Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia?

By Stephen Orr

Why is it that Adelaide, a beautiful city of churches and lush gardens, a place renowned for its support of the arts and culture, has become better known as the epicenter of some of Australia's weirdest and most brutal crimes? One of its denizens seeks the answers in this fascinating investigation. Some crimes are so mysterious or ghastly that they take on a legendary status, and Adelaide seems to have had more than its fair share of them. The whole nation remembers the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the ghastly Snowtown murders where the dismembered bodies were found in barrels in a disused bank vault, and the so called Family murders perpetrated by Bevan Spencer van Einem, with its trail of conspiracy theories, rumor, and innuendo, and other crimes just as notorious. Award-winning novelist and journalist Stephen Orr rounds up the infamous crimes of his native city and looks beyond the myth to the tragic sadness, badness and madness of violent crime and its consequences. Why Adelaide? Read Cruel City and find out. This book was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781742692944

Book preview

The

CRUEL

  CITY

Stephen Orr is the author of three novels, the latest of

which, Time’s Long Ruin, reimagines the disappearance

of the Beaumont children from Glenelg Beach in 1966.

The

CRUEL

  CITY

Is Adelaide the

murder capital

of Australia?

STEPHEN ORR

First published in 2011

Copyright © Stephen Orr 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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ISBN 978 1 74237 509 0

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Southern Gothic: Death in the afternoon

1 Colonial days: Botched hangings and poisoned milk

Part I    The Darkest and Cruelest Minds

2 The man who never was: The body at Somerton

3 John Balaban and the Sunshine Café murders

4 The Sundown Station murders

5 Murder in a limestone cave: Rupert Maxwell Stuart

6 The day that stopped a nation: The Beaumont children

7 Clifford Bartholomew and the Hope Forest massacre

8 The Adelaide Oval kidnapping: Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe

Part II    Inglorious Partnerships

9 Drowned on the beat: George Duncan

10 Bevan Spencer von Einem and the Family murders

11 Shallow graves: The Truro murders

12 The body in the freezer: Derrance Stevenson

13 The bodies in the barrels: Snowtown

14 ‘Your own flesh and blood’: The killing of Glenys Heyward

Part III    Trust and Abuse

15 ‘Misery, tears and sadistic nuns’: The Sisters of Mercy

16 Lost childhoods

17 Lies and abuse in the Church

An undeserved reputation?

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

A version of ‘The man who never was: The body at Somerton’ first appeared in The Sunday Mail (Adelaide) and The Week. Similarly, The Adelaide Review first published the piece that appears here as ‘John Balaban and the Sunshine Café murders’.

For their help, guidance and patience I would like to thank Richard Walsh, Sue Hines, Joanne Holliman, Clara Finlay, Catherine Taylor, Janet Hutchinson, Sam and Simon at Bookhouse, and Lisa White.

Again, my wife, Catherine, held the fort while I obsessed over newspaper cuttings, transcripts and piles of books. Thanks Eamon and Henry, my sons, and harshest critics, for telling me I needed to get a life instead of tapping away on the ‘black beast’. I suspect you’re correct.

Thanks to the helpful volunteers at the SA Police Historical Museum and the Old Adelaide Gaol, where I’ve spent many a Sunday afternoon reading messages from the past scrawled in the mortar. Thanks also to the lovely ladies at the State Library of South Australia for continually showing me how to re-thread the microfiche machine. And yes, number 17 was broken before I used it.

Thanks to my most important sources, the citizens of the Cruel City—my parents, relatives, friends, workmates and the dozens of people who have overheard whispers, had a strange neighbour, kept a secret for far too long or knew someone whose brother’s uncle’s friend saw something that was never properly investigated.

This is your book, but it’s only part of the story.

Southern Gothic:

Death in the afternoon

I first had the idea to write, or, more correctly, to gather together the newspaper clippings, articles, books, rumours, horror stories and folklore that make up The Cruel City, in early 2009. I was sitting at home, feet up, mind blank, kids caught up in a rare, quiet game of Monopoly, when I heard a knock at the front door. I was expecting a neighbour loaded down with nectarines, or a plea for money to help rid the world of macular degeneration, but instead was greeted by a visitor with a wild beard, stonewashed jeans and an armful of manila folders.

‘Are you Stephen Orr?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied reluctantly, listening to my sons arguing over Pall Mall.

‘You’re writing a book about the Beaumont kids, aren’t you?’ he stated more than asked.

‘Yes,’ I managed, studying his face. ‘Do I know you?’

‘No. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve tried every Orr in the phone book but it looks like I got lucky.’

Lucky? Now, I’m not the sort of author who attracts deranged or obsessed fans, but suddenly I felt like John Lennon standing in front of the Dakota, chewing the fat with Mark Chapman. My only other run-in with a reader was at a meet-the-author in the Barossa Valley when an elder of the Lutheran Church stood up, told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and reminded me that God was listening.

‘I know who took the Beaumont kids,’ the man at my door suddenly announced.

‘Really?’ I responded, taken aback. ‘The thing is, I’m just writing a novel, I’m not trying to solve the case.’

But he’d already produced a small mountain of photos.

‘This one here,’ he said, ‘this is where they were kept.’

He showed me a photo of the basement of a house on the Esplanade at Glenelg, a beachside suburb of Adelaide from where the three Beaumont children went missing in 1966.

There was a name scratched into the mortar—Jane, the name of the eldest girl—and childish drawings of houses and ships with smoke coming from their funnels. There were photos of the kids, most of which I’d seen in books and newspapers, pinned up on the walls, and old mattresses and bedding laid out on the ground. The stranger told me there were fingernail scratches on the walls and windows, and that the whole basement smelt of human faeces.

It was as though someone was trying to cast a local myth as a sort of Edgar Allan Poe horror story, complete with a theatrical setting and the irony of the lost kids living so close to the beach from where they were taken, listening daily to the surf, the carousel and the sounds of other children playing just beyond their screams.

‘They were kept in this room, and then moved,’ the man explained, fixing me with an intense, convinced stare, showing me other photos of other homes.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, throwing caution to the wind, stepping outside and closing the fly door, becoming intrigued with the photos.

The man explained that a friend of his had bought the house in the early 1990s and found the room intact. He didn’t try to explain why the children’s abductor had left such an obvious trail of clues behind, unless he was some sort of Norman Bates disposing of his mother’s house.

‘It’s beyond doubt,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you take this to the police?’ I asked.

He almost laughed, going on to explain how there was a network of homosexual, paedophilic senior police, judges and politicians that had conspired to keep this, and other stomach-churning instances of abuse of children, young men and others, secret. He could account for the murder of gay law lecturer George Duncan, knew the acquaintances of the ‘Family’ murderer, Bevan Spencer von Einem, knew the fate of abducted girls Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon, and many other, lesser known cases.

At this point I’d had enough. I explained, again, how I was just a writer, someone who made up stories, and that, although I didn’t doubt him for a moment, I couldn’t see how I could help him find the Beaumont children or expose the dark side of Adelaide’s ruling elite.

He told me how he’d approached newspapers, magazines and television current affairs programs, and how they’d all given him a wide berth. As I guessed I should.

‘The problem is,’ I explained, ‘how could you, or anyone, prove this? How could I write anything without being sued for libel?’ I told the stranger that his best hope of seeking justice might be in concentrating on one or two of the cases instead of trying to convince people of some sort of conspiracy theory. ‘You know what people are going to think,’ I said, carefully, taking off.

So we shook hands, and he left, thanking me for my time.

Later, thinking back on this encounter, I guessed that there must be some truth, somewhere, in what he said. I knew that it would take a brave person to open this can of worms and attempt to sort the truth from the half-lies and myths. The reality is, I suppose, that, given 50 years, things stay hidden. For every crime that’s uncovered there are many hiding their secrets down wells and buried in sand dunes. Was the stranger at my door just one product of a culture—a people, a state, a city—that knows there are dark secrets locked in a basement somewhere?

The statistics suggest not. South Australia has a homicide rate on par with the rest of Australia except, of course, the Northern Territory, with its particular issues of abuse within indigenous communities affected by alcohol, drugs, lack of employment and suitable housing. Still, South Australia, and the city of Adelaide in particular, has often been cast (mostly by a media in search of a quick headline) as some sort of macabre killing field, with deranged, inbred perverts filling their days dismembering innocent children and depositing their limbs in barrels.

Adelaide has been called the city of corpses, labelled by Salman Rushdie as the ‘perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film’. Locals have become defensive about this perceived reputation, quoting crime figures to dispel the myths, assuming it’s just more of the usual Sydney–Melbourne arrogance. At the same time, though, there’s a faint sense of pride in this slightly Gothic reputation, an inkling, perhaps, that when the gene pool starts to dry up the bodies float to the surface. During the twentieth century, as Adelaide moved from Australia’s third, to fourth, to fifth largest city, as the immigrants chose other places and the local young people moved interstate, there was a transition from breaststroke to treading water, to not drowning, waving.

The American response to insignificance has been a sort of well-meaning indignation—a not-quite-right celebration of a six-fingered, three-armed difference, a pride in one’s patch and people, an almost forensic fascination with what you eat, which cousin you marry, which war you’ve started and just exactly how strange (yet normal) you are. Southern Gothic has celebrated the grotesque. Southern US writer Flannery O’Connor remarked, ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic.’ If we substitute east for north we may go some way to understanding the rest of Australia’s perceptions of Adelaide.

Gothic is defined as art characterised by gloom, the grotesque and the supernatural, and these elements seem to saturate the stories included in The Cruel City. Although these real-life tales of death and abuse are not art, they have become a sort of myth, a sunburnt folklore smelling of coconut oil and formalin. This gives us some way of hearing the unspeakable, of understanding the unthinkable, of taking the faces and voices and small annoying habits of people we know and understanding what happens to them; of trying, just for a moment, to comprehend the minds of people who perpetrate these acts—people we work with, live beside and with whom we share stories and cigarettes.

Adelaide can look and feel Gothic: a midsummer’s day, standing, waiting to cross the endless expanse of bitumen that is North Terrace, its traffic lights perpetually favouring those who had the good sense to drive; walking beside the

Torrens River, or is it in fact a creek, or sewer, a dammed stretch of grey water that bubbles in the hot sun, breeding algae and contempt in equal measure, smelling of methane and hydrogen sulphide; the locals shuffling about, barely lifting their feet, their mouths open as they study German tourists studying city maps with a sort of is this it? look on their face; older women in Peyton’s Place frocks, clinging to their Zimmer Frames, smelling of April Violet talc, husbands shuffling a few steps behind with a look of acceptance, their ties never loose, their Panamas never crooked; a drawl, rounded vowels, left over from limp salad days themselves left over from illusions and visions dreamt up and clung to under wide, peeling verandahs.

But with the light comes the darkness: sexual fantasies savoured in the dying light of day; garments removed in the shade of pomegranate trees; boys taken into bath-houses and washed, scrubbed by strange hands; unrequited love, drenched in sentimentality, floating from one front porch to the next as Austen and Dickens provide a soundtrack of places-become-Adelaide; reformatories; brothels; hulks; asylums; prisons; watch-houses; and bedrooms decorated with Pears prints.

So if the Gothic, so grotesque in its manifestation, is real, then why? Many of the slighted lovers, child abusers and ordinary murderers in The Cruel City have come from dysfunctional families, existing on welfare, living in state housing on the northern and southern fringes of Adelaide. The mega-suburbs of Elizabeth and Salisbury, especially, stand testament to the failure of well-meaning, misguided politicians and town planners who linked Adelaide’s suburban sprawl to a manufacturing base that started drying up almost as soon as it was established.

These are places where human beings have slipped through the cracks, where a third and fourth generation of children grow up with un- or underemployed parents, waist-high front lawn and a Torana stumped in the driveway. These are darklands beyond the reach and concern of most middle-class South Australians, their problems hidden away like a spastic cousin in the woodshed.

On the other hand there’s respectable Adelaide, producing an entirely different sort of grotesque. The well-heeled eastern suburbs have always been the domain of old money, old names. There has been, and still is, a budget version of the Windsors intermarrying to preserve name and wealth.

Behind sandstone facades and clipped hedges is a world of mint juleps narrowly avoided, school chaplains and senior judges with a taste for Tennyson and Entertaining Mr Sloane indulging their fancies in the mistaken belief that no one is watching or is likely to do much about it.

In past years, Adelaide, a sort of garden of the good and slightly bent, was a hideaway, a backwater that hosted its fair share of war criminals and even, at one time, British fugitive Ronnie Biggs. But, we assume, things have changed. The Mullighan inquiry into the abuse of children in state care, for example, has sent teachers, carers and priests scampering into the privet, and as the abused come forward we can finally expect at least some justice.

The victims of the crimes in The Cruel City were real people, as were the families and loved ones they left behind. By telling and retelling these stories we are trying to come to terms with the seconds, minutes, hours, days and maybe years of their deaths; we are trying to imagine, but not imagine, people we live and eat and sleep with tied down, stretched out, their eyes filled with terror as they wait. We can never know, but we can never stop trying. We can wish it upon ourselves as a sort of penance, a means of understanding, but that still won’t fix the problem. We can never really admit that life is random, and often cruel, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it; we can make as many laws as we like, teach our kids every scrap of common sense, but there’s no avoiding the Gothic moments, shadows, faces and basements; we can build higher fences, trust each other less, but it’s still there, in our minds as much as anything.

This is not a book of true crime as much as true tragedy. Some crimes, such as the case of the Somerton ‘mystery man’, or the disappearance of the Beaumont children, will probably never have a resolution. With the passing of parents and friends the pain will end but the fascination will continue. Other cases, such as the beating death of David Mamo, have been solved, although the underlying causes still exist and lead to more of the same suffering for thousands of children on a daily basis. Quite frankly, few of us care about these slow deaths, these deaths in the making, although we’re quite prepared to get angry when there’s a body. Other stories have become almost passé in their similarity to something Hollywood has done a thousand times. Nonetheless, the murders at the Sunshine Café or Sundown Station, both in the 1950s, reveal much about what can go wrong with the human mind, with disastrous results.

Here, then, are just a few of the stories we tell.

Chapter 1

Colonial days: Botched hangings

and poisoned milk

1836–1940s

Where did our Cruel City, and state, begin? With a few hundred settlers wading ashore at Glenelg Beach, looking at the scrub, swatting sandflies, unbuttoning their celluloid collars and wondering what the hell they’d done?

Although Adelaide was a planned settlement, thought out, subscribed, full of hard-working Methodists and humourless Lutherans, before long there were flaws in the glass. Michael Magee, a runaway convict, and his offsider, William Morgan, tried to settle an argument with the colony’s first sheriff, Samuel Smart, by breaking into his cottage and attempting to shoot him. Magee missed, and was subsequently captured and sentenced to death.

A call was put out for a volunteer hangman but no one came forward. Eventually a reluctant citizen agreed, on the proviso that he appeared masked and ‘artificially disfigured’. In May 1838 the prisoner was taken by horse and cart to a hanging tree in the north parklands. The hangman had no idea how to tie a noose, or even a simple knot for the prisoner’s hands. Magee, standing on the cart, had the rope placed around his neck; when the horse moved forward he was left hanging, using his thumbs to try to loosen the noose. The executioner lost his nerve and fled. The crowd shouted for Magee to be taken down, or at least dispatched by rifle shot. Instead, the police chased after the executioner, returned him to the hanging tree, and forced him to take Magee by the legs and swing on his body until the job was done. Reports say that Magee was still murmuring thirteen minutes later.

We have an image of mothers covering their children’s face, fathers shouting out in support of Magee, the fainthearted dropping to their knees or vomiting, as the hangman ran for the hills. All this in a place of such innocence, a near shop-new paradise with fertile fields, opportunity and strangulation.

Meanwhile, Magee’s offsider, William Morgan, was captured at Encounter Bay and returned to Adelaide. On the way the police party became lost and left Morgan tied to a tree while they went looking for help. The writer Nathaniel Hales said that the prisoner was

tightly bound to a tree, exposed to scorching heat during the day, piercing chills at night, and suffering privation of both food and water. Ravenous birds screamed around him during daylight; wild dogs prowled near him at night,

Reviews for Cruel City

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having grown up in Adelaide during the 1980s, I have an odd pride in telling people I survived the mean streets of the cruel city. What with the Truro murders, the Family Murders and the echoes of the Beaumont children disappearance, we Adelaideans had every reason to be concerned about our health and wellbeing. Whether Adelaide is a cruel city is best left to the philosophers but I couldn't help but notice that Orr tries to sell us on this claim yet proffers as evidence crimes committed hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. But that still leaves many crimes to startle even the most jaded Adelaidean; I hadn't realised just how savage the Snowtown murderers were and I can only imagine that David Partridge must be the biggest idiot in the world for murdering the young son of the leader of the Finks motor cycle gang.I also noticed that Orr even used some research of mine, which gets him bonus marks. However, even with all this, "The Cruel City" never seems to reach great heights and it seems like a book he threw together to fill a gap in the market.

[spbooks_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a horrible little book - in the sense that is filled with gut churning descriptions of some of the infamous crime that has occurred in the beautiful city of Adelaide. It's not the sort of book that one can say is "enjoyable". But fascinating it is - and truly horrific. I've only given this book three stars because the author, who is a fiction writer, seems to try too hard, at times, to use sensational rhetoric and conjecture to make his stories intriguing. But when he does this, it makes his story telling sound naive and superficial. The facts of these cases don't need any embellishment. They stand on there own as unbelievably sensational and horrific and I won't be rereading this book again! I have read far better books on one of the cases - the so-called Snowtown murders - that provide a much better, more nuanced analysis of the possible sociological and psychological precursors to that particular series of crimes. But for someone who wants a quick survey of some of the sensational crimes occurring in Adelaide, I suppose this is a good introduction. But you need a pretty strong stomach to endure the book to the end.Another aspect of the book I didn't like is the way the author characterises Adelaide as somehow a unique "cruel city" throughout his story telling - but then, in a brief chapter at the end of the book, shows how these sorts of crimes occur everywhere - no city is immune.So, while the book was fascinating and compelling, overall, I think it suffers from a lack of true depth in grappling with some of the questions that need to be asked - and inevitably do get asked - when these sorts of things happening. The biggest question - Why? - seems to have no real answer in the end. How these people could carry out such "evil" crimes with complete disregard for the humanity of their victims is a complete mystery.