It was a routine “welfare check”, something police officer Ian Ninness had done countless times before. But this time, he knew something was different.
Just two days earlier, the former cop from Cardwell – a tropical coastal town located halfway between Queensland’s Cairns and Townsville – had taken a call from WW11 veteran Leslie Ball’s daughter Le-Chelle, who was desperately searching for her dad.
Le-Chelle Ball was just 18.
“Someone’s done this bloke in,” Mr Ninness said. “I thought he was dead.”
At 71, the single retiree had been looking forward to moving into his dream home. So much so he pushed for an early settlement. But on the day itself, he failed to show up.
That was April 1993 and since then three police investigations and two coronial inquests have failed to find out what happened to Mr Ball, or who’s responsible.
“I know who murdered my father and I want justice,” Ms Ball told news.com.au’s new true crime podcast Perfect Alibi.
Investigative reporters Jo Townsend and Callum Denness have spent two years trying to unravel what happened to Mr Ball as part of the Perfect Alibi podcast which launches today. They’ve tracked down family members and former police investigators, uncovered evidence of fraud, and found links to the Melbourne underworld. They have also uncovered proof they say identifies who killed Mr Ball.
“When I first heard Le-Chelle’s story about the disappearance and murder of her father, I genuinely thought it seemed pretty far-fetched,” Denness told news.com.au.
“But when I began to dig through the police file on Les Ball’s case, it checked out. And what followed has been two years of investigating a crime that is absolutely solvable.”
Townsend, who has spent years investigating true crime, said “this one stands out”.
“It is a pretty wild story – the links to the Melbourne underworld, the fraud and the forged documents, the seemingly perfect alibis and the initial suspect,” Townsend said.
“But it is all, unbelievably at first, true.
“I want people to listen because they should care about Le-Chelle and her 30 year fight to find out what has happened to her dad,” Townsend said.
“We want her to find out where her dad’s remains are and bury him properly. She believes she knows who murdered her father, and by the end of the podcast, we do too. And it isn’t very often that true crime journalists get to claim that, get to feel like that.”
Not knowing what happened to her father is “the worst feeling,” Le-Chelle told the Perfect Alibi podcast.
“I just felt sick in the stomach because my dad wanted to move into that house and he was not not moving into that house,” she said.
“So I was like, ‘well where is my dad’?
“Something’s happened to him … I was just hysterical”.
Le-Chelle is Mr Ball’s daughter from his second marriage to Et Ison.
“He was that absolutely obsessed with that child from the moment she was born,” Ms Ison told the Perfect Alibi podcast.
Despite being known to take off for weeks at time, Mr Ball would always keep in touch with La-Chelle. So when he failed to reply to two letters she’d sent him, La-Chelle knew something was wrong.
Desperate for answers, she called the local police station.
Former local Cardwell cop Ian Ninness picked up the phone and agreed to do a “welfare check” but within two days knew something more sinister was at play.
Officer Ninness went to Mr Ball’s new house only to find a tenant who said she’d heard the sale of the house had fallen through.
Mr Ball had paid a $7000 cash deposit and was due to settle the final $63,000. He’d even had all his mail redirected to the new house. But on the day of settlement – Monday April 19, 1993, he failed to turn up.
“There were bank statements, social Security, veterans Affairs letters and things like that. I started opening some of the mail up just to see if there’s anything that would assist me in finding him,” Mr Ninness told the Perfect Alibi podcast.
“I spoke to solicitors. I spoke to the real estate. I spoke to the people at the house that he was buying,” he said.
Two days after her phone call, Mr Ninness called Le-Chelle back saying her father never moved into his new home. He never showed up for the settlement.
“Someone’s done this bloke in,” Mr Ninness said. “I thought he was dead.
“All the investigations that I did myself led me to believe that this man, if he was alive, would’ve contacted his daughter, would’ve settled the house. A lot of things that he didn’t do. “And, I personally thought, he’s probably passed on”.
On May 22, 1993, five weeks after her father was due to settle on the new house, Le-Chelle filed an official missing person’s report, with the case handed to Townsville Detective Noel Powers.
“It was quite obvious that he intended to settle down there and make that his forever home,” Mr Powers told the Perfect Alibi podcast.
“And then all of a sudden it just, it stopped … basically dropped off the earth. There was no sign of his account being active,” he said.
The first people Mr Powers spoke with were Mr Ball’s daughter Leanne and her husband David. According to Mr Powers, neither seemed too concerned.
“From memory there was, there wasn’t a great deal of concern,” Mr Powers said.
“Le-Chelle in particular was in contact with me and with us quite frequently, wanting to know what was going on, asking how we’re going, had you do this, did you do that? That’s what you do expect of a family involved in this sort of situation.
“Whereas Leanne and David was nothing. There was no contact,” he said.
David Phillips told Mr Powers he had last seen his father-in-law on a Friday morning, while Leanne said she saw him a week later when he visited her in hospital in Brisbane.
“She said he didn’t stay all that long, just inquired about how she was going and that he was going to visit Le-Chelle up on the Sunshine Coast. and according to her, that’s the last he’s ever been seen of,” Mr Powers said.
But something didn’t add up. Why would Mr Ball on the day of the settlement of his dream home be 1300km in Brisbane, and why would he have a second train ticket from Brisbane to Dalby, which is four hours west of Brisbane?
Le-Chelle’s mother Et Ison wasn’t buying it either.
“I rang the station master. Did he remember anybody that description getting off? No, he didn’t,” Ms Ison said.
She also called all the hotels in Dalby. Again no one had seen a man matching Mr Ball’s description.
Officers would later find Mr Ball’s car abandoned at Townsville train station but there was no sign of his distinctive homemade trailer which was usually either hooked up to the car or parked in the Phillips’ driveway.
“I worry that La-Chelle’s never gonna let it go,” Ms Ison, now 80, told the Perfect Alibi podcast.
“She’s always gonna hope for the best and hope that something will come out.
“I pray about it all the time but she will never let it go. Not in my day, she won’t,” Ms Ison said.
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