A detective has unearthed an explosive confession, allegedly made by a former police officer, that dramatically implicates him in the 1993 murder of WWII veteran Les Ball.
This stunning breakthrough, years after the case ran cold, is now casting a stark new light on what happened to the 71-year-old just before he vanished.
Detective Liz McNaughton, a Queensland homicide investigator, meticulously re-examined the decades-old file and an alleged confession from David Phillips, Mr Ball’s son-in-law and a former detective himself.
Phillips allegedly confessed to a former Victorian police colleague, Brian Murphy – known as “The Skull” –, detailing a brutal confrontation in the family garage where he allegedly murdered Mr Ball.
The account describes the incident as “messy, quite bloody”, with Phillips boasting he “almost ripped his windpipe out”, and later “he had met up with some old guy that looked like Les and had got him to go and buy a train ticket”.
“And then he’d helped him bury him in some unmarked grave that he had previously had ready,” McNaughton said.
The confession further claims Phillips then executed the man he recruited to help dispose of Mr Ball’s body.
McNaughton’s investigation, which involved pouring over hundreds of pages of documents, revealed crucial details missed in previous inquiries and interviewing some of Mr Ball’s now adult grandchildren.
She noted glaring inconsistencies in the accounts of the day Mr Ball was last seen alive, with adult witnesses providing contradictory narratives.
Mr Ball’s youngest granddaughter Rochelle Phillips suffered recurring nightmares depicting her grandfather with his “throat slit”, a detail McNaughton found particularly disturbing.
While another granddaughter Danielle would later reveal she feared her grandmother Margaret – Mr Ball’s first wife – may have been involved.
“I’m not saying whether dad did it or not,’ Danielle told McNaughton during one of their interviews.
“I honestly have no idea we were too young to even consider what, what would, could have happened to granddad. We just, you know, we thought he left.”
Danielle would later ask police: “Could Nan have done it?”.
Mr Ball and his first wife had an acrimonious break up, with La-Chelle telling the Perfect Alibi podcast the pair often fought.
“Oh Dad couldn’t stand her,” La Chelle said.
“They’d have a lot of fights, like Margaret would be screaming at him where he’d be screaming,” La Chelle said.
At the time of his disappearance, Margaret – who died in 2020 – was also staying in the Phillips’ house.
Even David Phillip’s own family suspected the former detective may have had something to do with his father-in-law’s disappearance and suspected murder.
“I asked my mum and dad that, and dad said, I don’t know’,” Phillips’ sister Christine Royal said.
“My mum goes, ‘Possibly’. They went to heaven thinking that their son’s a murderer and didn’t have any answers,” she said.
“He’s rat cunning,” Ms Royal said of her brother.
McNaughton’s sharp eye also picked up on overlooked clues, such as Mr Ball, a non-smoker, being booked in a smoker’s carriage on the train he never boarded – a detail that raised immediate suspicion.
The absence of Mr Ball’s mattress when his garage was cleared out also suggested potential evidence of foul play had been removed.
David Phillips’ “evasiveness” during interviews and his suspected use of police knowledge to obscure evidence, like leaving Mr Ball’s car abandoned at the Townsville train station for weeks, also solidified McNaughton’s suspicions.
“My impression was that David was manipulative and he probably used his policing career to big note himself, he would like to dance around questions,” McNaughton said.
“[He] Didn’t really answer a question. Sort of more, was all very vague and had a story for a question, but the question was never really answered.
“I found him very hard to, very hard to read and very hard to pinpoint down to a particular,” she said.
Detective McNaughton firmly believes the motive for Mr Ball’s murder was financial.
Mr Ball had loaned the Phillips family tens of thousands of dollars, and family members attest to his desire to reclaim these funds to settle on his dream home.
“The conclusion … the only conclusion after reviewing all that I could come to was that David Phillips … was the only person that had the means and the motive … I truly believed that he was the person that murdered Les Ball,” McNaughton said.
These critical revelations, and the intricate details of Detective McNaughton’s relentless pursuit of the truth, are being brought to light by the investigative podcast, Perfect Alibi, presented by reporters Jo Townsend and Callum Dennes. The latest episode delves into the full extent of this alleged confession and the compelling evidence that led McNaughton to her unwavering conclusion.
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