remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame. A few stray locals eyeballing us suspiciously as we rolled down the main street, windows down, past the disused bank where they found the acid-filled barrels.
Where they found the bodies.
December 1999. It lingers in the memory. Roasting hot. Like Australian summers always are. A dry, scorching, unforgiving, relentless heat. I was moving from the Australian capital city of Canberra, back across the desert 3,718 kilometers (2,310 miles), to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia.
Just for fun, I decided to forgo the airlines and drive my car across the Nullarbor Plain, that vast, flat, empty, dry expanse that divides our major cities, east and west. My Perth-based buddy Scott flew across and came along for the ride. I mapped it out as a comfortable nine-day drive, stopping every night to rest and refuel.
The subsequent peripatetic journey went off without a hitch, bar one punctured tire, which I changed on the edge of the desert highway, while Scott kept watch to make sure a passing road train didn’t dissect my legs as they jutted out from under the car.
We took a few detours here and there to do some sightseeing. One such detour stands out to this day.
South Australia has an unfair reputation as the serial killer capital of Australia. It is their misfortune to have experienced quite an eclectic collection of serial murders over the decades. Perhaps none more bizarre than the ones that ended in the tiny northern town of Snowtown, population 467 (according to the last national census taken in 2016), some 152 kilometers (ninety-four miles) north up the A1 National Highway from the quaint capital city of Adelaide, known as the “city of churches.”
The case broke and made national and global headlines in May 1999. Eight murder victims found in six plastic barrels in a disused bank on the main street of sleepy Snowtown. When it was over, there were twelve bodies in total and four perpetrators in the most prolific case of serial murder in Australian history to date.
The murders really started in 1992 and weaved their way toward Snowtown down a long, twisted road. The perpetrators were John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and James Vlassakis. A fourth person, Mark Haydon, was later implicated in helping to dispose of the bodies.
There was no real reason for the murders, although an effort was made to use some of the victims’ identities to access social security (unemployment) payments and bank accounts. The victims were all known to the killers, all friends or casual acquaintances.
John Bunting was the ringleader in the killings. A former abattoir worker who professed a hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals, and who, like many ignorant people, thought they were one and the same. He accused many of the victims of these supposed sins. Like many individuals who become serial killers, Bunting had a childhood filled with neglect and abuse. Sexual abuse, in his case. No doubt it was the shame from the memory of it that led him to develop sociopathic tendencies, to detect weakness in others and exploit it. To hate anyone he suspected of being a deviant. History would show that Bunting’s psychopathic behavior and delight in torture increased as the cooling-off period between the murders decreased.
Robert Wagner, another damaged individual with a history of childhood abuse, was a neighbor Bunting befriended before the murders started. Mark Haydon was another neighbor roped in later down the path. James Vlassakis was the son of one of Bunting’s de facto lovers.
The murder spree itself was long and convoluted, a tale tinged with poverty, neglect, ignorance, addiction, and despair. Let’s start at the beginning to get a chronological understanding of how this whole mess transpired.
John Bunting had a terrible upbringing. Born in Queensland in 1966, at the age of eight he was sexually assaulted and beaten up by a friend’s older brother. Naturally this had an indelible effect on his psyche, as the incident was suppressed and never treated. In his early twenties, Bunting found work in an abattoir, where he derived great pleasure in slaughtering animals.
By the early nineties, Bunting was married but estranged from his wife, Veronica. They had no children. He moved into a rental property in Salisbury North, thirty-five kilometers (twenty-two miles) north of Adelaide, where he befriended two of his neighbors, Barry Lane and Robert Wagner. He quickly formed a bond with the two, using his domineering personality to get into their heads.
He impressed on them his hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals. This despite the fact that Lane was a practicing homosexual himself. The three social outcasts were united by poverty and unemployment.
Wagner had a very troubled upbringing, suffering at the hands of a violent stepfather. Lane was a crossdresser who called himself “Vanessa.” He groomed Wagner as a thirteen-year-old, and the two began a relationship. Lane was initially excused by Bunting because of his links to Wagner, who was totally under Bunting’s spell.
When they weren’t hanging around at Bunting’s ramshackle rental property listening to his anti-gay-and-pedophile rants, Lane and Wagner were befriending a young neighbor named Clinton Tresize, who had recently moved into the area. Clinton was outgoing and flamboyant in nature. When they described him to Bunting, the latter asked to be introduced. Obviously believing that Tresize was a homosexual, and therefore a pedophile, Bunting invited him round for tea on August 31, 1992. At this point Bunting had reached the stage where his inner rage was ready to boil over. As the young man sat unsuspecting on a sofa, Bunting snuck up behind him and bashed his head in with a shovel.
The killer called his two mates over, and they put the body in a car and drove it to a remote farm, where they interred it in a shallow grave. Despite Clinton’s sister attempting to file a missing persons report, most people thought he had willingly disappeared to start a new life. A report would not be filed until his mother did so three years later. Clinton Tresize’s skeletal remains were discovered on August 16, 1994. It would be another five years before he was officially identified.
In the months after this first murder, Bunting roped another gullible neighbor, Mark Haydon, into his cabal of misfits. Around this time, Bunting found himself a new sexual partner, Elizabeth Harvey, a divorcee. She moved into Bunting’s place with her two sons from a previous marriage, Troy Youde and James Vlassakis. Both boys had been sexually abused by their father, and Troy, the older brother, had also sexually abused James. Bunting quickly asserted his will over James, seeing in him another vulnerable, damaged soul to exploit.
Ray Davies was a twenty-six-year-old disabled pensioner living in a caravan not far from Bunting’s place. In December of 1995, he was falsely accused by his landlady of molesting a local child. Word got around the community, and it was a good enough excuse for Bunting to fly into a psychopathic rage. Bunting and Wagner dragged Davies into a car and drove him into the bush, where they gave him a severe beating. Then they took him back to Bunting’s house, where Bunting, Wagner, and Elizabeth Harvey tortured him and strangled him to death with some automotive jumper cables. As he grew more comfortable with the act of murder, Bunting started to get into the humiliation and torture of his victims, orchestrating his minions in how to do it and reveling in his power over life and death. He goaded Elizabeth into stabbing the already-dying victim.
Davies’s body was buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of Bunting’s house. He was not reported missing.
Bunting then met another woman who fell under his psychopathic spell. Suzanne Allen started to hang around his group of misfits, and the two quickly became lovers. Over time Bunting grew tired of her sexual demands, and, in November 1996, Allen disappeared. Years later, her dismembered body would be found in a shallow grave buried in Bunting’s backyard at the Salisbury North property, but her actual cause of death was never established. Bunting would claim that he and Wagner found her dead from a suspected heart attack and dismembered and disposed of her body so they could continue to claim her social
