, and had attempted to buy a burial plot next to hers. He reportedly also had a shrine to her in his home, and had based his cell phone number and his computer passwords around Jane’s birth date.
Most intriguingly, the unnamed policeman failed a polygraph test, and in particular seemed very nervous when asked if he was involved in Jane’s death. Though he was not believed to have killed the victim himself, he was suspected of hiring the two hit men to gun her down after she had rejected his advances.
Though he remained on the authorities’ radar, there was insufficient evidence to charge him with the crime, and he was even allowed to keep his position on the police force after undertaking medical and psychological analyses that suggested he was still fit to serve.
As the years went on with no arrests made, a third possibility for the seemingly random crime began to present itself, and it is this theory that is now most widely presumed to be true. It so happened that there was another blonde woman, named Carmel Kyprianou, who closely resembled Jane and lived on the same street; most significantly, Carmel’s husband Peter was involved in some intensely shady business dealings.
According to an anonymous tip, which was later corroborated by other evidence, the hit men had been hired to kill a blonde woman who lived three houses from the corner of Muriel Street, as retaliation for some criminal deal gone wrong. Peter Kyprianou, in fact, was a known associate of several underworld figures, and had been provably targeted for death before by a man named Philip Peters, also known as Mr. Laundry. Peters served three years for conspiracy to commit murder in that case, but had been released after a plea bargain; in fact, his release from prison had occurred only a few months before the slaying of Jane Thurgood-Dove.
Jane’s actual assassins were thought to be bikers from the port city of Geelong who were associates of an amphetamines dealer that Philip Peters had served time with. Apparently, the instructions they had been given for the hit were unclear, and they had mistakenly targeted the woman in the house at the wrong end of the street. Bolstering this speculative series of events was the fact that one of the suspected hit men was beaten to a pulp not long after the crime, suggesting that he had been punished for his mistake.
Sadly, by the time all of this information came out, the man who was believed to have pulled the trigger that day—Steven John Mordy, a member of the Rebels Motorcycle Club—was already dead, having succumbed to a drug overdose in September of 2001. Likewise, the individual thought to have stolen the getaway car, James Ian Reynolds, died in a supposed boating accident in 2004, before police could get to him. A third man, believed to be the getaway driver, is still unidentified, though authorities have offered leniency if he will come forward and confess to his part the slaying. Philip Peters, hypothesized to be the man pulling the strings, has repeatedly denied any involvement.
The case remains one of Victoria’s most frustrating unsolved homicides.
Crime Immemorial 