Vic: Police errors led to body not being identified - coroner

AAP General News (Australia)
08-04-2006
Vic: Police errors led to body not being identified - coroner

MELBOURNE, Aug 4 AAP - A series of errors by Victoria Police resulted in a missing
father-of-four being buried in an unmarked grave for almost a decade, a coroner has found.

The inquest into the death of Matthew Joseph Bibby, 35, of Richmond, was told that
his body was found by police in the Yarra River four days after he was reported missing
in November 1996.

But Mr Bibby's body was not identified until 2005 because police failed to enter the
details into the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP) database.

The Melbourne inquest was also told that despite dental records being given to police
by Mr Bibby's family in 1996, no attempt was made to match them with the body found shortly
after his disappearance.

In handing down his finding today, Coroner Graeme Johnstone said Mr Bibby remained
unidentified until 2005 because of a series of police errors.

The inquest was told that the police officer who found Mr Bibby's body failed to enter
the details of his remains into the LEAP database at the time.

A second attempt to match his missing person's file with unidentified remains also
failed in 2003.

The inquest heard that an Office of Police Integrity (OPI) report into the handling
of Mr Bibby's case was also critical of police saying the Bibby family had been "unnecessarily
traumatised".

Mr Bibby's sister, Liz Bibby Biasin, said even though her brother's body had eventually
been identified the family had suffered for almost 10 years.

"We've got a large extended family and it's just been absolutely traumatic," Ms Bibby
Biasin told ABC Radio.

"This is just absolutely traumatic and it's not acceptable," she said.

Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland said police had taken on board the coroner's
findings and those made in an OPI report.

"We have talked to the Bibby family, we obviously regret that our systems failed us,
bearing in mind this now goes back some period of time," he said.

"Obviously that wasn't good enough and we regret that the Bibby family has been put
in that position."

Mr Overland said Victoria Police had identified failures in relation to missing persons
cases and had moved to fix them.

"We don't pretend that the system is perfect," he said.

"But the internal systems that we have put in place are much stronger and I think that
is much less likely that this sort of thing would happen now."

The coroner found Mr Bibby drowned in the Yarra River near the Fairfield boathouse
on the night of November 10, 1996.

Mr Johnstone found that Mr Bibby was depressed and drug affected at the time, but he
could not determine whether he had originally intended to take his own life.

Some of the recommendations made by the coroner included that a national database of
missing persons be set up, and for the establishment of a new database linking the Victorian
Institute of Forensic Medicine, the State Coroner's Office and Victoria Police.

AAP sam/mh/sd

KEYWORD: BIBBY

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