Another True-Life Ghost Story
John Balaban: South Australia’s First Known Serial Killer
(CW: This article discusses the historical assault and murder of women and a child and includes references to supernatural horror. Please take care when reading.)
Earlier, I published an article about the last man hanged in Queensland, Australia, Ernest Austin.
My next profile, John Balaban, bears the dubious honour of being nominated as South Australia’s first, known, serial killer.
Balaban hails from my hometown of Adelaide in South Australia and, while researching him, I was both fascinated and chilled to read a letter he wrote to the local newspaper in 1951, citing his address on the edge of a park square, only a few doors away from my own humble abode!
Balaban murdered five people including his wife, his stepson and mother-in-law. He was not, however, a predatory serial killer in the vein of Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy.
His murders were committed less for sexual and psychological gratification and more because of an intense, alcohol-fuelled anger towards the people he believed had insulted him and made his life unbearable.
Born at Nabib in Rumania in 1922, Balaban’s family life was intensely troubled. His mother left his father because of his cruelty towards her and, shortly afterwards, Balaban’s father hanged himself.
In 1944 when Balaban was twenty-two years old, he claimed that God had appeared to him as a bearded man with long white hair who smiled and said, “It is all right if you don’t believe in me anymore. You can do anything your conscience dictates to you, and you will be happy.”
Balaban insisted it was not a dream. He said later, “Afterwards I thought I could do anything and I was not frightened of the law.”
In 1946, he spent time in a psychiatric hospital for depression. Upon his release and after a holiday, he obtained an engineering degree. Later, he joined the Rumanian army but, when he was arrested for a military offence, escaped to France in 1947.
In France, his depression returned. One afternoon in Paris, he met a woman, Riva Kwas, and accompanied her to her room to have sex. For some reason known only to Balaban, he became furious with the unsuspecting woman and put his hands around her neck, strangling her to death. “I did not have any intention of killing her, but I had the feeling I had to,” he said. He was never convicted for this crime in France.
Balaban emigrated to Australia in 1951 at the age of twenty-nine. Despite working at various jobs, his depression again reared its ugly head and caused Balaban to believe everybody was against him because he was a newly-arrived migrant.
He married Thelma Cadd in 1952, living with her and her son and her mother above a café near a popular market that still thrives today.
Despite getting married, Balaban’s mental state did not improve. He blamed his unhappiness on his wife, Thelma, who retaliated by complaining about his erratic behaviour. In his desire to escape his wife’s criticism, Balaban spent a great deal of time away from home drinking at the Royal Admiral Hotel a few blocks away. There, he met a woman, Zora Kusic, who invited Balaban back to her house.
After the couple had sex, Zora made the fatal mistake of admitting to Balaban she was a sex worker. She asked him for five pounds (about ten dollars). Balaban felt the same disgust as he had for Riva Kwas, the woman he’d murdered five years before in Paris.
He strangled the unwitting woman, then cut Zora’s throat and slit open her chest and stomach. In an unsworn statement, he was reported to have said: “I did not feel sorry for killing Kusic and I think I was quite justified in doing so, because anybody could tell she was a low woman and deserved to die.”
Balaban was arrested in January 1953 and sent to trial but, amazingly, he was released due to a lack of evidence! He returned to live with his wife in February.
Balaban’s marriage did not improve and the familiar black dog of depression continued to nip at his heels . On the 11th April 1953, Balaban went out for a drink and attacked a shop assistant, Dorothy Rowan, in a toilet in a popular park. She told the police Balaban hit her face and grabbed her throat as he attempted to kiss her. After Dorothy fought him off, Balaban ran away.
“I found a bar of iron and put it in my pocket in case somebody attacked me and then I could hurt him,” he later told police. True to his word, Balaban attacked several people with the iron bar, one of them, an innocent man lying on the banks of the city’s River Torrens with his girlfriend. Balaban said “I don’t know why I hit him with the iron bar, but I disapproved of him as I do of people lying on the banks of the Torrens and making love. Everyone knows that that is a very bad thing to do.”
Balaban finally returned to his home above the café, heavy-hearted, covered in blood, tired, dirty and desperately unhappy.
Balaban dreaded what his wife would say when she saw him. It was then he made a sudden, fateful decision. “I decided in an instant to kill my wife because she was the cause of my condition and of me fighting that night,” Balaban stated.
Balaban took a claw hammer and beat Thelma to death. He then killed his wife’s mother because he said she also ‘made me unhappy’. When Balaban’s stepson, Philip, sat up and cried, Balaban killed him with the hammer deciding it was best that the boy die so he would not live ‘under a shadow’ (Balaban’s words) for the rest of his life.
Balaban turned his final attention to Verna Manie, a café employee sleeping on the premises. Balaban claimed she had been stealing money from the shop and that she always took his wife’s side in their arguments. Verna however managed to escape by jumping out of a second floor window onto the pavement below. When he was arrested, Balaban said: “I only killed those at the Sunshine Café because they deserved to be killed.”
John Balaban was arrested, then tried and sentenced to death by hanging.
However, Balaban’s defence counsel appealed the death sentence on the grounds of insanity. Psychiatrist, Dr H M Southwood, stated that Balaban suffered from schizophrenia, “… a mental disorder where the sufferer did not have normal judgement and was unable to distinguish clearly between what he imagined and what was really so.”
However, Dr Birch, Superintendent of South Australian Government Mental Hospitals gave evidence that John Balaban was not mentally disordered but that he definitely possessed an abnormal personality. He said that when he interviewed Balaban after the Sunshine Café murders, Balaban told him he killed his wife because she made his life a misery. Later interviews with Balaban proved to Dr Birch that Balaban “… knew the nature and quality of his acts.”
While in Adelaide Gaol, awaiting his execution, Balaban compared himself to Napoleon and bragged that he (Balaban) was a great man, just misunderstood. He continued with his delusions of grandeur: “My poor Thelma was my Empress Josephine. It is a pity she had to die. Caesar, too, held the power of life and death, as did I. Caesar was remembered by the world and I, too, will be remembered by the world.”
When Balaban heard that his appeal on the grounds of insanity had failed, he grabbed an elderly warder at the Adelaide Gaol by the throat then punched him in the face. Two younger warders were nearby and came to the older man’s assistance. According to newspaper reports, Balaban received two punches in the face and was marched back to’ his cell to await his execution. It is said that the last days of Balaban’s life were spent playing chess.
At eight o’clock a.m. on 26th August 1953, John Balaban became the forty-second person to be hanged in the Adelaide Gaol.
A contemporary newspaper delivered the following report: “Balaban had not shaved for days and, with hair unkempt and dirty, stubble covering his bruised face, he looked the popular conception of a depraved murderer… However… in a peculiar calm, which appeared to have overcome him, he quietly submitted to the executioner’s final adjustment of the noose around his neck and within seconds, the loud click of the gallows tumbler signified to prisoners throughout the gaol that Balaban had paid the supreme penalty.”
Balaban was the first ‘new Australian’ (a term used to describe migrants who came to Australia following World War Two ) to be hanged in South Australia. He was buried in the gaol grounds in Murderers’ Row.
Balaban’s ghost is still said to haunt Adelaide Gaol. Many have seen and ‘felt’ his malevolent presence while attending the popular ghost tours run by the Gaol.
While I can pity Balaban for his troubled background and the resulting depression and alcoholism that plagued him throughout his life, my sympathies lie fairly and squarely with his innocent victims.
Like many serial killers, Balaban was a psychopath. He took pleasure in inflicting violence and pain upon others. He refused to take any responsibility for his actions and even blamed his victims for driving him to commit his terrible crimes.
On the day following his death, an anonymous notice appeared in the local newspaper, The Advertiser: ‘Tho’ 1 walk thro’ the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’
However, this was the only expression of sympathy John Balaban ever received.
By all accounts, Balaban died friendless. Despite the police closing off the Gaol Road to deter anti-death penalty campaigners on the morning of his death, not a single person turned up to protest his execution.
Balaban’s only memorial is his name and the date of his execution scratched on the brick of an internal prison wall.
It is still there today.
