When Pauline Williams asked her son if she could help, he said: "No ??? it's something I have to do for myself."

Williams, a strapping 25-year-old ruckman from Melton, was a man with a big reputation in a small town where the local football club was a social hub. This reputation extended beyond his football prowess to his interest in the girlfriends and wives of other men in the area.

In the parlance of the times, Williams was a ladies' man. And it didn't seem to matter much to the plumber if the woman he was pursuing was attached.

It also meant that police had several obvious suspects when Williams' body was discovered murdered in the bush - too many to ensure an easy arrest.

Some elements of the Williams cold case - one of several decades-old homicides that detectives are freshly examining - are typical.

But several pieces of intriguing information uncovered by Fairfax Media point to something most unusual. For example, one of the suspects in the murder of Bernie Williams was, at the time of the killing, a policeman.

Williams was the doting father of a three-year-old daughter. He was married to the girl's mother, but they were separated. They remained on good terms.

He was a strapping ruckman who had been expected to captain the Melton Football Club that season. He was one of the most talented and feared players in the Riddell Football League.

Shortly before his death, Williams was led by his killer to a scrubby patch of bushland.

Evidence suggests that he knew he wasn't coming home. It appears his hands may have been bound as he was walked towards the site of his execution. A pistol was used to kill him.

Five days later, his body was found hunched over, about 20 metres from Hobbs Road in Bullengarook.

A $50,000 reward was announced within a year of the murder, but did not yield a conviction. Now, over three decades later, police are expected to soon announce a much bigger sum - $1 million - in the hope that it will encourage some new information to emerge.

In the first few months of the initial police inquiry, police tested various theories.

Was Williams' killer a hit man hired by a jealous husband or lover of a woman the footballer was having an affair with? Was there any chance the death was a case of mistaken identity?

But perhaps most intriguing was a strange phone call to a police station north of Melbourne in the days after his disappearance.

A junior constable told homicide squad detectives that a man who had claimed to be Williams had called the station after Williams had been missing for four days.

The constable said he heard STD beeps, indicating the call had come from interstate. He said he briefly spoke to the man claiming to be Williams before passing the call to another policeman (officer B).

The constable and the officer said the man had told them he was camping in the foothills just out of Adelaide after meeting a few mates and going on a "binge", and that he would be home in two weeks.

Officer B insisted that the caller was Williams because he knew him well.

But Williams would not be coming home, and could not have made the call. When it was allegedly made, Bernie Williams was already dead.

The call and its timing is a potentially crucial line of inquiry. Police are now probing the question of whether the officer B's partner was having an affair with Williams. The officer may even have come across Williams in the family home.

Did the phone call ever take place? If so, was it a ruse to stop those worried about the missing Williams, and to prevent a more detailed investigation? Or simply to delay inquiries until the trail had gone cold?

If that was the plan, it failed within hours, because a trail bike rider came across the body the next day.

Given the state of his body, it was considered likely Williams had died within hours of going missing.

Early in the original investigation, police speculated that Williams' dalliances could be a motive for the murder, but then investigators and the coroner virtually dismissed it.

"The way he died is consistent with somebody having paid a hit man to do the job," Homicide squad Detective Sergeant Bob Snell told the media in 1985. "An irate husband would probably want to make sure he suffered before being killed. Mr Williams had not been touched. His only injuries were caused by the two shots."

In June, 1985, a coroner delivered an open finding, saying there appeared to be no motive for killing Williams. Police found Mr Williams had no known enemies or involvement in drugs.

Now, cold-case police are looking again at sexual jealousy as a possible motive. There are several suspects in addition to the now retired officer B. Williams was a man who made no secret of his sexual exploits, according to evidence given to police by an apprentice plumber who worked with him.

"He would brag to me of his sexual habits with other women and he would tell me the next day what he had done with the girl, and sometimes who it was," the apprentice said.

"Some days he would go off leaving me on the work site and he [came] back an hour or so later and tell me he'd just screwed some girl.

"During the time I knew him he told me of dozens of girls he had sex with, after a while I used to get sick of it and didn't listen to him."

Other evidence given to police underlined Williams' reputation.

He drove a dark blue Ford LTD, and several locals gave evidence about seeing him in a carpark outside a pharmacist the night before he was reported missing.

The carpark was about halfway between his house and his parent's house, where he had just finished his last meal.

One witness told police about a man he saw talking to Williams, and how it was unusual the man had greeted Williams as Bernard, not Bernie.

"I know Bernie Williams by sight and I have seen him round town," he said.

"I am familiar with his car, the LTD. I knew it was Bernie's car as soon as I saw it."

Williams worked as a plumber for his older brother Mick. It was Mick who had to identify the body. Today, the mystery of who killed his brother perplexes Mick as much as if it was still that day in the morgue.

"For 32 years it's gone nowhere," Mick Williams said.

"Obviously nothing is going to bring him back, but with all the suspicions and everything, we just want to make some sense of it all."