Ron Crawford hired a hitman to kill his wife – and got away with it

When Ben Crawford was told his father was dying and he should fly home from Japan to say goodbye, he refused. ”What was I going to do, strangle him?”

Ben had idolised his dad. “He was a good father and my best mate.” Yet by 2017, the relationship was over and for good reason.

Ron Crawford, a respected pharmacist, hired a professional underworld hitman to kill his wife, Anne Louise Crawford, and got away with it.

For 18 years Ben “grew up believing my mother was killed in a tragic accident and my father was being blackmailed”.

By the time he became a parent, and as a qualified lawyer, he began asking questions his father couldn’t answer. As an adult, he read all he could about the case. Then his grandmother (Anne’s mother) told him of Ron’s links to criminal activity.

“She was a smart, caring person, and he [Ron] said she was losing her marbles. He could never give an explanation as there wasn’t one,” Ben said. “He always had trouble with the truth.”

Ben was seven when on May 6, 1988, his mother was found dead under her 1983 brown Ford Fairlane in the driveway of their home in De Havilland Avenue, Strathmore Heights.

The scene was constructed to appear as if the car had slipped off the jack as she was trying to change the driver’s-side front tyre.

Fire and ambulance officers first at the scene had their doubts, but the police were less curious. The jack was not the one from the Ford. The spare tyre was resting against the carport wall clearly flat, meaning it was pointless to try and change one deflated tyre for another.

Brian Thompson had been a firefighter for 22 years when he was called to the driveway. “I later handled both these tyres and they were both obviously flat. This was the subject of discussion between myself and other people,” he would tell a coronial inquest.

There were four bruises on her left biceps as if she had been roughly grabbed, there were signs of a struggle inside the house and a false finger nail was missing.

She was supposed to be crawling under the car to grab a wheel nut but was found on her back. Ron had promised to return before midday to change the tyre and Anne had no pressing appointments requiring the car.

One of the first police on the scene told us they didn’t declare a crime scene because, “It was just so weird, we thought it had to be an accident.”

On the morning of her death, Anne Crawford woke, dressed in a tracksuit for her regular walk with a friend. When she returned, she passed the driver’s side of her car, centimetres from the flat tyre.