Where Truth Went Underground

THE SUNDAY AGE

Saturday October 1, 1994

Hendryk Gout

COOBER PEDY exists for one reason: opals - the finest in the world.

After opals were discovered in 1915, the small town in the middle of the South Australian desert became home to an influx of ex-soldiers, who lived in the now-familiar underground dugouts. Most made their money and left.

Coober Pedy has never been like most outback towns, where people have to be born in the district hospital to be considered a local. Here, 10 years is a long stay. Ms Lorraine Sternberg arrived in Coober Pedy 23 years ago, an Adelaide hairdresser on holidays.

``You turn yourself away from the rest of the world when you come to Coober Pedy," she says. ``You might call it lifestyle. You have a very free mind here: there's not the rules and regulations of the city."

But some rules there are, and should not be broken. One of them is murder.

In mid-July last year, a German tourist named Anne Neumann arrived in Coober Pedy on a backpacking holiday. She was tall, red-haired and attractive. Two hours later, she was dead.

The 22-year-old tourist had arrived in Coober Pedy by bus. She checked in at the Sternbergs' 300-bed underground hostel, before going for a walk. Lorraine Sternberg notified police on the second day after her disappearance. ``Her backpack hadn't been touched. Her bed hadn't been slept in.

``Some of the staff said not to worry. But I don't know: you're always aware it could happen," she said.

Possibly less than an hour after arriving, Anne Neumann was seen getting into a car driven by a local resident, Miho Christian Alavija, 23. What happened after that is hotly contested, but a jury in Alavija's murder trial last week found that he threw her down a mineshaft outside town, covered her body with soil, and left her for dead. She may have been buried alive, she may have been sexually assaulted - her leggings were around her ankles, her top was pulled up - but the body was too badly decomposed when it was found for anyone to be certain.

``Although the actual cause of death cannot be fixed, the evidence is that Anne Neumann was deliberately assaulted, the assault had a sexual component, she was assaulted to the head, and that she was killed deliberately," the prosecutor, Mr Barry Jennings, QC, told the Supreme Court jury.

Mr Jennings had a formidable task. For a start, there was the problem of finding the body - and then of finding a suspect.

``We've got over 20 named opal fields here," a Mines and Energy Department official said last week. ``We reckon there's over a million holes. Some of the shafts are 20 metres deep, some more. You can't look in them all."

When word got out that a woman had disappeared, the town was polarised. There were those who suggested she must have stumbled into one of the shafts in the night. It happens. Some townsfolk refused to believe that a murderer lived among them.

Others were not so sure. Two other women - one a 15-year-old local, the other an Italian tourist - had also disappeared in the previous two years. Was there a serial killer? Tourist operators, perhaps too dispassionately, worried what sort of image this was going to give the place.

This town's official population (2200) has always attracted its share of immigrants. There's only one pub in town, and a motel with a bar, but there are at least five licensed ethnic clubs, and not all of them are neighborly. There are the Italian and Greek clubs, and the long- established Yugoslav Club. Then the Serbs broke away to form their own club. Coober Pedy divides into clans.

The place can also get a bit rough. Locals tell the story of three mates who'd worked the same holes for years, scratching away, making just enough for beer and cigarettes but not enough to leave town or retire. One night after a rainstorm two of the men drove the old ute into town while the third stayed back to fix some gear. Walking back into town, he found an opal by the side of the road - a gem bigger than he'd ever seen in his life.

``I'm rich! I'm rich!" he shouted to his mates as he showed them the fist-sized stone in the pub.

They beat him to a pulp.

Hundreds of townsfolk went down mineshafts in unsuccessful quests for Anne Neumann's body, but police received precious little information about what might have happened to her.

It even got into the foreign press. Backpackers in Adelaide were warned by other travellers not to get off the bus in Coober Pedy but to go straight through. For a town that relies as much on tourism as it does on opals (some 800 coach parties stop there a year) this was as bad as a mine playing out.

It took two long months before someone, who to this day remains anonymous, finally came forward. Just what that person said has still not been revealed. But, as a result, police jumped in a plane to fly back to Coober Pedy to interview another two men. These men later became the Crown's star witnesses, leading police to the mine where Neumann's body was hidden, and accusing Alavija of the crime. Alavija, they said, had confessed to the murder on the night, but had threatened them into silence.

On their testimony, Alavija was convicted last week. He had pleaded not guilty. (He is not expected to be sentenced for several weeks.) Rumor around Coober Pedy is that one of the witnesses hasn't been seen in town since the trial began. The other is living just as he did before the case.

Even this weekend the search goes on, beneath the ground, for the precious opal, that rock which has no color of its own but draws its brilliance from the refraction of white light. Not everything is as it seems on the gemfields.

And somewhere, among the white craters and the deep shafts, and in the hearts of one or more people possibly still in Coober Pedy, could lie the evidence of what happened to 15-year-old local resident Karen Williams and 30-year-old Italian tourist Anna Liva, who disappeared in 1990 and 1991 respectively.

© 1994 THE SUNDAY AGE

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