James Ryan O'Neill (born Leigh Anthony Bridgart in Melbourne, Victoria 1947) is a convicted Tasmanian murderer serving a life sentence about whom allegations have been made that he murdered a number of children in several Australian states from the mid 1960s whilst he was still a teenager through to the murder that he was imprisoned for in 1975. He is currently Tasmania's longest serving prisoner for a single offence.

He was the subject of a documentary The Fishermen which was broadcast on ABC TV in October 2006.

James O’Neill has been imprisoned in Tasmania since 1975 for the murder of Ricky John Smith. Despite having murdered two children and being the longest-serving prisoner in Tasmania, O’Neill was almost unknown to the public at large until January 2005, when it was speculated that he may have murdered the Beaumont children.

1. About O'Neill

James Ryan O’Neill was born Leigh Anthony Bridgart, in Melbourne, Victoria, in about 1947 or 1948. Educated at Brighton and Caulfield Grammar and Scotch College, he began working in real estate. He then became a gun dealer and associated with members of Melbourne’s underworld.

Between 1965 and 1968, Bridgart, working in the opal industry, travelled frequently between Melbourne and the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy. He also travelled extensively in Western Australia where at one stage he worked on a cattle station; documentary makers found people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia who still remembered him, thirty years later.

In 1969, a business partner of Bridgart’s was manipulating bullets in and out of a pistol and accidentally shot him in the head. Bridgart survived but the bullet, which entered his right forehead and came out of his neck, destroyed most of his sense of smell and taste.

In 1971 Bridgart was charged with 12 offences involving abductions and sexual assaults of four boys in Victoria. He skipped bail and fled to Western Australia. Eventually, in November 1974, he moved to Tasmania and changed his name to James Ryan O’Neill.

2. The murder of Ricky Smith

One day in February 1975, O’Neill was on his way to a hospital to pick up his wife and newborn child, when he came across Ricky John Smith. Smith, aged nine, had been sent to buy a carton of cigarettes. O’Neill murdered him and dumped his body in remote bushland.

O’Neill was one of many who offered to help in the search for the missing boy. In the meantime he was planning another murder. Over the space of two weeks, four or five children were abducted in separate incidents but managed to escape. O’Neill then abducted Bruce Colin Wilson, aged nine, and murdered him. Wilson's body was discovered near Risdon Vale, three months after Ricky Smith’s disappearance.

The two murders were investigated by police, including Sergeant Richard McCreadie. Eventually O’Neill led police to where Ricky Smith’s body was hidden.

O’Neill was arrested for both murders, but following the legal practice at the time he was only tried for Ricky Smith’s murder. O’Neill pleaded insanity and said that he had been punched and that a gun had been held to his head, before Sergeant McCreadie and another detective took him to where Ricky Smith’s body was hidden. Both policemen denied this. The defence, led by W.J.E. Cox, suggested that O’Neill may have had a personality disorder following injuries to his brain that had occurred when he had been shot in the head in 1969.

After deliberating for 3½ hours, the jury found O’Neill guilty of murder and he was jailed for life. He became eligible to apply for parole in 1986. In 1991 he applied for parole but was turned down.

3. Documentary idea

In the 1990s, a freelance journalist named Janine Widgery had an idea to make a documentary series about unsolved child murders. She approached retired detective Gordon Davie with the idea. Davie had been a detective with Victoria Police, with more that 20 years’ experience. He had been involved in a number of high profile investigations, including the Russell Street bombing and the Hilton Hotel bombing. He had also been a consultant to the televisions shows Phoenix and Janus and had won an AFI award for co-writing the script for the movie The Interview. He was now living in Tasmania.

Davie liked Widgery’s idea but felt it had no natural starting point. In 1998, however, he was intrigued by a report he read in a newspaper about O'Neill. O’Neill had been transferred to the low security Hayes Prison Farm in the Derwent Valley in 1991, and was allowed to go fishing for trout in the Derwent River, accompanied only by his dog. The report said that O’Neill had had no criminal record before he committed the two murders for which he'd been jailed.

Davie thought this unlikely. O’Neill’s fishing activities suggested a strong pattern of behaviour, and as Davie said later, “Nobody gets to 27 years of age and then begins a homicide spree.”  He therefore wrote to O’Neill and asked if he could visit.

O’Neill agreed. Davie assumed that the meeting would last for about an hour, but found O’Neill fascinating and stayed for the whole day. He said afterwards:

It whet my appetite because Jim told me he’d never been in trouble with the police before, never even got a parking ticket. I spoke to Janine, I said there’s a story in this man because I don’t believe a word he’s telling me.

This was the first of many visits made by Davie to visit O’Neill, whom he described as being highly intelligent and immensely likeable. A friendship grew between the two men, based initially around their mutual love of fishing. However Davie began asking more questions about O’Neill’s background and started making notes. Eventually, after several months, he asked permission to tape record their conversations. O’Neill gave him permission. Davie continued to visit and spoke with O’Neill for hundreds of hours over the next four years.

4. Other cases

The tapes of their conversations were transcribed and enquiries were made at places where O’Neill had said he’d been. A pattern emerged. O’Neill, according to the documentary makers, had deliberately misnamed many of the places he’d visited. Much more alarmingly, children had disappeared at seven or eight of them.

It became increasingly clear to Davie and Widgery that, using the interviews between Davie and O’Neill as core material, they would be able to make a documentary about O’Neill and the activities they suspected him of, including responsibility for unsolved murders in some of the locations around Australia they knew he had visited.

It was hard to reconcile this with the man they were interviewing. Davie said afterwards:

He is one of the most likeable men you would ever meet. On the first day of filming there were six or seven out there and at end of the day I said, 'What do you think of him?'

They all said, 'You've made a mistake, this bloke couldn't have done anything wrong', and I said, 'Don't ever forget what I said at the briefing last Friday. No matter what this man says or does, don't ever forget he's a killer.'

Some of the key figures at O’Neill’s trial had gone on to greater public prominence since the trial. Among these was O’Neill’s defence lawyer, W.J.E. Cox, who had become Governor of Tasmania; the junior officer for the Crown, Mr D. Bugg, was now Damian Bugg, QC, and had become Commonwealth Director for Public Prosecutions. The most important for the documentary, though was Sergeant McCreadie. Richard McCreadie was now the Tasmanian Police Commissioner.

McCreadie was interviewed for the documentary about O’Neill, and confirmed that in his opinion "He’s got a real lust for kiddies. He’s a multiple murderer."

5. Linked with the Beaumont children

Davie and Widgery agreed with McCreadie, and said that O’Neill was probably a serial killer. They believed they could link him with actual cases. McCreadie had the same suspicion and said:

We started to check on the background, about the places that he'd been. There were about seven or eight kiddies, who were almost copybooks, in various places around Australia, who had simply disappeared -- never to be found. That trail led through Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, through Fitzroy Crossing and down into Western Australia. We found that he had come back through South Australia and through Adelaide at about the time that the Beaumont children had disappeared. I am not suggesting he was involved, but you couldn't discount his involvement.

Asked later to elaborate, McCreadie commented: "My personal view -- and I don't want you to say the commissioner says he's red hot for the Beaumonts -- but he could easily have been responsible for that".

Davie agreed. Being interviewed while promoting the documentary, he said: "I know O'Neill has told other people he was responsible for killing the Beaumonts, and I certainly wouldn't discount him being responsible." A station owner in the Kimberley, who remembered O’Neill from when he’d been called Bridgart, remembered that Bridgart had said that he was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children. Janine Widgery was even more convinced. Having spoken to O'Neill, she said she knew where the bodies of the Beaumont children were buried in country Victoria and wanted police to investigate.

Davie had asked O’Neill about the children but O’Neill denied having been in South Australia before 1966. Davie then asked him where the road from Melbourne to Coober Pedy went. This was a journey that O’Neill had told Davie he’d made more than once between 1965 and 1968. According to Davie, when asked the question, O’Neill’s head went left, his face went scarlet and he knew O’Neill was going to lie.

O’Neill denied murdering the Beaumont children. According to Davie, "He said, 'Look, on legal advice I am not going to say where I was or when I was there', and changed the subject." He refused to be drawn any further, leaving Davie to wonder about his involvement and reflect on the accuracy of McCreadie’s remark that O'Neill "...was going backwards and forwards through Adelaide at a rate of knots at about that time."

Davie and Widgery’s documentary, which was given the title The Fishermen: A Journey into the Mind of a Killer, was screened at the Hobart Summer Festival in January 2005. Offering as it did a completely new suspect for the disappearance of the Beaumont children, it achieved Australia-wide publicity. McCreadie’s remarks about O’Neill, both to the documentary makers and to the police, were widely quoted. It is not often that a police commissioner describes a man as being a possible suspect for the disappearance for the Beaumont children, and says that he has "a real lust for kiddies."

6. Eliminated as a suspect?

The South Australia police were asked for their opinion. The officer in charge of major crime investigations, Detective Superintendent Peter Woite, confirmed that O’Neill had recently been interviewed. However, Woite said that "no evidence was found to support this person’s involvement in the disappearance of the Beaumont children. While our investigation remains active on this matter, this person has been discounted from our enquiries."

The Hobart-based newspaper The Mercury applied for permission to interview O’Neill, but reported on 8 February 2005 that it had been rebuffed. Responding to the request, the prisons director, Graeme Barber, had replied in a letter on 7 February that while O’Neill was willing to be interviewed, "there is a longstanding protocol within the Prison Service that inmates, particularly those sentenced for violent or sensational crimes, are not made available for media interview."

Mr Barber said that the reasons interviews were not granted was because they could be distressing to victims, families and other people involved. They could also disrupt or hinder the safe running of prisons. The documentary team for The Fisherman had been given permission to interview O’Neill after stating that they would be making a documentary about the worm farm in the prison, and about O’Neill’s passion for fishing.

7. Broadcast blocked on grounds of defamation

The documentary was scheduled for broadcast on ABC television on 21 April 2005. O’Neill objected. He had not appeared before a parole board since 1991 but said he was thinking of applying again. He said that the documentary, if shown on television, would harm his chances. He therefore sought an injunction to stop transmission, on the grounds of defamation.

The ABC rescheduled the broadcast for the following week, on 28 April. Meanwhile, the case, O’Neill v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roar Film Pty Ltd and Davie, was heard by Supreme Court Judge Ewan Crawford on 22 April.

The ruling by Mr Crawford was made public several days later. In a move that appeared to surprise the ABC and other media outlets, Crawford said he could "see no aspect of public benefit in the making public of allegations that the plaintiff was responsible for the disappearance and murder of the Beaumont children or that he is suspected of being responsible." On the grounds that it would defame O'Neill, Crawford therefore granted an interlocutory injunction against the broadcast of The Fisherman in Tasmania.

The ABC announced both that it would appeal the decision and that the documentary would still be broadcast in other Australian states. Commenting on the decision, the ABC’s General Counsel, Stephen Collins, said that "Mr O’Neill is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a child. There is no stronger penalty that can be imposed upon any person in our society, and so it’s difficult for the ABC to see that he has a reputation which can be tarnished."

The documentary was not broadcast on 28 April. There was a slight satellite overlap on Tasmania that meant that if the ABC had broadcast the documentary, around 500 houses in the north of Tasmania would have been able to receive the transmission. This would have violated the injunction against it being broadcast in Tasmania. The documentary was therefore pulled, nationwide.

On 29 August 2005, the ABC’s appeal against Justice Crawford’s decision was dismissed by a full sitting of the Tasmanian Supreme Court. The appeal was dismissed by a 2-1 majority. The court stressed that the injunction was a temporary one; however Justice Alan Blow said that if O’Neill’s defamation action went to trial, it might be decided that the documentary defamed him and in this case a permanent injunction might be granted. This would mean that the broadcast of the documentary in Tasmania would be permanently banned.

The ABC announced that it would appeal this decision to the High Court. The ABC said it would file the application in Sydney, but it was understood that the hearing would be held in Hobart.

On 28 September 2006, by a 4-2 margin, the High Court quashed Justice Crawford's ruling and said that both he, and two other justices of the Tasmania Supreme Court, had erred. They had failed to take into account the importance of free speech, and the fact that if the program had been defamatory, the damages would have been nominal. They therefore overturned the injunction.

Following the High Court's ruling, Kim Dalton, the ABC's director of television, announced that the documentary would be broadcast on ABC television on 26 October.

8. Parole bid

While the legal wranglings over the documentary were taking place, O’Neill had decided to apply for parole. In Tasmania, the Criminal Code Amendment (Life Prisoners and Dangerous Prisoners) Act 1994 enables prisoners to be resentenced and given a fixed period of detention and a non-parole period. O’Neill had never done this but had the right to do so -- it was suspected that unless he did, he could not apply for parole. The parole board therefore adjourned O’Neill’s case in May 2005 while it waited for advice from the Solicitor-General as to O’Neill’s eligibility.

The Solicitor-General, Bill Bale, advised that O’Neill did have the right to apply for parole, even without applying for a resentencing under the Act. The parole board could not grant parole but it could make a recommendation to the Cabinet. When the parole board met on 24 June 2005 it considered O’Neill’s case, but adjourned the hearing until 8 July. O’Neill appeared before the board at the July 8 hearing, however the board adjourned again so that psychiatric and pre-parole reports could be prepared.

Author's note: I am not aware of any further details about O'Neill's parole application.

So how likely is it that O'Neill was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children? Below are the arguments for, and the arguments against:

9. The evidence for O'Neill's involvement

No less a person that the Tasmanian Police Commissioner, Richard McCreadie, thinks that O'Neill could have killed the Beaumont children. He thinks, as do others who know of O'Neill's past, that he has committed other murders that he has never been convicted of. He has demonstrated that he is willing and able to murder children. Acquaintances of his say that he has admitted to them that he killed the Beaumont children. He was also in areas where other children went missing and was often passing through the Adelaide area in the years 1965 to 1968. Interestingly, when questioned more exactly he denies ever having been in South Australia at this time.

10. The evidence against O'Neill's involvement

There is very little evidence to connect O'Neill with the Beaumont children disappearance. The South Australian police say that they have interviewed O'Neill in relation to the disappearance of the Beaumont children but that they have discounted him. Whatever he told them, it seems to have been sufficient to eliminate him from the enquiry.

That O'Neill is a murderer is in no doubt, and that he has committed more than one murder is also in no doubt, but there is only the barest of evidence to connect him with the Beaumont children -- namely that he might have been in South Australia in the year that they went missing and that he once boasted to someone in the Kimberley area of Western Australia that he had killed them. O'Neill is not the only person to have told someone else that he killed the Beaumont children -- Bevan Spencer von Einem, for one, has been said to have made the same boast.

Janine Widgery says that she knows where he buried the children in country Victoria, but why the presumed murderer would take the trouble to drive the three children all the way out of South Australia has never been explained. Also, both of O'Neill's known murder victims and the four children he was charged with assaulting in Victoria, were all boys. Only the youngest of the Beaumont children, four-year-old Grant, was a boy. Lastly, there are three other suspects for the disappearance of the Beaumont children, and logically they can't all have done it.

Beaumontchildren.com

Remember, he's a killer

TheAge.com.au

October 19, 2006