CHAPTER 15

THE FAMILY

Easygoing Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, with its population of around one million is small compared to most of the other capital cities of Australia. Rich in culture and beauty, Adelaide, and its surrounding districts, is responsible for some of the finest wines in Australia. Throughout Adelaide, seemingly on every corner, are houses of worship of all denominations. For this reason Adelaide is referred to as the ‘city of churches’. And they have never had to canvas for business – South Australians are notoriously reverent.

But there is an inexplicable dark side to Adelaide. In the annals of Australia’s most horrific crimes, easygoing Adelaide’s sinister past makes other cities look like Camelot. Consider this list of Adelaide’s appalling track record of carnage in modern times:

1958: Rupert Max Stuart rapes and murders nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam at Thevenard.

1966: The three Beaumont children, aged four, seven and nine, are abducted from Glenelg Beach.

1971: In South Australia’s worst mass murders, ten members of the Bartholomew family, comprising eight children and two women, are shot to death by a man at Hope Forest.

1972: Adelaide University law lecturer, Dr George Duncan, a homosexual, is thrown into the Torrens River and drowns. Two Adelaide vice squad detectives are eventually charged with manslaughter.

1973: Schoolgirl Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, and Kirsty Gordon, four, disappear from Adelaide Oval while attending a football match, and are never seen again.

1976–1977: In Australia’s equally worst serial murders, seven women aged between 15 and 26, go missing in and around Adelaide over a 51-day period from Christmas 1976. Their skeletal remains are discovered in the Truro district of the Adelaide foothills several years later in what becomes known as the ‘mass murders of Truro’. James Miller is sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murders.

1979: David Szach murders his lover, lawyer Derrance Stevenson, and conceals his body in a freezer in Parkside.

1979–1983: Between 1979 and 1983, in what became known as the ‘Adelaide Family Murders’, five men are abducted, drugged, held captive, sexually assaulted, hideously mutilated and murdered.

1984: Sexual sadist Bevan von Einem is tried for the horrific torture and murder of a 15-year-old youth. Later, von Einem is charged with numerous other horrendous crimes relating to the ‘Family Murders’.

1994: A letter bomb kills Sergeant Geoff Bowen at the Adelaide offices of the National Crime Authority.

1999: Eight decomposing bodies are found in casks filled with acid in a bank vault in rural Snowtown. This find leads to the discovery of two other bodies buried in backyards in suburban Adelaide. Two murders that took place in Lower Light and Kersbrook in 1997 are also connected to the same case. Four men are charged with multiple murder.

Of all these cases there are four that are deeply etched into the annals of Australia’s most notorious crimes. They are: the mass murders of Truro; the Snowtown serial murders; the missing Beaumont children; and the Adelaide Family Murders. And the mystery of the missing Beaumont children and the Family Murders may be linked by the sinister activities of the same monster.

On 26 January 1966, the Beaumont children – Jane, nine, Arnna, seven, and Grant, four – disappeared from South Australia’s Glenelg Beach at about 11.15 a.m. while on an outing alone. Their disappearance made headlines all around Australia.

On that morning the weather was fine and the forecast was for a hot and steamy day, ideal conditions for a day at the beach. The Beaumonts were an average Australian family living at suburban Somerton Park, not far from the beach, and the children’s father, a travelling salesman, had decided against joining his children at the beach for the day. Instead he chose to call on a client. It was a decision that would prove fateful.

At 10 a.m. the children took the bus to the beach, which was only a few minutes' ride away. The eldest girl, Jane, was considered old and responsible enough to mind her two siblings. She assured her mother, Nancy, that they would be home on the midday bus. They caught the bus at the stop just 100 metres from their front door. The bus driver confirmed later that he dropped them at Glenelg Beach five minutes later. When the children didn’t arrive home, their mother wasn’t unduly concerned. Children simply didn’t go missing in suburban Adelaide, especially from a crowded beach area. She concluded that they must have decided to walk home, had spent their bus fare money on sweets, and that she would hear the usual ruckus as they ran in the front door at any minute.

When Jim Beaumont arrived home in the mid-afternoon and his children weren’t home, he went looking for them. When they still hadn’t been sighted four hours later, he notified police, and a massive search was launched. By morning their photographs were being circulated to every newspaper across the country, telling of every mother’s worst nightmare.

The police were left with three possibilities: the children had run away; they had drowned in the surf; or they had been abducted and were being held for ransom. The only ray of hope was the sighting of the children in the company of a tall blond or light-brown-haired young man in blue swimming trunks. Then, another witness came forward and said that he had seen the children with the same young blond man in a park opposite the beach, then walking away with him behind the Glenelg Hotel. The local postman came forward and said that he had seen the trio walking up Jetty Road away from the beach and toward their home at about 3 p.m. They were laughing and holding hands.

The police received hundreds of calls about possible sightings of the Beaumont children, but they all proved fruitless. The Beaumont children had vanished without a trace and have never been seen since.

But there would be a glimmer of hope, albeit a horrific one, of discovering the fate of the Beaumont children. It would occur many years in the future at the committal hearing of one of the most evil murderers in Australia’s history.

• • •

At around midnight on a chilly autumn night in May 1972 on the banks of the Torrens River, which flows through the heart of Adelaide and is a notorious ‘pick-up’ area frequented at night by homosexuals, Adelaide University lecturer Dr George Duncan and Roger James were attacked by four men, bashed and thrown into the river and left for dead.

Duncan was a frail man with just one lung as a result of juvenile tuberculosis and was drowned. Severe bruising beneath his armpits indicated that he had been man-handled and thrown into the freezing river by a number of people. Roger James escaped with a broken ankle. He had been saved by a tall young blond man in his mid-20s who just happened to be passing by at the time. He was Bevan Spencer von Einem, a name that would be of enormous significance in the future.

Dr George Duncan’s death was treated as murder. Within days the spotlight fell on three senior vice squad detectives who were alleged to have gone to the Torrens River that night in search of ‘poofters’ to bash after they had attended a drunken send-off for one of their comrades. Witnesses said that the detectives were accompanied by a tall civilian whose name never came to light. The three detectives were called upon to give evidence at a coronial inquest into Dr Duncan’s death. But all refused to answer any of the incriminating questions put to them and were immediately suspended from duty.

A subsequent police inquiry failed to find sufficient evidence to recommend prosecution of the three police officers. The public was outraged, and while the whole matter stank of a cover-up, there was little that could be done and the incident was forgotten … for the time being.

• • •

In June 1979, while Adelaide’s citizens were trying to come to terms with the murders of seven young women in the mass murders of Truro, the hideously mutilated body of 17-year-old Alan Barnes was found on the banks of the South Para Reservoir, north-east of Adelaide, after he had been reported missing seven days earlier. His ‘fresh’ corpse indicated that he had died the day before he was discovered, and a post-mortem revealed that he had died of massive blood loss from ghastly injuries inflicted upon his anus by a large blunt instrument while he was still alive.

Two months later, police were called to investigate what looked like human body parts found in plastic bags that had floated to rest on the banks of the Port River at Port Adelaide. The body parts turned out to be the dissected remains of 25-year-old Neil Muir, neatly cut into many pieces, placed in the garbage bags and thrown into the river.

In June 1982, the skeletal remains of 14-year-old Peter Stogneff, who had gone missing 10 months earlier, were found at Middle Beach, north of Adelaide. The boy’s body had been cut into three pieces, as if by a surgical saw.

On 27 February 1982, 18-year-old Mark Langley disappeared while walking near the Torrens River. Nine days later, his mutilated body was found in scrub in the Adelaide Foothills. Among the mutilations to his body was a wound that went from his navel to his pubic region, which appeared to have been cut with a surgical instrument. The hair around the wound had been shaved, as it would have been if performed in a surgical operation. The post-mortem revealed that part of Mark’s small bowel was missing and that he had died from a massive loss of blood from gross injuries to his anus.

By now the zealous press was convinced that the murders were the work of a group of surreptitious Adelaide homosexuals in very high places throughout the community – politicians, judges, religious leaders and the like. This group, it was alleged, paid handsomely for kidnapped young men whom they drugged and kept alive for their pleasure. When the victim was no longer of any use to them, the procurers disposed of the body. The press christened this unconfirmed clandestine group ‘the Family’, and from then on the case was referred to in the national press as the ‘Adelaide Family Murders’.

Working on the now-obvious assumption that the murders were the work of the same individual(s) and that the person(s) they wished to talk to most of all was a homosexual, South Australian Police Major Crime Squad detectives infiltrated the vast South Australian homosexual network. Through their secret contacts, detectives came up with a short-list of possible suspects consisting of known deviants and ‘closet’ kinks known only in the homosexual subculture. One such person of interest was a tall, blond, meticulously groomed 37-year-old accountant named Bevan Spencer von Einem. Openly homosexual, von Einem was well known to police as a frequenter of homosexual pick-up spots or ‘beats’ as they were more commonly known. Von Einem also had a reputation of being particularly fond of young boys, a pastime scorned by the homosexual community.

Von Einem was brought in and questioned at length about the Barnes and Langley killings. He vigorously denied any knowledge of the murders other than what he had read in the papers and the rumours he had heard circulating about the specific injuries to the victims. Police had no choice but to let him go – for the time being.

• • •

On 23 July 1983, a fifth victim turned up. Seven weeks earlier, 15-year-old Richard Kelvin was abducted a short distance from his North Adelaide home, and his body was found by an amateur geologist off a track near One Tree Hill in the Adelaide Foothills. The boy was wearing a Channel Nine T-shirt, jeans and sneakers – the clothes he had on when he left his parents’ home on 5 June. Richard had gone to a bus stop only 200 metres from his home that afternoon to see a friend off. Several neighbours reported hearing calls for help in the afternoon, and police were convinced that Richard had been kidnapped.

No real attempt had been made to conceal the teenager’s body. Police weren’t surprised that the post-mortem revealed that Richard had grotesque wounds to the anus similar to those of the other victims. The post-mortem also revealed that he had been heavily drugged and kept alive for up to five weeks before he was murdered. Richard’s body was found to contain traces of four different drugs.

Police rounded up the usual suspects once again, and this time von Einem aroused their suspicions by not protesting as vehemently to their questioning as he had previously. Taskforce detectives decided to search von Einem’s house and to give him and his clothing a thorough scientific once-over. It paid off in spades. In von Einem’s possession they found three of the drugs taken from the dead boy’s body and they also found von Einem’s hair in the deceased’s clothing.

Von Einem was charged with the murder of Richard Kelvin. At his trial he pleaded not guilty, and although he was faced with undeniable evidence that he had been in Kelvin’s company, he denied ever having known the boy. Then, in a complete turnaround, von Einem said that he had picked up Richard Kelvin one time when he was hitchhiking and had dropped him off near his home. The jury was not impressed and found him guilty of murder. Bevan Spencer von Einem was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 24 years, which was later increased to 36 years on appeal by the Crown, a record for South Australia.

But that was not to be the end of it … not by a long shot.

• • •

The detectives who had worked on the Kelvin case were convinced that von Einem, either alone or most likely with others, was responsible for the deaths of the other youths, Alan Barnes, Neil Muir, Peter Stogneff and Mark Langley, or at least knew who was. And they had very good reason to be. Apart from the fact that most of the other victims had suffered identical anal injuries to those suffered by Kelvin and had died in similar circumstances, the detectives’ homosexual informants told them it was common knowledge that von Einem regularly picked up young hitchhikers, drugged them, and then sexually abused them. The detectives worked tirelessly on new leads and new witnesses, and after four years they visited von Einem in Adelaide’s Yatala Prison where he was being held for his own safety in the protective custody division. They charged him with the murders of Alan Barnes and Mark Langley.

At von Einem’s committal hearing held in 1990, the Crown chose to pursue a committal along the lines that ‘similar fact evidence’ was admissible, and alleged that if von Einem was guilty of the Kelvin murder, then he must also be guilty of the murders of Barnes and Langley as they were identical in every fashion. Furthermore, the Crown alleged, it had circumstantial evidence that could support this allegation. Magistrate David Gurry allowed Crown Prosecutor Brian Murray QC to proceed along these lines. It would prove to be a disastrous ploy. And, if the packed public gallery thought it had heard stories of unbelievable horror as the evidence unfolded of how the boys died from the injuries inflicted upon them, then they must have thought the Crown had saved the most shocking allegations for last. If what the public gallery was about to hear was true, Bevan Spencer von Einem would go down in history as one of the world’s most sadistic monsters.

The Crown Prosecutor called 22 witnesses who included former hitchhikers and associates of von Einem. The police had left no stone unturned in their efforts to nail the person whom they believed to be one of the most heinous killers in Australian history. The first prosecution witness would only give testimony under an alias of ‘Mr B’ for his own protection, and his name was withheld from publication by court order. ‘Mr B’ claimed that he believed von Einem had killed 10 young people, including five children who had disappeared 24 years earlier.

‘Mr B’ denied that he was a ‘perpetual liar’ and that a reward for the unsolved murders of several Adelaide teenagers, which stood at $250,000, had anything to do with his giving information to police. In an angry outburst, he claimed that consideration for relatives of the deceased was part of the reason he was telling what he knew of von Einem’s activities. ‘I have given a lot of consideration to the relatives of the kids. They deserve to know what’s really happened,’ he told the court.

‘Mr B’ was a former friend of von Einem and a homosexual. He said he had evidence that linked von Einem with the five Family murders and also the disappearances of the three Beaumont children in 1966 and the 1973 disappearance of schoolgirls Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon from Adelaide Oval. The people in the public gallery were stunned. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing.

For four days ‘Mr B’ testified how he and von Einem picked up young boys who were hitchhiking and drugged and raped them. On the night that Alan Barnes had died, he and von Einem went looking for hitchhikers after meeting on the banks of the Torrens River. He said that they gave Alan Barnes a lift and gave him alcoholic drinks containing a very strong sedative called Rohypnol, which they knew when mixed with alcohol would induce unconsciousness. The trio then went to a cafe where Barnes showed signs of being affected by the drug – he looked like he was going to pass out. Von Einem had gone away and made a phone call, and when he had come back he said he had rung a friend and arranged to meet him at the Torrens River.

They had met up with a man known only as ‘Mr R’. Von Einem had gone for a walk with ‘Mr R’ and had come back 10 minutes later, asking if ‘Mr B’ wanted to come with them while they ‘performed some surgery’ on the now-unconscious Barnes. Von Einem had also said that they intended to take videos of what happened, then kill Barnes and throw his body from a bridge. ‘Mr B’ told the hushed courtroom that he had declined the offer, and von Einem, ‘Mr R’ and Barnes had driven off.

‘Mr B’ said that he had seen von Einem a few days later, who said that the youth had died and that ‘Mr R’ was concerned about what ‘Mr B’ knew about what had happened. Von Einem warned him that if he said anything to anyone about what he had seen, he would be implicated in the murder as well. ‘Mr B’ then explained that, since that night, his life had been a mess and he lived under the constant threats of an ‘Adelaide businessman’.

‘Mr B’ also said that von Einem had told him he had picked up the Beaumont children at Glenelg Beach on 26 January 1966. Von Einem had told him how he went to the beach regularly to have a perve on people in the showers and had picked up three children, performed some ‘brilliant surgery on them’ and that he had ‘connected them up’ but one had died. He said that he had dumped the children’s bodies at Moana or Myponga, south of Adelaide.

Further, ‘Mr B’ said that von Einem had told him that he had picked up two children at a football match and killed them. Although von Einem didn’t mention any names, it seemed apparent that he was talking about Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon, who had gone missing from Adelaide Oval in 1973. ‘Mr B’ said that von Einem didn’t elaborate any further.

Finally, ‘Mr B’ alleged that an Adelaide trader whom he said could have helped kill Alan Barnes was in court while he was giving his evidence. ‘You’ve got no idea what I’ve had to go through … coming here … facing crap like (the Adelaide trader) sitting in the body of the court,’ he said during his testimony.

Magistrate Gurry immediately suppressed the name of the Adelaide trader whom ‘Mr B’ claimed could have helped kill Alan Barnes. The man’s counsel said the trader categorically denied being with von Einem and Barnes the night Barnes was last seen alive. The trader was not called as a Crown witness. The trader’s counsel said that his business of 20 years would be ruined if he was identified and also challenged the claim of ‘Mr B’ that the trader was in the public gallery listening to evidence.

Another prosecution witness, Garry Wayne Place, an insurance worker in his thirties, testified that he had come forward late in 1989 as he had ‘had enough’ after 11 years of being threatened by telephone if he talked. Place said that the last anonymous call had been about a week earlier and the caller had told him to ‘keep your mouth shut or you and your wife will get it’. He told the court that Alan Barnes had introduced him to von Einem one Saturday at an Adelaide hotel about a week before his murder. Barnes had also introduced him to three other people with von Einem – a doctor whose name sounded like Goodard, a man called Mario and a woman. There had been talk of a party that night where there would be ‘women, drugs, booze – anything you like’. Later that week Place and Barnes had gone to a hotel where von Einem had told him (Place) that if he provided sex, he would get ‘drugs, women, anything’ and the same things would be provided if he brought along some young boys.

Place told the court that the first threatening telephone call came on the night he learned that Alan Barnes had been murdered. A muffled male voice had said something like: ‘Keep your mouth shut or you’re going to get it’, and there had been about 20 other calls that night.

If the parents of the missing children were hoping that von Einem would admit guilt and tell police where the remains of their children were, then they were sadly mistaken. Von Einem vigorously denied any involvement in the abductions of the children and lashed out at ‘Mr B’, claiming that he was merely out for a portion of the $250,000 reward on offer. But the circumstantial evidence against him appeared to be overwhelming. After two months of hearings, on 11 May 1990, Bevan Spencer von Einem was committed to stand trial in the South Australian Supreme Court on charges of murdering Alan Barnes and Mark Langley.

• • •

Immediately after von Einem was committed to stand trial, his counsel lodged an interjection to have the trial put on a permanent stay of proceedings because, the lawyer argued, it would be impossible for his client to receive a fair hearing because of the amount of public animosity toward him and the over-exposure of the committal hearing in the newspapers. The interjection failed. The trial judge, Mr Justice Duggan, chose to throw it out. But there were other matters about the forthcoming trial that worried the judge. At a pre-trial hearing he ruled that the ‘similar fact evidence’, so successfully used in the committal hearing by the Crown Prosecutor, was inadmissible. This ruling rendered the evidence led at the committal all but useless.

The Crown had to resort to different tactics. It would present two separate trials for the murders of Barnes and Langley. But, a couple of days later, the Crown withdrew the murder charge against Langley, considering that it could build a stronger case by trying von Einem on the Barnes murder alone, the case for which it had the strongest evidence.

Then came the biggest blow. After lengthy consideration, Mr Justice Duggan ruled that evidence from the von Einem trial and conviction for the murder of Richard Kelvin was disallowed. Mr Justice Duggan also ruled inadmissible any evidence about von Einem’s alleged involvement with hitchhikers and his purported associates. The Crown case was in tatters because, if it went to court without their evidence, it didn’t have a prayer of gaining a conviction. On 1 February 1991, the Crown had no choice but to enter a nolle prosequi (unwilling to pursue) on the second charge of the murder of Alan Barnes.

To the detectives who had worked tirelessly on the case for years this was a bitter pill to swallow. To the parents of Alan Barnes and the other young men who were inhumanely violated and died ghastly deaths at the hands of suspected respectable citizens, it meant that their nightmare of wondering would go on. And, to many Australians, there is little doubt that ‘the Family’ of paedophiles did, and possibly still does, exist in South Australia. It is also believed by many that there are more victims as yet unaccounted for – transient hitchhikers from other states and young tourists perhaps. These same believers are convinced, too, that the tall, blond, meticulously groomed accountant with the aristocratic name of Bevan Spencer von Einem knows where the bodies are buried and who the guilty parties are. But as he does his time in Yatala Prison, he keeps his dark secrets to himself.

Footnote: Two of the three detectives who allegedly threw Dr George Duncan in the River Torrens in May 1972, and left him to drown, were eventually brought to trial in 1987 in the South Australian Supreme Court, charged with manslaughter. After a three-week trial, both were found not guilty.