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The Snowtown Serial Murders

Never before in the annals of multiple homicide has there been a gang of serial killers. Couples, yes. But never a group larger than two torturing and killing in harmony. Never, that is, until Snowtown. And as if to add insult to their already despicable crimes, the gang went on cashing their victims’ welfare cheques and using their credit cards until they were caught.

Before Thursday, 20 May 1999, Snowtown, about 150 kilometres north of the South Australian capital Adelaide, was best known as a sleepy rural hamlet with a nostalgic feel, and ideal land for sheep grazing and wheat growing. But that all changed for the population of around 550 when, in the closing stages of a year-long missing persons investigation, authorities found various remains of eight different victims decomposing in hydrochloric acid in six black 44-gallon plastic barrels in the vault of a disused branch of the State Bank of South Australia. The death toll connected to the ‘bodies in the barrels’ case would eventually rise to 12, shocking the nation and making it Australia’s most prolific serial killing to date.

Knives sat on top of some of the barrels. A variac machine used to give electric shocks was also found in the bank building on the small town’s main street. Police wearing breathing apparatus looked inside the barrels, and found clothing and random body parts, including severed hands and 15 human feet. One of the officers present that day, and the first to find the barrels, Detective Steve McCoy, later recalled the shocking scene. ‘The stench was unbearable,’ he remembered four years after the gruesome discovery. ‘It was the stench of what I would say was rotting flesh, rotting bodies, human bodies. It was putrid. It permeated your hair, your clothing … everything you had on the stench got into. It was horrific.’

Speaking for the prosecution in the eventual court case, Wendy Abraham QC described how rubber gloves, handcuffs, rope and tape used in the torture killings were found strewn throughout the bank, and said: ‘A number of [victims] had been dismembered, with legs and feet removed from their bodies, or they had been cut. One had his hands handcuffed behind his back and his legs tied together. More than one of the bodies had marks consistent with burn marks.’

There were ropes around necks, and heads with gags still stuffed in their mouths. ‘It was a scene from the worst nightmare you’ve ever had,’ said another police officer who attended the scene. ‘I don’t think any of us was prepared for what we saw.’

An examination by a leading pathologist would later conclude that prolonged torture had taken place using common everyday tools such as pliers, pincers and clamps – some of these were found in the bank. After the victims were tortured, they were strangled or asphyxiated.

One of the victims was placed in a bath after being viciously attacked with clubs. The murderers then beat him repeatedly about the genitals and crushed a toe with a pair of pliers before garrotting the man with a piece of rope and a tyre lever. Another victim received electric shocks to his testicles and penis. After his toe was crushed and his ears and nose burnt with lit cigarettes, he choked to death on his mouth gag.

Information received by the authorities suggested that the remains had been in storage behind the vault’s 10-centimetre thick metal door for up to three months, but the roots of the ‘bodies in the barrel’ case went back much further.

The man believed to be the first victim, Clinton Douglas Trezise, was just 22 in August 1992 when he was killed and buried in a shallow grave at Lower Light, 50 kilometres north of Adelaide. Clinton’s skeletal remains weren’t uncovered until 16 August 1994. When the discovery of the body was reported on the Australia’s Most Wanted television program, John Justin Bunting is alleged to have told James Spyridon Vlassakis – an accomplice in later murders – ‘That’s my handiwork.’

Bunting was 32 years old when police found the bodies in the barrels. He met his main accomplice in the horrifying string of murders, Robert Joe Wagner, in 1991, when he (Bunting) moved into Wagner’s house at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbusry North – the address where Trezise was reportedly murdered and where authorities would later find the remains of two other bodies. Described by neighbours as ‘brooding’ and ‘illiterate’, Wagner was 27 when the bodies were found. For the most part, Wagner and Bunting remained reclusive strangers in the small community. As a result, the people of Snowtown tended to leave them to themselves.

Though not a lot has come to light about Bunting’s past, it is believed he was the victim of sexual abuse, and he harboured a strong and deep resentment for those he believed to be homosexuals and paedophiles – people he would allegedly describe as ‘dirty’. Indeed, observers of the Snowtown trial soon came to believe that the crux of the case seemed to rest within Bunting’s seething hatred. It seemed he had made it his life’s work to seek revenge upon, and punish people he suspected to be homosexuals and paedophiles – and he seemed to think they were the same thing.

His friend Wagner was said to be a white supremacist who told neighbours that he ‘and his friends’ hated homosexuals and Asians. He is also said to have been a member of the National Action group. Wagner had been taken away from his family and reportedly forced into a homosexual relationship at the age of 14 by transvestite and convicted paedophile Barry Lane. Lane liked to go by the name Vanessa; he would become a victim in the bizarre murder spree.

Those responsible for the killings – Bunting, Wagner, James Spyridon Vlassakis and another alleged accomplice, Mark Ray Haydon – would later be described by authorities as ‘a group that preyed on itself’. The men also seemed to live in their own world, a world where the shocking was commonplace and vulnerable people were routinely singled out for brutal slaying. After their victims were tortured to the brink of death and then murdered, the men would continue to raid their bank accounts, stealing near $100,000 in social security benefits over time.

Thanks to information already gathered in relation to the missing persons case, police swooped the day after the bodies were discovered in the acid-filled barrels. Bunting, Wagner and Haydon were arrested and charged with one count of murder ‘of a person unknown between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999’. Authorities expected to lay further charges in the future. All men were remanded in custody while police made a grim search for more bodies.

Police wouldn’t know the full extent of what had happened to the Snowtown victims until the arrest of Vlassakis, then 19, on 2 June 1999.

Vlassakis would go on to plead guilty in 2001 to four killings and turn star witness for the Crown, an action that saw his eventual sentence reduced – and brought to light some of the most shocking tales of torture ever heard in an Australian court. The young man spilled information on everything from the stench of death in the barrels to the sound of the victims’ screams. He also told of toes being crushed by pliers, decapitated heads being held up and offered for kisses, and of sparklers being inserted into the penis of one victim.

Like Wagner (and Bunting, it is thought), Vlassakis had been sexually abused as a teenager. When he was at his lowest, filled with self-loathing and being molested by his half-brother Troy Youde, he met Bunting – through Vlassakis’s own vulnerable mother, Elizabeth Harvey. Vlassakis was tormented by his hate, and by what he felt was an inability to save himself and his siblings from the unwanted attentions of family friend and paedophile Jeffrey Payne. Bunting set about drawing the distressed teenager out of his shell. The older man took the youth riding on his motorcycle and soon became something of a father figure to him.

Before long, Bunting became the first person Vlassakis trusted enough to tell about his abuse. Feeling guilty, Vlassakis then moved away from the family home and went to live with Bunting, who set about grooming the youngster for violence.

Bunting became so obsessed by what he perceived as his mission against those he saw as ‘dirty’ that he created what came to be known as ‘The Spider Wall’ (a reference to the colloquial term for paedophiles, ‘rock spiders’). Pinned to the wall in a small bedroom in the Waterloo Corner Road house, the Spider Wall was a detailed diagram that had names and contact details for people he believed were paedophiles and homosexuals. The diagram was covered in post-it notes and cross-referenced by links of coloured wool. According to one witness who had visited the house, ‘On a few occasions the Friday night thing was to go into the room … [Bunting would] close his eyes and walk up to the wall, and whichever card he’d touch he would take down and ring the person and abuse them over the phone.’

Also stuck on the wall was a chart that had been written on the back of an anti-paedophile leaflet. In the centre of the chart was a single name, ‘Barry’ – Barry Lane, the transvestite and paedophile who had forced the teenage Wagner into a homosexual relationship. From Lane’s name spread a twisting maze of lines connecting him to dozens of other people Bunting considered to be paedophiles.

In Bunting’s eyes, Lane was a pivotal figure in his self-proposed mission because of the abuse Lane had committed on Wagner. Bunting and Wagner also gathered information on other paedophiles from Lane; it was Bunting’s friendship with Wagner that loosened Lane’s psychological grip on him.

Lane and Wagner had lived together in Salisbury North, one block from the Waterloo Corner Road house, for eight years. Lane was known for his flamboyant dress sense – he often wore bright pink hotpants and had dyed his hair blond before renaming himself Vanessa. Neighbours described him as ‘outgoing’, but he was sometimes persecuted by the local community because of his paedophilia predilections. The abuse was mainly verbal, though there were times when Lane and Wagner’s house was pelted with eggs. The pair – both of whom received disability benefits – eventually built a high fence around their home. They also kept four Doberman dogs on the property.

Lane was closely linked to the first victim in the Snowtown murders, Clinton Trezise. The young gay man from Adelaide’s northern suburbs was a lover of Lane’s. Wagner and Bunting met Trezise through Lane, though neither ended up being formally charged with his murder.

The next victim, Ray Davies, was also a friend of Lane’s. Davies lived in a caravan at the back of Suzanne Allen’s house, near Bunting and Wagner’s Waterloo Corner Road home. Bunting was convinced Davies was a paedophile. On 26 December 1995, Allen’s daughter heard allegations that Davies had abused her children. After the news got out, Davies was stabbed and later strangled to death by Wagner and Elizabeth Harvey, Vlassakis’s mother. His body was buried in the backyard at 203 Waterloo Corner Road.

It wasn’t until late 1996 that the next killing took place. Suzanne Allen seemed angry and depressed when she disappeared. Her remains were eventually found stuffed in 11 separate garbage bags and buried in the same backyard as Davies. Bunting maintains that she was already dead from natural causes when he and Wagner found her. Like eight of the victims, Allen’s social security benefits were stolen after her death.

Bunting referred to their next victim, Michael Gardiner, as ‘the biggest homo’. An obvious enemy for Bunting because of his lifestyle, Gardiner disappeared in September 1997. In fact, Bunting and Wagner had taken him to Murray Bridge, 80 kilometres north of Adelaide – Bunting’s home at the time – and strangled him in the shed. Gardiner has the unfortunate distinction of being the first victim whose body ended up in a barrel.

Considering the seething hatred inside Wagner and Bunting, it’s little surprise that Barry Lane was their next victim. Lane was in a gay relationship with a diagnosed schizophrenic by the name of Thomas Trevilyan when he (Lane) disappeared in October 1997. It is alleged that Trevilyan played a part in the torture murder of his one-time lover.

Lane was beaten and tortured before he died. His toes were squeezed between pliers, among other indignities, but according to Vlassakis, talking about Lane’s murder had little effect on Bunting or Wagner. ‘It’s like, you know, when you go to a shop with a young kid and you buy them a toy and the kid gets really excited … [Their reaction] was like that,’ Vlassakis later explained. ‘When they squeezed the toenail, Barry screamed more, which obviously hurt more.’

After a while Wagner finally strangled Lane, putting him out of his misery. In his own words, according to Vlassakis, the transvestite had been ‘made good’. His body was then put in a barrel and later taken to the bank vault.

Whether or not Trevilyan did indeed have anything to do with Lane’s murder will never be known for sure, because he was the next victim in a seemingly endless trail of terror.

After Lane’s death, Trevilyan moved in with Wagner and a woman he was having a relationship with, Vicki Mills, into a house in Elizabeth Grove, in Adelaide’s north. But on Melbourne Cup day in November 1997, Mills told Wagner and Bunting that she wanted the man out of the house. The young man’s body was eventually found hanging from a tree in Kersbrook.

The next victim was Gavin Porter, a drug-addicted drifter. Porter was Vlassakis’s best friend – the pair had even received treatment together at the same methadone program. Porter now lived with Vlassakis’s mother, Elizabeth Harvey, as well as Bunting and others. Bunting and Wagner tried to strangle the young man in April 1998. After a failed attempt – the rope got caught around the helpless victim’s nose – the men eventually succeeded. They then stashed the body in the Murray Bridge shed before transporting it to the bank vault.

It was in this shed, confronted by the bodies of Lane and Gardiner in barrels, and with Gavin Porter dead on the floor, that Vlassakis became convinced that the shocking stories of murder he had been told were true.

Vlassakis’s half-brother Troy Youde was the next to meet a gruesome death – he was also the first victim that Vlassakis played an active part in the murder of. At the age of 13, Vlassakis had been sexually abused by Youde on a number of occasions. In 1998 Youde was living with Bunting, Vlassakis and his and Vlassakis’s mother, Elizabeth Harvey. One night in August that year he was woken by Vlassakis, Bunting and Wagner. Mark Ray Haydon was allegedly the fourth person in the murder party. The men then attacked and handcuffed Youde before taking him to the bathroom, where Bunting and Wagner tortured him. As Vlassakis later recalled in his testimony, ‘John [Bunting] said, “We’d better make sure Troy’s dead.” So Robert stood on Troy’s chest and the air from Troy’s lungs came out of his nose and it made a grunting noise. John and Robert laughed and Robert kept pushing on Troy’s chest.’

Vlassakis delivered the final blow by strangling his tormentor. Youde’s body was another that eventually showed up in a barrel in the bank vault.

The toll continued to rise at an alarmingly regular rate. Fred Brooks – nephew of a later victim, Elizabeth Haydon – disappeared in September 1998. He was hated by Bunting, and was tortured horrendously over an extended period before finally being killed and moved to the Snowtown bank vault. With Vlassakis again taking part, Brooks was handcuffed and thumbcuffed. He had a ‘smiley’ face burnt into his forehead with a lit cigarette, and he received electric shocks via the variac machine. Water was injected into his testicles with a syringe, and sparklers were inserted into the eye of his penis and left to burn down.

The next man to die, Gary O’Dwyer, lived near Bunting in Murray Bridge. He had drinks with Wagner, Bunting and Vlassakis on the night he was murdered. While the men were sitting around, Wagner grabbed him. O’Dwyer was then beaten by all three men before Wagner and Bunting tortured and killed him. His body, too, was moved to the bank vault. His bank account was also accessed by the group. Another thing O’Dwyer shared with several other victims was a voice recording of his so-called confessions before he died. Some of these were later played down phone lines to the deceased’s family and friends to convince them the victims were still alive.

The ‘voices from the dead’ were also played in court during the trial. It is obvious that O’Dwyer is in pain when he is made to say, ‘I’m Gary O’Dwyer, I’m a paedophile. Now I’m really happy I’ve had treatment.’ A voice identified as Bunting’s then asks, ‘Did you like the treatment you got?’ to which O’Dwyer replies, ‘No.’ After admitting that the treatment ‘hurt’, O’Dwyer is asked, ‘Are you ever going to fuck another little girl or boy?’ He answers, ‘No I’m not … I know I will get hurt if I hurt someone else.’

The next victim was Elizabeth Haydon, the wife of Bunting’s other best friend, Mark Haydon, a woman Bunting is alleged to have referred to as ‘scabs ’n pus’. In November 1998, Bunting told Vlassakis that he and Wagner had strangled her to death in a bathtub. Her body was also found in the Snowtown bank vault.

The final victim was Vlassakis’s 21-year-old stepbrother David Johnson. Johnson’s murder occurred on 9 May 1999. Bunting told Vlassakis to tell Johnson about a cheap computer for sale in Snowtown. When Johnson arrived at the disused bank with Vlassakis, Wagner grabbed him from behind and Bunting handcuffed him. Johnson was later beaten and tortured, and another ‘voices from the dead’ tape was made. His bank keycard and personal identification number were then stolen. Bunting sent Wagner and Vlassakis to access the account at a highway roadhouse, but they were unsuccessful. When they returned, Johnson lay dead on the floor. Bunting said the man had grabbed a knife and fought for his life until Bunting strangled him. The men then cut up Johnson’s body to fit it into a barrel.

The authorities got their first real break in the Barry Lane missing persons case when they checked Mr Lane’s bank account and found that it had been accessed from a service station in the north of Adelaide. After checking surveillance tapes, they identified Wagner. Bunting’s name came up as an associate.

On 3 July 1999, Wagner, Bunting and Haydon were jointly charged with 10 counts of murder. Vlassakis was charged with murdering a then unnamed person. No charges were laid in relation to the death of Clinton Trezise. The investigation into his murder continues.

After pleading guilty to four murders, Vlassakis was given a life sentence with a non-parole period of 26 years. The judge said that if he hadn’t given evidence against his accomplices, the non-parole period would have been 42 years.

Bunting was later found guilty of 11 murders, and Wagner of seven. They each received automatic life sentences – this is mandatory under South Australian law. Neither Bunting nor Wagner showed any emotion as the judge handed down the court’s finding. The father of one victim and stepfather of another, Marcus Johnson, told a reporter, ‘I feel there’s no remorse there, none at all.’

At Mark Haydon’s trial, which concluded in December 2004, the jury of six men and six women unanimously convicted him on five separate counts of assisting John Bunting, Robert Wagner and James Vlassakis in five of the murders. They failed to reach a verdict on a sixth charge of assisting the killers in another murder.

But after a further deliberation of almost 37 hours over five days, the jury could not arrive at a decision on the two murder charges Haydon had faced – relating to the deaths of his wife Elizabeth and Troy Youde in 1998.

Supreme Court judge John Sulan bound Haydon over until 2005 (the date was not set at the time of writing), when he will hand down the sentence on the guilty verdicts and decide whether or not Haydon will be retried on the two murder charges and the sixth charge of assisting in murder.