The Family killer’s shocking jailhouse revelation
Convicted killer Bevan Spencer von Einem has inadvertently made a stunning admission in a prison interview while trying to convince a journalist of his innocence in the sickening ‘The Family’ sex abuse and torture ring.
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The convicted killer and notorious head of “The Family” ring who picked up hitchhikers and schoolboys to drug and offer to South Australia’s elite to sexually abuse has broken his 20-year silence, to blame his victim, and to claim innocence over other murders.
His explosive revelations come as a high-profile Sydney gay community leader has agreed to have a 30-year-old court-issued suppression order against his identity lifted to speak publicly for the first time about his association with the case, including never heard before details.
Their claims could see The Family police file investigation reopened.
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The Family was the name given to a close-knit group of men believed to be involved in the kidnapping, sexual abuse and, at times, torture of young men and teenage boys in and around Adelaide from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Bevan Spencer von Einem made national headlines when he was sentenced to life for the 1983 murder of the 15-year-old son of a prominent TV news presenter, and was named as a suspect in a string of up to 150 other abductions and druggings and at least four other murders.
But after 30 years of maintaining his jail cell silence, von Einem agreed to speak to an author working on a Foxtel documentary, to give a rare insight into the mind of a psychopath as he made crucial admissions police had attempted but failed for years to garner.
The insight into the mind of the now 73-year-old killer was aided by the discovery of his briefcase by Foxtel, which he kept filled with his detailed paintings of butterflies and newspaper clippings.
The clippings were of himself and other major crimes including the Snowtown slayings and the 1966 kidnapping of the Beaumont children, 1973 Adelaide Oval abductions and the 1970 rape and murder of sisters in Townsville — the latter three crimes all suspected to be by another psychotic killer from Queensland.
Author Debi Marshall, working with the Foxtel series team, not only spoke with von Einem during two jail visits, but, through lawyers, had lifted 30-year-old suppression orders on the names of five of his acquaintances, including a prominent gay community leader and a drag queen both from Sydney and a transgender Adelaide prostitute accused of drugging boys for abuse.
True Crime Australia can reveal one of the men whose name has now been lifted is 66-year-old Sydney gay community identity Lewis Turtur, brother of AO recipient and Olympic gold medallist cyclist Mike Turtur.
There is no suggestion Mike Turtur has any connection with The Family or activities of any kind they engaged with.
Lewis Turtur yesterday said he had been cleared of any suspicions of involvement in The Family and had just had sexual relations with von Einem a few times and would allow his acquaintance to visit his house “half a dozen times” with drugged-up boys for sex involving several men “to take turns”.
“I know some of the boys did come over there. He’d (von Einem) bring boys over there to our places … but they left alive in the morning, OK?” he said yesterday, breaking his public silence on the case.
He added: “But those … that half a dozen were pristine the next morning, OK? Woke up the next morning and left … went home.”
When asked why he would allow drugged boys into his home for sex he replied, “because I was a stupid fool wasn’t I”.
He said he never faced any charges related to von Einem.
Marshall said the documentary’s sensational new findings in the case demanded a fresh South Australian police investigation.
“Just getting those names released was really a breakthrough for the families of the victims,” Marshall said yesterday.
“When I saw (suspected Family victim) Alan Barnes’ sister all she could say was ‘wow’, then she said she would go down and sit at their mum and dad’s grave and tell them. She said they’d waited so long for this, ‘then I’m going to Alan’s grave too’.”
Alan Barnes was just 16 when he was found murdered.
“The judicial system in South Australia needs to be looking at why these suppression orders of people and facts remain, as a lawyer succinctly put it ‘there’s no better disinfectant than sunlight’,” Marshall said.
Alan Barnes was the first of five victims believed to have died at the hands of The Family. In June 1979, the 17-year-old’s body was found dumped on the banks of South Para reservoir after he had been missing for a week.
He had been sexually abused by his unidentified captors but no one has ever been charged with his murder.
According to Marshall, von Einem denied he ever kidnapped, tortured or murdered anybody including 15-year-old Richard Kelvin, son of Channel 9 newsreader Rob Kelvin, who he was convicted of killing.
But during the prison visit von Einem inadvertently admitted seeing the boy wearing a distinctive dog collar, a key issue in his trial, and also made lurid admissions of a sexual nature about the boy, too distressing to publish.
Police had questioned von Einem previously and he denied seeing the collar, which Richard had worn as a joke but removed prior to being kidnapped.
He was held captive, drugged and abused and tortured for five weeks before dying of sexually-inflicted injuries.
Marshall visited von Einem twice at Port Augusta Prison’s high security wing.
The murderer revealed he now had Type 2 diabetes and was being moved to an aged care jail ward where he would be getting better access to medicines.
Critically he again denied all knowledge of all five murders and abuse of others but recounted in great detail the sexual abuse he experienced in his childhood by a friend of his father.
“Von Einem didn’t appear particularly perturbed about what happened to him he was not particularly perturbed about the memory, and his father’s response was to tell him to ‘go to the bathroom and wash your hands’,” Marshall said.
She described him as a drama queen who made it all about him.
“After all these years in jail he is still blaming his 15-year-old victim, he was blaming Richard Kelvin,” she said.
“He is going to his death bed keeping his secrets, he isn’t going to give it up, they don’t. It’s his little power trip, box of tricks, take it to the grave.”
MY JAILHOUSE MEETING WITH A KILLER
By Debi Marshall
PAUL, a lifelong friend of convicted killer Bevan Spencer von Einem has made good his promise to try and organise a meeting between us. Staunchly loyal to the man he describes as “extremely caring with a great sense of humour and no streak in him that would suggest he could murder someone”, it is not a description with which police or victim’s families agree.
To get in to see von Einem, I have to use my real name, Debra, as opposed to my writing name, Debi to pass security. Relationship to prisoner? Friend. Paul assures me that von Einem is very keen to speak to me but warns that cameras will pick up his every word.
Von Einem is housed in the highest security section of Port Augusta prison. Now institutionalised, he has been incarcerated for almost four decades and eked out dreary days here, four hour’s drive from Adelaide for the past 10 years. Now 73 years old, and with Type 2 diabetes, he has recently been moved into the old age unit.
On the advice of a criminal profiler, I am bereft of makeup or jewellery.
Don’t let him under your skin, she has warned me. I am not allowed a camera or mobile phone and am reminded of Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, visiting Hannibal Lecter in the dungeons of the prison. I must give him no opportunity for distraction.
Expecting the security of a glass petition between us, I’m shocked to find there is nothing. I am 157cm and at 184cm, he towers over me. We sit at a low table with four stools bolted to the floor, our knees almost touching. There is only one other visitor in the room and a handful of guards behind us, guns strapped in holsters at the ready.
Face the colour of putty, short grey hair and deep brown eyes, alert as a dingo’s, behind large glasses. That distinctive distended chin under bulbous nose. Softly spoken, charming, intelligent. He swoops to kiss my cheek before I turn away and proffer, instead my hand. He stares, appraising me; his first visitor in seven years.
He talks: memories of a brutal Germanic father who terrorised the children and his lovely mother, impotent to stop the violence. Of being raped, aged seven, by his father’s drinking buddy; when his father found out, he did nothing.
“Tell me about your friend, known in Adelaide as the ‘wealthy businessman’ whose name is suppressed and who, it’s long been rumoured, may have been a member of The Family,” I ask.
“I haven’t seen him for years and years,” he shrugs. “And I don’t know the Family because I was not involved with them.” The first denial, but not the last.
“What about the witness, who told authorities you had admitted to being involved in the disappearance of the Beaumont children.” His lips purse.
“He was a jail snitch. Everything he said about me, he did it for the money. I didn’t do it.”
At the end of our first meeting, he issues a warning. “Do you know I’m likely to get a bashing when I get back to my cell? They’ll bash the door down and want to know who you were and what you were doing.”
He’s wrong. They don’t.
On the second visit the following day, he is tense and guarded when I ask him about (murder victim) Richard Kelvin. The guards are slightly on the move and I realise, with horror that the charming man from yesterday is gone, replaced with an unsettled psychopath who could strangle me with one hand. “Everyone painted him as this straight boy, but he wasn’t,” he says. “His father was in the media and they wanted to get the message out, that he was straight.” I try not to flinch.
“Was Richard wearing a dog collar when you saw him?”
“Yes.” It’s the admission that Major Crime tried but could not get. Kelvin had been mucking around wearing the family dog’s collar but removed it at the bus stop before he waved goodbye to his friend on the day of his abduction. If von Einem had seen him with it on, which he denied to police, then he had to have seen it either at the bus stop; or he had put it back on him when he was held captive.
The clock is inching towards time. “What’s your message to the world, Bevan?”
“Well, I’m not a killer, for starters. I didn’t do it. Yes, I picked up hitchhikers but I didn’t harm them. And they didn’t have any evidence for (suspected Family victims Alan) Barnes and (Mark) Langley. I’ve never, ever met them.”
On my attempted third visit, I receive an unceremonious phone call from the prison telling me the visit has been cancelled and that I will receive a letter telling me why.
That letter never arrives.
All these years, and von Einem still maintains his innocence. But this investigation is not over yet; in many ways, it is only just beginning. At home, I make the hundredth trip to my empty mailbox to wait for the prison letter and ruminate on the words of poet Robert Louis Stevenson: “Everybody, soon or late sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
• Foxtel’s true crime series Debi Marshall Investigates Frozen Lies premieres Tuesday September 24 at 8.30pm AEST or On Demand only on Crime + Investigation.
• The Frozen Lies podcast launches Tuesday September 17. Download on your preferred podcast app.
Originally published as The Family killer’s shocking jailhouse revelation
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