How Australia’s worst serial killers John Bunting and Robert Wagner stained Snowtown with their sadistic kill games

For the South Australian farming borough of the same name, however, the name Snowtown is synonymous with death.

The place will forever be remembered for the eight dismembered bodies found in six barrels hidden in a disused bank vault.

Police found the body-filled barrels 15 years ago this week.

It was a discovery that led to a minority of locals taking advantage and cashing in.

Magnets carrying slogans such as “Snowtown, SA — You’ll have a barrel of fun” quickly went on sale as souvenir items.

But the majority of those who live in Snowtown remain reviled and shocked; saddened Australia’s most prolific and sadistic serial killers plied their trade at all, let alone stained the rural township by choosing it as their dumping ground.

The stigma on the town remains.

In an effort to repaint the town’s image, local schoolchildren once called for it to be renamed Rosetown.

Unfortunately, such a change would never have sweetened the air there.

Despite the malignant tumour having long been removed from the bank vault, Snowtown will forever represent a macabre scar on the Australian map.

The main player in this gut-wrenching case of sadistic torture and murder is John Justin Bunting.

In true devil’s style, his aim was to convince those around him his inner demon did not exist.

A Svengali-like character with ulterior charm, Bunting had the ability to propagate and convince.

He dragged people to his evil level.

“When I first met John he was so polite, so well-spoken, so well-mannered,” his young pawn, James Vlassakis, would tell the South Australian Supreme Court.

“He did not seem to have a nasty bone in his body.”

But Bunting was a man who took depraved pleasure in torturing and killing people he believed to be a scourge on society — or the “waste”, as he referred to them.

He was the same man who liked to look into the eyes of his dying victims so he could “pinpoint” their moment of death.

The same man who laughed and joked while administering fatal torture.

The same man likened to infamous American mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 young men and boys during his reign of terror.

Between December 1995 and May 1999, Bunting — along with close friend Robert Joe Wagner — committed a selective killing spree in low socio-economic suburbs north of Adelaide.

Also involved was another of Bunting’s acolytes, a besotted older friend named Mark Ray Haydon.

In the SA Supreme Court, prosecutor Wendy Abraham, QC, told a jury that Bunting was the driving and dominant force.

“In some counts a possible motive was the accused men’s attitude to paedophiles and homosexuals,” Ms Abraham said of a string of 10 murders.

“I suggest in relation to these murders there was another motive — that is enjoyment. You’ve heard evidence that in relation to a number of the murders, torture was inflicted on victims.

“You have heard that Mr Bunting and Mr Wagner bragged — they laughed about what they were doing.”

To inflict torture, Bunting and Wagner used an array of items, including an electric shock machine, hand and thumb cuffs, cigarettes, garrottes, pliers, sparklers, syringes and hammers.

They even cooked and ate the flesh of one of their victims, a court was told.

The eight victims found encased in the barrels in May 1999 had been de-fleshed and dismembered.

They were: 19-year-old cross-dressing homosexual Michael Gardiner; Wagner’s 42-year-old former partner Barry Lane; 29-year-old drug addict Gavin Porter; Vlassakis’s 21-year-old stepbrother Troy Youde; Mark Haydons’ sister-in-law’s 17-year-old son Frederick Brooks; 29-year-old invalid pensioner Gary O’Dwyer, Mark Haydon’s 37-year-old wife Elizabeth; and Vlassakis’ 24-year-old de facto half brother David Johnson.

In the days after the grisly bank find, detectives discovered two dismembered bodies buried in one of Bunting’s former backyards — at a house in Salisbury North.

They were: 26-year-old pensioner Ray Davies and 47-year-old Suzanne Allen, one of Bunting’s former partners.

(Bunting and Wagner were never convicted of Ms Allen’s death. It was claimed she died of natural causes.)

Another victim, 18-year-old schizophrenic boy Thomas Trevilyan, had been found hanging from a tree in November 1997.

Previously, back in 1992, Bunting had beaten a 22-year-old man named Clinton Trezise to death and buried his body at a place called Lower Light.

IN 2011, an Australian-made feature film about Bunting and his gang’s murder spree was released.

It was simply entitled Snowtown.

No other words were needed.

The film was director Justin Kurzel’s debut feature.

Many thought it was an ambitious decision to take such a morbid and brutal case and try and turn it into entertainment.

Snowtown was a film that divided critics, but one that scooped up several Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards.

In a review, Herald Sun film critic Leigh Paatsch wrote: “Impressively directed, brilliantly acted and a complete work of focused, brutal power, Snowtown stands as one of the most impacting films ever made in this country.

“However, by virtue of its disturbing subject matter, the exploits of John Bunting — our most infamous serial killer — Snowtown is an uncompromising ordeal that will be too much for most viewers.

“What we have here is modern cinema at its most commendable, and yet, also at its most unwatchable. You have been warned.

“Once you enter Snowtown forgetting is not an option, and forgiveness will not be sought.”

As Paatsch pointed out, the film was set exclusively on the northern fringes of Adelaide, which were presented “as a drab suburban wasteland as hard on the eye as it is hard on those that live there”.

Paatsch went on: “Almost miraculously, Kurzel and (writer) Shaun Grant make a compelling argument — on both a sociological and psychological level — as to how Bunting’s unprecedented brand of evil was able to thrive in a place like this.”

Actor Daniel Henshall, who channelled Bunting for the lead role, told TNT Magazine: “He was only five foot four inches tall and he comes into a community he’s not part of and wins them over. How does he do that? He must have an amazing ability with people.

“From all accounts, from people who had six degrees of separation, he was really normal — he fixed your car, he made you dinner, he looked after your kids. Isn’t it unnerving?”

Director Kurzel told Filmmaker Magazine he found the “ordinariness” and “banality” the most horrific part of the story.

“These guys would be killing people over two days while they were watching TV or cooking. They normalised some kind of extraordinary brutality.

“John Bunting listened to people. That’s what his true skill was. He was able to listen and empower them.”

IN December 1991, Bunting and his then wife moved in to the suburb of Salisbury North; a low socio-economic area.

Barry Lane and Robert Wagner, a couple living nearby, introduced themselves.

Before long, Wagner was spending an inordinate amount of time with Bunting, who filled his head with hateful ideologies about gays and paedophiles.

Wagner bought in and became as obsessed as his new overlord.

As he continued to stitch himself into the local fabric, Bunting ingratiated himself into the life of single-mother Elizabeth Harvey.

She had teenage children, one of whom was 14-year-old James Vlassakis.

In true Svengali style, Bunting groomed Vlassakis.

Bunting became a father figure to the boy, and filled the kid’s head with his hateful propaganda.

“I looked up to him,” Vlassakis later told the SA Supreme Court.

“He was like a father figure … that I never had.”

At age 15, Vlassakis moved in with Bunting.

It was then that Bunting exposed Vlassakis to his world of vile prejudice and hatred.

Bunting had constructed a weblike collage on a wall in a spare bedroom.

It consisted of Post-It notes attached by pink and blue strands of wool.

“They were set up like a family tree,” one witness said in court.

On the notes, Bunting had written the names of alleged paedophiles from local districts.

“He called it the ‘spider wall’, or the ‘wall of spiders’,” Vlassakis would say in court.

“You could tell that he hated them (gay people and paedophiles). The way he talked about them — a lot of anger, a lot of hatred.”

(In colloquial terms, paedophiles are sometimes referred to as “rock spiders”.)

By 1995, Bunting and Vlassakis were vandalising the homes of people they thought were rock spiders, or “dirties”as they also called them.

It was about a year later when Bunting admitted to him that he’d a killed a man — Ray Davies, whom he believed was a paedophile.

Bunting claimed Vlassakis’s mother (who later died of cancer) had stabbed Mr Davies in the leg before Wagner strangled him with jumper leads.

In court, Vlassakis detailed Bunting’s recollections of torturing Mr Davies before he was murdered.

“Robert Wagner and himself … put him in the boot of the Torana. They drove to Bakara, they sat him in the bathtub, they used a pole — hit Ray Davies around the groin area.

“(Bunting) said that his balls enlarged — doubled their size.”

According to Bunting, they’d made Mr Davies “good”.

Vlassakis said of that saying: “It means to be killed.”

Mr Davies — last seen alive on December 26, 1995 — had lived in a caravan in a Salisbury North backyard.

The occupier of that property was Suzanne Allen, a woman said to have been infatuated by Bunting.

Mr Davies’ body was buried in the backyard of Bunting’s home in Waterloo Corner Rd.

Eleven months later, Suzanne Allen disappeared and ended buried in the same hole.

Cross-dressing gay man Michael Gardiner became the next target.

He lived just around the corner from Wagner.

Mr Gardiner disappeared in September 1997, presumably after being tortured and strangled.

He ended in a barrel.

A month later, Wagner and Bunting preyed on alleged paedophile Barry Lane.

While Bunting despised Mr Lane, he’d spent time with him in order to procure names of child abusers so he could add them to his “spider wall” list.

Mr Lane was tortured with pliers and forced to call his elderly mother to say he was moving to Queensland.

While listening to her son’s strange phone call, she heard muffled voices “giggling and laughing” in the background.

Mr Lane, who Bunting claimed had helped in the disposal of Clinton Trezise’s body, was strangled and rolled up in carpet.

He ended in one of the barrels.

In court, Vlassakis said Bunting and Wagner behaved like excited children after Mr Lane’s death.

“Do you know when you go to a shop with a young kid and you buy them a toy and the kid’s really excited? It was like that,” Vlassakis told the jury.

In the months after the murder, Wagner frequently claimed Mr Lane’s Centrelink benefits.

Schizophrenic teenager Thomas Trevilyan upset Wagner by frightening his de facto’s daughter with a knife.

Mr Trevilyan was also seen as a liability, telling people he was involved in Barry Lane’s murder.

His body was found hanging from a tree near Kersbrook on November 5, 1997.

A crate was found near his feet.

It was a murder disguised as suicide.

Bunting told Vlassakis Mr Trevilyan was killed because he was starting to ``f--- up’’.

HAVING fallen under Bunting’s spell, Vlassakis was sucked into a spiral to hell.

A poly drug user, he’d graduated from marijuana to amphetamines and heroin.

Vlassakis used drugs and lived with Gavin Porter.

The two had shared a house before moving in with Bunting in Murray Bridge in 1988.

Bunting often described the drug-addicted Porter as a ``waste”, although he did have one thing going for him — he was claiming Centrelink benefits.

On the night Mr Porter was murdered, Vlassakis took his younger brothers to the drive-in.

When he returned, Bunting took him to the back shed and showed him Mr Porter’s body.

A rope was said to be pulled tight around Mr Porter’s neck.

Next to the body was a barrel containing the bodies of Mr Gardiner and Mr Lane.

Bunting ordered Vlassakis to look inside.

“The lid was taken off the barrel,” Vlassakis told the Supreme Court.

“John said, ‘That’s Barry. That’s Barry’s arse. He also said Michael Gardiner was inside that same barrel. It was just a mess — just ugly.”

Vlassakis later helped Bunting put Mr Porter’s body in a barrel, and lied to people about his dead mate’s whereabouts.

The killers claimed Mr Porter’s Centrelink payments.

Vlassakis’s descent into hell continued.

In August 1998, he was coerced into killing his half-brother Troy Youde — a bloke who had been violent towards him in the past.

“John Bunting always disliked Troy, even before I had told him what he had done (to me),” Vlassakis would say in court.

On the night in question, Bunting and Wagner — armed with jack handles — woke Vlassakis and handed him a set of handcuffs and a wooden chair leg.

“He (Bunting) said this is your time to get your revenge,” Vlassakis told the jury.

Mr Youde was awoken and beaten, handcuffed and frogmarched to the bathroom.

He was ordered to call Bunting “Lord Sir”, Wagner “God” and Vlassakis “Master”.

“I walked into the bathroom and knelt down and told Troy to apologise,” Vlassakis said.

Only days from his 22nd birthday, Mr Youde was bashed and tortured with pliers in the bathtub.

He was forced to repeat various things into a tape recorder — abusive comments about a brother and the fact he was leaving and going to Perth.

The torture continued to music from a CD player — US band Live’s album Throwing Copper was the choice.

In prolonged fashion, Wagner strangled Mr Youde with blue rope.

“John turned around and said he could do this all day to Troy, that it was fun” Vlassakis recounted in court.

“Robert was laughing. John was laughing.”

During the strangle torture, Bunting stared into Mr Youde’s eye.

“He (Bunting) said he enjoyed staring into their eyes when they were being strangled,” Vlassakis said in court.

“He said he could pinpoint the moment when the person died.”

Mr Youde eventually died.

The men then wrapped the body in tied garbage bags and stored him in the shed before placing him in a barrel.

Bunting and Vlassakis later claimed some of his Centrelink payments.

About three weeks later, Vlassakis participated in the murder of Fred Brooks.

Mr Brooks and his mum Jodie Elliott, sister of Mark Haydon’s wife Elizabeth, had only recently moved to Adelaide from Queensland.

Bunting immediately viewed Mr Brooks as a ``dirty”, and told Vlassakis he believed the teenager was a paedophile.

There was no basis for that belief.

Mr Brooks was living in Murray Bridge when Bunting, Wagner and Vlassakis killed him during a depraved torture session in a bathtub — again with songs from the Throwing Copper album playing as the soundtrack.

He was forced to call Wagner “God” and Bunting “master”.

He was made to repeat into a tape recorder abusive phrases — including false confessions about having sexually abused young girls — and to reveal his PIN and other financial details.

Mr Brooks’ treatment was unimaginable.

While handcuffed and thumbcuffed semi-naked in a bath, he was punched and injected in his testicles.

He had electrodes attached to them.

Lit cigarette butts were placed in his nose and ears.

A lit sparkler was inserted in his penis.

He was bashed to death, wrapped in plastic and placed in the boot of a car.

According to a Court of Appeal judge: “After Brooks was murdered, Bunting described him as a ‘good one’ as he did not scream and he ‘took the pain’.

The car was kept in Mark Haydon’s shed before the body was placed in a barrel.

Ms Elliott reported her son as missing but withdrew that report after Elizabeth Haydon received a phone call from someone claiming to be Fred Brooks.

Gary O’Dwyer, 29, was a mentally impaired man with a limp who walked the streets.

Because he was “different”, Bunting picked him out and marked him for death.

“Look at that fag,” Bunting would often say to Vlassakis.

“He looks so much like Troy (Youde) … He’s a ‘dirty’. He needs to go to the clinic.”

Mr O’Dwyer was killed in late October 1998 after Bunting and Wagner told Vlassakis they wanted to “play” — or, in other words, torture someone and murder them.

Vlassakis knew Mr O’Dwyer well enough to talk to him over the fence, and got him and Bunting and Wagner together at his Murray Bridge house.

Mr O’Dwyer was plied with alcohol and, without warning, Wagner grabbed him from behind and handcuffed him behind his back.

He was taken into the kitchen where he was tortured in all manner of ways.

Before he died he, too, was forced to make false recorded statements for the benefit of his killers.

Mr O’Dwyer’s body was later put into a barrel.

The killers stole his furniture for personal use, and Bunting accessed his Centrelink payments.

Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth Haydon, was the next victim.

Bunting loathed her.

Wagner described her as a “low life” and a “whore”.

On November 21, 1998, Bunting and Wagner were left alone with Ms Haydon.

They dragged her to the bathroom where she was tortured and killed.

Bunting later told Vlassakis that Ms Haydon had said: ``If you want sex you only have to ask, you don’t have to go through all this.’’

She was left with a rope around her neck and a gag taped inside her mouth.

Her body was also put in a barrel.

Bunting and Haydon told Ms Elliott that her sister had “run off with another guy and wasn’t coming back”.

Four days after she disappeared, Ms Haydon was reported missing.

On November 26, 1998, detectives began an active investigation.

Bunting and Wagner were questioned.

In early 1999, Bunting had a concerned conversation with Vlassakis.

“He told me that the s--- had hit the fan, (and) he’s had to move the barrels,” Vlassakis told the Supreme Court.

“At that time he’d told me ... that he had murdered Elizabeth Haydon and that’s why the s--- had hit the fan — because the police were asking a lot of questions.”

The filled barrels were eventually moved to Snowtown, where Bunting and Haydon had leased the disused bank.

During one of their visits to the bank vault, Bunting pointed to the barrel he said contained Ms Haydon.

He invited Vlassakis to look inside it, saying: “She’s rotting nicely.”

Bunting and Wagner then joked about it.

But their murder spree was not done.

The last murder, on May 9, 1999, was committed while the suspected killers were under police audio surveillance.

The target: Vlassakis’s de facto half-brother David Johnson.

Bunting regarded Mr Johnson as a “yuppie”.

Vlassakis drove Mr Johnson to Snowtown, where it was said he could get a good price on a computer.

He was lured into the vault, and handcuffed and tortured and made to repeat phrases.

The torture attack was described as a “frenzy”.

Vlassakis said he and Wagner were sent out to a nearby service station to try Mr Johnson’s PIN.

When they returned Mr Johnson was dead; his own belt wrapped around his neck.

According to Vlassakis, Wagner got upset because he did not get to “play” with Mr Johnson before he died.

Mr Johnson was unceremoniously stuffed into one of the six barrels.

When detectives discovered the bodies in the barrels on May 20, 1999, they also found handcuffs, knives, gloves and other items used in the torture, mutilation and murders.

DNA evidence was present.

BUNTING, Wagner, Haydon and Vlassakis were charged.

Vlassakis was originally charged with five counts of murder.

He pleaded to four — those of Youde, Brooks, O’Dwyer and Johnson — while the fifth charge was dropped.

He told a court he just became “far too involved”.

“As I look back and reflect into the past, I wonder what went wrong and why I cannot change these terrible things I have done,” he said.

“I know that nothing I can ever say will justify the terrible way these people were viciously murdered and no one could ever deserve what happened to them. I hate myself for the fact I have done these degraded crimes.

“I have to live with the pain and suffering I have caused to the victims, families and friends, and it sickens me to think that I could even be involved in taking away the precious lives of their loved ones.

“I could kill myself tomorrow, but then I think this would be the easy way out ... I am sorry.”

In July 2002, Vlassakis, 22, was sentenced to life with a 26-year-minimum term and became a key prosecution witness against his co-accused.

Bunting and Wagner went to trial together.

It was a disturbing 11-month trial from which three jurors had to walk away.

Bunting faced 12 counts of murder.

Wagner, who was charged with 11, pleaded guilty to three — those relating to Lane, Brooks and Johnson.

The jury was told the sadistic duo were “in the business of killing”.

After deliberating for seven days, the jury found Bunting guilty of 11 murders. It found Wagner guilty of seven.

The jury could not reach a verdict on the Suzanne Allen murder charge.

It was determined the killers fleeced about $95,000 from their victims’ welfare benefits — “icing on the cake” as Bunting had described it.

In October 2003, Justice Brian Martin sentenced Bunting, 37, and Wagner, 31, to life without parole.

“The evidence given at trial has driven me to the conclusion that both of you are incapable of true rehabilitation,” Justice Martin told them.

“It is no exaggeration to say that, by 1999, you were in the business of killing for pleasure.”

The judge said while Bunting and Wagner had styled themselves as “vigilantes who took care of paedophiles”, many of their victims were neither gay nor paedophiles.

Bunting showed his contempt by sitting reading a book during the sentence hearing.

A deluded and defiant Wagner yelled out: “I decided to take action and I took action. Thank you.”

The duo unsuccessfully appealed their convictions.

Mark Haydon, who was said to have laughed when viewing his wife’s remains in the Snowtown bank vault, formed the third point of what was an evil triangle; an unholy trinity.

During Haydon’s separate trial, his sister-in-law Ms Elliott said that he, Bunting and Wagner were like “the three amigos”.

“They couldn’t be separated,” Ms Elliott said.

“Wherever Bunting went, Mark went. To me it appeared they were almost joined at the hip.”

Haydon, 47, was convicted of assisting in the murders of Gardiner, Lane, Porter, Brooks, O’Dwyer, Youde and his wife, Elizabeth Haydon.

In February 2006, Justice John Sulan sentenced Haydon to 25 years’ jail with an 18-year minimum.

“(Your actions) went far beyond being a passive onlooker,” Justice Sulan told him.

In May 2007, the outstanding Suzanne Allen murder charge against Bunting and Wagner was dropped — despite her body having been savagely mutilated.

That decision saddened and angered Ms Allen’s relatives and friends.

But it made no difference to Snowtown.

That farming community will never be the same place again after Bunting and his lieutenants brought their ghastly “play” games to town.

paul.anderson@news.com.au

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