Adelaide. It’s orderly, clean and quiet.
Maybe too quiet.
Because somewhere behind the odd mix of plummy accents and mullet haircuts, some seriously nasty stuff happens.
Statistics show Adelaide has a fairly low homicide rate. Statistically it’s not the murder capital of anywhere.
Statistics be damned. Weird stuff happens in SA (and I recently heard an interesting theory about why the southern city can be more Wolf Creek than Wolf Blass).
The most recent spate of violence – the Kapunda triple murder and the killing of a market garden worker - is almost tame by comparison to historical events.
In the 70s two men in a strangely unbalanced relationship abducted, raped and killed seven young women. These became known as the Truro murders.
In the 90s we had the “Bodies in the Barrels” murders. 12 dead, most of them accidentally preserved in barrels hidden in a bank. Nasty, with a bit of torture and cannibalism thrown in for extra gruesomeness.
SA also has the Family murders, the George Duncan death, the enduring mystery of the missing Beaumont children.
And there are other disappearances, mass killings, bodies in freezers, and bizarre sex crimes.
Some Adelaideans get pretty upset about the murder capital moniker, while others take a grisly delight in the notoriety.
Meanwhile, one top mind says it is because South Australia was a free settler state – a status of which many are irritatingly proud – that we have such a gruesome history.
This theory, put to me by someone who ought to know (but didn’t want to be named), is that there is a grim hangover of those early, feudal days. When convicts elsewhere were forging a new life, but in SA the free settlers were laying claim to vast tracts of land, and looking around for people to serve them.
South Australia is still divided into the landed gentry and their underlings. It’s a classist society, one in which where you went to school is used as a measure of your worth until the day you die. Where there are Princes and Saints, and then the others.
But it’s also a small enough society that the Old Adelaide Families inevitably rub up against the poorer classes, those from whom they buy their drugs or their sex. Or who they pay for labour.
This deep resentment between the haves and the have-nots can turn deadly. A sense of entitlement on the one hand and a sense of being disenfranchised on the other.
Bevan Spencer von Einem was convicted of one of five murders known as the Family murders. The Family murders have spawned one of South Australia’s most enduring myths.
The story goes that some of the state’s most high-profile, high-society individuals were involved in the kidnapping, torturing and murder of young boys.
There are rumours that some sort of paedophile circle still exists, and there are more rumours about snuff films, porn, and famous faces at dodgy parkland gay beats.
It’s the idea of the rich and powerful slumming it, of their depravity and the way they inflict it on the less powerful that make it an enduring conspiracy theory.
This expert was telling me that he had enough faith in his theory to leave town, and take his children with him.
Anyway, just a theory. Got a better one?
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