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Lock up your sons in the world's murder capital

August 14 2002

I have lived in or visited many cities in Australia, Europe, Asia and North America, but none has terrified me more than the dark, empty suburban streets of Adelaide at night, writes Mark Ellis.

So, according to an unsubstantiated claim on a British TV documentary, Adelaide is the murder capital of the world. Not that I subscribe to this hyperbolic theory, there is too much evidence to the contrary.

However, never let the facts get in the way of a good urban legend. If you ask anyone (like me) who grew up in Adelaide during the '70s and '80s, there is something slightly sinister and more than a little disturbing going on in the City of Churches. Let me explain.

I have lived in or visited many cities in Australia, Europe, Asia and North America, but none has terrified me more than the dark, empty suburban streets of Adelaide at night, so vivid are my macabre childhood memories of snatched children, buried bodies and disembowelled boys.

When I arrived with my family in 1971 - an eight-year-old migrant from England - the Beaumont children (aged four, seven and nine) had already famously gone missing, and their sad tale was retold in 1973 when schoolgirls Joanne Radcliffe and Kirsty Gordon disappeared from Adelaide Oval. In 1977, seven women were raped, killed and buried in shallow graves in what became known as the Truro Murders, and in the early 1980s five young men were abducted, drugged, mutilated and murdered in what became known as the Family Murders.

Parents always subconsciously fear for their young daughters when they leave the house, but in Adelaide parents feared for their strapping young sons in the same way.

With this heinous history of spine-chilling crimes, I was not surprised (and neither were my Adelaide colleagues and friends now living in Melbourne) to hear of the Snowtown Murders.

"Good ol' Adelaide" we joked, "nothing if not consistent." Shocked? A little. Surprised? No. And we laughed, not because it was funny - it most certainly is not - but because gallows humour allowed us a therapeutic nervous release.

What is it about this pretty, cultured city and its lazy manner that to this day still scares a grown man, now nearly 40? First, I think it is the size of the place. It has a large, country town feel about it, where somehow the "six degrees of separation" theory operates with an uncanny familiarity. If you meet an Adelaidean it is quite common to quickly find a connection. (Last year when I started a new job there were two people from Adelaide in my department and within minutes we established mutual acquaintances.)

In any small town, gossip and rumour travel quickly and someone always knows someone else who has first-hand knowledge. In that great tradition of urban myth-making, you never actually meet the person with the information - it always comes second-hand. And so it was with the so-called Family Murders. Rumours ran rife at my school, as I am sure they did in every other school across the state. We gossiped ghoulishly about severed genitalia, broken bottles inserted in rectums, dismembered bodies suspended from trees, and body parts in garbage bags.

Second, Adelaide is parochial and its media has a definite parish pump feel about it. This is especially evident in its only newspaper - a shrill tabloid with a fresh front page just waiting to be filled daily with salacious details.

In the case of the Family Murders, the irresistible mix of conspiracy, people in high places, bizarre secret sex societies, and the taboo of homosexuality, made it perfect tabloid fodder. It ran for weeks and it has been regurgitated on and off for years.

Similarly, the Beaumont children, the missing schoolgirls, the Truro Murders and now the infamous Snowtown Murders occupy a large part of the Adelaide psyche because nothing sells papers (or British TV documentaries for that matter) like sex or a gruesome murder - even better if the two are combined.

Try and imagine our lives as teenagers. Whenever we left the house for a night out or to visit friends, the commonplace questions and usual parental platitudes took on a special, unspoken meaning. It was impossible to escape the urgency in our parents' voices (was it implied or did we infer?) when they routinely called out after us "be careful" or "take care" as we dashed out the door.

You see, what they were really thinking, and what you knew, was that young women's remains were being dug out of the ground and that young men were going missing , and, although you never believed it would happen to you, the spectre still hung overhead or hovered in your subconscious.

For many Adelaide teenagers of the time it was, and perhaps still is, a very real part of growing up. For me, the name Bevan Spencer von Einem (convicted of the Family Murders) is indelibly etched in my memory, and those of my friends, more so than the names of any of the state premiers or governors of the '70s and '80s.

The smallness of Adelaide and the six degrees of separation theory became even more evident when it was revealed that one of the Family murder victims was Richard Kelvin, son of a popular Channel Nine newsreader, Rob Kelvin. Somehow we all became personally involved and watched the Nine news partly out of admiration and partly out of fascination whenever details of the case were read out by his female co-newsreader, Caroline Ainslie.

How brave for him to stay on air, we all thought. And for me, the closeness of it all got even tighter when one of the bodies in the Truro saga turned up on wasteland within sight of my father's workplace (he came home to tell us how he and his workmates watched the police forensics people at work). But imagine my horror when I realised I knew, albeit not very well, one of the bodies in the barrel in Snowtown: Barry "Vanessa" Lane.

Barry was the older brother of two girls I went to primary school with, Suzanne and Gillian. They were a famously poor family at our school, and Barry used to stop by the school gates in his Salvation Army Band uniform and play his trumpet for us.

As deeply troubled as his life was, there was no reason for him to end up, as one of his friends was quoted in the paper, "in a tin can".

Don't get me wrong, I love Adelaide. All my family and quite a few good friends live there, and I return often to be reminded of the wonderful quality of life they all enjoy. But still, after all these years, there is something sinister that I just can't shake.

On the dark and empty streets, surrounded by silence and brush fences, I often wonder: would anyone come running from behind the twitching net curtains if they heard you scream?

Mark Ellis is a Melbourne writer.


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