As Mark James got ready for school on a Tuesday morning in 1980, a random comment from his mother Maria was seared into his memory. “If anything ever happens to me, be sure to take care of your brother,” Mark, now 53, recalled last year in the Foxtel doco series The Good Cop. That conversation 40 years ago, when Mark was just 13, was the last he would ever have with his mother. Hours later, Maria James, 38, would be dead, the result of a frenzied attack inside her home in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury. She had been tied up and stabbed 68 times.
No-one has been convicted of the heinous crime, which left Mark and his little brother Adam, 50, grief-stricken, but a review by Victoria Police will…
