A daughter of murdered police informer Terence Hodson says her family has been denied justice after the State Coroner made an open finding into two of the most significant killings in Melbourne's gangland war.
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Judge Ian Gray on Friday ruled he could not reach the required standard of proof of who killed Mr Hodson and wife Christine, who were shot dead in their Kew home between May 15 and 16, 2004 after Mr Hodson had agreed to give evidence against allegedly corrupt police.
Former drug squad detective Paul Dale and hitman Rodney Collins were in 2009 charged with murdering Mr Hodson, after underworld boss Carl Williams implicated both men. Collins was also charged with murdering Ms Hodson.
But the case against them collapsed when Williams was murdered in prison in 2010. Mr Dale and Collins – in jail over an unrelated double murder – deny any involvement in the murders. Police cleared them of any involvement in Williams' murder.
Judge Gray told the Coroners Court that Williams was capable of organising the murders and Collins was capable of carrying them out.
But because Judge Gray did not accept Williams "as a witness of truth or any of his accounts as inherently reliable", he was unable to conclusively support the police theory that Mr Dale asked Williams to arrange the murder, and that the crime boss recruited Collins.
Judge Gray also found that while police could have helped bolster security at the Hodsons' home, Mr Hodson did not heed advice to stay out of his favourite television room. Mr Hodson, the court heard, acknowledged his vulnerability in the room, which was adjacent to a
courtyard next to a fence.
Judge Gray ruled the killer most likely entered the house from the courtyard after climbing the fence. The couple was found dead in the television room.
One of the Hodsons' daughters, Nikki Komiazyk, shook as she read a statement outside court, in which she said her parents had partly been blamed for their own deaths, and repeated a call for a royal commission into police corruption.
"The whole way this whole case has been held is just deplorable," Ms Komiazyk said.
"We can never move forward and ... there's no justice for us, there's no justice for my parents."
Fairfax Media reported on Friday that police might charge Mr Dale with fresh corruption offences over his relationship with Williams. Judge Gray was satisfied the pair met in Hillside on May 6, 2004, but could not be satisfied the former detective had a corrupt relationship with Williams.
"At the very least it certainly appears, following the Dublin Street burglary, to have been a highly inappropriate relationship for a suspended police officer to have engaged in," Judge Gray said. Mr Hodson implicated Mr Dale in the 2003 burglary of a drug house in Dublin Street, Oakleigh, but the charges were dropped after Mr Hodson's death.
A lawyer for Mr Dale declined to comment on the findings or the prospect of new charges.
