The same afternoon we returned to the Forensic Science Centre. One of the chemists, Domenic Vozzo, of the Toxicology Section, was working on a hunch. In October 1982, a young boy had reported to the Port Adelaide police that he had been picked up by a person in a car and taken to a house somewhere in the Port Adelaide area. At the house, he thought that he had been drugged, because he passed out there. Port Adelaide detectives interviewed the boy and arranged for a doctor to take blood from him so it could be analysed. Initial tests proved negative. Domenic used his initiative and decided to test for other drugs. Methaqualone and dyphenhydramine were found in the boy’s blood. Methaqualone and dyphenhydramine were the active ingredients of the drug known as Mandrax, which was a common drug in the 1970s.
Mandrax was used as a substitute for barbiturates, but the drug also was abused. Because of the effects of the methaqualone component of the drug, it was regulated in January 1978 by the Narcotic and Psychotropic Drugs Act. Placing the drug under the Act increased control over it: chemist shops had to record the level of their stocks every three months, and the Central Board of Health had to approve the prescribing of Mandrax to a patient if it continued longer than two months. This regulation was included to try and reduce addiction to the drug. By 1983 stocks of Mandrax in Australia were reducing and the drug was prescribed less and less.
The chemists working on Richard Kelvin remembered the excellent investigatory work by Domenic Vozzo nine months before. They tested for Mandrax and found it present in samples taken from both Richard Kelvin and Mark Langley. Also, with more testing, traces of other drugs were found in the blood of Richard Kelvin.
Richard Kelvin had been given a huge mickey finn. There were four different drugs. The drugs that were used on Richard were Mandrax, Noctec, and a diazepam such as Valium, and ‘Amytal’. Amytal was the common name for Amytalobarbitone, which is a long-acting barbiturate used as a sedative and an hypnotic.
Later, we would learn that a fifth drug may have been present in Richard Kelvin’s system but the traces were too small to be sure. He may have been given a dose of Rohypnol at some time during his captivity. Rohypnol was a common benzodiazophine of the day. The drug was called ‘rollies’. It was a sedative and hypnotic used for the treatment of insomnia. The drug had a popular name because people abused it. Users enjoyed its impact on their bodies. People also enjoyed its impact on other people’s bodies and it was obviously used to ‘drug’ people.
From my time in the Drug Squad, I had heard of Rohypnol tablets being used by men to spike women’s drinks. Men would pick up women at discos and offer to buy them drinks. This gave a man the opportunity to pop some rollies in the drink while he was away from an unsuspecting woman. Later, when a woman was affected by the drug, bouncers or barstaff would see the man take the women from the disco but the guy could just say he was taking home his girlfriend who’d had too much to drink. What pub worker would stop someone from taking a friend home who had ‘obviously’ drunk too much?
Once a woman was out to it, she could be abused in any way.
Now, I had seen the impact of this drug on boys and young men. Rollies were like Noctec but came as a white tablet with a cross on it rather than in a capsule. The drug was quick acting and acted more powerfully when alcohol had been drunk. An overdose of the drug would cause extreme drowsiness and respiratory depression.
All of the drugs found in the boys were ‘knock me outs’.
We stood there taking in the news from the forensic chemists. The pieces of the jigsaw were starting to come together. Our suspicions about the murders being linked were being confirmed. With at least three of them, the same people using alcohol and drugs to calm and control their prey most likely killed Alan Barnes, Mark Langley and Richard Kelvin.
Trevor’s suspicions look like being right, I thought.
Drugging and abusing people were not new. If you consider alcohol a drug, then men have often used that drug to weaken the defences of women. Men have done it for centuries but the ones Trevor and I were looking for were homosexual deviates who drugged, abused and killed their victims.
We were very secretive about the knowledge we gained from the result of the post-mortem examinations. We had released plenty of information about the sticking plaster on Mark Langley, the suspected vehicle and the possibility of a caravan being used for Richard Kelvin. But we didn’t have to release this information and decided that was the best play at this stage. We now had some evidence which we could use to check stories or to prove someone might be involved in the murders. We weren’t going to give them an opportunity to get rid of any hidden drugs.
The same afternoon we found out about the drugs, Trevor and I drove the short distance from the Angas Street police building to the Health Commission building on the north-eastern corner of Rundle Mall and Pultney Street. Things were starting to speed up. We had something new to work with and we couldn’t afford to let the trail go cold. Richard’s body had been found, the chemists had shown a scientific link between three of the murders and they did it in record time. We weren’t about to slacken up.
The ordinary looking eight-storey building we headed for housed the Bank of South Australia on the ground floor and Health Commission records upstairs. They kept copies of prescriptions for restricted drugs. We wanted to check their records about the prescribing of Mandrax.
We went to the front counter and
