Rye murders charges laid

Press, 15 June 1983, Page 1

Rye murders charges laid

NZPA Melbourne Information from the Stewart Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking and material already in the hands of the Victorian police led to the arrest and charging of two men with the 1979 murder of the New Zealand-born drug couriers, Douglas and Isabel Wilson. A police spokesman said in Melbourne yesterday that the charges were only the tip of the iceberg of major crime investigations by Victoria’s seven-man special task force.

A former painter and docker, James Fredrick Bazley, aged 58, was remanded in the Melbourne City Court to July 14 on a charge of the murder of the Wilsons on or about March 13, 1979. He was also charged with the $NZ348,400 armed robbery of the Downards department store in suburban Greensborough in December, 1978.

Bazley, who is serving sentences at Melbourne’s Pentridge jail for armed robbery, did not enter a plea on either charge. A second mafi appeared in court on Monday charged with the Wilson murders and was remanded to July 15. His name has been suppressed.

The Wilson murder charges came after Victorian detectives noticed a link between information they had and material from the Stewart Royal Commission.

They passed the information on to the task force headed by Detective Chief Inspector Mengler. The police spokesman said, “The charges were a direct result of the marrying together of the two lots of information. The . armed robbery charge was a bonus,” he said.

Chief Inspector Mengler, the senior Victorian police officer appointed to assist the Stewart Royal Commission, said yesterday, “Crime is so widespread the future frightens me.” The bodies of Douglas Wilson, aged 26, and his wife Isabel, aged 24, were found in shallow graves at Rye on the Momington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, in May, 1979. Police also raided homes in Victoria and New South Wales on Monday night in a bid to solve the disappearance of anti-drug campaigner, Mr Donald Mackay. Senior police in Melbourne said they had received new leads into the disappearance of Mr Mackay. ;

Mr Mackay disappeared in July, 1977, from a hotel carpark in Griffith, in the Reverina area of southern New South Wales.

His blood-spattered car was found in the carpark but his body has never neen found.

Police said more raids would be made in Melbourne and country areas of New South Wales.

Mrs Barbara Mackay was told yesterday by detectives assisting the Stewart Royal Commission that charges relating to her husband’s disappearance and presumed death would be laid soon, according to her solicitor, Mr Peter Dooley. In another drugs-associ-ated development yesterday, a Queensland man appeared in the Melbourne Magistrate’s Court on 26 charges of conspiring to import and traffick in heroin, possessing heroin and cannabis, and trafficking in heroin and cannabis between 1978 and 1983.

A police prosecutor, Mr Robert Redlich, said Darryl Leigh Sorby, aged 32, of Bribie Island, became a major distributor of heroin in Australia through his contacts in the “Mr Asia” drug syndicate.