Ringed by leafy parks and built on a precise grid, Adelaide’s ordered design may have driven some of its citizens to mass homicide. Native Adam McCulloch reflects on urban design gone murderously wrong and how he made it out alive.
Most visitors wouldn’t notice the sinister side of Adelaide, a small coastal city on the edge of Australia’s vast outback. Roughly the size of Austin Texas, the low hills that surround it are a patchwork of vineyards and olive groves while dolphins are regularly spotted off the local beaches. But every so often, a creepy, unsolved murder (or a dozen of them in a single clip) shakes
Adelaide into a recurring nightmare that, growing up there, I finally came to accept as just one of the many hazards of urban life.
The summers were long and hot: the desert winds brought hay fever to parents and sent kids running to the beach. When the Beaumont children (ages 4, 7 and 9) made their way to Glenelg beach on January 26, 1966, they vanished without a trace, never to be seen again. My eldest brother was born on the fourth anniversary of their disappearance. In 1971 my birth was marked by Clifford Bartholomew murdering ten of his relatives at Hope Forest. The victims were mostly children, including a baby. When my younger brother was born in 1973, two more children vanished: Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirsty Gordon (age 11 and 4). They were watching an “Australian Rules” football match at Adelaide Oval, went to the bathroom and never returned.
While America watched the moon landing and the assassination of JFK, Adelaide residents eyed their neighbors suspiciously from perfect houses. The city had no obvious poverty, no homeless people…in short no scapegoats. Unlike Sydney or Melbourne, which were established as penal colonies, free settlers founded Adelaide in 1836. Founding father Colonel William Light’s much-admired design idea was to surround Adelaide with parklands, making the city an inverted version of Manhattan’s Central Park. His statue is one of the most recognizable landmarks. Standing proudly on Montefiore Hill, he points towards the city he created – and, coincidentally, to the spot where Gordon and Ratcliff were last seen. In part I blame Colonel Light for Adelaide’s culture of murder. His design was about space, grids, uniformity and privacy, but each sparsely populated suburb and leafy boundary kept us insulated from everyday contact with others. On the pristine deserted streets I felt isolated, like I could be swallowed by the silence. Perhaps that’s why, once I eventually left, I sought out cities like New York that offered the exact opposite of this urban emptiness.
My young parents saw things differently and moved our family to the safety of the suburbs. It felt even less safe there. On weekends we were imprisoned by the impossibly steep grade of our suburb, Flagstaff Hill, which had no bus service. We never developed a taste for the ocean and instead spent our time playing in an olive strewn ravine between our suburb and the next. We fantasized with ghoulish fascination that we’d stumble on graves of some murder victim, and took the bones we found in fox dens to be that of missing children.
As I grew up, the age of the victims kept pace with our family. Entering my early teens four young boys disappeared – each eventually discovered dismembered in garbage bags. “You be careful of people,” my parents warned, as we watched Adelaide’s first celebrity news anchor Rob Kelvin detail yet another disappearance. On June 5, 1983, Kelvin was the one who announced that his own 15-year old son Richard had been abducted from outside their home. He was found dead five weeks later. The only thing more horrific than the injuries he sustained while being tortured was the discovery of whom was at fault. A mild mannered accountant named Bevin Spencer Von Einem went to jail for his murder, convicted on the testimony of an unnamed witness who spilled the beans on a group called “The Family”. They were never prosecuted, but the rumor went that all were high profile doctors, lawyers and public officials – ostensibly normal people in decent professions, like my father, a surgeon.
By the time a bank vault filled with bodies was discovered to the north of Adelaide I had moved away, taking with me a loathing of pre-planned metropolises. The Snowtown Massacre, as it came to be called, was perpetrated by a group of friends who killed relatives and each other (eleven in total) for the ludicrous benefit of collecting the deceased’s unemployment checks – about $5000 a head.
Last February I found myself back in Adelaide, enduring another desert wind that sent children scurrying to the beach. My parents had moved to a leafy suburb – ironically called Beaumont, like those missing children. The city has grown modestly but it’s still a beautiful place. Dolphins play in the waves, the beaches resemble Sardinia, and Rob Kelvin remains the anchor for National Nine News. I ate gelato at Glenelg, swam in the ocean and went wine tasting in the Barossa Valley.
Eventually I found myself at the foot of Colonel Light’s statue, wondering what he’d make of his city today. In spite of his good intentions, I think he had it wrong: there needs to be some insanity in urban design, lest it manifest itself in the inhabitants of the city.
Words by Adam McCulloch. Originally published in City Magazine.
