Police believe a man who died five years ago in a US hospital of a heart attack is Elmer Crawford, a fugitive believed to have murdered his pregnant wife and their three children before dumping their bodies at Loch Ard Gorge four decades ago.

Retired First Constable Duncan Hales, 92, said yesterday he was pleased to see closure to the case that has sparked flashbacks over the years.

“I’m very happy to see some sort of closure, although nature claimed his life and I’m a bit disappointed he never faced the criminal justice system,” the former Port Campbell police officer said.

Crawford has been on the run since the discovery of the bodies of his wife Therese, 35, and their children Kathryn, 13, James, 8, and Karen, 6, in the family car in the Loch Ard Gorge near Port Campbell on July 2, 1970.

A 1971 inquest found Crawford had bashed and electrocuted his family in their home in Glenroy, in Melbourne’s north, then pushed his car with the four bodies inside off the cliff at the gorge, where it was later found by police.

News reports yesterday revealed that Victorian police now believe Crawford fled to the United States and died in a Texas hospital on March 31, 2005.

Facial recognition experts from Victoria and the FBI have viewed old photos of Crawford and say the dead man is almost certainly the fugitive.

The fingerprints on the dead man’s body had been damaged deliberately.

The man was carrying identification in four different names, all believed to have been false.

The body of James may be exhumed as a last resort so his DNA can be compared with that of the dead man but police are appealing for any relative of Crawford's to come forward to avoid that move.

Mr Hales revealed previously undisclosed information about the murders during an interview with The Standard in December 2003.

That interview preceded the release of a book Almost Perfect: the true story of the brutal unsolved Crawford murders by Greg Fogarty.

A 2008 tip to Crime Stoppers suggested specially aged pictures of Crawford were very similar to images of a man published on a United States missing person's list.

Crime Stoppers passed the information to the former Victoria Police homicide detective in charge of the case, Sergeant Damian Jackson, who has since worked with US authorities to identify the dead man.

"If this deceased male in the US is Crawford, as we suspect it is, then it means we can close the book on what has been a 40-year saga," he said.

To his fellow Texans Crawford was known as Harold Frysinger, the grey-haired elderly man with big glasses while other Americans knew him as Gerald Brown, Roger Smith or Peter Turner.

Police had few leads on Crawford's whereabouts although there were alleged sighting in Western Australia and there was a rumour Crawford had gone to Ireland, joined the IRA and been killed.

"He just vanished into thin air," retired homicide squad detective Adrian Donehue said yesterday.

"It was a remarkable disappearing act. From that time until right up until now there's never been any confirmed sightings of him either in Australia or elsewhere," he said.

No motive was ever established for the Crawford murders, but two theories police examined were his wife had threatened to expose his various thefts from a racing club and the couple fought over their fourth pregnancy.