When Trevor Kipling first said that the same people killed all the boys it made sense. The murders were all so similar but then, after we found out about von Einem, he followed up with a statement which stunned me.
‘You know, I think that he has done the lot.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ I said.
‘Yes, but von Einem has done the Beaumonts, and Ratcliffe and Gordon as well.’
‘Come on . . . bullshit. How can that be? We’re looking at boys being murdered — the others were girls.’
‘There was a young muscular man seen at Glenelg with the Beaumonts — he had blond hair. Von Einem has been white-haired since he was eighteen and he would have been twenty when the Beaumonts went missing. Also, a man was seen with some kids on the banks of the River Torrens when Ratcliffe and Gordon went missing. Why couldn’t the same person be responsible?’
I didn’t believe Trevor at first. Why would a person move from picking up girls and murdering them to picking up and killing boys? Intuitively, it didn’t make sense. However, as I reflected on this theory, I thought that it could just be possible. The youngest of the Beaumont children was a boy. Also, von Einem could have been testing his sexuality at twenty years of age; maybe there was an interest in girls but, if the theory was true, more than likely the children were just young people who he could abuse — the sex didn’t really matter. Von Einem was just interested in playing around with bodies.
We had B saying in evidence that von Einem admitted to him that he had picked up and killed the children. Either von Einem was big-noting or he was bragging about what he actually had done. Trevor’s insights into the case were truly amazing and our superdeviate had to be considered as a suspect for the Beaumont, and Ratcliffe and Gordon murders all those years ago. Just how good the theory is, I don’t know.
Any success solving these bizarre murders is unlikely to come from physical evidence linking someone to them. Trevor had police divers search the Myponga reservoir for the Beaumont children. At that time, people could drive over the dam wall and it would have been easy to drop the Beaumont children over the side, just as Alan Barnes was dropped over the bridge at the South Para Reservoir. The divers failed to find any bodies but it would be unusual to find anything in water after such a long period of time, especially against a dam wall, which would have silt building up against it. Other locations, like the Alberton house and two other places used to take boys to, have been demolished — the passing of the years has reduced any likelihood of any physical evidence remaining there. Any new evidence is more likely to come from members of the Family who, except for the businessman, have moved on or away. They will carry their guilt with them for the rest of their lives. However, one member does not seem to feel any guilt or remorse — that person is Bevan Spencer von Einem.
Obviously, as with all investigations, mistakes were made. When I spoke with Trevor about it years later he felt that we should have made more effort to target the minor players who were involved picking up boys with von Einem. More pressure could have been placed on the drag queens and transvestites who assisted von Einem with places to take the boys. We knew they helped von Einem. They did it for the drugs he supplied them with, and the sex with the boys. Did they assist more than they admitted? The dumping of the bodies indicated this was possible. Now it is probably too late to put any more pressure on them. The element of surprise has been well and truly lost.
Another mistake was made by the uniform police about the time of the disappearance of Alan Barnes. B and von Einem picked up two hitchhikers and they were driving around town getting them drunk and off their faces on rollies. While they were doing this they needed to go to the toilet so von Einem stopped his brown Falcon sedan in a side street that came off Hindley Street. B and one of the boys were taking a piss, another was being sick from the booze and the drugs, and a police car came along. The uniformed officers asked what they were doing — obvious as it was. Von Einem had made the mistake of driving the wrong direction in a one-way street and the police car had followed them. The police asked them their names but didn’t book them. Sure enough, they weren’t serious offences — von Einem could have been booked for driving the wrong way in the street and B could have been reported for urinating in a public place. But more effective police might have taken greater notice of the two boys in the back of the car and a few questions about them should have caused them to smell a rat. However, the police accepted the comments of von Einem, and then later those two boys were abused, and narrowly escaped the fate of the others.
We tried for a long time to locate a record of von Einem being stopped by the police, but von Einem and B were not recorded in any of the police logs. No record of the boys’ names was found. Even though some boys who had been abused by von Einem were found and did give statements, many were not
