by Bob O'Brien
Rob was working for Channel Nine, the local television station that consistently won the ratings war against the three other local television stations. Channel Nine started broadcasting television to excited South Australians before any of the other rivals and the station has never looked back. Rob Kelvin joined Channel Nine after working as a journalist on Adelaide radio. He was well known from radio and his profile had become higher presenting the news-bulletin.
Rob and his two boys were playing at home on the weekend. It was 5–6 June 1983. Richard played football for a Lockleys football club on the Saturday and Rob had been kicking the football with his eldest son, Richard, at one of the nearby parks on Sunday. Richard’s best mate Karl ‘Boris’ Brooks was with them. Richard was a normal fifteen-year-old Australian boy. He was tall for his age, good looking and had blond hair. He liked sport, he put up with school and had just found a girlfriend.
He met his girlfriend at the Prospect Oval, a football ground where the North Adelaide football team play. They had been going together for over a month. She was similar in age and height, she was pretty and he really liked her. He liked having a girlfriend. They rang each other just about every day and went to the movies together. They even talked about getting engaged in four years time when they would be nineteen. Richard and Boris were speaking to the girl on the phone just before they walked to O’Connell Street. He said that he’d ring her back after he walked with Boris to the bus stop.
Richard and Boris walked along Ward Street, turned right onto O’Connell Street and stopped next to the yellow bus stop in front of a delicatessen. Although it was Sunday and some of the shops were closed, O’Connell Street was still active, with cars passing by and people walking to the restaurants and cafes across the road. A grey government bus arrived a few minutes after they walked to the bus stop. Frank Marrollo got off with his cousin, Frank D’Antiocchia. Marrollo spoke to Richard, who he knew as ‘Sticks’ while Boris got onto the bus. The three boys knew each other and spoke as Boris stepped onto the bus to ride home. Everything was still OK. Richard started to head home, about 400 metres away, to have dinner with his parents and younger brother.
But Richard Kelvin didn’t arrive home. Like the other boys before him, he simply disappeared. None of the neighbours saw him that afternoon. They did not see him walk to the bus stop nor did they see him walk home. No-one saw him arrive home because he never made it.
Chapter 2
The Search for Richard Kelvin
I had just moved to the Major Crime Squad when the remains of Peter Stogneff were found near Middle Beach. Detectives from the squad were already working on the Alan Barnes, Neil Muir and Mark Langley cases.
Major Crime investigates crimes that are too difficult or protracted for detectives posted in the suburbs. The squad’s main job is investigating murders, while a small group within the squad deals with armed robberies. However, any crime that is serious and causes community concern can be handled by the squad, which is made up of small teams led by a Senior Sergeant supported by two sergeants and four detectives. The two sergeants are senior investigators rather than supervisors.
I was pleased and excited to join the team led by Glen Lawrie who previously had teamed with Peter Foster and become well known as the detective who got James Miller to confess to his involvement in the Truro murders. Glen was relatively young to be a senior sergeant but he was smart and his success in solving the Truro murders would have helped him get his promotion. He was tall and fit — he liked to ride his pushbike home in the Adelaide Hills on occasions and with his fitness and long, shoulder-length hair he did not conform to the image of some older style, hard-drinking detectives in the squad.
I admit I was relatively young and ambitious. I’d wanted to be a police officer for as long as I could remember. Dad was a police officer and I wanted to do the same things that he did. I’d moved through the police ranks after graduating second from Fort Largs police academy.
Like all new graduates, I’d walked beats before being allowed to ride in patrol cars with the more experienced officers. My first brief as a police officer happened when I reported a driver for displaying an expired registration disc on his motor car. Hardly a capital crime! But over the years I learnt the trick to being a policeman. I transferred from Adelaide patrols to the traffic branch and rode motorcycles for five years. The work was a bit boring but I loved riding the bikes — I learned to ride police motorcycles because in the old days it was a stepping stone to detective work. Police motorcyclists rode alone and without radio communications in those years. You learned to be self-reliant and able to operate alone.
My first detective posting was at Holden Hill Criminal Investigation Branch in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. I worked there for a couple of months before being transferred to the detective office at Elizabeth. The districts around Elizabeth consisted of lower socio-economic groups among whom crime was a part of life. I learned the art of investigation, and my experience was given a great boost when I was sent back to headquarters to help with the Truro murders. As a very junior detective, it was exciting to see the Major Crime Squad buzzing with a major murder case on its hands.
I spent about six months in the squad taking statements and following up minor bits of information about the Truro killings. During my time there Alan Barnes was killed, but I was too engrossed with Truro to hear much scuttlebutt about his murder. Detectives working on cases generally keep the details close to their chests to prevent sensitive information being leaked. It’s important that detectives withhold certain bits of information. Occasionally, ‘nutters’ will confess to a crime even though they didn’t do it. If certain bits of information are kept in-house then detectives can tell whether or not a person is actually telling the truth. A person confessing to killing someone and saying they have tied the victim with rope when wire was used signals to detectives that something is wrong.
I returned to the Elizabeth detective office just before Neil Muir’s dismembered body was found in the Port River.
After Elizabeth, I spent a bit of time helping out in the Drug Squad but I wanted to have a go at investigating murders. My appetite was whetted after my secondment to Major Crime and I requested a posting to the squad. When I was transferred there in 1982, one of the sergeants on Glen Lawrie’s team was a senior detective called Trevor Kipling. I called him ‘Kippers’, not only because of his surname but because he liked fishing. He was already working on the Mark Langley case. I had first met Trevor when I spent my first months as a junior detective at Holden Hill. Trevor was a detective in the older style — he liked a drink and had a good sense of humour that brought out his strong belly laugh. He was tall, slightly taller than me, and his black hair had started to grey, complementing his blue eyes, which flashed when speaking to an attractive woman but turned a steel colour when his determination to prove a point came to the fore. Trevor was not university educated like many newer detectives but his high intelligence showed many times in the next few years.
Up to this time different teams were investigating the murder of the boys. The team that was working at the time a body was found usually ended up investigating the murder. Now it was different. There was a growing realisation that the murders of the young men could be linked. Bodies with anal injuries. Bodies being cut up. There were too many similarities to be ignored. The realisation was like a mudslide building into an avalanche. Police inside Major Crime talked more and more about the multiples of missing young men.
To combine the investigations, the team investigating the missing boys came to Senior Sergeant Glen Lawrie’s team. He’d been on a bit of a roll after solving the Truro murders, and while many people had been involved, it was Lawrie who’d managed to get James Miller to talk and take the police to the girls’ bodies that had not been found. Now, Glen Lawrie was about to turn his attention to the series of murdered boys.
Glen was introducing me to the day-to-day work of Major Crime. I went with him to the flat farming land to
the north of the city, where Peter Stogneff was dropped alongside the dirt road between the fence line and straight edge of the road. The area was featureless and it would have been very easy for a car to stop and empty its boot of Peter’s body and abandon it amongst the bushes. Nobody was near enough to notice. Visiting the locations where bodies were dumped allowed me to get a feel for the type of person who was doing these murders. Obviously, a car had to be used and either the person had to be strong enough to lift a body or more than one person was involved.
Within a very short time I was investigating murders and then assisting with the Kelvin disappearance. At the time, I didn’t realise just how much I would become involved and how it would become part of my life.
I had a professional relationship with the Kelvins. I never became as close to them as a friend but I liked the family. Rob Kelvin had a high profile, and he was popular — but he seemed a genuinely nice guy. He was the same in real life as he appeared on television. He was competent and professional without any big headedness. He was not snobbish, and because of that I liked the man. Rob was alarmed and worried about his son’s disappearance but he handled it by maintaining his composure, as he appears to do every night on television. Obviously, he has a strong side. His time as a patrol officer in New Guinea when he was a younger man also shows strength.
Betteanne, his wife, was also stoic about their son’s disappearance but you could see their relatively calm exteriors hid immense suffering. She worked in a small store in the city and matched Rob perfectly. Rob and Betteanne Kelvin were normal people but the only difference was that Rob worked in an industry that caused him to have a very high profile. The disappearance of their son caused even more observation of their lives in the years to come.
The disappearance of Richard Kelvin didn’t cause too many alarm bells to go off at first. Jim Munro, an older detective in Major Crime, and a bit of a snappy dresser, said to me the day after Richard had gone missing:
‘He’s run off with his girlfriend. You wait and see. He’ll turn up.’
Jim figured that Richard was just one of many young men who go missing all the time.
Here we had a young man who had recently found a girlfriend. He was growing up quickly. He could easily have run away from home just like many others.
Jim was an experienced detective but he hadn’t visited the Kelvin house the previous night. He didn’t speak to Richard’s parents and hear what the young man’s new girlfriend said when she was interviewed. This one was different.
Kids growing up do have worries and concerns. They may not be happy at home and they leave. Parents arguing all the time may upset a kid who might want to get out of the house, or parents may be seen to be coming down on the child so much that it causes the kid to leave home. Neither of these were the case with Richard Kelvin.
Police rely on differences to help explain what has happened when disappearances occur. When a young man runs away from home he might be missing, but often there are some indications where he may be — he doesn’t disappear without trace. His family may not know where he is but his friends do. Runaways don’t just disappear. They have to stay somewhere, usually with friends or acquaintances. They have to eat somewhere, usually at their local haunts. There are nearby pinball parlors. And fish and chip shops. There’s always somewhere and someone who knows them — and messages get back to the family and police. That tells us that they are still alive. If young men disappear interstate, then they still have to survive. Often welfare agencies become involved, and they encourage the boys to ring home. If they are old enough to receive welfare payments, then there are records of those payments. Police check with the welfare agencies to see whether or not the missing people are receiving any money. The money trail tells the police and family that they are still alive.
With Richard Kelvin, nothing suggested that he would have run off. He was happy that weekend. Having a kick of the football with his father on the Saturday went well. There were no arguments. He got on well with his mother. Boris’s visit on the Sunday went well; there were no arguments and when he saw him go at the bus stop, Richard was happy. The two guys who got off the bus at the time saw both of them in O’Connell Street and confirmed this. Richard was due home straight away for dinner and it was agreed that he would ring his girlfriend — besides it was another excuse to speak to her.
One of the uniform patrols from the city attended their home after the Kelvin’s call for help. At first, they did not think much about it as it was a weekend and there was nothing exciting about a missing fifteen-year-old. They were more interested, however, when they found out that it was the son of Rob Kelvin, the newsreader. This meant the media could be involved.
We better do this properly, they thought.
Once the uniformed officers heard the story they knew the disappearance was different from that of a normal runaway.
Police also spoke to Richard’s girlfriend that night. She was surprised that her new boyfriend had not returned home straight away. Everything was alright when she spoke to him earlier, on the phone, before Boris left the Kelvin home. She said they made small talk. Everything was fine and she enjoyed his friendship.
Boris jumped on after the grey government bus pulled up to the stop with a hiss from the airbrakes. He moved to the left-hand side of the bus and leaned out of the window as he left.
‘Praise the lord,’ Boris yelled.
‘Hallelujah,’ Richard yelled out, grinning and holding his arms. Frank Marrollo stood there and laughed. Boris and Richard were sending up the group of preachers that were across the road on the opposite footpath of O’Connell Street calling out about the Lord and handing out religious pamphlets.
Richard was tall and his body was starting to develop and become muscular. Boris described the clothes he was wearing: blue jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with Channel Nine television station logos on the front and back. The shoes he wore were trendy Adidas sneakers; however, the dog collar he was wearing around his neck was different. Boris saw him playing with the collar from the Kelvin dog when they were speaking to Richard’s girlfriend on the telephone. He saw the chrome metal studs circling the leather band, which stood out against his friend’s white skin when he put it around his neck. It was so different that Richard took it off when his mate stirred him about it at the bus stop. He said it looked stupid and gay. That’s when it came off. Richard wanted to look manly, not gay.
Over the following days, Rob and Betteanne were quietly asked about their son’s sexuality, and they insisted he was not gay. The question was also put to his friends as discretely as possible. There was nothing to suggest that he was homosexual or bisexual. I never asked Rob or Betteanne about the dog collar that he wore. It wasn’t the right time to be asking parents the reason why their missing son wore particular items. I thought that it did not suit his age or appearance but young men do wear things to make them look older or tougher or both. The dog collar and the way Richard went missing were the first of many unusual aspects to the boy’s disappearance.
The uniformed officers did all that they could that Sunday evening. They drove around North Adelaide and spoke to people in the shops near the bus stop. Nothing. They contacted Adelaide detectives and put out a KLOF message to other police patrols. KLOF is an acronym meaning to ‘keep look out for’. They couldn’t do any more. The disappearance was definitely a strange one.
When a crime occurs, there is normally a crime scene. An abandoned car, a body or a burnt house remains. Police place a cordon around the scene to preserve any evidence that might remain. Crime scene examiners look for things like fingerprints on smooth surfaces, a discarded shell from the bullet of a gun, some blood or clothing left behind. The difficulty with Richard Kelvin’s disappearance was that there was no crime scene to isolate for police to scour for evidence. The last known place where Richard stood was on the footpath of O’Connell Street and then there was nothing. We knew he had not arrived home. The area between the bus stop and Richard’
s home was too large an area to seal off. That left door knocking.
Police knock on the doors of people living near the scene of a crime to discover whether or not the home-owners have seen or heard anything. So police organised a door knock to occur the following day. The police use standard forms that ask the names of the people living in the house, whether or not they have heard or seen anything unusual and they leave a calling card with a police contact number.
Uniformed officers from Adelaide patrols and detectives from the Adelaide C.I.B. met outside the Kelvin home the following day. They were briefed about their duties, then sent to different homes between the Kelvin home and O’Connell Street.
The door knock over the next days confirmed my initial suspicions. Trevor Kipling, the senior officer investigating the murder of Mark Langley, had read the files on Alan Barnes, Neil Muir and Peter Stogneff, and felt the same way.
As one of the investigating detectives, I went and saw the parents the next evening. They told me about their son’s disappearance. They had rung the police about an hour after he did not come home from the bus stop. They checked with Boris to make sure he had got home OK and learned that Richard had left him at the bus stop and that everything was normal when he left him. They checked with his girlfriend to make sure he had not gone there.
By now we were increasingly worried.
The following day was a Monday and the first door knocks late Monday morning produced nothing. People were at work and that meant we had to return to those addresses later to speak to these people. That was the first sign that the investigation was going to be difficult. Quick arrests happen when information from the scene is given to police almost straight away. A car number may be taken, someone knows a name or a face or someone rings the police with information. This didn’t happen.
