James Ryan O'Neill (born Leigh Anthony Bridgart in 1947) is an Australian convicted murderer and suspected serial killer, currently serving a life sentence in Tasmania for a murder he committed in February 1975.
Allegations have been made that O'Neill also murdered a number of other children in several Australian states from the mid-1960s whilst he was still a teenager through to the murder that he was imprisoned for in 1975. He is currently Tasmania's longest-serving prisoner for a single offence.
He was the subject of a documentary, The Fishermen, which was broadcast on ABC TV in October 2006.
Life
O'Neill attended Brighton and Caulfield Grammar Schools and Scotch College following which he began working in real estate. He later became a gun dealer and is known to have associated with members of Melbourne's underworld.
Between 1965 and 1968, O'Neill (as Bridgart) worked in the opal industry, which required frequent travel between Melbourne and Coober Pedy in South Australia. He then obtained work on a cattle station in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. In 1969, a business partner accidentally shot him in the head while playing with a pistol. The bullet, which entered his right forehead and came out of his neck, destroyed his sense of smell and taste. Bridgart went on to give many reasons for the bullet wound to various people including it being the result of serving in Vietnam, that his mother's boyfriend had shot him and being an ASIO spy.
In 1971 Bridgart was charged with 12 offences involving abductions and sexual assaults of four boys in Victoria. He skipped bail and fled to Western Australia. In November 1974 he moved to Tasmania and changed his name to James Ryan O'Neill.
Arrest
In February 1975 nine-year-old Ricky John Smith (also known as Ricky Kube) was abducted and O'Neill was one of many who helped in the search for the missing boy. Over the next two weeks five children were abducted in separate incidents but all managed to escape. Nine year old Bruce Colin Wilson was then abducted and his body was found in May 1975 near Risdon Vale. O'Neill was a suspect and after interrogation led police to the body of Ricky Smith. Although arrested for both murders he was only tried for Ricky Smith's murder following legal practice at the time. O'Neill pleaded insanity, due to his head injuries from being shot in 1969, and claimed that police had held a gun to his head to get his confession.
After deliberating for three hours, the jury found O'Neill guilty and he was jailed for life. He applied for parole in 1991 and again in 2005 but was turned down and has not reapplied. He remains Tasmania's longest serving prisoner.
Documentary
In the 1990s, freelance journalist Janine Widgery approached a retired Victorian detective, Gordon Davie, with a proposal to make a documentary on James O'Neill. Davie saw no story suitable for a documentary and declined. In 1998 Davie read in a news report that O'Neill had been transferred in 1991 to the low security Hayes Prison Farm and was allowed to go fishing in the Derwent River unsupervised. The same report claimed that O'Neill had no criminal record prior to his conviction for murder. Davie thought this unlikely because Davie believed it was rare for a serial killer to start so late in life. Davie wrote to O'Neill asking for permission to interview him.
Davie interviewed him for the entire day with O'Neill claiming he had never even received so much as a parking ticket before the murders. Davie contacted Widgery and told her he didn't believe a word O'Neill had said and he thought there would be a story. Over the next four years Davie recorded hundreds of hours of their conversations.
O'Neill was highly intelligent and charismatic. Davie said afterwards: "He is one of the most likeable men you would ever meet. On the first day of filming there were six or seven out there and at end of the day I said, "What do you think of him?" They all said, "You've made a mistake, this bloke couldn't have done anything wrong", however a pattern emerged from the interviews, of the places O'Neill visited, children had gone missing in seven or eight of them. It was also alleged he was in Adelaide about the time the Beaumont children disappeared and that he had told people he was responsible for their disappearance.