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.

She rang her friend to say she wouldn’t be able to take her child to kindergarten because of the puncture.

When Anne was found under the car she had changed from her tracksuit and was wearing caramel slacks and a white shirt with no towel or rug to protect her clothing from the concrete floor. This was out of character, as Ben recalls his mother would make him change into “outdoor clothes” for playtime.

What we now know is Crawford paid $10,000 to a hitman to kill his wife, having recently increased her life insurance policy. He would receive $79,029 when his wife died – making a profit on the murder deal.

The car was already on the jack when the hitman, known in court as PS, arrived. The career criminal entered the house, attacked Anne, placed a pillow case over her head, sat her in a chair, punched her in the face rendering her unconscious, dragged her under the car and rocked the vehicle until it slipped off the jack, crushing her skull and killing her instantly.

This version was consistent with the crime scene. Her body was found under the car next to the front door with one leg on the front step.

To complete his alibi, Crawford needed an innocent witness to find the body. He chose his daughter, then aged four. He knew what time she was dropped at home from kindergarten. She found the body along with a little boy and the woman who picked them up.

A neighbour used a hydraulic jack to lift the car, but it was too late. On cue Crawford arrived home – telling police he was there to change the tyre, implying his wife was too impatient to wait.

His original version went like this.

Anne was reversing out of their long drive with their two children about 8.10am when he noticed the car scraping on the ground due to the flat tyre. She apparently didn’t.

They took their son to school and daughter to kindergarten in his Toyota Landcruiser, removing his jack to later change the tyre. He dropped Anne home, kissed her, saying: “I will be home before lunch so just leave everything, and I’ll fix it.”

Local police declared it an accident. No pictures were taken, no search ordered and no forensic examination made. The car was sold weeks later to an airforce officer in Canberra. The fire brigade hosed down the carport floor.

Behind the facade

The first 24 hours in a homicide investigation are vital, but it was a month before a Moonee Ponds detective on another inquiry received information that Crawford was far from a middle-class chemist, father of two and grieving widow.

An armed robber facing jail time tried to cut a deal with police. Did they know that Anne Crawford had been murdered and Ron was behind it?

Crawford, he said, was an underworld medic who, when the bandit was shot, provided him with drugs and a Moonee Ponds GP to treat him. He also supplied a .38 revolver for an armed robbery.

The armed robber would claim he refused the contract to kill Anne for $25,000.

The deeper you dig into the character of Ron Crawford the deeper the cesspool. As well as being a successful chemist with three shops, he traded in stolen property, was having multiple affairs, lived for 10 years on a sickness insurance policy for a bad back while maintaining an active lifestyle as a part-time cattle farmer, peddled pornography and stole from his parents and business partners.

One of his girlfriends, Jan, would testify he considered murder plots including wiring the toaster to electrocute Anne, dropping a hairdryer in her bath, having her run over by a truck or tossing her from the balcony of an apartment.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you just divorce her?’ and he said, ‘I’m not doing that, I’m not giving her anything’.”

Jan told me, “When he talked of doing Anne in, I thought it was the grog talking, then I read in the Herald Sun that Anne had died in an accident and I thought, ‘Oh My God, he’s finally done it’.”

She recalled: “He told me he could get a hitman to kill my husband for $5000, and for $10,000 the body would never be found.”

Jan rang Anne to inform her of her husband’s infidelities, there was a short separation and the marriage was tenuous at the time of her death.

How did Crawford settle on such a murder plot so bizarre it left the first police on the scene believing it was an accident? The answer was just up the road.

The previous year a young man was killed when the car he was working under slipped off a ramp in the carport of his home. It was in Boeing Road, which joins De Havilland Avenue about 200 metres from the Crawford home.

Ron promised to reform and take the family on a holiday to Hong Kong – a promise he knew he wouldn’t honour. The children had passport photos taken the day before the murder.

The brother

Neil Crawford was four years younger than his brother Ron and was in shock at the death of his sister-in-law. “I am a little embarrassed and angry that I believed his story that it was an accident,” he now says.

About a month later (when police realised the death was suspicious), he received a call from a man he didn’t know. It was the hitman, PS. He said, “Tell Ron if everyone keeps their mouths shut we will all be OK.”

PS believed Ron Crawford’s phone was bugged. When Neil passed on the message Ron blustered that it meant nothing.

Neil remembers Ron insisted his wife be cremated. Her parents, Beth and Norm, said she wanted to be buried. “I remember an argument on the day of the funeral. Obviously, Ron wanted to make sure there was nothing left of her [to be exhumed].”

Earlier he insisted there be no autopsy saying he didn’t want her “further mutilated”.

What was the connection between PS, a serious armed robber out of Flemington, and the chemist from the same side of town?

‘I am a little embarrassed and angry that I believed his story that it was an accident.’

Neil Crawford

The Moonee Ponds detective found Crawford drove to Bendigo Prison four times with girlfriends to visit PS, signing with the alias Jonathan Hart from his favourite television show, Hart to Hart. Later asked by police why he had, Crawford replied: “He was lonely.”

On two visits he took Jan. “He said, ‘Come on, I’m going to meet a mate in jail’. I sat there [in Bendigo Prison] thinking, ‘What am I doing in a place like this?’”

Crawford loved to use aliases to show how clever he was, often writing letters to the Herald Sun under false names.

“He was the ultimate conman,” says Jan.

The Moonee Ponds investigation faltered when PS denied all allegations. An inquest judged Anne’s death as an accident, and Crawford was in the clear, for now.

The school friend

Maxine went to Hadfield High with Anne. “We were best buddies.”

“Ron was a few years in front of us. Even then, he was quiet and shifty. He had to have his own way.”

Maxine remembers Crawford’s reaction at the first suggestion he was involved in Anne’s death. “He said, ‘I went back to work and had a pie for lunch. Would someone do that if they had hired a hitman to kill their wife?’.”

The more relevant question is: Why are you leaving your two children who have just lost their mother to snack on a Four’N Twenty?

Maxine’s ex-husband, Ian, says after the funeral they went to Crawford’s country property, and he said, “If the police take me away promise me you will look after the kids.” At that point police still thought it was an accident.

Once, when the Crawfords were on their way to visit Maxine and Ian, a car crossed the massive median strip on St Georges Road, Northcote, and T-boned their Jaguar. “Was that his first attempt to get rid of her?” Ian still wonders.

The case remained closed until October 2003 when PS’s former wife went to police saying he was hired to kill Anne, had driven to Melbourne the day before, returned the next day and admitted he was the killer.

This time, PS, who had become a protected witness in another case, confessed, was sentenced to 12 years and agreed to testify against Crawford, who was then charged.

Neil Crawford remembers Ron turning up in tears asking his brother and parents to lend him the money for his high-powered defence team. They did, with Neil putting up his own home as guarantee for Ron’s bail.

Having signed a note promising to pay back $250,000 (plus interest) to his parents, he waited until after their death to claim it was a gift.

In a separation agreement with a later partner, he swore an affidavit that he owed his parents $300,000 for the legal fees – and that it was not a gift.

Crawford had hired a car from Hertz the day after the murder, returning it the same day. He would later claim his 1987 Toyota Landcruiser was being serviced, even though he had access to two work vehicles.

The rental travelled 301 kilometres in a day. Police believe he used the hire car to drive 150 kilometres to Euroa, where he paid PS the $10,000 for the hit.

The Landcruiser was still under warranty, but there are no records of it being serviced that day. Crawford suggested he had sent it to another mechanic because it was a “lemon”, yet he would go on to buy another two Landcruisers in the years ahead.

If he had hired the car to drive in Melbourne at an average of no more than 30km/h, he would have spent 10 hours in the vehicle the day after his wife died.

At the trial, the defence team argued PS went to burgle his Strathmore home, was surprised by Anne and killed her.

It defies logic. There were no signs of forced entry, there was a heavy security door on the front, rear access was blocked by the family’s doberman, it was broad daylight, the Ford was in the driveway, indicating someone was home.

Would an underworld figure drive 300 kilometres, and stay at the Tullamarine Travelodge overnight just to do a common house burglary?

He parked his Ford ute streets away meaning he would not have been able to steal any bulky valuables.

PS was a convicted criminal and his testimony needed to be corroborated. The allegations from the first armed robber alleging he was offered $25,000 to kill Anne was not put to the jury.

Crawford knew how to play the odds. When he didn’t like the look of one of the juries, a mate, an ex-policeman, approached a juror in a pub to discuss the case. The trial had to be aborted. “It was a set-up,” says one of the investigators.

In 2006 at the third trial, Crawford was acquitted. He approached his senior defence barrister to shake his hand. The barrister refused, instead turning his back on his client to face a detective sitting behind him, quietly saying, “You’ve been robbed.”

The son

Ben now lives overseas, the relationship with his father shattered. Maxine says, “He couldn’t bear to live in the same country as Ron.”

Always the victim, Ron accused his son of damaging the family by continuing to look into Anne’s death. By the end they were reduced to communication by emails.

Crawford wrote, “Your behaviour is personally disappointing to say the least; however your decision-making has far-reaching consequences for the entire family.”

Ben responded, “How dare you besmirch my family and the memory of my mother with your self-serving cowardice, feigned indignation and call to arms of far-reaching consequences. The far-reaching consequences of your actions are already chiselled in stone, Ron.”

Again, Crawford plays the mental health card. “I would urge you to seek professional assistance sooner rather than later as your state of mind is worrying.”

Ben says, “I lost my mother three times: once to an accident, once to murder and then with my father the offender.”

When I thought Crawford couldn’t get any lower, I would be proven wrong.

Although out of time, he applied to the courts to have the rules waived to receive $50,000 in crimes compensation. The man who organised the murder of his wife now wanted to be paid for it.

The application was denied.

“I was nearly sick when I heard he had applied for compensation,” says his brother Neil. “He was always only motivated by money and greed.”

Ron Crawford died on July 29 aged 75. The world is a better place without him.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.