Debi Marshall - Banquet: The Untold Story of Adelaides Family Murders

In this definitive expos Walkley awardwinning journalist Debi Marshall turns her investigative blowtorch to the shocking Adelaide Family murders and to secrets long hidden in the City of Corpses. This chilling account begins with the liberalisation of South Australia under the premiership of Don Dunstan and demands answers to decades-old questions. Who were the Family killers? Why are suppression orders still protecting suspects four decades later? Why do some of these serial killings remain unsolved? Only one suspect, Bevan Spencer Von Einem, has been charged and convicted.

With her combination of investigative skills and sensitivity, Marshall treads a harrowing path to find the truth, including confronting Von Einem in prison, pursuing sexual predators in Australia and overseas, taking a deep dive into the murky world of paedophiles, challenging police and judiciary, and talking to victims and their families. The outcome is shocking and tragic.

Following the broadcast of the Foxtel television and podcast series Debi Marshall Investigates Frozen Lies , numerous people came forward to courageously share new information with Marshall. Their stories are here. Banquet takes aim at the public service, wealthy professionals and the judiciary and, for the first time, reveals hitherto unpublished details of the Family. And it demands a Royal Commission to break the silence that keeps the truth hidden.

E VENING SHADOWS SHROUD HIS face in silhouette. I turn to greet him as he clumsily manoeuvres his towering frame into the back seat of the hire car.

Hello, Lewis. Thanks for meeting me. I appreciate it. He nods, silent, and I continue talking in case he changes his mind and gets out of the car. Your name has been suppressed for decades. Why, after all this time, did you agree to have that suppression lifted?

A sound escapes him, a guttural moan. This is just never going to go away, is it? It will always haunt me. So... its time, okay? Its time.

Yes, Lewis, I agree. Its well past time. He doesnt reply. Lewis, the poet Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Well, he says, emitting a melodramatic sigh. I guess this is my banquet.

The randomness of murder makes us all vulnerable: instinctively, we know it could happen to us. Throughout decades of crime journalism, one of the most poignant observations I have made about victims families is their understanding that closure is a nebulous concept. As a friend of mine, the late Professor Donald Brook, whose three-year-old son Simon was abducted, mutilated and murdered in Sydney in 1967, articulated to me: Grief never ends; it just comes upon one less suddenly as the years go by. Once the murders are no longer on the front page, victims families often feel a sense of abandonment and loss. For many too many a murdered loved ones file has lay buried among the coldest cold cases for far too long and they dont know where to turn. In telling their stories, I dont resurrect their pain for pointless entertainments sake. Instead I acknowledge their loss and share their slender hopes that a fresh investigation may bring forward new information that could prove to be a missing link. I am a caretaker of their stories, and am always mindful that it is a privilege to gain their trust.

My partner, Ron Jarvis, was murdered in 1992. A decade later, his killer, Stephen Standage, murdered another man. During my pursuit of Standage, who was the last person to see Ron alive, he attempted to terrorise me into silence. Phone jangling in the middle of the night and no one on the end of the line. Threats to back off, or wear cement boots. Rons body was found in isolated Tasmanian bushland seven long months after he went missing. I understand the pain of waiting day in, day out, for someone you love to come home, the pain of not knowing what has happened and the agony of hearing the worst. I understand the relentless need for justice and the bitter-sweet victory of a successful prosecution. But I also understand this: to lose a partner is painful, but to lose a child must be incomprehensibly so.

Over my thirty-five years as a journalist, I have written countless crime feature stories, worked as a true-crime television producer and researcher, and published eight books, five of them about unsolved murders and serial killers. In 2019, a five-episode series, Debi Marshall Investigates Frozen Lies , for which I was investigative producer and host, aired on Foxtel. The series, which starts with the murder of criminal lawyer Derrance Stevenson in 1979 and continues into the cases of the Family murders, is a complex labyrinth of questions and possibilities. What was going on in the years leading up to the series of abductions and murders that became known as the Family? Was there a connection between Stevenson and the Family? Was there, as was so often suggested, a cover-up at the highest levels of government and the judiciary? The more questions we asked, the murkier the story became.

During production, our team, led by director Chris Thorburn, flew in and out of Adelaide for a year for research and filming. Adelaide. This lovely city built on the banks of the Torrens River, and its dark secrets, had fascinated me for decades since the two years I had spent there as a university student in the late 1970s. How dark those secrets were, I would come to understand only too well. I had written the book Killing for Pleasure about the bodies in the barrel case, on which much of the movie Snowtown was based; had spent months submerged in the subterranean fringe that lies beyond the citys bright lights, investigating the dangerous, disturbing and sad world inhabited by an underclass whose lives revolved around dole cheques and sickness benefits, questioning why the Snowtown killers turned on their own, murdering eleven people over a decade in a series of macabre and sadistic rituals that shocked and sickened even the most hardened police officers. I knew that side of Adelaide.

Now, I was turning my attention to her other face, the world of violent spectacles, of power and money and influence, of unsolved murders so bizarre, so ritualistic, so horrific that by the time I had finished writing, I had to step back from the abyss of possible post-traumatic stress. This Adelaide was foreign to me. A city fringed by inky-black parklands, and where a gothic angel guards its main cemetery. A city of rumours and innuendo; a city of shadows. A city of suppression orders; a city of secrets. A city of churches; a city of corpses.

A podcast of the same name followed the television series and, soon after, I started writing this book. I had researched the story for years but with people coming forward on the back of revelations aired in the series and podcast, I now had more contemporaneous material based on their memories. I was under no illusions that this would be a tough story to write, but just how tough, I could never have imagined.

In a telephone conversation with me in 2016, Trevor Kipling, the former head of the Family murder investigation, described by some victims families as a compassionate saint and their lifeline, declined to be interviewed. He had his reasons, he said, known only to himself, and was polite but firm. No. His decision, I sensed, was not just born from him enjoying life in retirement but of not wanting to revisit the rituals of horror in these cases that, for all his efforts and dogged pursuits, remain largely unresolved. He wished me luck and ended the call with this enigmatic comment: The story you need to tell is the story you can never tell. For months, I wrestled with what this meant.