The Family Murders
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The Family Murders was the name given to an alleged high society conspiracy involving the kidnap, torture, and murder of teenagers, particularly young men and teenaged boys, in Adelaide, Australia and surrounding areas in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s.
The five victims where:
- Alan Barnes, aged 17, murdered in 1979. His body had been hideously mutilated and dumped in the South Para reservoir northeast of Adelaide. A post-mortem examination revealed that he had died of massive blood loss from ghastly injuries inflicted upon his anus by a large blunt instrument, while he was still alive.
- Neil Muir, aged 25, murdered two months after Alan Barnes in 1979. His remains had been dissected and neatly cut into many pieces, placed in the garbage bags and thrown into the Port River at Port Adelaide.
- Peter Stogneff, aged 14, murdered in 1982. His skeletal remains had gone missing ten months earlier and were found at Middle Beach, South Australia, north of Adelaide, cut into three pieces as if by a surgical saw.
- Mark Langley, aged 18, murdered in 1982. His mutilated body was found in scrub in the Adelaide foothills. Among the mutilations was a wound that appeared to have been cut with a surgical instrument that went from his navel to the pubic region. The hair around the area had been shaved as it would have been in an operation in a hospital. Part of his small bowel was missing. The post-mortem revealed that Mark had died from a massive loss of blood from gross injuries to his anus, similar to Alan Barnes.
- Richard Kelvin, aged 15, murdered in 1983. He was abducted a short distance from his North Adelaide home and his body was found by an amateur geologist off a track near One Tree Hill in the Adelaide foothills.
Of the five murders, there has only been one convinction, that of Bevan Spencer von Einem, and for the murder of Richard Kelvin only. The four other murders have remained unsolved.
