O'Neill attended Brighton and Caulfield Grammar Schools and Scotch College following which he began working in real estate.
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.
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 the 1990s, freelance journalist Janine Widgery approached a retired Victorian detective, Gordon Davie, with a proposal to make a documentary on James O'Neill.
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.
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.
The case, O'Neill v Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Roar Film Pty Ltd and Davie,[1] was heard by the Supreme Court on 22 April.
[2]Chief Justice Murray Gleeson and Justice Susan Crennan wrote in their joint judgement: "It is one thing for the law to impose consequences … in the case of an abuse of the right of free speech, It is another … for a court to interfere with the right of free speech by prior restraint."
Dissenting Justice Michael Kirby wrote: "Effectively, it means that any prisoner, serving a sentence for a heinous crime is fair game for anything at all that a media organisation … might choose to publish".In the early 1970s O'Neill told a station owner in the Kimberley and several other acquaintances that he was responsible for the disappearance of the Beaumont children.
The Tasmanian Police Commissioner, Richard McCreadie was also interviewed for the documentary and claimed that O'Neill was going backwards and forwards through Adelaide frequently at about that time.