The search for finality: Serial killing,the narration of sexual injury,and the promise of consolation

Introduction

The event of crime calls forth a desire for finality. That is, a search for truth and ultimately a judicial decision which may offer, in the words of Felman, ‘a force of resolution’ (1997: 738). This is not always simply a desire for resolution in the form of a trial and conviction. It is implicitly also a desire for narrative, through which the unpredictability of life may be mediated (Sparks, 1990). However, while narratives may offer consolation, this is not always so. This article is broadly concerned with the search for finality, albeit one in which consolation remains wanting. Its focus is on a series of murders that occurred in the South Australian city of Adelaide between 1979 and 1983. While more than 30 years have since passed, it is a case that remains both infamous and enduring. The bodies of each of the victims – males aged between 14 and 25 – bore varying degrees of injury and decay. One man, Bevan Spencer von Einem, was convicted for the murder of one of these victims. However, despite strong beliefs to the contrary on the part of police, von Einem and his alleged associates have to date not been convicted of any of the remaining deaths. Finality remains unrealised. Notwithstanding the emergence of a narrative of responsibility, the absence of a formal legal outcome in the form of convictions for this series of deaths ultimately offers little resolution.

The case and its reportage and ongoing reception are illustrative of a broader cultural fascination with violent crime. True and fictional accounts of sexually motivated criminals have become central components of the contemporary cultural imagination. Seltzer, for example, contends that fascination with the spectacle of violence constitutes a wound culture: ‘the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma and the wound’ (1998: 1). ¹ In the context of true crime, this may be accentuated. It follows that this case has been particularly high-profile and newsworthy. The random discovery of five young male bodies in various states of decay lends itself to this designation. There were not simply five murders, however; the bodily injuries were understood as distinctly sexual in nature. In this respect the case cuts across several criteria of newsworthiness (see Greer, 2003; Jewkes, 2004). These include that of shock factor, violent spectacle, proximity and the status of the victims as ‘children’ or ‘boys’. Such high-profile cases of homicide are also significant for the manner in which their reportage enables a mediated encounter between publics and the event of crime (Haggerty, 2009, Peelo, 2006; Wiltenburg, 2004). It brings, in the words of Wiltenburg, ‘deviant actions from the margins of experience into the mainstream’ (2004: 1378).

My engagement with this case study is, borrowing the language of Adrian Howe in relation to another iconic Australian case, not of the ‘who-done-it variety’, but instead relates to ‘the construction of regimes of truth about the evidence’ (2009: 221). In this respect, my reading of the case and its reportage is informed by the distinction between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, cognisant of the manner in which this constitutes a mediated re-presentation of the ‘facts’ of the case (Jewkes, 2004: 37). In doing so I examine processes of social construction that produce such ‘truths’. My emphasis is upon the way in which these truths are incumbent upon and reaffirm particular cultural anxieties or phobias. Scholars such as Haggerty (2009) and Wilson (2007, 2009, 2012) demonstrate the significance of broader cultural phobias as causal factors relating to victimisation in the context of serial killing. However, in this particular case, the article reveals how this logic is inverted. These phobias and anxieties instead produce a theory of causation and culpability on the part of the serial killer. Warwick writes that ‘the figure of the serial killer is being used in ways that go beyond entertainment and police work, having more to do with ways of understanding ourselves and modern society’ (2006: 553). In this particular context this observation is illuminated through an imaginative alignment between serial killing, homosexuality and paedophilia. Specifically, I demonstrate how the narrative of causation established by police invokes this alignment as an important explanatory device to make sense of these deaths. In the context of the search for finality, the spectre of sexual difference thus performs a readily digestible script of causation through a conjoining of homosexuality and paedophilia, therein disavowing responsibility and culpability to an ‘other’. ² This parallels a broader tradition in which, as Haggerty writes, ‘serial killers are routinely presented as unknowable, and their actions beyond comprehension’ (2009: 169). To the extent that finality may be promised through this narrative, it is through an indictment of sexual difference. In what proceeds, I do not attempt to engage with the truthfulness or validity of the story of these deaths so much as with the manner in which they are rendered intelligible through the aid of discursive practices.

Methodologically and conceptually, my approach is located within the perimeters of a ‘media criminology’, which Greer defines as ‘the complex and constantly shifting intersections between crime, criminalisation and control, on the one hand, and media, mediatisation and representation on the other’ (2010: 5). In accordance with this pursuit, the article takes as its primary object of analysis a true crime book written by an investigating detective, Bob O’Brien (2002). This text is the most sustained treatment the case has received, and is a unique account of the way in which police made sense of it. Furnished alongside this is an analysis of corresponding newspaper reportage, owing to the widespread coverage that attended the case. Taken together, these sources reveal the manner in which the case has figured within public consciousness, and the contours of its mediatised representation. My methodological engagement reveals the significance of narrative as an imaginative and constructed ordering device that distils and reinforces a series of discursive logics. In doing so, I attend to the way in which, as Craft writes, ‘the unpredictability of actual life is forced into an order that identifies cause and effect, innocence and blameworthiness’ (1992: 536–537). Notwithstanding this, the article reveals the contradiction that arises from this: in spite of a narrative that causation that appears to lend itself towards finality, closure and consolation, it remains unrealised. In the absence of a satisfactory legal outcome, the case remains alive in the minds of South Australians.

The following section offers a closer overview of the story that emerges in response to the deaths. I argue that the discovery of these bodies elicits an impulse to contain – through narrative – the destabilisation initiated by the corpse. The remainder of the article moves to explore the composite moves that arise as a response to this. Sections three and four consider the manner in which these deaths are conceived as revealing a link with homosexual desire, first by reference to a textual reading of the victims’ injuries, and next by reference to the location of their disappearance. Both these sites, I demonstrate, function to ‘indict’ homosexuality. Sections five and six then move to consider the co-implication of paedophilia. Section five examines the manner in which the victims are produced as children or boys, while section six considers the name police subsequently created for those deemed responsible, ‘the Family’. In its entirety, the article engages with the causative scenario that is evoked through an analysis of these decomposing bodies, and the manner in which anxieties surrounding sexual difference underpin this.

‘The butchered boys’ ³

On 17 June 1979, 16-year-old Alan Barnes disappeared from the streets of Adelaide. Around midday, he had attempted to hitchhike from a nearby central arterial in the suburb of Cheltenham; however, he failed to return home. His body was discovered one week later at the bottom of a bridge, lying by a reservoir in the Adelaide Hills, to the north east of the city. While the drop from the bridge had broken his back, a post-mortem determined that the injury would have been painless due to shock resulting from severe internal bleeding caused by the insertion of a large tapered object, such as a bottle, into his anus.

On 28 August 1979, the body of Neil Muir, aged 25, was found floating in shallow water on the Le Fevre Peninsular, north of Adelaide. His body had been mutilated and stuffed into a plastic garbage bag. His legs and head had been cut off, his intestines removed and his legs placed inside his carcass. A cord connected the head to the body, and one of his testicles was removed. Despite his receiving a severe blow to the head, a post-mortem examination determined his cause of death to be the result of a large tapered object penetrating the anus, similar to the situation of Alan Barnes.

On 27 February 1982, Mark Langley, aged 19, disappeared in the early hours in Adelaide parkland by the River Torrens. He had been in a vehicle with friends; after an argument he left to walk home. His body was discovered in the Adelaide Hills nine days later, lying close to a road partially concealed by foliage. His body was dressed, covering an incision in his abdomen that had been re-stitched. His body also bore the signs of anal injury.

About six months before this, on 27 August 1981, Peter Stogneff, aged 14, disappeared after truanting from school. He failed to meet a friend in central Adelaide. On 23 June 1982, 10 months later, his remains were discovered approximately 20 kilometres north of the Le Fevre Peninsular. A local farmer had set fire to scrub, subsequently discovering Stogneff’s remains. Stogneff’s body had been cut up, and his lower legs were missing. The burning impeded attempts to more clearly ascertain the nature of his injuries and cause of death.

On 6 June 1983, 15-year-old Richard Kelvin disappeared after failing to return home from walking his friend to a nearby bus shelter. His body was discovered seven weeks after his disappearance in scrub in the Adelaide Hills. His body was dressed in the clothing he had worn on the evening he disappeared, including a dog collar he had placed around his neck prior to leaving. The post-mortem revealed that his body had been undressed and redressed and that he bore large bruises on his back and buttocks, a substantial head injury and anal trauma. The specific cause of death was unclear due to decomposition of the body.

A local doctor, Peter Leslie Millhouse, was charged and later acquitted of the murder of Neil Muir in 1980. He had known Muir, and was seen drinking with him at a hotel a few days before his disappearance. The prosecution case against him was circumstantial and the trial judge ordered his acquittal on the available evidence. In 1983, Bevan Spencer von Einem was charged with the murder of Richard Kelvin. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 24 years. The Attorney General successfully appealed this, with the Court of Criminal Appeal imposing a non-parole period of 36 years. At the time it was the longest non-parole period ever imposed in South Australia. In 1989, he was charged with the murders of Mark Langley and Alan Barnes; however, following a committal hearing, these charges were withdrawn. No other person has been prosecuted for these murders.

These deaths have been accompanied by prolonged newspaper and true crime reportage. To return to the question of newsworthiness, the discovery of the victims’ bodies was initially marked by media curiosity and coverage. However, it was not until later that they gained the notoriety that continues to mark the case. Police had long suspected the involvement of Bevan Spencer von Einem in the deaths of Alan Barnes, Neil Muir, Mark Langley and Peter Stogneff, but the failure to successfully bring a case against him meant this remained a matter of conjecture. In 1988, in events that precipitated the failed case against von Einem the following year, a coronial inquiry was established to investigate the possibility of a relationship between each of these deaths. Until this time, police had strategically withheld a number of details relating to the victims’ injuries. In reviewing this evidence, the coroner found that the murders were likely to be connected, given their resemblance to the wounds enacted against the body of Richard Kelvin. The significance of this was twofold. It meant that this information was for the first time subject to widespread circulation; however, more substantively, it raised the spectre of serial killing. ⁴ It is thus no coincidence that these events precipitated a magnification in the newsworthiness of the case. As Haggerty writes, ‘serial killers … [are] ready-made for prime time’ (2009: 174). This underscores a ‘symbiotic relationship [that] exists between the media and serial killers’ (2009: 174). Accordingly, while the discovery of the young male victims’ bodies elicits a degree of both cultural fascination and newsworthiness, the spectre of serial killing renders this acute.

The focus of this article is not so much on the extent to which this case has been newsworthy as it is upon the narrative of causation that was established to render these deaths intelligible. Bronfen writes that ‘the corpse initially marks a moment of total destabilisation of categories like position, site and reference; that death suspends relations with the place; that the cadaver is not in its place, not here and yet it is not elsewhere’ (1992: 52). In this sense, death is destabilising. In order to be rendered meaningful, a ‘stability of categories must again be recuperated, namely in the act of representation so that we move from the experience of decomposition to composition, from the dying body/corpse to a representation and narration of the dying body/corpse’ (1992: 52). The dead body invites questions, underscoring a demand for knowledge. What has happened to these bodies? How have they died? Who could be responsible? In answering these questions, a movement takes place – first from a focus upon the wounded body, in which it is textually pored over for clues, then to a move away from the body, toward a narrative to account for the signifying injuries.

As Scott Bray observes, ‘stabilising crime at the locus of the dead body, forensic examinations and their routine representations seek to arrest crime and death’s incomprehensibility by narrating “facts” drawn from evidence’ (2002: 128). In this respect, post-mortems enable tentative sketches about the particular scenario prefacing these deaths. The move towards re-stabilisation, signalling the way that representation strives to displace death’s decomposition, is witnessed within the ‘story’ that emerged regarding these victims. While this story is the subject of my subsequent analysis, a brief overview here is beneficial in order to contextualise what follows. That the victims were young males, alongside the presence of anal injury, led police to hypothesise that the killer or killers were driven by some instinctive and perverse sexual thrill. As my analysis goes on to demonstrate, this functions to homosexualise the serial killer. This is in spite of the fact that in the context of serial killing, gay men tend to overwhelmingly figure as victims as opposed to perpetrators (Haggerty, 2009; Wilson 2007, 2009, 2012). In contrast, for police, that the bodies exhibited injuries to the anus confirmed this heteronormative assumption. A site regarded as the preserve of the homosexual, this logic foreclosed a consideration by police that these injuries might instead be understood as indicative of homosexual victimisation.

However, this is not simply a story in which homosexuality is linked to serial killing. The ages of the victims, as well as the (speculated) disparity in age between victims and offender(s), led police to the view that this ‘type’ of homosexual desire was intergenerational in nature – consisting of older, predatory homosexuals and young, innocent victims. Of further significance is the fact that the victims were repeatedly produced as heterosexual – they were, the reportage emphasises, just like other boys their age: they played football and were athletic and strong. This led to the assumption that a gang of paedophilic, homosexual predators were responsible. In 1988, this story produced a name, which remains its enduring legacy: ‘the Family’. The nature and effect of this name is a key concern of this article. The remainder of the article moves to explore this story more critically.

Textual bodies

On what basis does the story sketched above emerge? The answer lies first in the rendering of the dead body as textual. As my recounting makes plain, police developed an assumption that each of the murders were linked. With the passing of time this may appear self-evident. Indeed, the story of ‘the Family’ has circulated so repetitiously since the 1980s that it may appear unequivocal. However, it remains just that – a story. As such, it is a narrative constituted through an assemblage of decoded signs read from the textual bodies of the victims. In this section I explore how the bodies and their injuries were read as signifiers of homosexuality, thus resulting in the assumption that these deaths must have been linked.

For investigating police, the distinguishing feature of the deaths was the fact the victims were males – specifically young males. In this respect it was confounding to police that young, athletic males should be the victim of a sexualised homicide (O’Brien, 2002: xvii). Compounding the ‘exceptional’ or ‘remarkable’ nature of the victims’ status were their injuries, informing assumptions by police that the murders were connected. This assumption was compounded by the discovery of traces of prescription drugs following post-mortems performed on the bodies.

The presence of these drugs confirmed for police a connection between the deaths, while simultaneously serving as the conceptual means by which those responsible could overpower their victims. I recounted above how the victims’ heterosexuality was consistently reproduced within the reportage. While I return to this theme subsequently, its function here is to figure homosexuality as weak and passive in contrast to the strong, aggressive heterosexual victims. For example, as O’Brien hypothesises, ‘speculation had always existed over the disappearance of Mark Langley. He was tall and strong. He worked as a plumber, which built up his muscles and strength. People wondered how someone could abduct a growing young man of his size’ (2002: 151). This logic implicitly adheres to a long tradition linking homosexuality with illicit drug use (Dalton, 2002), here rendering intelligible how homosexuals could otherwise overcome strong, masculine and athletic young males.

With the anal injuries functioning to denote homosexuality, the consequence is to conflate anal penetration with anal injury. Following the discovery of the bodies of Muir and Barnes, police sought two psychological profiles. The first read the injuries as the embodiment of a carefully controlled, extreme anger, hatred or fear for the deceased. This led to speculation that the killer was a psychotic homosexual who had strong sexual fantasies (O’Brien, 2002: 60). In forming this opinion, emphasis was placed both on the mutilation and the fatal anal injuries (O’Brien, 2002: 60). The removal of the testicles was conceived as the acting out of aggressive sexual fantasies, with removal of the fingers explained by their status as phallic objects. That the psychologist understood these injuries in this manner reveals a reading of the injuries themselves as sexual in nature. The second forensic profile, upon which less emphasis was placed, had little to say about homosexuality, instead reading these injuries as the actions of a sadistic psychopath. There remains, however, a multitude of ways the murders could potentially be read; notwithstanding this, it is telling that they were seen as the embodiment of sexual desire. O’Brien notes that ‘the homicidal rampages of serial killers are thought to have a sexual component. The murders are part of an elaborate fantasy that climaxes at the time of the killing’ (2002: 82). According to this rationale, sexual desire is figured as the underlying factor precipitating violence and death. Importantly, killing is not the aim so much as the sexual pleasure derived from such acts.

In this context serial killing produces anal trauma as a metonymic referent for homosexual desire: the anal wounds function as an index for homosexual desire, linked as it is to death. In trying to imagine the subject who inflicts anal trauma, investigators – in their desire to encounter or come to terms with the deprived minds of their killers – sourced a pornographic video dedicated to ‘fisting’. Describing it as ‘disgusting’ (2002: 95), O’Brien offers: ‘[it] graphically showed men inserting their whole hands into the anuses of other men. The film showed what some people will do and just what some people are into’ (2002: 95). In the context of broader investigative efforts in responding to serial killing, such proactive efforts by police may appear unique or even encouraging. Internationally, police have a deleterious record of proactively investigating serial killing where it appears that homosexuality may figure within the causative scenario (see Wilson, 2007, 2009, 2012). However, considered in the context of the presumed heterosexuality of the victims, this is less remarkable in that the concern is not associated with gay men as victims per se, but more specifically with gay men as perpetrators. While it is acknowledged that other gay men may have also been victimised, the primary objective on the part of police is to infiltrate the ‘gay community’ in order to identify the culprit. In doing so, it presupposes that this community is akin to a subculture that envelops both victims and perpetrators.

That the murders were conceived in this manner resulted in very tangible consequences. Foremost, police focused their energies in locating their suspects and other potential victims within Adelaide’s homosexual community. One newspaper article, for example, describes how ‘a special unit set up by the major crime squad had enquired into Adelaide’s homosexual community and believed that a number of men had been sexually abused and that many were lucky to have survived’ (The Advertiser, 16 March 1988). In part, according to the logic offered here, the apparently clandestine homosexual community constitutes a cloak for the actual killers, with a special unit required to infiltrate it. However, to the extent that there may be victims located within this community who survived their sexual victimisation, they are regarded as ‘lucky’ and exceptional in contrast to those who did not. Thus, there are two possibilities for those who reside in this community: they may be either the possible killer(s), or ‘lucky’ victims. Everyone is potentially one or the other.

The metonymical linking of anal trauma with homosexual desire operates in another important way with regard to the murder of Richard Kelvin. Describing the process through which serial killers select their next victim, O’Brien asks whether ‘it is something about their smile, their clothes, their hair or the way that they carry themselves’ (2002: 87). At the time of Richard Kelvin’s disappearance, he was wearing his family dog’s collar around his neck. This is a point of great emphasis for O’Brien, used to speculate about why Kelvin aroused attention. As he says:

I was sure that the killers would have seen Richard Kelvin wearing that dog collar around his neck … If our serial killer was a homosexual sexual sadist then fantasies involving Richard and the dog collar would have been a real turn on. (2002: 87)

The dog collar thus assumes a weighty significance, metonymically denoting homosexual desire as deranged and animalistic. The ‘homosexual sexual sadist’ reads Kelvin’s behaviour not as an innocent schoolboy joke with a friend, as O’Brien repetitiously frames it, but as a catalyst for his own sexual desire: ‘he was a young, fit boy and would have been attractive to homosexuals. Normally, homosexuals would not approach him because they would sense his distaste for homosexuality’ (2002: 172). The dog collar thus acts as a trigger through which the homosexual urge becomes irrational and uncontrollable.

This prompted police to attempt to source a pornographic film depicting a young boy being led on all fours. The implication of the conception of homosexual desire by reference to sado-masochism and homicidal violence is to conceive of homosexuality itself as murderous. If anal injury metonymically signifies homosexual desire, then penetration itself here is characterised as death.

Textual spaces

Having attended to the manner in which the bodies are treated as textual, and the reading of bodily injuries as signatures of homosexuality, there is another dimension in which homosexuality is textually located – not in the materiality of the bodily injuries, but in the space of the city itself. Founded in 1836, Adelaide was intricately planned from the outset: situated north of the Fleurieu Peninsula and nestled between the Gulf St Vincent and the Mt Lofty Ranges, it is served by the River Torrens that divides the city between north and south. ⁵ Colonel William Light, the state’s first Surveyor-General, designed the central city. To this day it remains consistent with his vision. In order to preclude the polluted air of European cities, a ring of parkland was incorporated that encircles the central business district. Moat-like, it remains ensconced from its suburbs. That a city should be designed in this way underscores the intents of those designers for its population. Despite this, such spaces can entail illegitimate endeavours or usages.

As recounted previously, Mark Langley disappeared after arguing with friends in a car parked by the River Torrens. According to the reportage on his disappearance, this is no ‘ordinary’ space. Under the cover of darkness, it entails an illegitimate usage, continually linked with homosexual desire by its characterisation as a gay beat or ‘haunt’. ⁶ The reportage consistently identifies this status as a sense-making device in explaining Langley’s disappearance. For example, one article states that Langley ‘vanished after alighting from a car near a homosexual haunt by the River Torrens on February 28, 1982’ (Sunday Mail, 19 March 1989). Another states how the ‘gay pick up area [was] linked to deaths’ (The Advertiser, 28 August 1989). This is not a benign characterisation. In the words of the article, this site is linked rather than coincidental to his disappearance.

That space entails both legitimate and illegitimate usages is borne out by the police investigation that followed. The fact that Langley disappeared at a beat prompted the investigators to spend time at the site, trying to gain a sense of its workings and the sorts of people who attended. O’Brien describes how his understanding of these locations transformed as the day’s hours changed:

Picnickers sit on the soft grass and use the playground and barbecue facilities during the day. At night, the area is used for other reasons. Homosexuals who want to met [sic] other men go there, including married men who seek pleasure and excitement different from that provided by their wives – and, just perhaps, people visiting the beats were serial killers. (2002: 89)

This underscores the lengths to which police went to in order to understand these offences – the sourcing of pornography, observing how people navigate public spaces – each exemplifying the conception of these killers as different or foreign objects requiring interpretation. In this respect, this presence of police at the space of a beat appears as both enlightening and foreign. This is in spite of the long tradition intertwining police and beat spaces – specifically, the manner in which beat spaces have long been an object of concern and observation by police (Dalton, 2006, 2007, 2012). In this particular instance, a series of contradictory usages can be witnessed. Ordinary citizens use these spaces in line with the purposes of the city’s designers. At nightfall, parklands facilitate sex between men, along with the potential hovering of serial killers. This functions to efface the gay man who uses the beat for sexual pleasure and the serial killer. This is rendered starker where O’Brien invokes the ‘stalking phase’ through which serial killers select their victims in order to describe gay men at beats: ‘all the theories and practices recorded about the stalking phase of serial killers rang true. These actions reminded me of someone moving out at night going for a hunt – looking for prey’ (2002: 241). This conception of the motivation of the serial killer echoes Katz’s (1988) experiential account of crime’s seductive appeal, as well as Lyng’s concept of edgework as ‘a clearly observable threat to one’s physical or mental wellbeing or one’s sense of an ordered existence’ (1990: 857). However, while these accounts may be useful in understanding the experiential dynamics of crime, when applied in the context of serial killing they risk reaffirming the longstanding tradition in which such offending has been overwhelmingly understood by reference to individual characteristics, at the expense of broader structural factors such as late modern capitalism itself (see Wilson, 2012; Haggerty, 2009; King, 2006). To return to this particular case, the conceptualisation of the killer that underpinned investigative inquiries on the part of police appears to obscure the potential for a more complex understanding of the phenomenon of serial killing, in particular one which moves beyond individualised sexual psychopathology in order to also encompass the possible role of modernity and its features (see Haggerty, 2009).

The reading of beat spaces offered by O’Brien functions in a contradictory manner. Following Myslik, the public recognition of gay spaces invites violence against those who inhabit such spaces: ‘as the reputation spreads in the media that an area is a gay neighbourhood or queer space, the violence increases. Queer spaces become hunting grounds’ (1996: 162). However, any possibility for gay men to be the subject of violence within these spaces is denied within the reportage’s imagination of beats. Instead it endows the beat – the gay man’s haunt – with danger and death occasioned by homosexuality.

While I have accounted for the manner in which Adelaide’s parkland is conceived to implicate homosexuality, of further significance is the position of bodies within this space. Dalton writes that ‘the state of being “there” (in or near a “beat”) transform[s] a place containing male bodies into an imagined crime scene’ (2007: 379). That is, the presence of male bodies at beats is sufficient for police to mark these bodies as homosexual, and their status as criminal. However, in the case of Mark Langley’s disappearance, Dalton’s observation is not borne out. Langley’s presence here never implicates him in the usage of the beat. To the contrary, his presence is repeatedly produced as a circumstantial accident: Langley’s heterosexuality is incontestable – the possibility that he may have left his friends to engage in homosexual encounters is never entertained.

A similar logic can be witnessed in attempts to hypothesise the disappearance of Richard Kelvin. The beat from where Mark Langley disappeared is identified as close to Richard Kelvin’s home. Replicating how Langley’s location there is figured, there is never any suggestion that Kelvin might have voluntarily attended it. Instead, as police learn more about Bevan Spencer von Einem, they discover both that he is known to frequent a number of beats, and that he commonly uses his vehicle to travel between them. This leads O’Brien to speculate that Kelvin’s disappearance occurred during one such trip by von Einem, and to explain the disappearance of the other victims who were in transit or attempting to hitchhike. His homosexuality, his use of beats and the fact that he had once been interviewed in relation to the death of Alan Barnes, considered together, make him a prime suspect in the murder of Langley.

Writing of a beat in Sydney’s Bondi, another location which has been associated with murder (albeit of homosexual men, as opposed to by homosexual men), Davis states that ‘by day it’s crowded with suntanned locals, smartly dressed tourists and visiting Hollywood stars’, but by nightfall it is the site of homosexual sex and murder (2007: 4). Returning again to the idea of the design of the city as manifesting particular ideas and ideals of intended and permissible social usages, non-normative appropriations render these as ‘parafunctional spaces’ – namely, those ‘spaces that surround us and yet, whose meaning eludes easy classification’ (Papastergiadis and Rogers, 1996: 79). This underscores the significance of the city’s underside, observable ‘in all those corners which lurk at the edge of activity, or in the passages where activity occurs but the relationship between use and place remains unnamed’ (Papastergiadis and Rogers, 1996: 76). They are spaces that depart from their intended function or, as Hayward puts it, ‘represent the exact opposite of discipline’ (2012: 441). As Davis writes in the context of what may be described as a parafunctional space of the Australian city of Sydney, conventional or ordered usages of space ‘imply that when the sun sets, the picnicking families, fitness enthusiasts and day-trippers disappear without a trace’. Owing to the parafunctionality of city spaces, in the case of the murder of Langley, he too disappears without a trace. However, far from a disappearance to the safe confines of his home, his disappearance occurs by virtue of his misplaced presence after nightfall. Despite its currency as privilege, heterosexuality does not belong at a beat at night. The dangers denoted by homosexuality render this so.

Marks of paedophilia

I have thus far demonstrated the manner in which the textual reading of the victims’ bodies, alongside the figuring of space, function as signifiers of homosexuality. Following Fuss, this illustrates the manner in which sensational cases constitute ‘fertile ground … for activating old phobias and breeding new justifications for the recriminalisation and repathologisation of gay identity’ (1993: 197). However, there remains another important manner in which old phobias are activated: namely, through the co-implication of paedophilia.

The height and build of the victims led to the assumption that more than one person was involved in their abductions. This illustrates two ideas underpinning the victims’ deaths, each of which I consider in more detail. First, their strength, build and presupposed heterosexuality necessitated that a group of people were required to abduct and kill them, and second, the victims themselves were consistently reproduced as boys. It is through this conjunction – the reading of the victims’ age, alongside the imagination of a group of killers – that paedophilia is evoked within the story. The effect is to reinforce the abjection associated with the killers, particularly in light of the unique revulsion commonly felt toward paedophiles (see Cross, 2005; McDonald, 2012, 2014).

The tendency to produce the victims as either boys or teenagers throughout the reportage is widespread. For example, reflecting on the case in his memoir of his time as a crime reporter, Prior describes Adelaide as ‘the graveyard of murdered children and teenagers’ (1993: 282; emphasis added). Similarly, he states that ‘four teenage boys were kidnapped, held captive in appalling conditions, and suffered terrible sexual injuries’ (1993: 282; emphasis added). Curiously, Neil Muir’s death is erased from this memory. While my claim is not that these victims were not, nor should be, conceived as ‘young’, of significance is the way their age was characterised to produce the encounter with their aggressors as intergenerational.

Kenton Penley Miller, who was active in a campaign resisting the emphasis that police and the media placed on homosexuality and paedophilia, observes that ‘the press stories around the killings had magically adjusted the ages of the victims so they were all referred to as “boys”, thus reinforcing the erasure of any distinction between homosexuality and paedophilia’ (2000: 102). This appears curious, given that the victims’ ages range as high as 25. It functions to implicate paedophilia within the narrative: that an older male might exhibit a sexual desire for another male (between the ages of 14 and 25) is held to be paedophilic. To draw upon common language concerning paedophiles, if their sexual desire constitutes the death of childhood, here it reveals itself in its most literal sense.

The second related claim that implicates paedophilia relates to the idea that a group of predatory killers were responsible, with police assuming that von Einem was the dominant actor. As O’Brien states, ‘I firmly believe von Einem was the linchpin and he had a circle of people around him that he used to achieve his ends’ (The Advertiser, 8 February 2002). Similarly, another newspaper report describes von Einem as the ‘ringleader of the notorious group of paedophiles and murderers’ (Daily Telegraph, 22 May 2007). This group is not characterised as a temporal or fluid association of individuals, but as a ‘gang’ or ‘ring’ (The Advertiser, 4 October 1988; Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2007; emphasis added) – tropes commonly utilised regarding paedophilia. To return again to my claim that the victims were represented variously as boys, children, or indeed even as ‘Adelaide’s sons’ (Sunday Mail, 18 December 1988), this characterisation elevates the gravity of the crimes. In this manner they constitute, following Nils Christie (1986), ideal victims. Christie identifies particular underpinning characteristics for victim status to be unequivocal and ‘legitimate’. While I do not seek to rehearse the attributes that ensure ideal victim status, that these victims are consistently produced as children – alongside the production of the offenders as murderous and insatiable – functions to render their victimisation ‘ideal’ and thus privileged.

Peelo identifies the way in which press coverage of homicide victims more broadly locates readers as mediated witnesses, through which victims are objectified: reporting of such cases not only reminds ‘us of unhappy events, but the history of reporting itself turns these cases into social property, leaving them shorn of the personal meaning arising from direct experience’ (2006: 163). This is particularly evidenced through the representation of these victims as ‘Adelaide’s sons’. However, while the victims are collectively produced in this manner, there remains a degree of distinction in how they are memorialised in comparison to each other. Sympathy or compassion for victims entails a moral statement about the wrongness of that which occurred (Mason, 2007). While each of the victims is undoubtedly endowed with sympathy, this is the subject of degree. Hence while their ‘childhood’ may ensure their status as ‘ideal victims’, this is not absolute; instead, it is subject to a subtle though discernable differentiation in the way in which the victims are treated. If there is a most unqualified ideal victim to be observed, it is Richard Kelvin. The son of the prime-time news presenter Rob Kelvin, Richard was described by O’Brien as ‘a normal fifteen-year-old Australian boy’, as ‘good looking [with] blonde hair’; ‘he liked sport, he put up with school and had just found a girlfriend’ (2002: 16).

Reflecting the pattern in which Kelvin’s life is publicly memorialised is the response to persistent rumour and innuendo concerning his sexual orientation. Writers such as O’Brien and Prior steadfastly reject such theories in order to retrieve his heterosexuality. On the other hand, Neil Muir is not subject to such a rigorous defence. At the time of his death Muir was addicted to heroin and participating in a methadone programme (O’Brien, 2002: 9). Alan Barnes had also used marijuana and other drugs, albeit more experimentally (O’Brien, 2002: 9). Mason argues that distinctions between those claiming victim status arise as a consequence of differences in emotional thinking. As she writes, ‘emotion – whether it is fear, compassion, disgust or anger – is integral to, and cannot be excluded from, moral and legal judgment’ (2007: 251). For a crime to be wholeheartedly repudiated, it requires its victim or victim groups to meet the image of the ‘ideal victim’. While her argument is developed by reference to hate crime, its basic tenor applies here. Specifically, she observes that ‘we need to feel compassion for victims in order to support their moral claims for respect and an end to prejudice’ (2007: 265). My argument is not that the case of ‘the Family’ reveals an absence of respect or compassion for its victims. To the contrary, that these victims consistently figure as children precludes such a possibility. My claim is thus more subtle: an implicit ‘hierarchy of compassion’ for, and disgust about, the deaths of each of the victims is observable. Richard Kelvin is held as the victim who most resembles ‘us’; he is, in many respects, ‘our’ golden-haired son, or at the very least, ‘the boy next door’. Alternatively, Muir, while certainly undeserving of his fate, is never revered to the same extent as Kelvin.

Mason, drawing upon the work of Miller, writes that ‘feelings of disgust are a means of separating “our group” from “their group”, “purity” from “pollution”’ (2007: 265). The consequence is that ‘victims who evoke such feelings must be assiduously avoided lest they pollute the moral capacity of other victim groups to engender compassion (and the moral recognition of injustice that flows from this)’ (2007: 265). While none of the five victims ultimately transgress the collective ‘we’ or ‘our’, there remains a subtle distinction of degree. However, considered in tandem, these victims remain ‘our’ victims, they are ‘our’ sons, and their purity has been stolen from them. The homosexual, paedophilic killer stands condemned.

Paedophilia as ‘the Family’

In the early parts of this article I referred to the fact that those held responsible for these deaths became known as ‘the Family’. Here, I elaborate on the consequence of this naming. While the deaths ascribed to ‘the Family’ occurred between late 1979 and 1983, the term was not publicly deployed until 1988, in the lead-up to a coronial inquest into the deaths. Immediately following its invocation, it gained an enduring infamy. From the outset, despite its novelty, it was presented as having been in circulation since the murders occurred. Shortly after its first deployment, the Sunday Mail editorialised that ‘in the public interest, we have carefully presented stories establishing new links between the horror chain of murders and the notorious “Family”’ (18 December 1988; emphasis added). In circulation for only three months at this point, it is already figured as notorious. Reinforcing its apparent notoriety, and the enthusiasm with which it was deployed, are the bulk of articles in which it is used as an anchor to describe the cast of characters it was said to denote. ⁷

Significant implications arise from naming this group ‘the Family’. It is a name derived not from police surveillance of participants, information provided by a witness or associate, but by police themselves. That is to say, the name was invented by police and ascribed to an assumed collective of individuals. The labelling of a group of predatory killers as ‘the Family’ elicits an immediate juxtaposition with the idealised nuclear family. This contrast renders ‘the Family’ as a mimic, parody or masquerade. As stated in one article, ‘they live together, play together and plot together like one big happy family’ (Sunday Mail, 2 April 1989). Families are supposed to be nurturing and protective. However, ‘the Family’ is a site of fatal injury. This contrast was encapsulated in a companion to the above article, published on the same day: ‘The Family. In Adelaide, these are two words that mean anything but home and hearth and decent values’ (Sunday Mail, 2 April 1989). In this sense, the name ‘the Family’ invites incomprehension. As O’Brien asks, ‘what kind of “family” would act like this?’ (2002: xviii). These unanswered (and unanswerable) questions lend ‘the Family’ a dangerous enigma, eluding intelligibility.

In naming the group ‘the Family’, the traditional or conventional structure of families is invoked. One of the most notable implications of this is the conjoining of adults and children. In this sense, ‘the Family’, comprising adult, homosexual paedophiles and their ‘children’, their victims, crystallises the conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia. The acquisition of children is not through reproduction, but theft. These children are thus stolen from their authentic families, their own childhood stolen by their predators. To the extent that there is a bloodline within ‘the Family’, it is blood in its most literal sense.

The notion of a sinister or deviant bloodline parallels the broader cultural anxiety regarding the blood of the gay man. Here, the murderousness of these killers echoes the discursive production of homosexuality in the context of HIV/AIDS – as the site of terminal infection (Bersani, 1987; Young, 1996). Further, in that homosexuality is conflated with HIV/AIDS by reference to the image of blood, a lethal potential lies not just within ‘the Family’, but also in homosexuality more broadly. Through this, the lingering discourses of HIV/AIDS are brought to bear upon the body of the child. If ‘the Family’ comprises predatory homosexual adults and illegitimately obtained (heterosexual) children, this ‘arrangement’ of family reaffirms the trauma and violence embodied by reference to ‘the Family’.

Whereas ‘the Family’ was characterised as a sadistic and extreme collective of persons, it was simultaneously located within the margins of the Adelaide community. More specifically, its members were held to be powerful and influential within Adelaide circles, both in terms of their professions and the protection they were afforded. Its members reach ‘into the high echelons of Adelaide society’ (Sunday Mail, 4 December 1988); it is ‘believed to include about nine highly respected and eminent SA people’ (The Advertiser, 4 October 1988); ‘just who is involved will shock the public and it is likely the standing of many respected institutions will be considerably damaged’ (The Advertiser, 23 July 2006). Casting its members in this manner, the group’s dangerousness is accentuated. By projecting the trope of power onto ‘the Family’, there is an imaginative explosion in the severity of the crimes they are capable of. They are powerful, visible and yet simultaneously also invisible. Their profile would shock, and yet their powerful status enables their subterfuge.

In concluding this section, I want to dwell for a moment longer upon this notion of visibility and invisibility, of the surface as both legitimate and deceptive. ‘The Family’ is rendered abject and dangerous by virtue of its clandestine character, as well as the fact that its members are said to be simultaneously present, known and knowable. This is in spite of the fact that this knowledgeability is itself misplaced. Identification of these killers, the logic goes, will shock Adelaideans. They are both known and yet unknowable. A family is prized as the primary institution; however, ‘the Family’ signals the possibility that family may not be what it seems. It may constitute a subversive, dangerous possibility.

In this respect, ‘the Family’ mirrors or evokes the uncanny. For Freud, ‘the uncanny is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’ (cited in Weber, 1982: 209). That is to say, the uncanny is simultaneously familiar yet foreign. Heimlich and unheimlich are not simply opposites; rather, heimlich itself is the repository of ambivalent meanings which signify the domestic and the familiar, and at the same time the concealed and hidden (Weber, 1982: 209). Similarly, ‘the Family’ is the enmeshing of both the familiar and the repository of the other, ‘in some way or other a sub-species of the canny, of heimlich’ (Freud cited in Weber, 1982: 209). If the uncanny is a doubling, a duplicity (Punter, 2006: 527), ‘the Family’ reveals this, originating both in the familiar as well as the deceptive. It is a masquerade of the familiar. Punter writes that the uncanny involves ‘foreign bodies and border guards; it has to do with what appears constantly to invade our self-definition, with the “other” that always already appear to be within our own “precinct”, despite out apparent efforts to exile it’ (2006: 528). Such is the power of this group named ‘the Family’ that it constitutes both the familiar and the foreign. It is the other internalised, and the internal rendered other. The impermeable boundary is rendered obsolete.

Conclusion

In this article I have explored the move towards representation elicited by the decomposing corpse. As Bronfen and Webster Goodwin write, ‘in death, there is only representation: it allows for no knowledge beyond this’ (1993: 4). Representation may suture the destabilisation of death, but death itself remains unknowable beyond representation. Further, knowledge itself is not simply a consolation in narrating the circumstances of death: it is intricately bound up with the search for finality, and the impulse for justice. In the case of ‘the Family’, a narrative of causation flows from the textual reading of the victims’ bodies. However, whereas narratives conventionally offer a degree of consolation through resolution, this one does not. Police were successful in convicting Bevan Spencer von Einem for the death of Richard Kelvin, but in spite of their strong belief to the contrary, he has never been brought to justice for the deaths of the four other victims. Similarly, again in spite of their strong beliefs about the involvement of ‘the Family’, its members have never been charged or convicted. Their identities, while known by police, remain elusive. They remain elusive.

Fuss writes of the cinematic genre that ‘success in solving the case is wholly dependent upon the novice’s ability to identify fully with the killer, to learn … to desire what the other desires, to inhabit the place of the other’s identifications’ (1993: 191–192). The same is true here. The investigating detectives attempt to grapple with and ‘know’ the other. They hypothesise, with the aid of forensic pathology reports; they profile, through the use of police psychologists; they witness, through the visitation of gay beats; and they look, through the use of surveillance. But ultimately, they fail. In the face of five deaths: one murder conviction. And in the face of this failure, the criminal spectre persists as an omnipresent index of the law’s failure to indict.

As with the uncanny, the spectre is both visible and invisible, present and absent, familiar yet foreign (Hutchings, 2001: 9). While Bevan Spencer von Einem resides in Adelaide’s Yatala Prison, ensconced within its maximum-security division, he simultaneously exceeds these walls, figuring regularly within Adelaide’s imagination of crime, anathema to the logic of finality and consolation. Despite his absence (located within the walls of the prison), he remains imaginatively present. Press reports about him and ‘the Family’ continue, including his lawlessness within the prison. ⁸ Of the attempt to catch the spectre, to arrest its evanescence, Hutchings writes that none of these things ‘really succeeds, but the effects of these attempts are felt nonetheless’ (2001: 21).

In the face of five deaths, the attempt to arrest the spectre that hovers over a city’s imagination fails. A picture of evil, he is also at once the picture of ordinariness – or, following Arendt (1963), banality. His ‘mild, myopic appearance lends an immediate lie to the shocking crime for which he has been convicted and the terrible, unresolved allegations he resists’ (Courier Mail, 17 March 1990). Even the home where he resided fulfils this uncanny figuring: it is ‘a place that could best be described as bland’ (O’Brien, 2002: 115; emphasis added). Indeed, ‘the most outstanding feature of the house was its ordinariness’ (O’Brien, 2002: 115; emphasis added). In spite of, or owing to, his banal appearance, his dangerousness is marked, however invisibly.

In a parallel manner, the very ordinariness of Adelaide itself produces such exceptionality. In spite of its surface and design, the city produces criminality par excellence: gruesome serial killing. Despite its origins as a city ‘without a convict past that had been planned by a military engineer to be forever surrounded by gardens’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 1999), it is, in spite of itself and its history, criminogenic. The absence of a convict past is not enough to ensure the absence of criminals in its midst. Its careful design – marked by its ring of parkland – becomes the parafunctional space at which gay men gather to have sex, and murderers gather to hunt their prey. It is ‘a city of paradoxes. Von Einem may not have looked like a cold-blooded killer, but neither did Adelaideans think a gang of violent homosexuals that became known as the Family had been operating in their midst for so long’ (The Advertiser, 9 February 2002). Both ordinary and exceptional, innocent and depraved, familiar and yet foreign, Bevan Spencer von Einem, ‘the Family’, even Adelaide itself, constitute uncanny abjection.