Another child’s abduction in 1982 brought all these thoughts back into focus just as Adelaide’s memory of these unusual crimes was beginning to fade. This time young Louise Bell was abducted while she slept in her own home in the southern suburbs. A stranger entered her bedroom through the window and walked out the front door with the small child, neither ever to be seen again. Louise’s mother was asleep in the house at the time. How could such a heinous crime occur? Who on earth would do such a thing? Was nothing, not even our own homes, sacred anymore?
The fear in people’s minds undoubtedly was that out there, somewhere in Adelaide’s suburbs, a killer or killers preying on the community’s children was still on the loose — and police had been unable to track them down.
There had been other murders, however, which had been easier to solve. One, in particular, in 1971, was a tragic crime of passion, a multiple killing spree unleashed by Clifford Bartholomew against his family at Hope Forest, south of Adelaide. In the end Bartholomew’s wife and nine children, from the baby to the teenagers, had been shot dead, and he had been dealt with by the police and convicted by the court.
In the scheme of things, this was like many multiple killings elsewhere in the world. A mad moment in which all hell breaks loose and a man, usually a husband, murders his wife and children. In policing terms the crime is easily identifiable. The person who ‘loses the plot’ is usually found nearby and the legal system does its work, for right or wrong. The family is devastated and the community’s collective heart goes out to all those concerned.
In Adelaide, the Hope Forest murders served to highlight the difference between such an explosive, one-off event, and the still unsolved, gradually unfolding series of abductions and presumed killings that haunted the state’s psyche over the next two decades. Was there a cold and calculating serial killer still prowling the city and, if so, where would his deliberations lead him next?
The answer to that question took an unfortunate twist in the summer of 1976–77 when seven young women, aged from their mid-teens to mid-twenties, were snatched from Adelaide’s city centre and northern suburbs in just a few months. The bodies weren’t found for more than a year: the first of them, that of Veronica Knight, by a mushroomer in April, 1978, in harsh, dry scrubland near a township called Truro, about 100 kilometres north of Adelaide. In the end five of the girls were found in the area, dumped haphazardly under shrubs and fallen trees, some not even buried. Although the other victims were found elsewhere, the unfolding saga soon became known as the ‘Truro murders’.
Once again the police were under increasing pressure to rid the city of a menace that had invaded its quiet streets. Glen Lawrie and Peter Foster were the two detectives from Major Crime working on the case when they received what police call ‘information from the public’, another term for one person dobbing in another. Someone out there obviously had a guilty conscience, or was seeking revenge, perhaps a reward. Maybe someone with a strong moral sense was just trying to do the right thing.
Whatever the reason, the information helped solve the case and led the detectives to uncover that Christopher Worrell, a good-looking, young bisexual who had ‘form’, and his current boyfriend, James Miller, had been picking up the young women, driving them to remote locations and killing them. It seemed a careless and crazy series of events; the official reason that was given was that Worrell killed the girls because he had been in jail before for attempting to rape a female and he did not want to go back in again.
The real reason for the murder spree, no doubt, was that he perhaps lost control the first time, then realised he enjoyed it. Miller, who at the time was totally infatuated with Worrell, acted as the driver. Although police could not prove that Miller actually killed any of the girls, he knew what Worrell was doing, he actively assisted him and so, as an accomplice, he was found guilty of murder.
There was an unusual turn in the case, however, which strangely affected the community’s sense of closure of the shocking series of events. Worrell had been killed in a car accident just days after the final young woman had been murdered in February 1977. It was this simple twist of fate that stopped the killings.
There was a second twist in the Truro serial murders that seemed even more bizarre. There was a sexual deviation at play here that for many was incomprehensible. The City of Churches was having to come to grips with what once was a nice, conservative life unravelling before its very eyes. Babies snatched from their bedrooms, young children disappearing from their favourite haunts, now killers unleashing a torrent of violence against the weaker sex.
It was all too weird, but what was about to happen over the next few years changed Adelaide’s reputation once and for all. For even as the police were solving the case of the Truro murders, another bout of serial killings was already underway. This time it was the turn of young men to be snatched from the city’s streets, and this time the investigation was to reveal what were perhaps some of the most shocking details ever uncovered about the way the mind of a serial killer works. In the process another dark chapter in Adelaide’s criminal record was opened.
This case would eventually become known as the ‘Family Murders’, implicating, rightly or wrongly, members of the elite of South Australian society. But what kind of ‘family’ would act like this? And what kind
