Interview with a monster: The City of Corpses murders
A diabolical man jailed for one of Adelaide’s terrifying teen boy torture murders has spoken for the first time from behind bars.
WARNING: Distressing content
It’s visiting time at Port Augusta prison and the diabolical Bevan Spencer Von Einem, the only man jailed in any of Adelaide’s teen boy torture serial murders, is licking his lips.
Thirty-five years since Von Einem murdered Richard Kelvin, 15, in a prolonged slaying of barbaric sexual sadism, the now 72-year-old is facing a visitor from the outside world.
Crime author Debi Marshall is the first such person Von Einem has seen in years, and the vile killer chooses to regale her with talk about his favourite subject: sex.
Sitting on a plastic chair in green sweatpants, the depraved rapist and boy killer speaks in a soft voice and splays his soft, doughy hands.
The cross-dressing mummy’s boy with massive social pretensions, despite his ordinary background, is regaling Marshall with vignettes from his sordid former life in Adelaide.
Or the “City of Corpses” as Marshall has nicknamed the South Australian capital, given the series of murders it has seen over many decades.
Marshall is on a mission. With a podcast, a TV series and now a book, she is trying finally to resolve five serial murders for the sake of families still anxious for answers about their lost boys.
The five boys killed in the series known as the Family Murders were all found with their torn and dismembered bodies bearing marks of incalculable pain and savagery.
The backstory of the murders has always been the same, that a tight-knit group of five or six adult men, paedophiles who include members of Adelaide’s elite, carried out the slayings.
Bevan Spencer Von Einem was the only one who got caught, after the fifth boy – the son of a popular Adelaide newsreader – was abducted, tortured and horrifically killed.
Debi Marshall interrupts Von Einem’s indulgent jailhouse talk by mentioning Richard Kelvin, who vanished 300m from his family home on a Sunday afternoon in mid-1983.
After being held drugged but alive for five weeks, the teenager’s body was washed, dressed and dumped in scrub by a dirt airstrip near Mt Crawford about 30km north of Adelaide.
Von Einem responds to Marshall with a smooth stream of well-rehearsed victim blaming about the boy, slavering as he delivers it.
It’s a Saturday afternoon and Marshall has travelled far to be here, in this remote prison, and omitted facts though never lied to prison authorities to be seated opposite this drooling creep.
“(Kelvin) was not gay, just a beautiful young man with a new girlfriend he wanted to marry,” Marshall later tells news.com.au.
Disguising her rage, she jolts Von Einem with a question about an item Kelvin was wearing when he was last seen alive and safe.
Von Einem takes the bait and before he can help himself, a telling answer is falling off his tongue.
“He’s used to being in control. He wanted to control me … the slip was pretty great and he couldn’t catch it,” she said.
The gotcha moment sparks Von Einem’s own rage and for a moment, as Marshall fears he might be about to snap her neck in the visits room, the monster is bared.
“He started getting really jittery and anxious, his facial expression changed … you were looking at the killer,” she said.
It’s the real Von Einem, Marshall believes, the man a teenage boy saw before being brutalised and killed.
And Marshall is no novice at delving into the minds of evil men.
The award-winning journalist and author has written books about the Snowtown murders, NSW Family Court bomber Leonard Warwick and Derek Percy, perhaps Australia’s most prolific child killer.
Marshall’s goal is to prove what the South Australian justice system has to date failed to do: that more than one male youth saw this same monster and his evil cohorts before dying.
The visit ends and Marshall leaves the inmate to return to his cell in a prison where he’ll likely die.
Its location is a fitting purgatory for the socially ambitious psychopath Von Einem, between a featureless desert and the Spencer Gulf.
The Gulf was named by explorer Matthew Flinders in honour of a first lord of the British Admiralty, who a crashing snob like Bevan Spencer Von Einem could only dream was his distinguished relative.
It is that, Von Einem as the opportunistic parvenu to a perverted elite of Adelaide society, that is one of his most despicable qualities.
In her shocking new book Banquet: The Untold Story of Adelaide’s Family Murders, Marshall returns to it as a chief motivation, to be a “someone”.
In the whole sick saga of the murders, from the luring of boys off the street to drug and rape, to the sinister, fastidious washing of the bodies before they were dumped, Von Einem’s social toadying stands out.
As Marshall writes, in his imaginary world Von Einem is descended from a privileged Germanic family going back to the time of the Crusades.
He imagines himself to be a high-flying professional, a pilot or perhaps a gynaecologist, a gay man but not a boring old gay, instead a someone that other men want to be with.
In reality, Von Einem grew up in a house collapsing from termite infestation with a vicious brute of a Germanic father who allowed his drinking buddy to rape his own son as a boy.
Von Einem was a would-be accountant who slogged it out in a tedious job as a bookkeeper for years, while living with his mother.
In his secret life, he became a drug supplier and exploited drug-addicted trans women to lure victims off the streets.
He was a 193cm-tall coward who used date rape drugs like Mandrax to overpower and sexually abuse boys.
In revisiting the murders, Marshall is trying to unearth long-held secrets in South Australia, where suppression orders have protected “people of power and influence” for decades.
They still do: she succeeded in having five suppression orders on names overturned.
These include a man named Lewis Turtur, a former acquaintance of Von Einem’s who decided it was “time” the truth about the killer’s days of drugging and raping boys.
Turtur, who had no involvement with any of the Family Murders, recalled Von Einem bringing drugged-up boys to his house for sex.
All the boys he saw left in the morning still alive, but he told Marshall that they arrived unconscious, or barely so, and “Von Einem had drugged them”.
Turtur had gone to police following the revelations about Richard Kelvin’s murder in 1983.
Nevertheless, powerful people who were implicated back then still today, armed with lawyers, continue to resist public exposure.
These include a shadowy figure she calls “the businessman”, who Marshall finds and confronts in a scene she retells in the book, but who remains anonymous to most of us.
Not to the victims’ families who know the names of the people who likely killed their sons and brothers.
Marshall’s motivation in creating her podcast and Foxtel series Frozen Lies and now this book is to prompt a royal commission into the unsolved murders of the four other young men whose horrific deaths were grouped with Kelvin’s.
As she told news.com.au, for the murders to remain unsolved would be like Ivan Milat’s Belanglo slayings to still be open cases in NSW.
Before all hell broke loose after Richard Kelvin’s body was found, the horrific nature of the murders of four other young men had gripped Adelaide, and created no less grief for their loved ones.
Alan Barnes, 16, was murdered in June 1979, Neil Muir, 25, two months later, followed by 14-year-old Peter Stogneff in 1981, and Mark Langley, 18, in 1982.
Marshall charts the connections between the first two victims and Bevan Spencer Von Einem, who was charged with Alan Barnes and Mark Langley’s murders.
But committal proceedings failed to come to fruition after prosecutors decided evidence was insufficient to confidently proceed to trial.
In each murder, the manner of death is dreadful and Marshall has decided to use the forum of her book to pull no punches about what happened.
To put it bluntly, the young men and teens died from massive blood loss from anal injuries, and what amounts to mutilation and crude surgery.
Neil Muir’s dismemberment is related in harrowing detail, his body sawn into four, his fingers, tattoos, private parts and intestines removed, his limbs thrust inside the cadaver.
The absolute desecration of Muir’s body can be cast against the high mindedness of South Australia’s justice system in shielding the names of possible perpetrators for 40 years.
The same system has served to protect and even cosset Von Einem since his conviction and sentence for Richard Kelvin’s murder.
Before being sent to the netherworld of Port Augusta prison, Von Einem lived as much of a high life that you can behind bars.
Inside Yatala Labour Prison, he charmed guards and programs staff to bring him special food and creature comforts.
Von Einem and fellow murderer Stephen McBride were eventually rumbled for living in a “luxury cell” with carpet, two TVs and comfortable furniture.
Von Einem had been able to have his prized harp brought into Yatala, the same one he claimed to have played to Richard Kelvin at his home in 1983.
That had been an attempt at trial to explain how the teenager’s hair had found its way into his bedroom at his mother’s home in the Adelaide suburb of Paradise.
SA Corrections was forced to split up Von Einem and McBride, the “Sandy Creek killer”, who murdered a postmistress, robbed a woman at knifepoint and attempted to murder a third woman.
Afterwards, Von Einem claimed the duo had been used as “political footballs”, and bemoaned the publicity, which he said made his jail life harder.
“We are in here with a wall around us and there is not much they can do to us. It’s our families who cop it all,” Von Einem said.
“(Prison life) had been hard at first. But some of the fellows have shown me how to follow the ropes and get on with life inside.”
Von Einem said he enjoyed nights when cells were locked and “you are free to do what you want”.
This included painting and drawing birthday cards for other inmates and their families.
Von Einem’s power of manipulation go back decades to when he was masquerading by day as the mild-mannered bookkeeper.
His mother was the envy of her friends for having such a “good” son who dutifully drove her to the Adelaide Hills to stay with a friend while he got up to nefarious life back in town.
By night, Von Einem frequented Adelaide’s Mars Bar and the Green Dragon, and its notorious gay beats down by the Torrens River where boys were picked and sometimes tossed in to its depths.
He was known as “Bevbang”, his parties guaranteed to turn into an orgy fuelled by the drugs he peddled from bent doctors.
Marshall believes Von Einem was “very probably impotent” which might explain the terrible acts perpetrated on Richard Kelvin as a kind of twisted display of potency or power.
He was an associate of gay lawyer Derrance Stevenson, who was murdered two weeks before Alan Barnes – who may have witnesses the event – went missing.
Stevenson’s slaying, the scandalous “body in the freezer” murder, is just one of many facets of Adelaide’s underbelly dug up and disturbed by Marshall in her quest to she light on Adelaide’s dark truths.
Von Einem’s other associates are mostly either dead, have fled the country or remain protected by the SA system.
The first Family Murder, and one of three Von Einem was charged with, was Alan Barnes, a 16-year-old who vanished in mid-1979.
Nicknamed “Spook” for his pale skin and hair, he was a cheeky boy whose attraction for women made him, his sister says, a “chick magnet”.
A week before his 17th birthday, Barnes goes missing and when he’s not home for the celebration, his 41-year-old mother Judy knows in her heart that “Alan’s gone”.
On June 24, 1979, a body is tossed from height into the South Para Reservoir in the Adelaide Hills.
Two friends on an afternoon bike ride find the body; Alan’s older sister Robyn refuses to believe it’s her brother.
An autopsy concludes the cause of death is blood loss, from bleeding from the anus which has deep lacerations and evidence of massive trauma.
The body also has broken bones, head injuries from beatings with a blunt instrument and a severed spinal cord.
It is also remarkably clean, having been washed and redressed; toxicology tests will find the hypnotic sedative chloral hydrate and alcohol in his system.
Forensic examiners will deduce that Alan Barnes was held captive for a week, assaulted, drugged and horrifically abused with a high level of violence right up to his murder.
Marshall poses the question in Banquet about why the boy’s killers had to inflict such a level of violence right up until the end when he was already drugged and captive.
Alan’s mother Judy Barnes fought all her life for the truth to come out about her son’s killers.
She died aged 71 in 2009 from kidney failure, having passed “the torch” on to her three children.
As Marshall says, the remaining relatives of all the victims are now ageing too, as are police officers and witnesses who could testify before a royal commission into the murders.
And then there’s Von Einem, now in his 70s and suffering from diabetes.
“He’s the ultimate coward,” Marshall says with not a small amount of loathing.
“Imagine how it is for the families?” she asks.
“Key suspects are still walking the streets, their identities protected by the law.
“The same names that keep coming up time and time again, they’ve been hanging around for decades and these people are so determined to keep their reputations intact.
“It’s time … to drag these cases out of the darkness and into the light. It’s long, long overdue.”
Anyone with information regarding the Family Murders of any of Adelaide’s unsolved killings can contact Marshall on dminvestigates@foxtel.com.au
Banquet: The Untold Story of Adelaide’s Family Murders, Debi Marshall, Vintage Press, $34.99
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