On January 18, 2002, Adam Zito, 19, and his 17-year-old mate, who can’t be named, got drunk and went down to “poofter park”, as Zito called it – Veale Gardens – where they saw Kym Pitcher sitting on a bench. They went straight up to him and the 17-year-old attacked. Hitting Pitcher to the ground, he kicked him and jumped on his head.

Zito joined in. Together they smashed Pitcher’s face to a pulp – and that expression is meant literally – breaking his jaw, his eye socket, his cheek. They took Pitcher’s mobile phone and Zito phoned his own mum. Pitcher was in a coma for five days, during which time he almost died twice when the swelling from the broken bones in his head threatened to block his airways. Thanks to the phone call, the attackers were caught and tried. They each received minimum sentences of 16 months. Four months after Pitcher’s attack, Mark Coonie, 34, left Adelaide’s most prominent gay nightspot, the Mars Bar, saying he was headed for Veale Gardens. With yellow hair and numerous facial piercings, he was hard to miss. But his movements would remain unclear. He was next seen at 1.30am by two women who approached him a block away from the Mars Bar, heading away from Veale Gardens near Adelaide’s Chinatown. They asked what was wrong because they could see he was bleeding from the back of his head. They gave him a towel and offered to take him to hospital, but he declined. Instead, the women drove him home to the suburb of Dover Gardens. Despite the blood, he was chatty. He told them he was gay and that he’d been bashed by a man he’d met who wanted to take him home. The good Samaritans dropped Coonie off, but were sufficiently worried to visit later the same day. They found him asleep and snoring on his bed. Ten days later, Coonie’s brother checked and found him still in his bed, dead. He had died from the head injuries.

Adelaide community groups reported that they were hearing of about one attack a week on gay men at this time. The violence was escalating.

It would appear that robbery was part of the picture because his bag and wallet were missing, but the fact that his assailant had “wanted to take him home” would indicate that he was targeted as a gay man. And certainly the gay community saw it as a hate crime. Even the police never said this one was a robbery gone wrong. Which brings us to the curious case of Robert Woodland. It is most likely another sad, lonely death in the dark, but maybe, if you allow your mind to run a bit, you can see it entwined in a deep-black criminal conspiracy touching on those stories that many believe about who really run South Australia.

Robert Woodland

Robert Woodland’s body was just starting to decompose, the papers said, after four days in the early summer heat, when it was discovered by a dog walker on December 8, 2004 – 50 metres from Sir Lewis Cohen Drive, a busy road feeding into the city centre. Woodland’s dark-blue Commodore was parked in the Veale Gardens car park at the Adelaide Pavilion restaurant, while the 36-year-old's corpse was found 700 metres away at the far end of the beat, and off to the left in long grass. He was last seen at the beat at 1am on December 5, after having left a Gouger St nightclub.

“He was afraid for his life. He said there were people who didn’t want him to be able to talk about what he wanted to tell me.”

Within a week, police had declared robbery as the motive. Perhaps they thought saying that would save the family some anguish. Perhaps they thought his missing wallet was sufficient to explain away the vicious injuries to his head at a place where gay men were routinely bashed. It was a small murder in the media sense, rating a few short stories over following days and in the normal scheme of things would have received minimal attention even if a killer had been caught. Three months later, however, Woodland’s death would become a whole lot more. It would become central to an exquisitely Adelaide-style front-page drama, featuring allegations of paedophilia in high places, a string of deaths, claims of a cover-up, a political resignation and, of course, the Parklands – that ring of darkness that besieges the city each night. The story had its origins a few years earlier when Peter Lewis, the independent Speaker of the South Australian parliament, and a small team of committed campaigners fought to change the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse cases. Once they won that battle, they switched to campaigning for a royal commission into child abuse. The victims came flooding through the Speaker’s door with their stories of abuse. Among them were former male prostitutes who had plied their trade down at Veale Gardens and had stories about people in high places. One of them, according to Lewis, was Robert Woodland. “He was afraid for his life,” recalls Lewis. “He said there were people who didn’t want him to be able to talk about what he wanted to tell me. And I said I understood and that I’d be pleased if he would talk to some of the people who were my staff volunteers.” Now, the reason I said, “according to Lewis” was that I haven’t seen anything to substantiate that Robert Woodland even visited Peter Lewis’s office, let alone what he said there. Neither of Lewis’s researchers, victims’ rights advocate Wendy Utting and Lewis’s old school friend Barry Standfield, have strong recollections of Woodland or what he said.

“I grew up in welfare ... and was sexually abused there in Western Australia, and by the age of 12 had decided, pragmatically, that if I was going to be bent over and f**d every night I’d rather be paid for it and get on with having independence.”

I never saw any stat dec by him. If he made one, it was gobbled up by the legal system and buried under suppression orders in the events that would follow. Lewis says he probably has a copy in storage but he wasn’t able to go looking for me. When I phoned Woodland’s mother, she stated, emphatically, that her son was not gay, that he had never spoken to Lewis and never made the allegations attributed to him. But the story that became public was this: that Robert Woodland, along with two others, alleged that while underage they performed sexual acts for two MPs (one of whom was still serving in 2002), a judge and a prominent policeman. According to Lewis and his team, two female social workers had, independently, already come forward claiming knowledge of the same allegation against the same people. Another of those to walk into the Speaker’s office with stories of abuse was former male prostitute, Brad Shannon – the beat regular mentioned earlier – who remains happy to talk openly about what happened to him. He says, “I grew up in welfare ... and was sexually abused there in Western Australia, and by the age of 12 had decided, pragmatically, that if I was going to be bent over and f**d every night I’d rather be paid for it and get on with having independence.” He adds, “So I knew from one of the first paedophiles that I met about The Wall [in Sydney, where rentboys gather] ... He told me how a boy of my age could go to The Wall and make a lot of money and life would be fabulous and you’d have sugar daddies and everything would fall into your lap.” Shannon escaped from the children’s home and lived with the paedophile until he was tossed on the street: “the novelty wore off for him”. He then made money in Perth beats and travelled to Sydney via Adelaide. “I hit beats at the sweet spot ... where it coincided with the legalisation of homosexuality in South Australia, and shortly after also in NSW. So I was privy to the high-fliers and big rollers who used to come through The Wall and pay us boys for sex.” Shannon used his earnings to move around the country and found himself working Veale Gardens where, in about 1985, he claims to have been picked up by a well-known South Australian politician, though not one of the two implicated in Woodland’s allegations. “When (the politician) came along, I remembered, I rthat he had a white VK Commodore. I remembered that it had a burgundy interior. I remembered it was an automatic and it was a six-cylinder and I remembered the first three letters of the number plate.” I ask how he’d remembered the number plate 20 years later. Shannon said it was a habit he got into on the Wall. “You’re on the side of the road. You have no place to live. Your next meal comes from the next money you’re going to earn.

“They’re bashed to shut ’em up, and if that doesn’t shut’em up, then bash’em a bit harder and they won’t ever be able to stand up, let alone walk up”

“You also know you’re jumping into the car with complete strangers who could be genuine clients or they could be axe murderers. You’re also watching the only people that you have as friends doing the same thing ... I look at the first three letters and I turn them into a word, because if your friend doesn’t come back in an hour or two, I can then go to the police and go, ‘Right, he jumped into a red Commodore and these were the first three letters.’” So just imagine the besieged atmosphere of an office where you were hearing stories like this every day implicating powerful people. But then, a partial victory. On December 3, 2004, former Supreme Court judge Ted Mullighan was appointed to head a commission of inquiry into the abuse of children in state care. Lewis had wanted something more wide ranging. But it was a start. The very next night, however, Robert Woodland went to Veale Gardens where he was seen by an acquaintance about 1am, on Sunday December 5. He was never seen alive again. Soon after his presumed time of death, someone attempted to use his ATM card to withdraw money near the Mars Bar in Gouger Street. Woodland’s body was found on the Wednesday. “It was before lunch that I was told about it,” recalls Lewis, “and it made me sick – and I’m not often made sick – because he’d been afraid of that happening to him.”

Peter Lewis

I ask Lewis if he was alleging that Woodland had been killed to shut him up. There is a long pause. “I don’t have any doubt that that was the reason for him being murdered,” he says. “Why would somebody murder a bloke like that, or any person like that, that’s harmless?” But gay men get bashed at beats all the time, I point out. Lewis pauses again: “It’s well documented and not only in the case of Robert Woodland, but in many other such instances, they’re bashed to shut’em up, and if that doesn’t shut’em up, then bash ’em a bit harder and they won’t ever be able to stand up, let alone walk up, and talk up, again.” As part of the investigation into Robert Woodland’s murder, police went looking for another one of the guys who’d made the same allegations of paedophilia to Lewis, Shaine Moore. In February 2005, the police knocked on his door, went into his house, had a look around but couldn’t find him. Friends reported Moore missing. It wasn’t until 10 days after he was last seen that a forensic team was sent to examine Moore’s bedroom and the truth was revealed. Shaine Moore was lying under his doona, bulked up with pillows, with a red line around his throat where he’d been strangled with a shoelace. This death had an even greater impact on the team, says researcher Wendy Utting. “Our reaction was more so utter disbelief when Shaine was found ... It became rather surreal at the time. And even then, I don’t think any of us were in there saying this is definitely connected. We did not know.” Another of Lewis’s informants, Craig Ratcliff, leaked the story of the link between the two deaths to the media and the frenzy was on. The police were surprisingly quick to publicly dismiss the paedophilia allegations, especially considering that they hadn’t even seen the information that Lewis and his team had gathered.

“The perpetrators had infiltrated the police service and its administration and ... evidence ... was then either corrupted or destroyed”.

Fearing that the police officer who was at the centre of the claims might still be able to influence the inquiry, Lewis’s team refused to hand over their information. They didn’t trust the police. Lewis told me that “the perpetrators had infiltrated the police service and its administration and ... evidence ... was then either corrupted or destroyed”. Utting says they told police what they knew but were guarded in what documents they handed over. “When they [the police] came to us and questioned us,” Utting says, “we believed they were there to ... ask us what we knew about these people that had been murdered. But it didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t about that. They were there to find out about these allegations.” Now, it isn’t at all peculiar that an officer investigating such a murder would focus on the allegations the victim had made. What else was there to ask the Speaker and his staff about? The fact is, though, that Lewis and his team already had a deep distrust of the police’s ability to handle the allegations, given what they’d been told by their informants about police cover-ups. Frustrated by the deadlock, Utting wrote a letter to the inquiry head, Ted Mullighan, outlining the allegations that had been made about the prominent citizens. Her colleague, Barry Standfield, thought he’d shake things up by sending the letter to the media with all names included. WIthin five weeks of the discovery of Moore’s body, Lewis’s failure to hand over the documents and a video tape (which he’d never claimed to possess) to police led to him being forced to resign as Speaker. And Utting and Standfield were on notice that they faced criminal libel charges over the letter. The team kept quietly plugging away. Lewis tried to make contact with another witness to the same goings-on at Veale Gardens, Walter Handley. He wanted to encourage Handley to come forward and give a statement. But he claims his attempts were hamstrung by police seeming to somehow know of their planned meetings in advance and being there waiting. Then Handley left a message on Lewis’s mobile asking if Lewis could get him a handgun for protection. Utting recalls: “Peter was absolutely flabbergasted at the time as the Speaker of Parliament [Her timing is out on this; he’d actually resigned the previous month], to have a message like that left.” He tried to calm Handley down, saying if he felt threatened, protection could be organised. Within days, Walter Handley was killed with a single gunshot wound to the head while attempting to buy a gun in the car park of the Smithfield Plains Sports Club. It was May 2005, exactly three months after Shaine Moore’s body had been found. Two days later, Lewis got up in parliament to say that Handley had been another of his witnesses. “I say now to the House that there is a stench of the most heinous kind arising from these crimes and associated activities which comes right into this place and into the front bench.” Soon after Handley’s death, Utting received a phone call from another of her contacts, the former local chapter president of the Gypsy Jokers, Steve Williams. Williams had not only been a great source of knowledge about official corruption relating to the perpetuation of paedophilia – he’d begun his own anti-child-abuse campaign – but he’d been a great friend to Utting, too. This day she’d left parliament and was heading home when Williams rang. “He said, ‘Look, I think you should carry something.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no.’ And he said, ‘What about a sawn-off shotgun? How big a purse do you carry?’ ‘No, no, no, please don’t say these things over the phone at the moment, Steve, for God’s sake, you’re trying to get arrested before I even attempt to try to protect myself. I’m not carrying anything.’”

“The day he was due to meet with this officer ... those couple of days ... is when he disappeared.”

A week or two later, after much cajoling, Utting convinced Williams to come in and meet a police officer she trusted with a view to handing over some of his information about how paedophiles were getting away with it through the legal system. “The day he was due to meet with this officer ... those couple of days ... is when he disappeared,” Utting recalls. Steve Williams has not been seen since and is presumed murdered. Utting blamed herself. She knew Williams had a lot of dangerous enemies, any one of whom could have taken him out, totally unrelated to her business. But she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d caused his death by setting up the meeting. And then one day while opening her front door, Utting was attacked. She regained consciousness unsure what had happened. She moved house a couple of times. Farmed the kids out to friends. Two and a half months after Williams’s murder, she and Standfield were charged with criminal libel, an extraordinary move that had only ever happened once before in the state. A judge ruled there was no case to answer, but the director of public prosecutions reinstituted the charges. They spent the next three years in court. They beat the charges a second time and were acquitted, but the evidence became so obscured under the weight of suppression orders that it has become difficult to talk about. They won the court case but lost the fight. Lost the will to fight it. Meanwhile, the Mullighan inquiry into the sexual abuse of children in state care found that it was very common for state wards to run away and head to the beat at Veale Gardens to make money, much as Brad Shannon had done. Mullighan made no mention of any specific high-profile paedophiles in his report, just that: “One PIC [person in care] alleged that at Veale Gardens ‘there was judges, there was magistrates, there was police ... they all go down there, absolutely’.” Brad Shannon’s allegation to the Mullighan inquiry about having had sex with a well-known politician while underage was passed on to South Australian police along with another allegation he’d made about being raped by two police officers and a man known as Mother Goose, but nothing came of it. The police have said they made “comprehensive and extensive inquiries”. For his part, Shannon blames one particular former police officer for his claims not proceeding further, and says male prostitutes who witnessed or suffered crimes were too readily dismissed as unreliable witnesses. While the Mullighan inquiry was underway, the mystery of Shaine Moore’s death was solved. In 2007, his ex-boyfriend, David Richard Fraser, took a plea deal and confessed to having strangled him in an auto-erotic sex game gone wrong. Fraser got manslaughter and was out a few years later on parole. In 2009, he killed his next boyfriend, Luke Noonan, 29, in similar circumstances. This time the charge was murder and he got a minimum of 22 years.

The disappearance of Steve Williams remains a mystery, as does the bashing death of Robert Woodland in Veale Gardens.