There is always pressure on the Major Crime Squad when a murder occurs, especially when an old, very young, or some prominent person is murdered. There were the usual killings — a man was killed after a family argument at Waterloo Corner and a man was knifed and killed at Modbury. However, the murder of Derrence Stevenson, a homosexual lawyer, was the most unusual case.
Derrence Stevenson was murdered by his young boyfriend and stuffed in his food freezer. The Stevenson house and office on Greenhill Road was notable for its unusual design. The house was built on a triangular block on Greenhill Road, near Glen Osmond Road. It filled most of the block and not only was the house triangular but the roof rose to form a three-sided pyramid. The case is memorable because of the design of the house and the use of the freezer to hide the body.
The young boyfriend put the lawyer in the freezer and then used superglue to stick the lid down before he took his car and headed to Coober Pedy, the opal town in the far north of the State. The freezing of the body did not allow a time of death to be accurately obtained from body temperature. When a body is found relatively soon after death the pathologist places a thermometer into the anus to find the body temperature. After death, rigor mortis sets in and, also, the body cools at a steady rate. After so many hours the body temperature will be at so many degrees. By freezing the body the cooling process is interrupted and so time of death cannot be determined.
Here was another man murdered in a bizarre way. These killings seemed to be the start of something very strange in the quiet, conservative State of South Australia.
Not everyone thought Neil Muir was killed by druggies who wanted their money. The dissection of his body would just have been going too far. Lee Haddon wanted to keep his options open, so he sought help via a new science which was just starting in the 1970s.
Criminal profiling had been receiving a great deal of publicity at the time. Profiling was refined and marketed by the FBI in America but other law enforcement agencies in the 1970s were experimenting with it as well. The South Australia Police Department also tried it when Neil Muir was found. The crime was so different and so bizarre it warranted a try. So, detectives from Major Crime asked the police department’s psychologists to have a go at it after Neil Muir was found.
Most large police departments have psychologists working for them. However, they are not employed to do criminal profiling, as people may first think. Their primary role is to help police to recruit suitable people and also to help those recruits later in their careers. They help police deal with the stress from their work that can occur at different times. These problems may be from work or from stress caused by working in an hierarchical organisation, stress from marriage breakdowns or from drinking too much.
Lee Haddon received two reports from the police psychologists. Ray Dowd, university educated and the son of a police officer, furnished his report on 31 August 1979. Ray believed that Neil Muir’s murder was not a crime of passion in which the murderer lost control. If that was the case, Ray felt that extreme anger, hatred or fear would have affected the killer. Such emotions usually result in injuries to the head or body, with a number of wounds inflicted in a very short time. Neil Muir had received a blow to the head but there was no evidence of multiple blows to the head or body or multiple knife-wounds.
Ray felt that the killer might be psychotic — the murderer might have had a severe mental derangement involving the whole personality. Psychotic behaviour could be drug induced and Ray recommended investigating Neil Muir’s association with other drug users. Because Alan Barnes may have died in a similar way, he recommended that common associates be considered. As with Alan Barnes, it soon became obvious that this was not the case and speculation of Alan Barnes and Neil Muir being killed by the same person or group was starting.
Ray theorised that the killer might be a homosexual who had strong sexual fantasies. He considered the deliberate and meticulous mutilation of the body, which could have taken up to three hours, as completing some kind of plan. He also considered the insertion of an object similar to a tapered bottle into the anus. The pathologist, Ross James, was talking about the possibility that if it was a beer bottle, the metal cap had still been on it, causing some of the tearing. Ray considered this and the cutting up of the penis and the removal of the testicles to be part of the acting out of aggressive sexual fantasies. He thought that cutting off the fingers may have occurred because they were considered phallic objects. The mutilation was compared with the Boston Strangler, who also mutilated his victims.
There was a lack of agreement between the professionals as to whether or not the mutilation was done with some professional knowledge and skill. Ray Dowd worked on the advice that there was some skill involved. He said that the semi-professional nature of some of the cuts suggested that the killer could be a person with a medical or para-medical background or in a job where knowledge of the joints and cuts could be learned. The difficulty was that on 30 August 1979, the Chief Meat Inspector for the abattoirs gave a statement. He had expert knowledge about boning and skinning of animals. He believed that the skinning was not
