by Bob O'Brien
Dedication
To Trevor Kipling
and dedicated professionals
within the Criminal Justice System
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
The Butchered Boys
Chapter 2
The Search for Richard Kelvin
Chapter 3
The Evidence
Chapter 4
The Arrest of Dr Millhouse
Chapter 5
Serial Killers
Chapter 6
New Leads
Chapter 7
Bevan Spencer von Einem
Chapter 8
The Raids
Chapter 9
The Associate
Chapter 10
The Case
Chapter 11
The Alibi
Chapter 12
The Trial
Chapter 13
Additional Charges
Chapter 14
The Rumours
Chapter 15
The Family
Photo Section
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Many people assisted with the telling of this story. In particular, I thank Lee Haddon, Malcolm Howells, Tony Love, Jodie O’Brien, Des Phillips, Ivan Sarvas and Lois Snow for their encouragement and support.
Also, I acknowledge the work of M.L. Dietz, J. Douglas, J. Norris and M. Olshaker, which provided much of the detail about serial killers in Chapter 5.
Introduction
Adelaide is no different from any other city when it comes to crime. It has its traffic offenders, its petty thieves, its drug users and dealers and its murderers. But somehow Adelaide has earned a reputation for having more than its fair share of killers — and weird, sick ones at that.
That reputation has been earned by the city in spite of itself. Adelaide has always had a sense of difference about it. When it was established in the late 1830s the city was well planned: a square mile encased by a ring of parklands, with fine city parks in each of its quarters and a main central square that took the name of Victoria, Queen of England. A small river, the Torrens, created a green corridor just to the north of the main city area, separating it from another small section, North Adelaide, built on a rise and populated by the colony’s wealthiest residents. Adelaide was different, too, because while most of Australia’s cities began their histories as penal colonies, South Australia was a province of free settlers.
This heritage remained a touchstone, the city forging a name for its culture, its charm and its lifestyle. It is home to a world famous Festival of Arts. Its wide streets and historic buildings impart a sense of space and calm compared to the rush and bustle of many of Australia’s larger capitals, and its lifestyle revolves around a social charm that has come from a Mediterranean climate coupled with a focus on excellent food and wine. This is seemingly intensified by Adelaide’s place in the South Australian landscape. The city is hemmed in by successive arcs of low mountain ranges, wine growing areas and, finally, the harsh and unforgiving Outback.
With such a history and setting, Adelaide has always been thought of as a large country town. A nice place to live. The strength of its society, with great landed interests and moral obligations, built another reputation — Adelaide became known as the ‘City of Churches’.
But beneath all of these conservative and wealthy trappings, people’s lives in its expanding suburbs had all the complications experienced elsewhere. Every city has its underbelly and Adelaide was no different in that sense. In fact, author Salman Rushdie once declared after a visit to its arts festival that Adelaide was the ‘perfect setting for a . . . horror film’, and that ‘sleepy conservative towns are where those things happen’.
It is the horror of many of Adelaide’s strange murders that nowadays peppers its international name. Why, in the second half of the 20th century, did a whole string of abductions and killings target such a nice community’s children, adolescents and young adults? Why have many of these remained unsolved, leaving a bitter taste of unfinished business in the mouths of families and law agencies?
Some of these murders were no doubt single acts of madness. But some were so incomprehensibly deliberate and so heartless the psyche of the city was damaged forever. Why, people now ask, is Adelaide the home of Australia’s weirdest killers?
Unfortunately, the catalogue of murders at the centre of these questions does not shed any light on an answer.
Three of them have baffled Adelaide’s police force for close to thirty years. They remain unsolved, and detectives were powerless in a way because they simply didn’t understand the killings. They didn’t understand why they occurred or what sort of person would commit them.
Firstly, in 1966, three young children disappeared from the city’s most popular beach, Glenelg. It was Australia Day and nothing more un-Australian could have been imagined. The three children from one family, the Beaumonts, were thought to have been abducted, and after extensive searching, and many publicly shocking leads, they were never found and were presumed murdered. What remains from the case is that name — the Beaumont children — which has stuck in the minds of all South Australians as a catchphrase for the day the nicest city in Australia lost its innocence. What also remains for many is the image of an eerie identikit illustration of a thin, harmless looking man, perhaps in his 20s or 30s, who was seen lurking in the area at the time. Whatever became of him? Was he indeed the sick criminal responsible? We will never know.
Seven years later, the disappearance of two young girls from an Aussie Rules football match at the picturesque Adelaide Oval, situated on the banks of the Torrens River just a kilometre from the city’s central business district, was equally troublesome. The oval was packed with people watching their favourite winter sport when the two girls, Joanne Ratcliffe, eleven, and friend Kirsty Gordon, four, left their parents to go to a toilet within the grounds. In any proper society there shouldn’t have been a problem. The toilets were not far away, the place was crowded with similar family folk — but the two girls were never seen again.
The person responsible was never found, and all the bad memories surrounding the case of the Beaumont children came flooding back into the minds of South Australians. The places where they had always felt at home, always felt secure, where they went to enjoy their free time at the beach or at the footy, were no longer safe. More importantly, their children were no longer safe. The quiet, peaceful life they had always known had taken a turn for the worse, and the question on many lips was whether the same evil mind was responsible for both shocking crimes. Again, the police could give the public no solution to allay their fears.
Another child’s abduction in 1982 brought all these thoughts back into focus just as Adelaide’s memory of these unusual crimes was beginning to fade. This time young Louise Bell was abducted while she slept in her own home in the southern suburbs. A stranger entered her bedroom through the window and walked out the front door with the small child, neither ever to be seen again. Louise’s mother was asleep in the house at the time. How could such a heinous crime occur? Who on earth would do such a thing? Was nothing, not even our own homes, sacred anymore?
The fear in people’s minds undoubtedly was that out there, somewhere in Adelaide’s suburbs, a killer or killers preying on the community’s children was still on the loose — and police had been unable to track them down.
There had been other murders, however, which had been easier to solve. One, in particular, in 1971, was a tragic crime of passion, a multiple killing spree unleashed by Clifford Bartholomew against his family at Hope Forest, south of Adelaide. In the end Bartholomew’s wife and nine children, from the baby t
o the teenagers, had been shot dead, and he had been dealt with by the police and convicted by the court.
In the scheme of things, this was like many multiple killings elsewhere in the world. A mad moment in which all hell breaks loose and a man, usually a husband, murders his wife and children. In policing terms the crime is easily identifiable. The person who ‘loses the plot’ is usually found nearby and the legal system does its work, for right or wrong. The family is devastated and the community’s collective heart goes out to all those concerned.
In Adelaide, the Hope Forest murders served to highlight the difference between such an explosive, one-off event, and the still unsolved, gradually unfolding series of abductions and presumed killings that haunted the state’s psyche over the next two decades. Was there a cold and calculating serial killer still prowling the city and, if so, where would his deliberations lead him next?
The answer to that question took an unfortunate twist in the summer of 1976–77 when seven young women, aged from their mid-teens to mid-twenties, were snatched from Adelaide’s city centre and northern suburbs in just a few months. The bodies weren’t found for more than a year: the first of them, that of Veronica Knight, by a mushroomer in April, 1978, in harsh, dry scrubland near a township called Truro, about 100 kilometres north of Adelaide. In the end five of the girls were found in the area, dumped haphazardly under shrubs and fallen trees, some not even buried. Although the other victims were found elsewhere, the unfolding saga soon became known as the ‘Truro murders’.
Once again the police were under increasing pressure to rid the city of a menace that had invaded its quiet streets. Glen Lawrie and Peter Foster were the two detectives from Major Crime working on the case when they received what police call ‘information from the public’, another term for one person dobbing in another. Someone out there obviously had a guilty conscience, or was seeking revenge, perhaps a reward. Maybe someone with a strong moral sense was just trying to do the right thing.
Whatever the reason, the information helped solve the case and led the detectives to uncover that Christopher Worrell, a good-looking, young bisexual who had ‘form’, and his current boyfriend, James Miller, had been picking up the young women, driving them to remote locations and killing them. It seemed a careless and crazy series of events; the official reason that was given was that Worrell killed the girls because he had been in jail before for attempting to rape a female and he did not want to go back in again.
The real reason for the murder spree, no doubt, was that he perhaps lost control the first time, then realised he enjoyed it. Miller, who at the time was totally infatuated with Worrell, acted as the driver. Although police could not prove that Miller actually killed any of the girls, he knew what Worrell was doing, he actively assisted him and so, as an accomplice, he was found guilty of murder.
There was an unusual turn in the case, however, which strangely affected the community’s sense of closure of the shocking series of events. Worrell had been killed in a car accident just days after the final young woman had been murdered in February 1977. It was this simple twist of fate that stopped the killings.
There was a second twist in the Truro serial murders that seemed even more bizarre. There was a sexual deviation at play here that for many was incomprehensible. The City of Churches was having to come to grips with what once was a nice, conservative life unravelling before its very eyes. Babies snatched from their bedrooms, young children disappearing from their favourite haunts, now killers unleashing a torrent of violence against the weaker sex.
It was all too weird, but what was about to happen over the next few years changed Adelaide’s reputation once and for all. For even as the police were solving the case of the Truro murders, another bout of serial killings was already underway. This time it was the turn of young men to be snatched from the city’s streets, and this time the investigation was to reveal what were perhaps some of the most shocking details ever uncovered about the way the mind of a serial killer works. In the process another dark chapter in Adelaide’s criminal record was opened.
This case would eventually become known as the ‘Family Murders’, implicating, rightly or wrongly, members of the elite of South Australian society. But what kind of ‘family’ would act like this? And what kind of community could continue to tolerate such an intrusion upon their lives? Strangely nothing about the murders leading up to this point seemed to intersect. Would this be the case that might answer some of the questions now being asked about the bizarre killers lurking beneath the surface of one of Australia’s nicest cities?
This case would eventually become known as the ‘Family Murders’, implicating, rightly or wrongly, members of the elite of South Australian society. But what kind of ‘family’ would act like this? And what kind of community could continue to tolerate such an intrusion upon their lives? Strangely nothing about the murders leading up to this point seemed to intersect. Would this be the case that might answer some of the questions now being asked about the bizarre killers lurking beneath the surface of one of Australia’s nicest cities?
Chapter 1
The Butchered Boys
The young man’s body should have disappeared below the cold, grey-brown waters of the South Para Reservoir, except the winter rains had not come in sufficient quantity to fill it. The water level was still low after Adelaide’s hot summer, causing the old road and bridge to be exposed. The reservoir fits into the contours of the Adelaide Hills to the north-east of the city, the curves of the hills forcing the water into little valleys and taking the shape of a serpent’s tail stretching out to the east where it is crossed by a new bridge that helps link the small hills communities of Williamstown and Kersbrook.
The cracked and unused road snakes down the hill towards the reservoir and flattens on the top of the old bridge that crosses the South Para Creek before climbing between the gum trees on the opposite side. The new bridge sits ten metres above the old road and bridge and is much longer, as it spans the 100-metre gap between the hills. If you stop in the middle of it you might think that you would be stopping over water but the ramp running to the northern side of the old bridge is immediately below.
Alan Barnes was dropped over the side of the new bridge, discarded like an uncaring person would discard a bag of rubbish. His back broke when it hit the hard mud but he did not feel his bones break. His ability to feel pain had left him long before he was thrown over the tubular rails of the bridge. Before he was dumped he had been harmed beyond any hope of recovery — his anus was split open, allowing his blood to pour from his body. Once the tearing started, shock set in and his body gave up its fight to live. The pain, alcohol and drugs that he had been given prevented much of a struggle. He died before half an hour had passed.
Alan disappeared on Sunday 17 June 1979. He was found exactly a week later when a bush walker and his girlfriend parked their motorcycle and climbed over the fence and entered the grounds of the reservoir. They walked down the old road and saw the body of Alan Barnes. He had landed on the earth that ran alongside the old road and not into the waters of the reservoir as most likely had been intended. If Alan Barnes had landed in the water and descended to the mud on the bottom of the reservoir he would never have been found. He would have remained another missing person.
The deviates who had murdered the boy had made their first mistake.
Alan Barnes was a product of Salisbury, a suburb sitting on the hot flat plains about twenty kilometres north of central Adelaide. Salisbury grew as migrants from England and the rest of Europe moved to the open spaces where there were opportunities for jobs and houses of their own. The immigrants were promised a cheap passage to Australia and a new life.
Alan was the first of a new generation of Australians born and bred in our changing world. He was young and experimenting with life, with all the hope of a promising future ahead of him. His blond hair and good looks ensured that he always had company to enjoy life with but with them came the opportunities to expe
riment with drugs that had become freely available in Adelaide in the 1970s. He had stayed overnight with a friend in a house in the north-western suburb of Cheltenham. Alan and his friend woke about mid-day and ate a meal of fried eggs on toast before being driven to Grand Junction Road and left to hitchhike to Alan’s home in Salisbury. The two young men were not having much success getting a lift so his friend headed home, thinking Alan would have a better chance to get a lift by himself. Alan was last seen trying his luck getting home on Grand Junction Road.
His mother, Judy, reported him missing to the police the next day, when he had not come home. Police appeals for people who may have seen him produced few results even though he was on a main arterial road within a city of one million people. One caller to police thought that he had seen Alan getting into a car on Grand Junction Road. The car was described as a white Holden sedan with three or four people in it.
A week later, local officers greeted the detectives from the Major Crime Squad on the dirt verge on the northern side of the South Para Bridge. They moved down the slope to view Alan’s body. The detectives waited for the police photographers to arrive to record the location and body, and for crime scene examiners to scour the location for any evidence. Some stood with their hands in their pockets looking at the body from about ten metres away. They distanced themselves from the body to make sure that their footprints were not disturbing any footprints or evidence around the body. They stood with their hands in their pockets because they had been trained to do so. Leaving their hands in their pockets made sure they didn’t touch murder weapons or items left at the scene of a crime. The sort of cop show scenario where detectives pick up a gun by putting a biro in the end of its barrel only happens on television. Police officers who are crime scene examiners doing that sort of work day in and day out don’t place biros into gun barrels. However, they need not have worried, as the only evidence was the body of Alan Barnes — and the abnormal twist in his body indicated that he had been dropped from the bridge. A search of the bridge revealed nothing of interest on the concrete and tar.