It is one of those “mate of a mate” stories which sounds like an urban myth but has at its centre a terrifying truth.

Every young man growing up in Adelaide in the 1980s heard versions of it. Their parents heard similar things too, and its unnerving content changed the way every young man in Adelaide behaved in the 1980s, and the way their parents let them behave.

This young guy was studying science at Adelaide Uni and got stuck late at the lab one night.

He finally finished around midnight and walked down to his car parked on Victoria Drive next to the banks of the Torrens.

As he approached his vehicle he saw a woman sitting inside.

He stopped and waved his hand in a circular motion asking her to wind down the window. The woman was shaking.

She explained that she had been chased through the parklands by two men. She managed to get away and hid on the ground by the student’s car. She noticed the door on the car was unlocked so she quietly got in and locked herself inside, lying flat on the passenger seat until the men went away.

The student asked her if she wanted to go to the police. “No”, the woman said. “I just want to go home”.

The student offered to drive her. She only lived in Parkside, barely five minutes away south of town.

As the student was driving he asked the woman how she managed to get into the car when he was sure he had left it locked. The woman said all she knew was that it was unlocked by the time she got there.

As she was talking the student noticed something odd about the woman’s voice. It was gravelly.

He glanced down at her hands. They were big. He looked at the shape of her neck and the size of her Adam’s apple.

The student told the woman he needed to stop at the petrol station on Pulteney St to get something before dropping her home. He went in and asked the console operator to call the police and waited inside.

When the police turned up the woman was gone.

Five young men were murdered under the most unspeakable circumstances in Adelaide between 1979 and 1983.

The man who murdered at least one of them, Bevan Spencer von Einem, died this week of lung cancer at the hospice inside the Yatala Labour Prison, having been jailed for 24 years but never considered for parole due to his lead role in one of the most depraved crimes in global history.

Police have long been convinced that Von Einem did not act alone but was part of a sick and shadowy network that came to be known as The Family. The group preyed on male youths who were either grabbed and drugged or lured by transvestites and female honey traps into private homes in Adelaide where they were tortured, raped and killed, often over periods of days and weeks.

The workings and membership of The Family has been the subject of feverish and continued speculation. It has been said that some members of The Family were very well connected, hailing from business and even the judiciary and politics. There are rumours to this day that some of the killings were filmed. There are houses which still stand in the city which are believed to have been used as locations for gatherings of The Family.

The players in The Family killings have strange links to other Adelaide crimes including the 1972 murder of University of Adelaide law lecturer Dr George Duncan, who drowned after being thrown into the River Torrens, allegedly by South Australian police in a hate crime at what was a popular gay beat at a time when homosexuality remained illegal in SA.

Von Einem was on the banks of the Torrens that night coming to the aid of another gay man, Roger James, whom he drove to the Royal Adelaide Hospital after James broke his leg when he too was thrown into the river.

He refused to give the families of the victims the satisfaction of any resolution. There was no deathbed confession. He shed no light on who his accomplices were. Despite all evidence to the contrary, von Einem died insisting he was innocent of the murder of 15-year-old Richard Kelvin, even though he admitted to meeting him.

Kelvin was the son of the then Channel Nine newsreader Rob Kelvin, who somehow managed to keep working on television through the horror of his child’s demise.

Richard Kelvin was kept alive for five weeks and pumped with Mandrax, Noctec, Amytal, Valium and Rohypnol before eventually dying from horrific injuries, his body found near an abandoned airstrip in Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills.

The other four victims went a similar way.

Alan Barnes, 16, was picked up hitchhiking. His mutilated body was later found dumped at the North Para Reservoir.

Neil Muir, 25, was dissected and placed in a bag and thrown into the Port River. Peter Stogneff, 14, was cut into three pieces and dumped in the mangroves at Middle Beach north of Adelaide. Mark Langley, 18, was found dead in the Adelaide foothills, his eviscerated body having been partially shaved and undergone crude surgery. All four had traces of multiple hypnotic drugs in their system.

The brutal and predatory nature of the killings helps explain why South Australian parents were so terrified throughout the 1980s. This was a genuine horror show. As the police investigations into the deaths of the five boys continued, reaching a conclusion with von Einem’s conviction for the fifth murder, that of Kelvin, in 1985, there was barely a day in South Australian when the words von Einem did not appear in 140 point on the front page of the old Adelaide News. It was a story that was completely repellent and utterly compelling at the same time.

It was different from the 1966 disappearance of the Beaumont children with no information ever forthcoming about their presumed demise.

It was different from the 1999 Snowtown killings, whose victims all hailed from an unrelatable subculture. This was different because you didn’t need to imagine anything. These were methodical, real-time abductions by a sinister cabal of powerful men, plucking innocent youths off the streets for the most depraved of endings, the grotesque details of which all become public knowledge. It was the reason why in Adelaide in the 1980s your parents wouldn’t let you go to concerts with friends, the reason they would wait outside parties in their cars to pick you up as you celebrated a friend’s 16th.

It is the reason stories such as that of the Adelaide Uni science student feel more accurate than apocryphal.

This is a story that caused great anguish in Adelaide as it gained its reputation as Australia’s murder capital, off the back of the Beaumont’s disappearance, the Truro killings and The Family murders. When Salman Rushdie visited for Writers Week in 1984 and quipped that Adelaide would be a great city in which to set a horror story, the rawness of the emotion over the Family killings saw the author denounced as a pariah and drummed out of town, declared never to be invited to return.

Attorney-General Kyam Maher spoke for the state this week when he said South Australia would be better for von Einem being dead.

“Every day that he’s not on the planet I think is a good day for society,” Mr Maher said.

“South Australians rightly have been for many, many years horrified at what that person has done.

“I don’t think there’s a single person who will have any remorse at his death.”