‘Praise the lord,’ Boris yelled.
‘Hallelujah,’ Richard yelled out, grinning and holding his arms. Frank Marrollo stood there and laughed. Boris and Richard were sending up the group of preachers that were across the road on the opposite footpath of O’Connell Street calling out about the Lord and handing out religious pamphlets.
Richard was tall and his body was starting to develop and become muscular. Boris described the clothes he was wearing: blue jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with Channel Nine television station logos on the front and back. The shoes he wore were trendy Adidas sneakers; however, the dog collar he was wearing around his neck was different. Boris saw him playing with the collar from the Kelvin dog when they were speaking to Richard’s girlfriend on the telephone. He saw the chrome metal studs circling the leather band, which stood out against his friend’s white skin when he put it around his neck. It was so different that Richard took it off when his mate stirred him about it at the bus stop. He said it looked stupid and gay. That’s when it came off. Richard wanted to look manly, not gay.
Over the following days, Rob and Betteanne were quietly asked about their son’s sexuality, and they insisted he was not gay. The question was also put to his friends as discretely as possible. There was nothing to suggest that he was homosexual or bisexual. I never asked Rob or Betteanne about the dog collar that he wore. It wasn’t the right time to be asking parents the reason why their missing son wore particular items. I thought that it did not suit his age or appearance but young men do wear things to make them look older or tougher or both. The dog collar and the way Richard went missing were the first of many unusual aspects to the boy’s disappearance.
The uniformed officers did all that they could that Sunday evening. They drove around North Adelaide and spoke to people in the shops near the bus stop. Nothing. They contacted Adelaide detectives and put out a KLOF message to other police patrols. KLOF is an acronym meaning to ‘keep look out for’. They couldn’t do any more. The disappearance was definitely a strange one.
When a crime occurs, there is normally a crime scene. An abandoned car, a body or a burnt house remains. Police place a cordon around the scene to preserve any evidence that might remain. Crime scene examiners look for things like fingerprints on smooth surfaces, a discarded shell from the bullet of a gun, some blood or clothing left behind. The difficulty with Richard Kelvin’s disappearance was that there was no crime scene to isolate for police to scour for evidence. The last known place where Richard stood was on the footpath of O’Connell Street and then there was nothing. We knew he had not arrived home. The area between the bus stop and Richard’s home was too large an area to seal off. That left door knocking.
Police knock on the doors of people living near the scene of a crime to discover whether or not the home-owners have seen or heard anything. So police organised a door knock to occur the following day. The police use standard forms that ask the names of the people living in the house, whether or not they have heard or seen anything unusual and they leave a calling card with a police contact number.
Uniformed officers from Adelaide patrols and detectives from the Adelaide C.I.B. met outside the Kelvin home the following day. They were briefed about their duties, then sent to different homes between the Kelvin home and O’Connell Street.
The door knock over the next days confirmed my initial suspicions. Trevor Kipling, the senior officer investigating the murder of Mark Langley, had read the files on Alan Barnes, Neil Muir and Peter Stogneff, and felt the same way.
As one of the investigating detectives, I went and saw the parents the next evening. They told me about their son’s disappearance. They had rung the police about an hour after he did not come home from the bus stop. They checked with Boris to make sure he had got home OK and learned that Richard had left him at the bus stop and that everything was normal when he left him. They checked with his girlfriend to make sure he had not gone there.
By now we were increasingly worried.
The following day was a Monday and the first door knocks late Monday morning produced nothing. People were at work and that meant we had to return to those addresses later to speak to these people. That was the first sign that the investigation was going to be difficult. Quick arrests happen when information from the scene is given to police almost straight away. A car number may be taken, someone knows a name or a face or someone rings the police with information. This didn’t happen.
Our first decent bit of information came to us on Tuesday — two days after Richard had gone missing. The door knock had been widened. We had now covered alternative routes to the bus stop. The quickest way for Richard would have been straight down Ward Street and right into O’Connell Street. An alternative route was to turn right into Boulton Street about 50 metres from O’Connell Street and left into Marian Street to come out next to the delicatessen and bus stop.
Margaret Street was near the Kelvin’s and certainly was not the shortest route to O’Connell Street but Trevor wanted to widen the search to make sure that we covered all possibilities. This move gave us our first bit of information. A young officer reported that a local resident living just around the corner from the Kelvin’s had heard something unusual that Sunday evening.
‘I was asleep in bed,’ he said. ‘I was suffering from the ’flu. I went to bed late
