Debi Marshall: Interview with Bevan Spencer von Einem

Crime author Debi Marshall found herself sitting face-to-face with brutal convicted killer Bevan Spencer von Einem. He was softly spoken, charming and intelligent. He was also a psychopath.

The Family was a phrase coined by a SA detective who vowed to “break up the happy family” of the suspected wealthy elite tight-knit clique of men in Adelaide believed responsible for the kidnapping, sexual abuse and in at least five cases of torture and murder of up to 150 young men and boys including hitchhikers between the early 1970s and mid-1980s. Four of the five murders linked to the group remain unsolved and only one man has ever been charged. His name is Bevan Spencer von Einem. Author Debi Marshall, working with a Foxtel series team, spoke with von Einem during two jail visits.

Convicted killer Bevan Spencer 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.

Crime journalist Debi Marshall interviewed convicted killer Bevan Spencer von Einem. Picture: Tim Hunter.

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.

Bevan Spencer von Einem agreed to the sit down interview.

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.

Front page coverage of von Einem’s case.

A newspaper from 1984.

“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.

Journalist Debi Marshall filming Frozen Lies for Foxtel.

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.

Police cadets conduct a search for the murdered boy Peter Strogneff, 14.

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.

Police mugshot of Bevan Spencer von Einem from 1983.

Bevan Spencer von Einem led into the Adelaide Magistrates Court in 1984.

After 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.”