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 of community could continue to tolerate such an intrusion upon their lives? Strangely nothing about the murders leading up to this point seemed to intersect. Would this be the case that might answer some of the questions now being asked about the bizarre killers lurking beneath the surface of one of Australia’s nicest cities?
Chapter 1
The Butchered Boys
The young man’s body should have disappeared below the cold, grey-brown waters of the South Para Reservoir, except the winter rains had not come in sufficient quantity to fill it. The water level was still low after Adelaide’s hot summer, causing the old road and bridge to be exposed. The reservoir fits into the contours of the Adelaide Hills to the north-east of the city, the curves of the hills forcing the water into little valleys and taking the shape of a serpent’s tail stretching out to the east where it is crossed by a new bridge that helps link the small hills communities of Williamstown and Kersbrook.
The cracked and unused road snakes down the hill towards the reservoir and flattens on the top of the old bridge that crosses the South Para Creek before climbing between the gum trees on the opposite side. The new bridge sits ten metres above the old road and bridge and is much longer, as it spans the 100-metre gap between the hills. If you stop in the middle of it you might think that you would be stopping over water but the ramp running to the northern side of the old bridge is immediately below.
Alan Barnes was dropped over the side of the new bridge, discarded like an uncaring person would discard a bag of rubbish. His back broke when it hit the hard mud but he did not feel his bones break. His ability to feel pain had left him long before he was thrown over the tubular rails of the bridge. Before he was dumped he had been harmed beyond any hope of recovery — his anus was split open, allowing his blood to pour from his body. Once the tearing started, shock set in and his body gave up its fight to live. The pain, alcohol and drugs that he had been given prevented much of a struggle. He died before half an hour had passed.
Alan disappeared on Sunday 17 June 1979. He was found exactly a week later when a bush walker and his girlfriend parked their motorcycle and climbed over the fence and entered the grounds of the reservoir. They walked down the old road and saw the body of Alan Barnes. He had landed on the earth that ran alongside the old road and not into the waters of the reservoir as most likely had been intended. If Alan Barnes had landed in the water and descended to the mud on the bottom of the reservoir he would never have been found. He would have remained another missing person.
The deviates who had murdered the boy had made their first mistake.
Alan Barnes was a product of Salisbury, a suburb sitting on the hot flat plains about twenty kilometres north of central Adelaide. Salisbury grew as migrants from England and the rest of Europe moved to the open spaces where there were opportunities for jobs and houses of their own. The immigrants were promised a cheap passage to Australia and a new life.
Alan was the first of a new generation of Australians born and bred in our changing world. He was young and experimenting with life, with all the hope of a promising future ahead of him. His blond hair and good looks ensured that he always had company to enjoy life with but with them came the opportunities to experiment with drugs that had become freely available in Adelaide in the 1970s. He had stayed overnight with a friend in a house in the north-western suburb of Cheltenham. Alan and his friend woke about mid-day and ate a meal of fried eggs on toast before being driven to Grand Junction Road and left to hitchhike to Alan’s home in Salisbury. The two young men were not having much success getting a lift so his friend headed home, thinking Alan would have a better chance to get a lift by himself. Alan was last seen trying his luck getting home on Grand Junction Road.
His mother, Judy, reported him missing to the police the next day, when he had not come home. Police appeals for people who may have seen him produced few results even though he was on a main arterial road within a city of one million people. One caller to police thought that he had seen Alan getting into a car on Grand Junction Road. The car was described as a white Holden sedan with three or four people in it.
A week later, local officers greeted the detectives from the Major Crime Squad on the dirt verge on the northern side of the South Para Bridge. They moved down the slope to view Alan’s body. The detectives waited for the police photographers to arrive to record the location and body, and for crime scene examiners to scour the location for any evidence. Some stood with their hands in their pockets looking at the body from about ten metres away. They distanced themselves from the body to make sure that their footprints were not disturbing any footprints or evidence around the body. They stood with their hands in their pockets because they had been
