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Hello listeners to Real Crime with Adam Shander.

I want to wish you a very safe and happy festive season.

We're going to be taking off over the Christmas break, so I wanted to leave you with a couple of excerpts from my favorite podcasts of twenty twenty five.

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The interesting thing about the way the bomb is detonated, as I understand it, was that it wasn't a timing device, it wasn't a pressure device.

It had to be detonated manually with a line of sight.

And there were two vehicles, one red land Cruiser I believe or missing patrol that was seen in the area before the day and on the day, and there was a guy driving it who had a very particular eagle tattoo on one forum this was seen and I guess it was believed that this one might have detonated the bomb.

Yes, that's correct, And he does appear throughout the investigation and turns up again after as far as the inquiries goes, he even inserts himself into the whole inquiry by attending at Saint Kildo Police Complex, which was the headquarters for the crime department back then.

Yet very interesting character.

I didn't get to meet him, unfortunately.

He committed suicide a few weeks after his last contact with Jeff Maher.

And he would confess to all sorts of things, then sometimes retract that.

But then if he did scratch around and.

Have a bit of a look to try and corroborate things, sometimes some of the most amazing things that he was confessing.

To were actually real.

I give you the main example.

Was he put his hand up for a bombing that he did at a house in Flemington that I think was probably requested or orchestrated by these same people behind this bomb.

But he also someone very very close to him and committed a murder and he helped dispose of the body as in this particular fellow, and he phoned police and said, if you go out to this particular freeway on the side of the freeway, you'll find a body.

And in the end they had to have a couple of looks and they finally found it.

He ended up getting charged for well.

The other person got charged with murder, and he got charged with helping dispose of the body.

So you can't just sort of dismiss any of his claims because sometimes they were really good information.

You're talking about Philip Lander, also known as Philip Matthews, and he was a young man I think he was nineteen at the time or twenty when this car bomb detonated.

And you're right, it comes in two thousand and four to the police unannounced and says I killed John Ferland.

And this doesn't happen.

A walk up start to a confession like this just simply doesn't happen.

And Jeff Maher it was your boss, interviewed him and some parts of his evidents were very compelling.

Others were doubt and it led them to overall have doubts about him.

You were reading about him in the file and when you mentioned the murder there, of course, this was a murder committed by his twin brother.

Correct, Yes, so he ends up giving up his twin brother for a murder.

This boy liked to confess.

And I don't know if that was something that he would be involved with these things, but then he'd be a little bit at odds with himself on what he'd done and what to come clean.

It was with this one, with John Ferlan's murder, it was like he wanted to.

Get it off his chest.

And you know, I don't know his motivation for a.

Committing suicide, whether this was part of it and it was just the guilt factor and maybe other things that he'd done.

But I also think he and his brother were raised in the school of hard knocks, so that I think there's a lot of demons in there for him.

And it's funny, but I kind of got to like him a little bit, almost like he was the underdog, which is kind of weird.

I've not really felt that towards anybody else that I've in this to goate it, or certainly that's got a criminal history like his.

But it was.

Almost like I wanted him to sort of be able to offload this and succeed.

But you know, already by the time I was anywhere near the file, he was long gone.

Well, it's interesting because he does commit suicide weeks after he turns up and kill or roote police headquarters, and even the manner of his death.

If you're a conspiracy theorist could get you excited because he attaches a hose from his car exhaust into the vehicle and gases himself like that, you know.

I mean, if you're a conspiracy theorist, as I say, you might say, well, maybe he was killed to cover up his confessions, to stop him giving more detail.

Yes, and that's.

Something that would have been looked at it at the time, given the involvement that he'd had in this matter, and just is you know, in other matters that he'd been involved in, and the type of people that he mixed with and mingled with, he could easily have been the target of somebody.

But there was nothing a stablish in that respect.

It was a non suspicious action that I believed he committed suicide.

Yeah, the toxicology didn't show any sedatives or anything else.

He might have been compelled to kill himself.

Not that I'm aware of.

I did read the autopsy results in that, but I don't recall anything other than just the whole situation with the car.

Yeah.

I think if there had been anything that suggested foul play, your bosses would have been strayed on to.

I mean, Jeff mar being one of the best homicide detectives in the state he would have been right onto this, but nothing was found, so that that had to be so frustrating because there the evidence seemed to stop.

And for instance, he did talk about bearing other explosives, detonators at a property up in the country.

He did talk about bearing detonators, explosives and other items in the country somewhere there yet to be found, and that could be critical evidence to standing up what he did tell police in the past that he was the bomber.

Absolutely, and I believe that those items were there at some stage.

I mean, the investigations earlier did establish that he went out to a particular location near where he lived many years ago, and he spent time at that location, and we did I was involved too with a search.

We had ground penetrating radar, we had drug dogs, explosive dogs to try and establish where that was.

And at one stage I got very excited because I found this nice area there.

And we thought, oh, we're onto something here.

But in the end it was just pushing and mounding for where they bocked off the track for vehicles.

But I was so hoping that we would find something there.

But it's often crossed my mind just to go out as a little bit of a you know, a member of the public and just have a bit of a poke around if it's not there.

I think it was, and that's where some people will know.

The friends of his and I think even his brother were aware of what was there, as Phil Matthews himself said that there were things in there, like maps of where he was supposed to do the surveillance on Ferlin.

There were explosive leftover Bella Clavi's and you know, all sorts of things, a good little crooks kit, and that would be magnificent.

To be able to find well, because you'd probably have DNA on there as well.

And you could, of course, you've got his twin brother who's still alive.

You could compare the DNA to him and say, well, this is Phil Matthews little cachet.

Yes.

And that was going just briefly back to the cigarette butts.

That was something I thought, Oh, I wonder if any of these cigarette butts were Phil Matthews, and thought, oh, if only he had an evil twin brother who already had his profile on the system.

And I was like, oh, okay, maybe not evil.

That's probably well, I don't know, he's committed for I call him, he's committed murders, he's probably not squeaky clean, and you know he's an identical twin, and unfortunately there were there was.

No match there.

So that was always the challenge to connect Philip Matthews with Domenico Italiano, who the theory went had ordered the murder.

And as I talked to people when I've been looking in this case over a number of years, I started to get a profile of Matthews as someone who was incredibly willing and wanted to do this, wasn't seeking even there's no discussion of money.

And I wonder whether there's a discontinuous link between Matthews and Italiano, whereby some people talk to Philip Matthews while he's in jail and say, you could make a name for yourself by blowing up this individual, he goes and does it.

It may not have been directly ordered by Italiano, even though he benefited from that.

Do you think that's possible.

Part of the investigation did look at whether there was talk and we never could quite confirm it whether he actually did the Flemington bombing a is a bit of a run up to this one.

To show that he could do it and then he would do it.

And also that by also confessing to that was another situation where he's gone in and said, oh, you know, I did that bombing and he ended up being locked up as a result of that.

But there was some suggestion that that was so that he could be inside to have the discussion with these two particular people that were already inside, to have that approach made through them.

So it's a little bit of an obscure kind of way of going about it.

But I did look at those people and they were in prison at the same time, and he gave a location in the prison where that conversation took place, so I checked those units and the floor plan and everything to see if that could have taken place at that location.

So we did have a look at that.

I've actually corroborated that with another source who knew both Ferlan and Italiano, that those individuals did have links to Italiano and could well have been the organizers and the urgers for Matthews to do what he did.

So it's fascinating and of course we should just go to a Taliano to ask him what happened, but we can't because, as luck would have it, he was jailed.

In fact, Jeff Maher when he was looking at these dodgy raffles as part of the fell and investigat well here's some offenses here, and Italiana was charged, went to jail, and when he came out, he decided to visit the wife or girlfriend of his former cell mate, which is a bit cheeky.

What happened then, Well.

My understanding is there was a little blue pell involved with a session with this lady and he died in the process of having an enjoyable afternoon or evening with her.

So that was the end of Dominique.

Taliano died on the job.

Yes, this is a case that just keeps on giving.

There some things in it that, you you know, it's like stranger than fiction sort of thing.

You couldn't make some of this up, or if only had an egle twin brother, or this sort of death of the main suspect.

So it's like somebody's written it for a TV series, but it's real.