After the police crime scene examiners and photographers finished, the coroner’s staff placed Alan in a body bag and zipped it up. They placed him in a plain white van. He was driven to the Forensic Science Centre in Divett Place, Adelaide, where the van’s driver signalled the security officer to raise the roller door at the rear of the building. Alan Barnes was taken from the van and placed onto one of the three mortuary slabs in the rear of the building. Pathologist Dr Colin Manock carried out the post-mortem examination of the lad. He assessed the injury as mostly likely to have been caused by an object similar to a bottle with a tapered neck being inserted into Alan’s anus so far that it caused tearing of the skin and opening of the blood vessels. The injuries caused massive bleeding. There was a catch, however. When the boy was found he was fully clothed and no blood had soaked into the fabric of his clothes. The only marks on the clothes were from the reservoir mud.
It was not unusual for young men to go missing. It is not unusual for young men to be murdered. What was unusual was the mutilation of this body. Death from ruptured tissues surrounding the anus was unusual. Alan Barnes had been undressed and abused — that too was unusual. Usually, when a person is abused, killed and dumped, it’s a woman. This time it was a young man.
Unfortunately, detectives made little progress toward solving the murder of Alan Barnes. Police received some tip offs but no solid evidence was forthcoming. As well, Major Crime detectives were busy finishing paper work after investigating the serial killings of seven young women that had become known as the Truro murders. This case had just ‘burst wide open’ when James William Miller was charged with the Truro murders just one month before Alan Barnes was found. The media largely forgot the Alan Barnes murder — there were too many front-page stories about Truro for reporters to be writing stories about Alan Barnes. Besides, there were no leaks from the police that indicated that they were close to solving this new murder. The leads being followed by detectives were not going anywhere.
When the mutilated body of Neil Frederick Muir was found on Tuesday 28 August 1979, the media did not report a connection between the two murders. Two months had passed since the murder of Alan Barnes and the disposal of Neil Muir did not indicate killings committed by the same people — not in the beginning, anyway.
This murder was even more bizarre. Neil’s body was found floating in shallow water of the Port River, a tidal estuary joining the sea at the top of Le Fevre Peninsular, which runs north and south for about twelve kilometres and is shaped like a small thumb extending from the Adelaide Plains. Ground water feeds into the estuary from the wealthy suburb of West Lakes, which was designed and built on small, undulating sandhills and low-lying land that absorbed the water flowing from the Adelaide hills onto the plains.
As with Alan Barnes, it had been intended that Neil Muir would disappear under the surface of the water, never to be seen again. He was dropped from the wharf built at the end of Veitch Road, near the top of the peninsular. The remote and disused wharf serviced Mutton Cove on the eastern side of the Port River. The dock is no longer used, except by line fishermen trying to catch bream and other small fish in the river.
Neil Muir was not just killed and thrown off the wharf. He was stuffed into a plastic garbage bag. To make him fit into the bag, his head and his legs were cut off, his intestines removed and his legs shoved inside his carcass. The head was tied to the torso with yellow plastic cord, which passed up through the severed neck and back through the mouth and looped through the top ribs. The resulting sight was bizarre. Neil’s head was attached to his body by cord rather than by his neck.
His feet stuck out of his carcass but the body was now small enough to fit in the bag, which was then wrapped with cord to hold everything together. When the whole package had been thrown into the river at Mutton Cove, the murderers had not realised that the tidal flow of the river leaves the bottom of mud and rocks exposed at low tide. The bag jagged on the partially exposed rocks and a local worker with the Department of Marine and Harbours found the gruesome container. The worker was planning to go fishing at the Cove — but that day he found more than bream.
Mutton Cove, I thought cynically. What an appropriate name to find such a carcass.
An Advertiser reporter and photographer were present when the police divers lifted the body bag up onto the wharf, so the media knew that Neil Muir had been cut up. But they didn’t know the full extent of his injuries. Pathologist Dr Ross James revealed the additional injuries when he examined Neil Muir’s remains on the same mortuary slab where Alan Barnes was placed just over two months previously.
Neil Muir received a
