7

Murder at the Sunshine Cafe

On the evening of 5 December 1952, the body of Yugoslav street prostitute Zora Kusic was found in the tiny tin shanty where she lived in the Adelaide suburb of Torrensville. Zora’s chest and upper body had been savagely mutilated and her throat had been sliced from ear to ear.

The killer had been relentless in his attempt to make the crime scene resemble that of an abattoir. Zora’s unkempt squat – which she shared with her defacto husband (who approved of her daylight dalliances) – was awash with her blood. The walls were sprayed crimson and there were long blood clots hanging from the ceiling like miniature stalactites. The murder weapon – a razor sharp butcher’s knife – was found on the floor nearby. Despite the fact that it had been wiped clean of fingerprints, the handle and blade were still covered in congealed blood.

Closer examination revealed that parts of Zora’s body had been taken away by the killer, no doubt as grisly souvenirs. To the hardened detectives assigned to the case the only similarity they could come up with was the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, England, 64 years earlier.

Given the grotesque circumstances, police launched an investigation the likes of which Adelaide had never seen before. Adelaide’s women of the night made themselves scarce on the streets as police combed the bars, hotels, clubs, cafes and underworld migrant haunts that the popular Zora Kusic was known to frequent. The police pleaded for assistance on the grounds that her killer must be caught quickly as he was obviously a demented psychopath who had the taste of blood and – as was the case with the Ripper murders – he would almost certainly strike again. And soon. The streets were not safe until the fiend was behind bars.

Given an amnesty against any outstanding crimes should they come forward with any leads, Adelaide’s low-lifes beat a path to police headquarters with all sorts of snippets of information that could be useful in catching Zora’s killer.

One name kept cropping up, that of John Balaban. Numerous eye witnesses claimed to have seen Balaban leaving a hotel arm-in-arm with the ill-fated Zora and heading toward her home on the afternoon she was murdered. No one saw her between then and when her body was discovered by her defacto husband later that evening.

John Balaban, 29, was picked up by police and, although unable to explain his whereabouts on the afternoon of Zora’s murder, vehemently protested his innocence. Balaban explained that he was an industrial chemist who had immigrated to Australia from Romania a couple of years earlier. He had recently married a 30-year-old Adelaide woman who ran the busy Sunshine Cafe in the heart of Adelaide. Balaban lived above the cafe with his wife, her mother and his 6-year-old stepson, Phillip.

Balaban told police that on the afternoon in question he had been drinking at a hotel in Adelaide and had had too many and couldn’t remember anything after that. He named the hotel that was on the opposite side of Adelaide from where he was allegedly seen with Zora. Unable to confirm he was at the hotel or what happened to him later, police charged Balaban with the prostitute’s murder.

Despite the fact that the victim was a lady of the night – or in Zora’s case, the day – Adelaide folk were appalled at the nature of the crime, the grim details of which had leaked out to the press and subsequently wound up in the papers.

On the first day of Balaban’s committal hearing at the Adelaide Police Court to determine if there was sufficient evidence to send him to trial, an angry crowd gathered outside. They waved placards and called for the blood of the immigrant who had butchered an innocent woman while she was doing her best to make a living – albeit a deviant one.

During the hearing the court heard from numerous transient witnesses who put John Balaban with the deceased on the afternoon of the murder. It was up to the judge to decide if their testimony was reliable or if it could be disproved as a case of mistaken identity should Balaban be committed to stand trial.

On the other hand, John Balaban was immaculately groomed and although his command of the English language wasn’t all that good, he gave the impression of an educated, gentle and happily married man who would no more have anything to do with a prostitute – let alone a street walker – than fly to the moon.

Balaban explained as best he could that he had a bit of a drinking problem that his new wife didn’t know about. Every now and then, he said, he would go to a hotel in the afternoon where no one knew him and get drunk and sleep it off in a park, explaining to his wife when he got home that he had worked late.

Balaban told the court that that’s exactly what happened on the day of the murder. The eye witnesses must have been mistaken, he said. And given that they were such a motley lot who hung about in the lowest establishments, survived on their wits, spoke little coherent English and were drunk most of the time, he could understand them making a mistake.

After a five-day hearing Balaban was released on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to take him to trial. Within a few days the good citizens of Adelaide had all but forgotten about John Balaban and went about their business as usual. But the bad citizens remained on guard, acutely aware that there was a maniac still out there – Balaban or not – who could strike again among them at any minute.

The police weren’t in the least bit convinced by Balaban’s lucky escape. They knew that the smooth-talking foreigner was their man. But what they had no way of knowing was that John Balaban was a serial killer who had just gotten away with his second murder. And it wouldn’t be his last. The police put a 24-hour tail on Balaban but nothing suspicious came of it. After a few weeks they dropped off and went on to more pressing cases. All they could do now was wait and hope that Balaban would make a mistake. It didn’t take long.

Late in the evening of 12 April 1953, just three months after the murder of Zora Kusic, police were called to the Sunshine Cafe in Gouger Street, Adelaide, after passers-by reported blood-curdling screams coming from the second storey of the building. They also said a woman had been thrown from the balcony into the thoroughfare below. Police arrived to find a bloodbath. A seriously injured waitress, 24-year-old Verna Manie, lay barely conscious in a pool of blood in the street, her body broken from her four-metre fall from the upstairs balcony.

Verna told police that she lived with the Balaban family above the cafe which Mrs Balaban owned and operated. She said that she had jumped from the balcony after awaking to find John Balaban smashing her about the head and body with a hammer.

Police rushed upstairs and found the dead body of Balaban’s wife, the former Thelma Joyce Ackland, lying in her own blood on a bed. Her head was smashed to pulp. There was a blood-soaked claw hammer on the floor beside the bed. In the next bedroom they came across the body of Mrs Susan Ackland, Thelma’s 66-year-old mother. Mrs Ackland was still alive but her head had been so badly bashed in with a blunt instrument – no doubt the same claw hammer that had killed her daughter – that she died in hospital several hours later. But the worst was yet to come. In another room police found the body of Thelma Ackland’s 6-year-old son, Phillip. The lad had been so savagely beaten that his face was almost unrecognisable and it was a miracle that he was still alive. He too, died a few hours later in hospital.

Crouching behind a vehicle at the back of the cafe was John Balaban, who police found and took into custody. Balaban could offer no explanation for the killings, only that he heard voices that told him to kill everyone in the house. He was taken to police headquarters and charged with the three murders. Soon after he was also re-charged with the murder of Zora Kusic.

The horrors of the Balaban murders became news around the country and was headlined as the worst case Australia had ever seen. It was certainly a first for sleepy Adelaide – the City of Churches – and the news services couldn’t get enough of it. Soon it was also headlines all over the world.

John Balaban’s trial began in the Adelaide Criminal Court in July 1953, and the drama was played out before a packed courthouse every day. Queues lined up for hours to get into the public gallery so they could get a look at the man who had perpetrated arguably the most heinous murders in the nation’s history.

And those lucky enough to get a seat weren’t disappointed. Each day of the trial brought with it a new sensation. Balaban pleaded not guilty to the murders on the grounds of insanity. In his defence the court was told by Adelaide psychiatrist Dr Harold Southwood that his client suffered from a mental condition, a form of schizophrenia which caused delusions and hallucinations. But the best was to come from the defendant who, against the advice of his counsel, took the stand in his own defence. In an unsworn statement from the dock, Balaban told of the night he murdered Zora Kusic: ‘I became very disgusted with her,’ he told the court. ‘However, she enticed me into the shed. I then looked at her and saw how dirty and common she was. I then took a knife and cut her throat. I did not feel sorry for killing Kusic.’

Balaban also told the court of an unprovoked bashing spree leading up to the Sunshine Cafe murders. He said that he had attacked a number of people including a 16-year-old girl on the banks of the river Torrens. Another victim, John Slattery, 20, was taken to hospital, his head badly battered, after Balaban savagely attacked him. Balaban then offered a brief explanation as to why he killed his wife, mother-in-law and his stepson: ‘I only killed the people at the Sunshine Cafe because they deserved to be killed,’ he said.

But John Balaban had saved the biggest shock until last. After all the evidence had been heard and as the trial was drawing to its inevitable conclusion, Balaban stood up and said that he had murdered a woman named Riva Kwas in Paris in 1946. Balaban said that they had met on a subway tram and he strangled her after they had made love in a park. The court was adjourned immediately and Adelaide police made contact with French authorities who confirmed that a Riva Kwas was indeed strangled in 1946 and that the case was still open.

When the Crown prosecutor, Mr R. R. Chamberlain, QC, resumed his summation to the jury the following day, he said, ‘Surely this case is the most extraordinary ever heard in this court, if not in any court where British justice is administered. John Balaban was cruel, sadistic, pitiless, remorseless, giving way to his own perverted ideas.’ Still obviously disoriented by the proceedings and in desperate need of medical attention for his deranged mental condition, the only excuse John Balaban could offer in his final words of defence was to tell the court, ‘I think I am not guilty.’

The public gallery clapped and cheered as the jury quickly found John Balaban both sane and guilty of the murders as charged. The only consoling words anyone had to say to him came from the judge who said, ‘May God have mercy on your soul’ as he sentenced him to death. John Balaban dropped quietly to his death on the gallows in Adelaide Jail at dawn on 26 August 1953. There were none of the usual candle-waving, anti-hanging protestors outside the gates to see him off.