Shortcut: Snowtown: The Bodies in the Barrels Murders *Re-Issue*

Meshel Laurie (0:00)

The following podcast contains accounts of child sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. Big news in the world of Australian true crime this week, with the release on parole of James Vlassakis, the youngest member of the Snowtown Bodies in the Barrels gang. In May 1999, South Australian police investigating the disappearance of Adelaide woman Elizabeth Hayden and acting on a tip-off entered a disused bank in the tiny hamlet of Snowtown, a couple of hours north of Adelaide. Upon entering the bank, they discovered the dismembered remains of eight people in barrels of acid. One of them was indeed Elizabeth Hayden. From there, the investigation moved quickly and within weeks, police had arrested John Bunting, Robert Wagner and Elizabeth Hayden's husband Mark Hayden. Days later, they arrested 19-year-old James Vlassakis. Bunting was the leader of the gang. He presented the killings to the others as a cleansing of society, of pedophiles and homosexuals. There's an argument that James Vlassakis was another victim in this story. He was 14 when his mother started a relationship with Bunting. He'd been molested by his older brother, Troy Youd, who became one of the gang's victims. And Vlassakis confessed to his involvement in the crimes during his first interview with police before he was even suspected of taking part. As of his upcoming release, Vlassakis will have served 27 years in custody.

It's hard to do this story justice in summary, so we're reissuing a conversation from some years ago with journalist and author Jeremy Pudney, who wrote the definitive book on the subject, Snowtown, The Bodies in Barrels Murders.

This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.

Jeremy Pudney (1:56)

One of the reasons that these killers were able to go on for as long as they did in an undetected way or a semi undetected way towards the end was because victims weren't reported missing or they weren't reported missing for a long time. And that was because they came from fractured unusual backgrounds. What happened to them went undetected and then what happened to others went undetected as a result.

Meshel Laurie (2:16)

Yeah, but it also explained to me how the perpetrators came to be a group because that always fascinates me how these groups of people find each other. Sometimes it's even couples, you know, how do these people find each other? We often ask ourselves, your book helped me to understand how in some of these cases, in all of these cases, how John Bunting, at least initially was a person that they were so happy to have in their lives, how he represented a father figure to a number of them, how he represented for the first time in their lives somebody they could rely on, somebody who wasn't taking advantage of them sexually, somebody who was fighting for them. Can you explain that to us, please? Can you explain that context to us?

Jeremy Pudney (2:59)

Yeah, sure. I mean, the interesting thing about John Bunting is that his background wasn't that different in terms of trauma and troubles to some of the other people that he then coerced into his circle of killers, if you like. But he had this way of endearing himself to people, of making them think that he would help them, save them, protect them, and earn their trust. And then what he did, I think it would be fair to say, is got them to a point of no return, where they were implicit in what had gone on, either by helping after the fact early on, or by taking part in murders, or luring people to their deaths.

And so once he had you, he had you. And he was also a terrifying person. I mean, clearly he's a terrifying person. You or I would cross the street and roll our eyes and think, geez, he's a bit weird. But he would endear himself to people who were out there lowest ebb, who'd suffered trauma or abuse, typically. And he would come across as some kind of saviour, draw them in and then get them into a situation where it was too late for them to get out.

Meshel Laurie (4:01)

And childhood sexual abuse was endemic in this community, right? This could never have happened if that weren't the case.

Jeremy Pudney (4:07)

No. So this is, it's clearly, you know, unfortunate that Snowtown is how these killings have become known because that's where the bodies were found and that's where the last murder took place. But the reality is a lot of this happened in other places well before that. And the epicentre of this really is the northern suburbs of Adelaide. So a suburb called Salisbury North and the surrounding areas. And that's where Bunting came to be. That's where he came to know Robert Wagner. That's where he came to know Mark Hayden. And that's where he came to be in a relationship with the mother of James Vlassakis. And all of these people were drawn into his killing circle with him. And Bunting almost certainly endured sexual abuse as a child. It was never formally investigated, but he told people that that was the case. And it seems likely that that was the case. Robert Wagner absolutely was sexually abused as a boy and then abused continually by Barry Lane who became one of the victims and was also involved in helping after the fact with one of the murders. And then Mark Hayden, there's no evidence that he was sexually abused as a child, but I suspect he had a tough upbringing and that was probably demonstrated in the way he treated his stepchildren. And James Vlassakis endured the most horrific abuse of all. And so he was very susceptible to John Bunting and shared his thoughts of revenge to some extent. John Bunting modeled himself as some sort of anti-pedophile crusader. The truth is he had a burning hatred for homosexual people and he really couldn't differentiate between the two, which was very wrong because it just wasn't true about many of his victims. So it had gotten to the point where there was eight victims in six barrels being stored by the killers in this bank, this disused bank in the vault in the disused bank at Snowtown. And for several months before this time, police, through a series of unrelated at first missing persons investigations into some of these victims, had started to realize that the names John Bunting and Robert Wagner were coming up over and over again. And so there was some limited surveillance on Wagner in particular and Bunting as suspects, and they had made a trip to Snowtown while under police surveillance. And the police, when they were having a look around Snowtown, came across in a driveway of a friend of Bunting and Wagner lived across the road from the bank, in a driveway there was a four-wheel drive, which they believed human remains had been put in at some point, and police had been looking for this four-wheel drive and they spotted it there. And so they then made arrangements to go back a few days later. And when they did, the four-wheel drive was there, but the remains weren't, and they were pointed in the direction of the bank, and that's how it all unfolded. One of the things that happened was that no one knew, not even the police, how big this was, until after the discovery had been made. So even when the police rolled into Snowtown that day, they were investigating the disappearances of five people.