(dramatic music) (birds chirping) - I never saw Leigh do
anything unkind or cruel. Throughout the whole time
of the holidays every year, the cruelest he was ever to me or I saw him cruel to anything was when he was with that
boy that night in 1962. They had the tent up and
there was a campfire going and the car was parked a
little bit further away, facing away and they were cooking some food and I spent some time at the campfire. And then the other boy said to me, "We've got a body in the car." And I can't remember what was said on. I must've shown some disbelief because I remember being over at the, they opened the boot of
the car and looked in and there was just tins of petrol, or tins of something, I don't
know, and a few other things. And then I, maybe I confronted him. I can't remember that I didn't say, said something like you're a liar because he went around then to the back seat of the car, back door of the car on the left-hand side
and opened the car door. And said to look. But you'd look and there
was a tarp or blanket, some sword and there
was bumps underneath it. But I couldn't see that was a body and so I think I said
something like "It's not." And then Leigh called to me
from the other side of the car and he'd opened the back door. And told me to come here. And then he moved the blanket tarp back over the head of a boy laying in the back seat of the car. And he had wet here. So I, and I didn't see his eyes, but I could see his head and wet here. And I remember I did
look a little bit closer and see a face. It was European. I don't remember anything else was said, but what I do remember was that he said, "So you'd better go home little girl, or I might shove something
up your bumper hole and bury you, murder you and bury you like we're doing with him." And I'd look to Leigh to
see if there was any help, but he just sort of had a
defined look on his face like I'd never seen him look before. - [Narrator] These events
have remained unresolved since 1962. The Leigh this woman refers to is now serving a life sentence for a murder committed
in Tasmania in 1975, 13 years after the incident she described. (ominous music) (wind howling) - [Gordon] I spent almost 20 years in the Victoria police force. Most of that in the major crime squad. I worked on the Costigan Royal Commission and the Hilton Hotel, Turkish Consulate, and Russell Street bombings. Soon now after I moved
back to Tasmania in '98, I read an article in "The Hobart Mercury", it concerned some prisoners who were allowed out of
Hayes Prison Farm on weekends to go fishing in the Derwent River. The article focused on one
prisoner, James Ryan O'Neill. He was serving a life sentence for the murder of a boy in 1975. This bloke was fascinating. He'd arrived in Tasmania in November 1974, and murdered nine year
old boy at Eaglehawk Neck in early February, '75. In April, he murdered another boy. And in the intervening
period of two months, he unsuccessfully tried to abduct at least another five boys. It was a very strong pattern. And all my experience told me that a person doesn't
just arrive in a new state then start killing and abducting. There had to be previous crimes. I wrote to Jim and told
him a bit about myself. I said, I'd like to come out to Hayes and talk to him about his life. He wrote straight back
agreeing to meet me. That was the start of my journey. (solemn music) So Jim, you've spent over
a quarter of a century in the prison system, 26 1/2 half years, somewhere about there. How have you found it? - Well, I haven't gotten any older, I've deliberately not had a birthday since I came in.
(Gordon laughing) - How old were you when you came into the prison system?
- 27. - And now 54? - Yeah, I was born in Melbourne, '47. Went to school, Scotch
College, Caulfield Grammar. Scotch College was a very upper class boarding school which I did not like. - Did you enjoy schooling? - No. No. And no again. (laughs) I suppose, you know, reasonably normal, uneventful sort of childhood. Father was in real estate which I followed him into
after leaving school. We used to go away on annual
holidays, fishing trips. One of my favorite places, ever since I was very, very young, was Johanna River, the Western District of
Victoria, Cape Otway area. We used to go camping down
there at least every year. We knew all the farms,
the families in the area. - And I suppose, by any chance, did any of those farmers happen
to have some nice daughters? - You got a one track mind, you know that? (both laugh) Yes, they did. I mentioned at the beginning of this that I learned fishing, and
shooting, and other things. And the other things had quite a bit to do with one particular daughter
of this farmer, yes. - I think I was probably about six when I saw the father,
Leigh's father called to him in a really harsh, demanding
tone, authoritative like sergeant in the
army type tone of voice. "Leigh, come here!" And I remember seeing Leigh
have to walk towards his father with all his fear in his face. The father had a stick
about 30 centimeters long and he got hold of Leigh by the arm and started belting him
hard with the stick, hard enough that he swung off the ground. - [Gordon] It was obviously an unhappy (indistinct) with your mum and dad. - [James] Yes. - [Gordon] Correct me if I'm wrong here, your mother had a problem with the booze? - [James] Yes. And still does. - [Gordon] Oh, she's still?
Oh yeah, she's still got. Jim O'Neill's father had
been a prisoner of war. He had a lot of problems. Jim's mother was a much younger woman and apparently, a pretty bad alcoholic. They fought violently and
the police were called to their house in Brighton
on many occasions. Jim dropped out of of
this real estate course at Prahran Tech and set
himself up as a gun dealer. Round about this time,
he got himself tangled up with some notorious underworld figures. People like George Joseph, the man who supplied the gun that killed anti-drugs
campaigner, Donald McCoy. - I don't care what
anyone says, nice fella. - And who were the other people that you come in contact with? - To a much lesser and much
smaller extent, Trimbole. Shoot down mafia. You know what I mean? They'd like to portray
that sort of attitude. (ominous music) There's such a great deal
that went on in Melbourne that never came to light, that was only sort of
known by those involved. And I'd grown up in Melbourne, you know, gone to good schools, and I had no inkling of
what actually went on. And all of a sudden I
was introduced to a world where judges could be bought, where police officers could be bought. And not just bought, but actively engaged in the criminal activities. - [Gordon] I got the feeling Jim liked his money quick and easy. He branched out into a new line of work. He started buying uncut opals and selling them to jewelers in Melbourne. It must've paid him pretty well 'cause he made a lot of road trips backwards and forwards to
Coober Pedy between '65 and '67. How many such trips approximately
would you have made? - Oh, that's hard to estimate exactly, but quite a few. 15. - Yeah? - Could have been more. - [Gordon] And how many
vehicles would you have worn out in that period of time?
- Seven or eight. - Good gracious. - Because I mean, you know,
to get stranded out there, was you could go for
several days and see no one. I have actually made trips up there where you leave Port Augusta,
turn off towards Woomera, and not see another vehicle for
the entire rest of the trip. All the horror stories that I'd
been told about Coober Pedy, I mean, I know they happened and they even happened
while I was up there. But... - What were some of the horror stories that you heard of there? - Well, people will just disappear. - [Gordon] We were
talking about Coober Pedy and he clammed up on me. This wasn't the first time he'd done it. I started to think to myself, what's he done in the mid
'60s in South Australia that he doesn't want me to know about? (gentle suspenseful music) In all the time I'd spent talking to Jim, he'd maintain that he
never had any trouble with the police before he
was arrested in Tasmania, not even a speeding ticket. I'd heard some stories about an incident with some kids in Victoria, but I never had any hard facts. Then one day, out of the blue, he handed me a copy of
his '96 parole assessment. I've got no idea why he did this because on page three are
details of 12 charges against him for abduction and indecent assault on four boys in Melbourne in 1971. Hello, there.
(dogs barking) How are you, Jim? - I am well. - [Gordon] I'd spent a lot
of time with Jim O'Neill and I felt I was getting
far too close to him. So I decided to see if
he'd talk more openly to someone he never met before. - I read in the files,
when I read the whole case and the parole board reports
that there were accusations and accusations, that things
that happened in Melbourne with boys.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This I cannot say. - [Paul] Right, okay. - I'm under-
- Legal- - Yeah. - Did you have a chance to
talk to the parole board? - I have had, yes. - Did they imply to you that you were sexually interested in boys? And were you able to answer that? - Oh, you know, I don't know. I denied it and said, "Well, there are no proven incidents
of that whatsoever." - Yeah, how would you
describe your sexuality? Would you say you're just
a heterosexual man or? - Yep. Not of recent years, more like a monk. (laughs)
- Right, right. - [Paul] But in the past, you'd see yourself as being that? - Yes.
- [Paul] Yeah. - And demonstrably so. - [Paul] Yeah, right. - I mean... - [Paul] But wouldn't people say, I'm sorry to hark back,
but I think it's important, that the were boys in the two
cases, and then the one case. Why boys? Just accident, happened to be there? - I have no idea.
- [Paul] Right. - None whatsoever. - Right. You had an accident, didn't you? A gunshot accident.
- That's right, yeah. But I was a licensed gun dealer- - Oh, okay.
- In Victoria. I had a partner at the time
and we'd purchased a 32 Beretta which wasn't feeding properly. And he was stupidly, I suppose, cycling live rounds through the mechanism, and one discharged and
it hit me right there. It was later taken out in hospital. It had gone back through my skull, had a bit of damage there, gone down, it turned and
went down through my throat and lodged in my neck. - [Paul] But that led
to a lot of blackouts. - Well, I think a more
proper description of what they were was an unaccounted
for period of time. - [Paul] Right, yeah. - [Gordon] Jim O'Neill's
in jail for a murder he reckons he can't remember
because of the gunshot wound, but I had a strong feeling that he's problems began
a lot earlier than that. - Well, it's about the
worst possible thing that could happen if you've got someone
who's already anti-social and then you damage his frontal lobe, because he's already got
limited control over impulses. And the frontal lobe is where the control over impulses reside. So if you knocked that out, he's gonna become even more disinhibited than he would have been
beforehand, even more impulsive. (gentle music) - [Gordon] I found out
from the trial documents that as a child, Jim O'Neill
was prone to fantasies. There are instances of cruelty
to animals, dishonesty, arson, and truancy. On top of that, there was
also a strong inference from one of the psychiatrists that Jim himself had been
sexually molested as a child, probably by someone close to him. You talked about your father, how was your relationship
with your mother? You said you had a
fairly good relationship with your father. I mean, you got on reasonably
well with your mother. Was that, a bit so so, you know? What? Just couldn't get close or got too close?
- Ah. Look, can we skip this one? - That body language is so interesting. He'd gaze left, he's going to lie. He'd gaze right, how am I gonna get out of this one?
- Out of this. Yeah. - [Gordon] Following your
shooting in Victoria, can you take us through a
chronological sequence of events? - No, Gordon, I can't without... - [Gordon] Right, sorry. - See, if I mentioned that,
it's gonna position it. (ominous music) - [Gordon] Jim jumped bail
before he could face trial for the boys in Victoria. He headed to the west and
disappeared off the radar for quite a while. At first, Jim talked openly
about his time in the west. He told me about how he'd
worked on cattle stations around Fitzroy Crossing. But then, for some reason, he
started to get real evasive. He said that on legal advice, he wouldn't say where he'd
been or when he was there. He told me he was worried that one day the police
might find something and plant his DNA on it. Only a man with something to
hide would make such a comment. What was your real name? - [James] Bridgart, B-R-I-D-G-A-R-T. - [Gordon] And your Christian name? - [James] Leigh Anthony, L-E-I-G-H. - [Gordon] L-E-I-G-H. So why did you change it? - [James] Look, I really don't know. I didn't conceal my movements, Gordon. I mean, you know, my friends, my family and all that knew exactly where
I was and what I was doing. - [Gordon] I talked to people
up there and it surprised me how many of them remember Jim O'Neill. He apparently spent a lot of time hanging around the Fitzroy Crossing pub. It was there that he met, then married, a young Tasmanian barmaid. I found one bloke who
actually went to the wedding. - Well, I suppose the first time I really run into him properly was he came up to Fitzroy Crossing and he wasn't actually doing anything. He just in the bar
there for quite a while. And he actually met one
of the bar maids, Carol, at that stage. And they end up getting married. And to this day, I still
don't know whether anybody, you know, got up and told Carol that, you know, the things
that people were saying about her husband or her future husband. I was working for the
Department of Agriculture at that stage out at the research station, we had a research station,
23 mile out of town. And the next minute, he
end up there as manager. And I certainly wasn't
happy about working for him. - [Gordon] How did he get the job? - Yeah, Jim could tell
a pretty good story. He was full of shit, basically. So, you know, and he
would just go in there and he would have spun a yarn and said that he had done
that and they probably wouldn't have done a
decent checkup on him. - [Gordon] Did you notice
a scar on Jim's head while he was there? - Yeah, well, he told us about that. Like he had been shot, and he told us that was in
Vietnam that it happened. And apparently, the bullet went in here and out through the
back of his head there. And it was a war wound
from Vietnam that we heard. - I got on the phone to an other bloke who'd been a JP up there. He had no time for Jim at all. And there was something else, he told me about the unsolved death of an Aboriginal boy in November '73. And Aboriginal, was it a young fellow? - Yeah, he was found wrapped in barbed wire around a log, and he was actually found up a
tree once the river subsided. But, you know, it just went
down as a tribal killing to the best of my knowledge. - [Gordon] There weren't any
records about the boy's death. No official inquest, no
newspaper stories, nothing. And it was pretty clear some people didn't appreciate
me raising the subject. Was there any deaths up there at all that you thought was a bit suspicious at the time O'Neill was up there? - No. There was some black fella tied on a log floating down the river, but that, you know, that's a sort of black fella, it was something you wouldn't
take any bloody notice of. But he evidently had a bit
to do with the gin, so. - [Gordon] Where did you hear that? - Oh, there was him and
his mates at the races got tangled up with gins. - [Gordon] The Muludja community's located near some of the stations
that Jim worked on. A few of the elders remembered him. But they're gentle people and I got the feeling they
wouldn't speak ill of anyone. - He'd always kept to himself.
- Yeah. You remember what his name was? - Jim, right?
- Yeah. - I didn't know his surname
but that's what I knew him by. - Jim O'Neill. Can you remember what sorta
bloke this fellow was? - He was good bloke. - [Gordon] Some of them
gave the impression that Jim was just another white fella, but I got a nagging feeling
things weren't quite right. (ominous music) Things became clearer when I talked to the
owners of Fossil Downs, one of the big stations
where Jim worked for a while as a store man. For someone who only worked
there for a couple of months more than 30 years ago, he seemed to have made
quite an impression on them. - We found no fault with Jim's work. It was more the moral issue, I suppose, that prompted us to ask him to go, because in due course, it came up because the native
girls can never keep secrets. They said that Jim was paying for their favors by giving them bacon and drinks. - Who's that fellow, do you reckon? - Jim O'Neill. A guy that used to work
on other property told me, he'd said that he'd done the Beaumont job. And that's Beaumont
children in South Australia. And at the time I thought he was too young to be involved at all and didn't take much notice of it. - [Gordon] Now, there was
another young Aboriginal boy found dead in the river somewhere
around Fitzroy Crossing. Did somebody tell you
something about that? - No, no. You hear of people dying, but not that, we didn't hear of that. We probably heard about it but we didn't hear any
of the detail of it. If we did, you know, I've forgotten. - [Gordon] I thought you'd
said to me on the phone that one of the workers had told you that Jim had spoken about
killing an Aboriginal boy? - No, no. It wasn't me, 'cause I don't
know anything about that. - He apologized to me the next day. He said there were some
things better left unsaid. I just thought I'd give you a ring and see whether it's all right- I decided to have a talk to Norm Adams. He'd been a policeman in Fitzroy Crossing. And when I'd talked to him
a couple of days earlier, he'd mentioned the boy in the river. With the wire. What was the guts of that? Never heard of it before? Oh. That's right. Oh, well, if you've
never heard of it this... Norm didn't wanna talk. But I found out there
was another policeman in Fitzroy Crossing at
the time Jim was there. He died a few years ago but his wife was happy to talk to me. She didn't remember the boy in the river but she he had plenty to
say about Jim O'Neill. - Soon as Trevor met Jim O'Neill, he said, "I don't trust that bloke. He's a sly man, it's
written all over him." He said, "There's something
not right about that bloke." He didn't like the way he
hung around the children, particularly Norm Adams' boys. On one occasion, he asked
Norm to let the boys, and they had a daughter,
Vicky, a bit younger, spend the night out there. And Trevor did ask Norm not
to let them go but he did. Trevor was very, very angry
about the whole episode. And we went out there the next day and had this barbecue and
a bit of a stressful day. Carol was terribly upset. She thought the marriage
was a sort of a sham. And she didn't say straight
out that he belted her around but she certainly intimated that he did. He used to tell these outrageous stories. So you reckoned his wound on his head, naturally, somebody
would inquire about it. He told one story that his
mother's boyfriend was a gangster and that he had shot him in the head. - [Gordon] Jim O'Neill told a pack of lies when he was in the Kimberley. Apart from the fact he
told people he was a driver when he couldn't ride a horse, he also said he was an accountant, a Vietnam veteran, a bush lawyer, and even an AGO agent. By all accounts, Jim
wasn't much of a manager and eventually, the department
moved him sideways to Derby. By this time, his wife
was three months pregnant. He left Fitzroy Crossing in August '74. Within weeks of him arriving in Derby, a young boy disappeared off the street. - A few years back, a friend of mine was
telling me that a little boy went down to a shop to get
something around tea time and never ever returned home again. I don't remember what year that was. I just remembered him telling me this and it's just stuck in my head ever since. This fellow said he was 12
year old when he went missing. The shop he went to has
been gone from there maybe 10 years, maybe more. - [Gordon] According to
a missing persons report, this boy was last seen getting into a car driven by a European man outside the Elderstore in Derby. He'd just been to the local shop. It's the exact same thing
that happened in Tasmania. The first boy disappeared
after going to the shop to get a carton of
cigarettes for his father. The second boy was
getting a carton of milk. Jim only stayed in Derby
for a couple of months. In November, he and his
wife moved to Tasmania. At that time, it was the
only state in the country he hadn't been to. He killed the boy at Eaglehawk
Neck in early February '75, on the same day he brought his wife and newborn son home from hospital. - [James] We came down
from the Kimberleys, you know, directly to here. We arrived in, I think about
the middle of November '74, and I was in prison on the 2nd of May '75. So it wasn't long, no. - [Gordon] One of the detectives who arrested and charged Jim O'Neill is now the Tasmanian Police Commissioner. He was a junior detective
sergeant in early '75 when he and his partner
tracked Jim and his wife to a motel in Launceston. True to form, Jim was
about to leave the state. - When the second boy
disappeared off the street, he was doing a paper run and his disappearance sparked
a great deal of concern. There was anger, there was fear, there was a great deal
of media speculation that there was perhaps a serial killer operating in Tasmania and of course, that turned
out to be very much the case. We discovered that in the fortnight prior to the second boy disappearing, that there were probably
four, if not five, other children who had been picked up, taken to remote locations, who had managed to escape the
person that had abducted them and get away relatively injury free. O'Neill at that time was a
barman at the Lufra Hotel, which was the Eaglehawk Neck hotel. And of course he was a very
dominant influence in the search and offered all sorts of
advice and assistance. And of course, the
investigation later proved that he had picked the boy up on the day that he was due to bring
his wife home from hospital from having their first child. He obviously saw this kiddy
playing in the wash way, somehow or other got him into the car, took him up a desperately
long lonely bush track, had his way with him sexually, and then inflicted massive
injuries to his head with a rock. We visited the key sites, the sites where the bodies had been left, the sites where some
clothing had been secreted. And the photographs we took show him being absolutely relaxed, smoking, very distant
from the whole activity. So much so that when we
were eventually led up this enormously long,
difficult, thickly overgrown bush track to find the first child, O'Neil stepped on the remains and it wasn't, "There he
is" or "There's Ricky," it was "There it is." He showed absolutely no remorse at all. There was never a tear shed by him about what he'd done to those children. (ominous music) - [Gordon] Could you explain to me what you mean by it
wouldn't ever have happened? The charge that arose to bring you in here? - Oh, the charge was murder and the victim was a child. And later on, thinking about
it, I felt very sorry for that jury because that court could not have made a decision, an accurate decision, because nobody in that court gathered the information
they needed to do it. It was a load of crap
from both the defense and the prosecution. - [Gordon] Jim's trial
was over in four days. He was sentenced to prison for the term for his natural life. (ominous music) - See, I maintained and still do that I had no memory of the event at all. I mean, not partial, it was just no memory of it there. And (coughs) I think whatever- - [Gordon] After 28 years, Jim O'Neill still uses
blackouts as his excuse, even though it came out he'd persuaded his wife to
create a false alibi for him. He also had disposed of
his blood stained clothing. Later, he led detectives to the body he'd hidden in thick bush. - He may have suffered
some form of blackout at some stage. He suffered a major head
injury and meningitis, and there were a couple
of episodes in the past, fairly soon after the illness that may have been a form of epilepsy and that's a fairly high risk for someone who's suffered
a penetrating head injury and has suffered meningitis. He would be at high at risk for epilepsy. But I just cannot conceive of a situation where you carry out
highly complex activities of abducting a child and
killing a child during epilepsy. That would be unique. - [Gordon] Jim told me he'd
had at least eight or nine of these so-called blackouts while he was traveling round the country. He'd already used blackouts
as his excuse in Tasmania and I wondered what else he was hiding. - I think one of the times
that sticks in my memory is I found myself in the
Western District of Victoria sitting on a beach in a
suit, in a business suit, with waves washing around me, sitting on the edge of the ocean there and actually becoming aware of where I was at that particular time. And yet I could not have
told you how I got there or what I was doing there. - Can you tell me what
period of time was missing? - Well, probably in the
vicinity of 24 hours. - When we started to check on the background about
the places that he'd been, I think from memory, that
there were about seven or eight kiddies who almost copybook in various places around Australia who had simply disappeared,
never to be found. - [Gordon] Let me ask
you a real hard question. Don't answer it if you don't want to, but the question is do you ever worry about what you might've done when you had the worst
period of blackouts? Does it ever worry you
that as you can't remember, was that the worst period? What other things might have happened- - Yeah, well, that's quite correct, yeah. But then again, nothing has come to light. - Right. After Jim O'Neill had been
locked up for life in Tasmania, police from the other states
started sniffing around. I got hold of a couple of letters from the police in South Australia written to the officer in
charge at Fitzroy Crossing. These letters made me think, why was Jim O'Neill
granted bail in Victoria, and why is it that the
police in three states never spoke to each other until after he was arrested in Tasmania. The dates in this document clearly relate to the disappearance of two young girls from the Oval in Adelaide
on the 25th of August, 1973. And there was an abduction
and buggery committed on a young boy in Elizabeth,
the 10th of January, 1974. And the previous day, there was another little boy
that was abducted and raped. The second document is
addressed to Sergeant Sherratt. In part, this document reads, "We have been chasing O'Neill ever since he was released
on bail in Melbourne several years ago on
13 charges of abduction and indecent assault on young boys. He changed his name and
skipped to the west. And now, as you know,
has run the full course and killed two boys in Tazzy. And it is anybody's
guess how many other kids he's interfered with during his travels. For some reason or another, he denies ever having
been to South Australia." (ominous music) The thing I found interesting is that the South Australia police had been looking for O'Neill
since he jumped bail in 1971. That was before the incident
referred to in the letters. It got me thinking, maybe they wanted to talk
to him about something else, something that occurred
when he was traveling between Melbourne and
Coober Pedy in the mid '60s. (kids playing) - [Narrator] The disappearance
of the Beaumont children from Glenelg Beach in Adelaide is the most baffling mystery
in Australian criminal history. It was Australia Day in 1966 and the temperature was over 40 degrees. The three children, aged
nine, seven, and four went to the beach and
were never seen again. One of the last sightings of them was in a beach side milk bar. (soft music) - [Gordon] In my travels, I'd
come across people who told me that Jim O'Neill had
confessed that he was involved in the disappearance of
the Beaumont children. Unfortunately, the original
witnesses were dead. So I traveled to Adelaide
to talk to Brian Swan, who's in charge of the
Beaumont investigation. - On page three here were dealing in opals from Cooper Pedy. As you know, Cooper Pedy
is in South Australia. Is this where the possible
Beaumont connection comes in, his movements in South Australia? - Yes, he was fascinated, greatly fascinated with Coober Pedy. And he brought the topic
up on numerous occasions, and he never once mentioned
Adelaide whatsoever. He spoke about going from
Melbourne to Coober Pedy, and possibly two years after I'd been commenced visiting him, I said to him, "Where
does the the ride run between Coober Pedy and Melbourne?" He start, "You gotta go through Adelaide." That was the first time that
he'd ever mentioned Adelaide and I thought that was a peculiar thing. - Do you have him in South Australia? In 1966 I note here it's got the late '60s and early '70s. - Definitely, from '65 and '66. - Specifically, has he mentioned anything about the disappearance
of the Beaumont children? - I said to him on one occasion that I had heard that
he had told other people that he was responsible for the murder of the
Beaumont children in 1966. And his response to me was,
"I couldn't have done that. I was in Melbourne at the time." The point that stuck in my
mind was he didn't deny it. I don't know if Jim O'Neill killed the Beaumont children or not. I know he told others he did it. I can certainly put him in
South Australia in 1966. I also know that in all the time he talked about his travels, he never once mentioned Adelaide. He was barely 19 in 1966, but you've got to remember, he was only 15 at the time of the incident at Johanna River in 1962. The Johanna River area holds special significance to Jim O'Neill. He's talked about it so many times. Mostly, he was talking
about fishing and hunting. Although in my view, when
he talks about those things, he's actually talking about killing. - I watched them pack and I watched them come up the
driveway past the car yard. There was a knock on the door and my mother went to the door. She came back in and said that
Leigh wanted to talk to me. And I went to the door and
he asked me to step outside, shut the door behind me
and out to the side a bit where there was an old
tank, I stood there. And he asked me, had I told anyone. And I then shook my head and said no. And he said, "We buried him." And I must've asked where,
'cause I remember him saying across the river from where we camped. And that was... I asked was the other boy with him and then he looked over and I saw the car parked over in the drive, and he was sitting, watching us. Then he looked away and then
Leigh said he had to go. And he went over and got in
the car and they drove off. I watched them go up the road and disappear out of sight. And it was then after
school, or the weekend, or in the next few days, anyway, I went looking
down along the river, went walking, looking for what could be a grave. (ominous music) - [Gordon] I felt that
my best chance of proving that Jim had killed other children would be found on the
dairy farm at Johanna. I contacted the Victoria police and told them I was gonna
try and locate a body. The search area covered about
half an acre of floodplain. It was badly overgrown with
weeds and blackberries. The willow trees that lie in the river when Jim and his mate were there in 1962 had recently been cut down
and piled into windrows. - Do you see that there? - What do you think that is? - Well, a pretty good sign, I think. - [Gordon] He says it was here that he had his biggest blackout ever. When he woke up, he was
sitting on the beach, waves were washing around him, his clothes were muddy and
torn as if he'd been digging. He claimed he had no
idea how he got there, and reckons that he'd been
missing for more than 24 hours. The experts I have spoken to
about his so-called blackouts all agree, it's a code that he uses to describe a period of time when he
committed serious offenses. (machine beeping) (eerie music) 40 years is a long time for
a small body to be buried. It's possible we missed
finding it by centimeters or even that Jim moved it at a later time. Whatever the case, I'm still convinced that when he was 15 years old, something significant happened here, maybe even his first taste of murder. - Psychopaths are people who like to control other human beings, who often like to control life and death. And here you have a situation of a man who's nurturing worms but
then feeds them to rodents. And the symbolism for a
psychopath on that is enormous. - He'll tell you as much
as he wants you to know at particular times, but I've got no doubt that he's got inheritability
to persuade himself that he's absolutely guilty of nothing. (solemn music) - Jim and you both fish and hunt, but Jim goes one step further,
he hunts for humans too. He did it when he killed those two boys and I think he's done it in the past. - Earlier this year, I went out to Hayes to talk to Jim O'Neill. I wanted to ask him some questions about the things people
had said about him. He lost his temper and
stormed off shouting, "I'm putting an end to this. You're trying to set me up." Over three years, Jim and
I did a lot of talking. But for the moment, it
looks like my questions are going to remain unanswered. They'll probably never be answered, but that doesn't mean
I'm gonna stop asking. (solemn music) Fishing creeks, small
rivers is my greatest love where you can read the water and work out where the fish will be lying or is most likely to be lying. And using a small hook, most likely I'll only use one worm. - Yeah, I think, you
know, when I think back to the best fish, especially the best fish
I've caught down here, I've been stargazing or not
taking much notice at all. But I've just logged a
little, just a, you know, a Tazzy devil or something that you can get a bit of distance with. There was no finesse,
no skill, if you like, involved at all. I mean that lure hit the
water near a hungry salmon. If you couldn't care less, if you just stick a
worm on an ordinary rig- - [Narrator] James Ryan
O'Neil is now 56 years old. He has served 28 years in prison and is currently Tasmania's
longest serving prisoner for a single offense. His last application
for parole was in 1996. In that report, there is an excerpt from a letter written by
the crown advocate in 1975. "In my opinion, this man is
a very dangerous man indeed and any question of his release should be approached very cautiously. Further, any person considering
the release of O'Neill should, in my opinion, make
inquiries of the police in Victoria and Western Australia." (solemn music)
