The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia?

by Stephen Orr

Why is it that Adelaide, a beautiful city of churches and lush gardens, a place renowned for its support of the arts and culture, has become better known as the epicenter of some of Australia's weirdest and most brutal crimes? One of its denizens seeks the answers in this fascinating investigation. Some crimes are so mysterious or ghastly that they take on a legendary status, and Adelaide seems to have had more than its fair share of them. The whole nation remembers the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the ghastly Snowtown murders where the dismembered bodies were found in barrels in a disused bank vault, and the so called Family murders perpetrated by Bevan Spencer van Einem, with its trail of conspiracy theories, rumor, and innuendo, and other crimes just as notorious. Award-winning novelist and journalist Stephen Orr rounds up the infamous crimes of his native city and looks beyond the myth to the tragic sadness, badness and madness of violent crime and its consequences. Why Adelaide? Read Cruel City and find out. This book was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

About the author

Stephen Orr is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. His works are set in uniquely Australian settings, including coastal towns, outback regions and the Australian suburbs. His fiction explores the dynamics of Australian families and communities.

Reviews

[Edgarr Alien Pooh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Cruel City is the story of the city of Adelaide, capital city of the state of South Australia. As an Australian (never having lived in South Australia) I picked this book up because I know of two particularly disturbing crimes in Adelaide - The missing Beaumont kids from the 1960s that have not been found to this day and the Snowtown murders where mutilated bodies were found in barrels of acid in an old bank building.

So I wanted to read about these fascinating and macabre events but I really didn't know about most of the other stuff contained in the book. It begins right back from settlement days, murders amongst the new British settlers and some involving the local indigenous people. Others involved shocking crimes in the Church
, family killings and the underlying story of 'the family' which links through several of the murderous scenes.

'The Family' ultimately set off events for the Snowtown murders which were perpetrated against the homosexual community however lines were blurred. Some of those involved in the murders were gay men forced to take part by others and then became victims themselves. However 'the family' was much more than that. There were roots in the police force, judges and lawyers, some proven and some not. It would seem the purpose was an anti-gay sentiment.

Whether or not 'the family' was involved there were several serial killers that seemed to get a fair run without investigation despite evidence pointing their way. Christopher Worrell killed a series of young women with his accomplice James Miller. The two of them preyed on the women as they hitchhiked or were alone in the city before raping and murdering them, dumping or burying the bodies. The killing spr
ee only ended when Worrell was himself killed in a car accident, ironically while with a young woman who would probably have been his next victim. Tragically she too died in the accident.

Perhaps the biggest story is the one of the missing Beaumont children. Probably because they have never been found but also because there have been many suspects, some now living interstate or dead. Periodically this crime is revisited, usually when a pedophile is captured and jailed or a prison inmate tells authorities they overheard something - to this day none of this has brought results.

The three Beaumont children went missing from the beach in the Adelaide suburb of Glenelg in 1966. At the time there were reported to be several major sightings of a man with the children but nothing came to fruition. Seven years later two young girls were snatched from the Adelaide oval while visiting the toilets during a football match. immediately after this several witnesses said t
hey saw a man carrying a young child while an older child was hitting him and trying to rescue her. The description of the man and that of the man reported to have kidnapped the Beaumonts were quite similar. Police have not been able to link the crime in any way except for the obvious similarities.

Cruel City shows Adelaide as precisely that, a cruel city. It describes the poverty and hopelessness of some of the outer lying regions and tries to explain how such evil can get together and grow in those climes. Well may this be the case but I believe it has to ""exist' to begin with. I cannot fathom that collected unemployment and boredom leads to groups murdering to pass the time. To me there has to be an evil element festering. Perhaps just within one person who can string along some lesser lights and hook them in. Once they are a party to the crime it is easy to tell them to keep quiet or face consequences.

Adelaide, as shown, has had many issues and an e
xtremely violent past but I am confidant you could find similar events in almost every major city in the world. It is not the fault of the city or location but the fault of the deranged individuals that carry out the crimes.

The REAL Adelaide is a quieter capital city. It has beautiful gardens and beaches and is known as ""the city of churches"" for its many old churches of astounding architecture. It has everything ever other major city can boast and has the heart of a driven sporting culture. Like most cities in Australia it benefits from multiculturalism being rich in food and entertainment. It holds very successful comedy and writers festivals and only a short drive away is the Barossa Valley, one of the countries, if not the world's, most renowned wine regions.

By the nature of the book Cruel City highlights the ugly truths but these are blights on the history of a beautiful city."

[Kristian Thoroughgood · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book entertained, horrified, and ultimately… disappointed.

As far as a listed summary of the many creepy and horrible murders that have taken place in Adelaide, this book is fine but it left me wanting. The writing is clear and engaging with lots of appropriately terrible details, but real insight is thin with amounts text seeming like aimless conjecture standing as filler. Some of the latter cases looked a lot like they were tacked on to increase page numbers.

That said, given this book details abuse, kidnappings and murders that have taken place right here in my home town… I found it a bit terrifying, but I suspect that is due more to my imagination now having fuel to populate the dark shadows with monsters, than with this being a good book.

Basically whilst I don’t feel it was a waste of time, I also don’t really think I can recommend this book. If you are from Adelaide you might find it interesting.

Slightly more detailed review available here: https://uncertaintales.wordpress.com/...

[Cyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of lunatics, and a nice reminder that the only way I'll probably ever go to Adelaide is unconscious in the back of a van. Which seems to be how many people leave it. I like his writing style and I'd give it 5 stars but he seemed to fall into some victim-blaming language here and there which I didn't care for. Good book overall.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a horrible little book - in the sense that is filled with gut churning descriptions of some of the infamous crime that has occurred in the beautiful city of Adelaide. It's not the sort of book that one can say is "enjoyable". But fascinating it is - and truly horrific. I've only given this book three stars because the author, who is a fiction writer, seems to try too hard, at times, to use sensational rhetoric and conjecture to make his stories intriguing. But when he does this, it makes his story telling sound naive and superficial. The facts of these cases don't need any embellishment. They stand on there own as unbelievably sensational and horrific and I won't be rereading this book again! I have read far better books on one of the cases - the so-called Snowtown murders - that provide a much better, more nuanced analysis of the possible sociological and psychological precursors to that particular series of crimes. But for someone who wants a quick survey of some of the sensational crimes occurring in Adelaide, I suppose this is a good introduction. But you need a pretty strong stomach to endure the book to the end.

Another aspect of the book I didn't like is the way the author characterises Adelaide as somehow a unique "cruel city" throughout his story telling - but then, in a brief chapter at the end of the book, shows how these sorts of crimes occur everywhere - no city is immune.

So, while the book was fascinating and compelling, overall, I think it suffers from a lack of true depth in grappling with some of the questions that need to be asked - and inevitably do get asked - when these sorts of things happening. The biggest question - Why? - seems to have no real answer in the end. How these people could carry out such "evil" crimes with complete disregard for the humanity of their victims is a complete mystery.

[Xanthi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been to Adelaide and liked it well enough. When I visited, I was aware of some of the cases covered in this book but not all. I am now startled to realize that I visited and probably stood in the physical spaces where at least two of these horrid events happened. I remember poking fun with some friends who were locals, about their city being kinda creepy and one tour guide pointed out the house where one of the crimes took place, as we drove by.
Is Adelaide weirder than any other Australian city, in regards to the nature of its crimes? It would seem so, though we in Perth had the Birnies and the Claremont serial killer, so we can't talk, I guess.
Despite the gruesome content, I found this book easy to read, in the sense that the writing style was pretty accessible. This book tries to cover a lot, so there isn't a great deal of detail for each case. In a sense, this book works well as an introduction to incidents and cases, so that the reader can then go and investigate further via other books that specialize in the given topics of interest.

[Internet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compelling, but incredibly pulpy. A bit lazy and repetitive, with crude conservative moralism (at one point, lumping "cross-dressers" in with child rapists), unnecessary hyperbole, and poorly-supported speculation about what happened and why. The author has almost nothing of substance to say on why Adelaide is or is not the "cruel city". At one point, he pulls the classic middle school move "Wester's dictionary defines 'cruel' as...'. I was a bit disappointed, too, by the lack of attention to the psychology and motives of the perpetrators. In the same book, we get claims that they're really just like us and we're all capable of horrific evil, but also they're totally different and we may never understand why they do what they do. On the whole, this book feels rushed and poorly thought-out. Fortunately, the subject matter is so interesting that it would be hard to write a truly unengaging book about it. I would therefore recommend the Cruel City, despite my criticisms, as a quick and enjoyable overview of some gruesome South Australian crimes.

[caity · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book contributes nothing to the genre of true crime in Australia. It is a biased, heavily shaded by the authors own views account of murders and abuse from the city of Adelaide’s conception to 2008. One star is one too many to serve as a rating to this book which slanders the victims and repeatedly uses slurs to describe them. For a factual account of what happened, you’d be better off reading a Wikipedia page than this book.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gruesome - but interesting.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very interesting, and I highly recommend it for any true crime readers :)

[Annie Booker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguingly creepy but well told tales of crime in my home city

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's no doubt that when it comes to how Adelaide is represented in the popular imagination will fall back on certain tropes. Churches, wine, the absence of a convict history, the rise and fall of car manufacturing all may figure in the discussion, however, it's more likely the ghastly history of some of the worst criminals and crimes to have been committed in Australian history will be at the fore. The Beaumont Children disappearance, the Snowtown 'Bodies in the Barrels' murders and the Truro killings are just three cases that have captured the attention of both those in Adelaide and beyond, marked by their perverse or mysterious details. In The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia? the author, Stephen Orr, recounts these cases and others, attempting to document the history whilst trying to respond to the question embedded in the book's title. He doesn't do a bad job of the former, and also offers some credible responses to the latter issue. Yet this is an unsatisfactory book; one that reads partly as a sensationalist exploitative text and partly as an overblown, unresolved exercise in half-baked criminology. Orr can't escape from using the same stereotypes and inordinate fascination with cruelty to sell his unresolved 'answer' to the question he poses himself.

In the opening chapters of the book Orr tries his hand at developing a construct of Adelaide that tapes into the city's culture, its history, the unique social and political hierarchies of the South Australian capital. He speaks of a certain southern Gothic aspect that Adelaide supposedly possesses, and how in some respects its insularity helps reinforce the strange nature of the crimes committed there. It's not a bad thesis per se, and he does understand that Adelaide is different to the rest of Australia. And yes some of the crimes he goes on to discuss are particularly gruesome or memorable. Unfortunately he doesn't have the intellectual ability to draw out anything truly significant about how Adelaide's environment creates a particular type of murderous criminal. He also pads his book out with a few cases that seem only marginally relevant, and the result is he doesn't provide a convincing argument that addresses the book's nominal concern.

The book's focus on how Adelaide has seen some of the worst crimes committed in Australia is built around five cases; the Truro and Snowtown serial killings, the disappearances of the Beaumount children in 1966 and Joanna Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon in 1973, and so -called 'Family' murders committed by Barry von Einem. These are all horrific in their individual circumstances, and have left many people traumatised. It could even be argued that they have in part defined Adelaide to both those who live there and from those outside the city. Orr does a fairly respectable job of exploring these cases and trying to piece together not just what happened, but also what they mean.

The problem is that Orr then adds to his narrative several more cases that occur outside of Adelaide, such as the rape and murder of Mary Hattam in Ceduna in 1959, or the murder of Glenys Howard in Mount Gambier in 2007. It seems rather unreasonable to link these crimes to Adelaide. Then there are accounts of how various religious and school organisations have either facilitated, condoned or ignored violence against children who were in their charge; sad and criminal yes, but not exactly murders. I would argue that if Orr had stuck to the five cases he spends most of his narrative focus on, and perhaps tried to tease more out about what was specifically 'Adelaidian' about those crimes, then his book would've been more effective. The author dilutes his book's impact by trying to bring in more criminal history than he needed to.

The other, and perhaps more injurious, issue with Orr's work is that he states on several occasions that Adelaide is no worse than other cities in Australia when it comes to murders, then he throws in for sensational effect the repetition of the phrase 'cruel city'. It's annoying and shows that at heart Orr isn't concerned with finding an objective truth; instead he is exploiting the trope of Adelaide's murderous reputation for some (at times) tabloid exposes. What is the point of saying on more than one occasion that Adelaide is no worse than Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane etc, then in other sections of the book playing up the popular stereotype?

There is a kernel of a good book within The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia?. If Orr had foregone the pseudo-serious examination of Adelaide's reputation, and perhaps set out to document some of the most infamous crimes committed in South Australia then that would've helped his work's reception. Instead, he and his publishers have produced a rather disingenuous and arguably sensationalist 'true crime' book that is only just above the level of tabloid journalism.

[Daniel Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia?" by Stephen Orr is a riveting and thought-provoking exploration of true crime set against the backdrop of Adelaide's urban landscape. Orr masterfully weaves together history, crime narratives, and societal dynamics, offering readers an immersive and engaging journey into the heart of a city grappling with its dark reputation.

One of the book's standout qualities is Orr's ability to blend meticulous research with a captivating storytelling style. The narrative is rich with historical context, providing readers with a nuanced understanding of Adelaide's evolution and its intimate connection to the crimes explored. Orr skillfully navigates the complexities of each case, offering insights into the lives of both victims and perpetrators.

The choice of Adelaide as a focal point adds a unique dimension to the narrative, challenging preconceived notions about urban safety. Orr delves into the sociological aspects of crime, examining how the city's architecture, culture, and socio-economic factors contribute to its reputation. This broader perspective sets "The Cruel City" apart, elevating it beyond a standard true crime account.

Orr's writing is evocative and immersive, drawing readers into the gritty details of each case while maintaining sensitivity to the human stories at the center. His exploration of the emotional toll on families and communities affected by crime adds depth to the narrative, creating a powerful and empathetic reading experience.

The book not only explores the darkness but also sheds light on the resilience and strength of communities facing adversity. Orr masterfully balances the grim realities with moments of hope, showcasing the human spirit's ability to endure in the face of tragedy.

In conclusion, "The Cruel City" is a triumph in the true crime genre, offering more than a mere recounting of criminal acts. Stephen Orr's meticulous research, insightful commentary, and compelling storytelling combine to create a narrative that transcends the genre's boundaries. It is not only a captivating exploration of crime in Adelaide but also a poignant reflection on the intricate relationship between a city and its inhabitants. True crime enthusiasts and those interested in the intersection of crime and urban life will find "The Cruel City" to be a masterfully crafted and unforgettable read.

[Inés · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's kind of difficult to rate properly a book such as this.

I'm working in a writing project set in Adelaide in the 50s and 60s, and one of the main themes it's the mystery surrounding the vanishing of a young man who worked at the circus (not a real case, but one made up for the novel) and I wanted to know what kind of crimes ocurred in Adelaide in those days. I knew about the Beaumont children case and I was amazed when I read about the Somerton Man, a unsolved case which happened in the very same beach the Beaumont siblings vainshed some years later.

After those two cases, I discovered more and more, not too far in time from the others and I asked myself: "What the hell happens in that city?". I chose Adelaide as the setting of my writing project because I admire how the city is dedicated to the arts, to all type of arts (from what I've read, a ton of different festivals are celebrated in Adelaide each year), but I didn't know anything about this dark background of it.

Personally, I don't think Adelaide is a cruel city, as the title of the book says, but a bright, beautiful city where very bad things happened from time to time. It's a misfortune, but I don't think that defines Adelaide: the city has so much more to offer than these dark stories. Nevertheless, the reading was very helpful and it helped me to understand how these crimes affected the city and how in some way it changed the perhaps naive sense of security from the 50s to the actual way of living in Adelaide.

This book was extremely helpful and I'm grateful that the author put all these stories down in words with such knowledge of each one of the cases, the places and Adelaide in general. I couldn't ask for a better book to use as research in my project.

[italiandiabolik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this book, along with another similar one, few months ago during my first and so far only visit to Adelaide, a truly pretty city, at the airport bookstore.
I was shocked to learn about its reputation of Australia’s murder capital, so I wanted to learn more about it.
Whilst it is an interesting read, albeit covering tragic facts and dehumanizing acts of violence, it presents two major issues: on one side, it pushes hard on the notion that the city seems somehow possessed by the evil, and on the other side it lacks in-depth analysis over these acts, as if enlisting then would suffice to explain them.

[Aussie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My notes:
I love any crime stories that are based on true events.

Summary:
Some crimes are so mysterious or ghastly that they take on legendary status, and Adelaide seems to have had more than its fair share of them. The whole nation remembers the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the ghastly Snowtown murders where the dismembered bodies were found in barrels in a disused banks vault, the so- called family murders perpetrated by Bevan Spencer von Einem, with their trail of conspiracy theories, rumour and innuendo, and other crimes just as notorious

[Maria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy read briefly going into different murders in Adelaide. And some abuse by the church towards kids

[Sharon Mcneish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining and horrifying.
Each little Adelaide story covered with detail.
Stories I’ve grown up with and in places I know and have been, brings it all a little to close to home.

[David Shawne · Rating 2 out of 5]

No original sources. It parrots previously published material which contains inaccuracies and passes them on as fact.

[Chele Morel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was interesting, easy to read, well researched, but the writing style just didn't excite me.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be rather frank, this book left me wanting more. This book goes into great detail about the many gruesome and gory crimes that Adelaide has had, however i feel that i did not go into detail enough about the things that truly matter and allow the reader to get a good grasp. while it did go into details on the actual crimes themselves, i feel like it would have been a much better book if there was information on the people who commit these terrible crimes as well motives behind them. An all around okay book.