by Bob O'Brien
After the police crime scene examiners and photographers finished, the coroner’s staff placed Alan in a body bag and zipped it up. They placed him in a plain white van. He was driven to the Forensic Science Centre in Divett Place, Adelaide, where the van’s driver signalled the security officer to raise the roller door at the rear of the building. Alan Barnes was taken from the van and placed onto one of the three mortuary slabs in the rear of the building. Pathologist Dr Colin Manock carried out the post-mortem examination of the lad. He assessed the injury as mostly likely to have been caused by an object similar to a bottle with a tapered neck being inserted into Alan’s anus so far that it caused tearing of the skin and opening of the blood vessels. The injuries caused massive bleeding. There was a catch, however. When the boy was found he was fully clothed and no blood had soaked into the fabric of his clothes. The only marks on the clothes were from the reservoir mud.
It was not unusual for young men to go missing. It is not unusual for young men to be murdered. What was unusual was the mutilation of this body. Death from ruptured tissues surrounding the anus was unusual. Alan Barnes had been undressed and abused — that too was unusual. Usually, when a person is abused, killed and dumped, it’s a woman. This time it was a young man.
Unfortunately, detectives made little progress toward solving the murder of Alan Barnes. Police received some tip offs but no solid evidence was forthcoming. As well, Major Crime detectives were busy finishing paper work after investigating the serial killings of seven young women that had become known as the Truro murders. This case had just ‘burst wide open’ when James William Miller was charged with the Truro murders just one month before Alan Barnes was found. The media largely forgot the Alan Barnes murder — there were too many front-page stories about Truro for reporters to be writing stories about Alan Barnes. Besides, there were no leaks from the police that indicated that they were close to solving this new murder. The leads being followed by detectives were not going anywhere.
When the mutilated body of Neil Frederick Muir was found on Tuesday 28 August 1979, the media did not report a connection between the two murders. Two months had passed since the murder of Alan Barnes and the disposal of Neil Muir did not indicate killings committed by the same people — not in the beginning, anyway.
This murder was even more bizarre. Neil’s body was found floating in shallow water of the Port River, a tidal estuary joining the sea at the top of Le Fevre Peninsular, which runs north and south for about twelve kilometres and is shaped like a small thumb extending from the Adelaide Plains. Ground water feeds into the estuary from the wealthy suburb of West Lakes, which was designed and built on small, undulating sandhills and low-lying land that absorbed the water flowing from the Adelaide hills onto the plains.
As with Alan Barnes, it had been intended that Neil Muir would disappear under the surface of the water, never to be seen again. He was dropped from the wharf built at the end of Veitch Road, near the top of the peninsular. The remote and disused wharf serviced Mutton Cove on the eastern side of the Port River. The dock is no longer used, except by line fishermen trying to catch bream and other small fish in the river.
Neil Muir was not just killed and thrown off the wharf. He was stuffed into a plastic garbage bag. To make him fit into the bag, his head and his legs were cut off, his intestines removed and his legs shoved inside his carcass. The head was tied to the torso with yellow plastic cord, which passed up through the severed neck and back through the mouth and looped through the top ribs. The resulting sight was bizarre. Neil’s head was attached to his body by cord rather than by his neck.
His feet stuck out of his carcass but the body was now small enough to fit in the bag, which was then wrapped with cord to hold everything together. When the whole package had been thrown into the river at Mutton Cove, the murderers had not realised that the tidal flow of the river leaves the bottom of mud and rocks exposed at low tide. The bag jagged on the partially exposed rocks and a local worker with the Department of Marine and Harbours found the gruesome container. The worker was planning to go fishing at the Cove — but that day he found more than bream.
Mutton Cove, I thought cynically. What an appropriate name to find such a carcass.
An Advertiser reporter and photographer were present when the police divers lifted the body bag up onto the wharf, so the media knew that Neil Muir had been cut up. But they didn’t know the full extent of his injuries. Pathologist Dr Ross James revealed the additional injuries when he examined Neil Muir’s remains on the same mortuary slab where Alan Barnes was placed just over two months previously.
Neil Muir received a blow to the head shortly before his death but the whack did not kill him. The post-mortem examination revealed the cause of death. Neil Muir, like Alan Barnes, also had horrible injuries to his anus. Neil’s anus had also been torn by the insertion of something like the neck of a tapered bottle, which had been inserted so far that the skin could not stretch any further. As the bottle-like object was forced upward even further, the skin ripped apart, rupturing blood vessels and causing massive bleeding. The blood loss and shock from the tearing caused Neil Muir to die.
After he was killed, a saw had been used to cut his spine in two places. His head had been sawn off at the neck. His arms and legs were neatly cut from his body at the joints. The lower arms and legs had been cut from the upper arms and legs. All fingers and thumbs had been cut off and his pelvis had been separated from his torso and backbone. The teeth marks from the saw could be seen on the C 4 vertebra where the head had been cut from the body. The same saw marks could be seen on L 4 of the spine, where the pelvic bones had been separated from the torso.
As well as being dissected, Neil Muir’s flesh and muscle tissue had been removed from his arms and upper legs, leaving bare bones. All internal organs — the heart, lungs, liver, kidney and intestines — had been removed. His scrotum had been cut open and his testicles had been removed. The head of his penis had been cut off and his penis shaft had been cut open down the middle. One testicle was missing. Neil Muir’s tattoos were cut from his arms and legs and placed in a separate plastic bag and placed inside his torso along with his arms and legs.
The cutting up of the body was gruesome but, in this sordid case, understandable. Murderers trying to get rid of a corpse might consider making it as small as possible for carting around and also easier to dump. It was the other injuries that were harder to understand. The removal of fingers and tattoos could have been a bungled attempt to prevent the police finding the identity of the body in the bag. However, when the pathologist found one testicle was missing, a new dimension to the case was presented to police. The person who removed that testicle did not do it to help dispose of Neil Muir or to stop police identifying the body. There had to be a more bizarre reason. Was it eaten in a bizarre ritual or was it kept as a hideous souvenir, in the manner of some serial killers? These were the kind of questions going through police minds at the time.
This information was not released to the media, but detectives were worried. Neil Muir was a known drugs user, and later they learned Alan Barnes had been starting to use marijuana and other drugs. Neil had passed the experimental stage with drugs. He was addicted to heroin and was participating in a methadone trial at Hillcrest Hospital in the north-eastern suburbs. Neil Muir, like Alan Barnes, was relatively good looking and even though Neil Muir was older than Alan Barnes — Neil was twenty-five and Alan was sixteen — both were too young to die, especially to be killed in a way that was so depraved and brutal. The anal injuries to both of the young men were bad enough, but the dissection of Neil Muir was so barbarous that it even stopped the cynical humour of hardened detectives. They became increasingly concerned, as the dumping into water was similar to that of Alan Barnes and the anal injuries were also similar. Two young men killed in the same way within two months of one another started speculation that a serial killer was at work on the streets of the city. The second murder caused increased pressure on detective
s attached to the Major Crime Squad.
Detectives from the Major Crime Squad continued investigating leads but as time passed the intensity of inquiries lessened as public concern about the murders dissipated. Detectives went back to investigating crimes of passion — murders that occur when people who know each other become frustrated and angry — angry enough for one to kill the other. A mate kills a mate. A husband kills his wife.
Then, two years after Neil Muir, another young man, Mark Andrew Langley, went missing.
Renewed vigour, and not a little tension returned to the Major Crime Squad when, in February 1983, Langley’s mutilated body was found in the Adelaide Hills. Mark had the same type of anal injury as Alan Barnes and Neil Muir.
Mark Langley had been driving in the city with two friends when they decided to stop on War Memorial Drive, which curves and bends following the northern bank of the River Torrens. It was late at night. The warm Saturday evening was typical for Adelaide. They had left a party and the three of them wanted to go to the city. Mark’s friend Ian Samson drove into War Memorial Drive and angle-parked his white Datsun 1600 on the northern side of the road. The Saturday night had moved to Sunday morning and at 1.30 a.m. the area was dark and quiet.
War Memorial Drive cuts through parklands that separate the CBD from North Adelaide. During the day the road is used by commuters for parking before they cross the river to go to their offices in the city. Students also park and cross the footbridge linking the two roads on either side of the river to go to lectures at the University of Adelaide. Very early in the morning and on weekends rowers use the road to get to the boatsheds scattered along the banks of the river. The road is not used much at night, except to provide car parking for people going to shows in the city or by lovers stopping under the trees later in the night.
A large gum tree separated their car from the Adelaide University Boat Club building that stood to their right, its branches sheltering the car from the light falling from the few streetlights in the drive. The playing grounds of the university football club spread out in front of their car. The three of them: Mark, Ian and Ian’s girlfriend, Paula, were sitting in their car when an argument started between Mark and Ian. They argued over some cigarettes, but whether the argument had really happened because of that, or competition between the two young men over the single girl, is not clear. Two young males sitting with a pretty girl late at night is a potentially explosive mix.
Mark Langley did not like the way the argument was going. He got out of the car, fuming over the way things had gone. Mark walked into the blackness of the night.
The argument indicated a lack of maturity that was not evident in his manly physical appearance. Mark Langley was tall, strong and good-looking. Thick tufts of chest hair protruded from the open shirts that he wore. His black chest hair contrasted with the silver chain and the ingot engraved with the crab, his Cancer star sign, which he wore around his neck.
Ian Sampson and Paula Atkinson initially drove off, circling and driving over the bridge near the Adelaide Zoo past the University on their left and Jolly’s Boathouse on their right before turning onto the King William Street Bridge and returning to their parking spot. They were gone for about four minutes. Mark had not returned. They drove around trying to find him but he had disappeared.
Mark’s family worriedly contacted friends and relatives over the remainder of the weekend but no one had seen or heard from Mark. As their concern heightened, they rang the police on Sunday evening to report him missing.
Police filled out a missing person’s report and circulated the information; but their question was simply ‘Where do you start looking?’ The young man disappeared within a large city. There are no easy answers when investigating reports of missing people. Information is needed and that information was presented to police nine days later, on March 8.
A local Adelaide Hills dweller was poisoning blackberry bushes on the side of Sprigg Road, Summertown, which nestles on the rear slopes of Mount Lofty close to three high-powered television towers that dominate the city skyline from the southern ridge leading to the Mount Lofty summit. The hills formed a barrier to the growth of the city of Adelaide, forcing it to spread north and south along the Adelaide plains, trapped between the waters of the Gulf of St Vincent and the grey-green hills to the east. The local, moving through the grass and bushes, found Mark lying on the ground close to the road, partly concealed by the scrubby landscape. He was dressed but his skull and neck were exposed and the hot weather had started to putrefy the exposed parts of his body. Blue jeans still protected his lower body.
Mark Langley had also been redressed and placed into the clothes that he was wearing the night he disappeared. He had been wearing a blue woollen cardigan, a smart blue satin shirt to match his blue jeans, and that distinctive chain with his Cancer star sign on a silver ingot. Mark was still wearing the same clothes but his necklace and shirt were missing. At some stage his shirt had been removed and his cardigan put back on. While the forensic examination at Divett Place revealed other injuries that were similar to those inflicted on Alan Barnes and Neil Muir, there was something different this time. Mark Langley had suffered the same tearing to his anus, but there was a wound to his abdomen that had been stitched up — he had been operated on, sewn up and then reclothed.
The cut in the abdomen started about five centimetres above the penis and travelled vertically towards the navel. The incision was 16.5 centimetres long and slightly to the right of the middle of his abdomen. The body hair around the wound had been shaved and the incision had been stitched together with a three-ply polyester filament before being taped over with a Johnson & Johnson type surgical tape.
Mark Langley also had anal injuries similar to Alan Barnes and Neil Muir. Police wondered whether or not the same people were involved and if there were other boys missing that they did not know about.
In fact, there was another body waiting to be found. Peter Stogneff had been abducted twelve months after the dissection of Neil Muir but his body was not found until after Mark Langley had been killed.
Peter Stogneff also lived in one of the northern suburbs of Adelaide. His home was the normal dwelling of a middle-class family in one of the newer suburbs of Adelaide. He wagged school on Thursday, 27 August 1981, six months before Mark Langley disappeared.
Like the others, Peter’s family reported him missing that evening and media coverage failed to attract any response in finding him.
Peter was the youngest of the boys. He was fourteen. Alan Barnes was sixteen, Neil Muir twenty-five and Mark Langley nineteen when they went missing. Peter was, like the others, young, and good looking. Friends knew that he was going to wag school. He left his home first thing in the morning carrying his school bag, and his parents were none the wiser about his plans for the day. Peter returned home later that morning, possibly after going off to the Tea Tree Plaza, a local shopping centre, where kids congregate. He left his school bag in the garage and then left again, heading for the city to meet his friend Daniel Tzeganoff at the silver balls sculpture in Rundle Mall, which runs off King William Street. Peter Stogneff did not meet his mate; he, too, just disappeared.
Ten months later, on 23 June 1982, his remains were found on the side of Middle Beach Road, Two Wells. Middle Beach is about twenty kilometres north of Le Fevre Peninsular and is best known for the shacks that shelter the holiday makers who like to walk out in the low tidal waters to catch blue crabs. A local farmer had cleared grass and bushes on the side of the dirt road near his farm, pushing the unwanted material into piles to allow them to dry before setting fire to them some months later when the weather was cooler. Now, in winter, he followed through with his plans, and was checking the remains of the fires several days later when he found the burnt skeleton. Detectives believed that they were the boy’s remains but identification was difficult. Only the skeleton remained and no clothes or personal effects were found amongst the debris. This time pathologist Dr Derreck Pounder examined the
remains. The size and shape of the skull and examination of the teeth caused the coroner to later conclude that it was Peter Stogneff.
Like Neil Muir, Peter had been cut up with a saw. His back had been sawn through leaving an oblique cut. The legs had been cut above the knees with the same saw and his lower legs were missing. The people who were killing these boys now were not even trying to dispose of the bodies. The first and second were dumped into water with the expectation that they would be lost out of sight but Mark Langley was dumped alongside a dirt road not far from Mount Lofty, the highest point of the Adelaide Hills, which overlooks the city. Now, Peter Stogneff had been dumped on the side of a nearby country road.
South Australia now had four young men killed in a relatively short space of time. Three had anal injuries, so it was possible that the same people killed three of them — Barnes, Muir and Langley. The fourth, Peter Stogneff, was cut up — not exactly in the same way as Neil Muir but similarly enough to make detectives wonder whether or not the same people killed them. If the same people killed Muir and Stogneff, then perhaps the same people had killed them all.
Those questions were now in the minds of the police when another young man disappeared. This time the public’s attention skyrocketed.
Richard Kelvin lived with his mum and dad in North Adelaide amongst some of the smartest houses of the city. Rob and Betteanne Kelvin lived in a modern townhouse in one of the newer developments of the time. Their home was ‘trendy’ but Rob and Betteanne were down to earth people who did not exude airs and graces. Their modern comfortable home stood about one kilometre from the Torrens River and less than half that distance from O’Connell Street, the main shopping road of North Adelaide, which splits North Adelaide into two. The broad street allows traffic from the CBD to pass through the northern suburbs before heading to the premier wine district, the Barossa Valley.