A large gum tree separated their car from the Adelaide University Boat Club building that stood to their right, its branches sheltering the car from the light falling from the few streetlights in the drive. The playing grounds of the university football club spread out in front of their car. The three of them: Mark, Ian and Ian’s girlfriend, Paula, were sitting in their car when an argument started between Mark and Ian. They argued over some cigarettes, but whether the argument had really happened because of that, or competition between the two young men over the single girl, is not clear. Two young males sitting with a pretty girl late at night is a potentially explosive mix.
Mark Langley did not like the way the argument was going. He got out of the car, fuming over the way things had gone. Mark walked into the blackness of the night.
The argument indicated a lack of maturity that was not evident in his manly physical appearance. Mark Langley was tall, strong and good-looking. Thick tufts of chest hair protruded from the open shirts that he wore. His black chest hair contrasted with the silver chain and the ingot engraved with the crab, his Cancer star sign, which he wore around his neck.
Ian Sampson and Paula Atkinson initially drove off, circling and driving over the bridge near the Adelaide Zoo past the University on their left and Jolly’s Boathouse on their right before turning onto the King William Street Bridge and returning to their parking spot. They were gone for about four minutes. Mark had not returned. They drove around trying to find him but he had disappeared.
Mark’s family worriedly contacted friends and relatives over the remainder of the weekend but no one had seen or heard from Mark. As their concern heightened, they rang the police on Sunday evening to report him missing.
Police filled out a missing person’s report and circulated the information; but their question was simply ‘Where do you start looking?’ The young man disappeared within a large city. There are no easy answers when investigating reports of missing people. Information is needed and that information was presented to police nine days later, on March 8.
A local Adelaide Hills dweller was poisoning blackberry bushes on the side of Sprigg Road, Summertown, which nestles on the rear slopes of Mount Lofty close to three high-powered television towers that dominate the city skyline from the southern ridge leading to the Mount Lofty summit. The hills formed a barrier to the growth of the city of Adelaide, forcing it to spread north and south along the Adelaide plains, trapped between the waters of the Gulf of St Vincent and the grey-green hills to the east. The local, moving through the grass and bushes, found Mark lying on the ground close to the road, partly concealed by the scrubby landscape. He was dressed but his skull and neck were exposed and the hot weather had started to putrefy the exposed parts of his body. Blue jeans still protected his lower body.
Mark Langley had also been redressed and placed into the clothes that he was wearing the night he disappeared. He had been wearing a blue woollen cardigan, a smart blue satin shirt to match his blue jeans, and that distinctive chain with his Cancer star sign on a silver ingot. Mark was still wearing the same clothes but his necklace and shirt were missing. At some stage his shirt had been removed and his cardigan put back on. While the forensic examination at Divett Place revealed other injuries that were similar to those inflicted on Alan Barnes and Neil Muir, there was something different this time. Mark Langley had suffered the same tearing to his anus, but there was a wound to his abdomen that had been stitched up — he had been operated on, sewn up and then reclothed.
The cut in the abdomen started about five centimetres above the penis and travelled vertically towards the navel. The incision was 16.5 centimetres long and slightly to the right of the middle of his abdomen. The body hair around the wound had been shaved and the incision had been stitched together with a three-ply polyester filament before being taped over with a Johnson & Johnson type surgical tape.
Mark Langley also had anal injuries similar to Alan Barnes and Neil Muir. Police wondered whether or not the same people were involved and if there were other boys missing that they did not know about.
In fact, there was another body waiting to be found. Peter Stogneff had been abducted twelve months after the dissection of Neil Muir but his body was not found until after Mark Langley had been killed.
Peter Stogneff also lived in one of the northern suburbs of Adelaide. His home was the normal dwelling of a middle-class family in one of the newer suburbs of Adelaide. He wagged school on Thursday, 27 August 1981, six months before Mark Langley disappeared.
Like the others, Peter’s family reported him missing that evening and media coverage failed to attract any response in finding him.
Peter was the youngest of the boys. He was fourteen. Alan Barnes was sixteen, Neil Muir twenty-five and Mark Langley nineteen when they went missing. Peter was, like the others, young, and good looking. Friends knew that he was going to wag school. He left his home first thing in the morning carrying his school bag, and his parents were none the wiser about his plans for the day. Peter returned home later that morning, possibly after going off to the Tea Tree Plaza, a local shopping centre, where kids congregate. He left his school bag in the garage and then left again, heading for the city to meet his friend Daniel Tzeganoff at the silver balls sculpture in Rundle Mall, which runs off King William Street. Peter Stogneff did not meet his mate; he, too, just disappeared.
Ten months later, on 23 June
