Snowtown- The bodies in the barrels murders .

warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.

Detective Paul Shram initiates a review of old missing persons cases, leading to the discovery of Clinton Trezise’s disappearance, which unravels a tale of torture and murder.

” They were the disease…we werethe cure.”

It was a series of murders that would defy human comprehension,this is the worst case of serial killling in Australia’s history,the revelations about the case would captivate and shock the nation.

It’s  the stuff of horror movies, tortue , electrocution decapitation and one stage  cannibalism.

Paul Scharmm was the man who led the police investigation.

There  were barrels of body parts, the  difficult was how many bodies they have there.

And in a world  exlusive we reveal the footage taken by detectives

as they entered the infamous bank vault for the first time.

This is Snowtown  and the bodies in the barrel’s murders were crimes that shook Australia.

Sometimes the most shocking crimes can start with a less significant case an almost inconsequential inquiry that prompts an inquisitive detective to delve a little deeper.

That was certainly the case with a routin missing  person’s inquiry in Adelaide which would uncover a tale of torture coldblooded murder. and lead to Australia’s most prolific serial killer.

There was an officer in charge of the police major crime section Paul shramm who instigated a system in the major crime branch that when  detectives had some downtown -which was  rare.

They would have a look at old missing persons cases,

so cases that had perhaps  sat for a while they never closedbut perhaps had set for a while.

Schramm asked the missing person section to choose 10 files that they thought were most worthy of a review.

The reason he did that was that people who disappear really only disappeared for thre reasons ,generally and one is that they’ve chosen to another is that they’ve taken their own life.

And the third is that they’ve med with Foul Play  and when that possibility can never be discounted then a missing person’s case is always worth looking and considering.

One of those files was a chap calledClinton Trezise.

Clinton Trezise was  adown on his luck young man who had spent most of his childhood in foster care, he disappeared in 1992 and wasn’t reported missing for 3 years

There wasn’t really anything to go on , the usual trails had gone cold soon after his disappearance, things like  transactions in his bank account  they had weren’t occurring.

Some  of his possessions had disappeared at the time he did  from his flat, a lot of people disappear in that way  for whatever reason  and so it was a difficult case.

While that was happening there was another missing persons case that came to the attention of  the missing person’s Unit which  worke side by side with the major crime branch.

And that was a person called Barry Lane who were vanished and was reported missing by his family.

and it became clear to the police fairly quickly,

That there was a link between Trezise and Lane that thy were associates.

Clinton Trezise had actually been living with Barry Lane in the early 1990s and the pair had become close friends.

Rumors swirling around Adelaide’s Nothern suburbs even suggested there was a physical relationship between them.

Barry Lane was a bizzarre warped character, he was a pedophile, he was a predator, he had no redeeming features.

The detective started to  look  into the background  of those two peope and what they learned very early was that  they were on a disability  pension .

Their disability pension was still being drawn down at various ATMs, traditional  when you look at a missing person’s file , if that is happening it may indicate that the pesron is still alive.

Investigators  searched Barry Lane’s  bank account which revealed that regular withdrawals were being made for a missing person.

that was naturally suspicious but what  was more uusual was that most were being made from a service station ,North of Adelaide.

Surveillance cameras were installed  watching that particular bank machine at that particular service station, and pretty early on, pretty soon after those cameras were installed

police were able to obtain footage of a person making withdrawals from Barry Lane’s bank account,

Only, it wasn’t Barry lane, and so that left police with a task to determine who that was and they were able to do that pretty quickly and that person was Robert Wagner.

Police discovered that Wanger was a friend of Barry Lane’s and now he’d been spotted taking money from the missing man’s bank account, 2 weeks later  he was seen doing the same thing  again.

With Lane now missing for over 6 months , police decided to follow Robert Wagner and the trail led to the home of a man who also knew Barry Lane…

His name was  John Bunting,they had been seen and were  known to have frequented each other’s homes,  hung around in the same areas.

The epicenter of that  at the time was 203  waterloo corner  Road at Solsbury North.

Which is where John bunting was living with his then wife and so the names John Bunting and Robert Wagner came up very early in those  missing persons investigations.

The pieces of the jigsaw were slolwly falling into place, the more police searched.

the more links they found between Jong Bunting,Robert Wagner and missing people in Adelaide’s northen suburbs.

Slowly  a sinister tale was beginning to emerge in November 1998 it took another ominous turn.

About  that same time Elizabeth Haydon was reported missing.

When police wisited Haydon’s home  looking for the missing women they interviewed her husband Mark.

He claimed the marriage was over and his wife had left, his statement also mentioned another man who had often visited the house- John Bunting.

Suspicions of  Foul Play had always surrouned the missing person’s cases.

 Since the review had  started months earlier , But now detectives were genuinely concerned that there were much more to this  than just missing  people.

There first fears were realized when they made a chance  discovery at  Elizabeth’s hayden’s home,they  learned that there had  been  a fourwh drive a land cruiser that had been parked in her driveway.

Some neighbors had seen it being loaded up and it  disappeared,the witness account  described Bunting and Wagner loading garbage bags  into four- wheeel  drive about the time she disappeared.

The landcruiser was important to the investigation because it had disappeared from Elizabeth Hayden’s premises  at about the same time as she had gone missing.

So, it was important  to find out , had she  met Foul play, had she been conveyed in this particular vehicle, what was the relationship with her disappearance?

The Land Cruiser represented  a vital clue, the first  breakthrough that would eventually lead police to the infamous bank wault and iit’s gruesome contents.

John Bunting , Mark Hyden and  Robert Wagner were all interviewed separately.

and they all provided a different account as to what had happened to that land cruiser where it had gone and how it had been disposed.

So that  immediately rang bells with the police, it became a vehicle they needed to urgently  find.

Bunter and Wagner were soon linked to yet another missing person when the 1996 disappearance of Suzanne Allen was  reinvestigated.

Her file was littered with connections to both men  including the two of them being spotted loading her furniture into a truck,around  the time she was reported missing.

Throughout the review gradually the names John Bunting and  Robert Wagner  just kept coming up as police were making routine  inquiries into what  had happened  to these people.

Whether  it was as someone who had known them , a friend had lived with them, or just had made a statement about the missing person’s last known  movements.

Those names , John Bunting and Robert Wagner kept coming up and eventually that meant they were focus.

By February 1999 ,the disappearances of Clinton Trezise,

Barry Lane, Elizabeth Hayden , and Suzanne Alen were all classfied as major crimes.

Only  a fewm months later a fifth name was added to the list .

A former lover of Suzanna Allen called Ray Davies,hwo hadn’t been seen since 1995.

Police  began to link more and more  disappearances wit the names Buntng  and Wagner,

but what detectives  yet didn’t realize was that a trail of missing people across Adelaide’s Northern  suburbs would lead them 150 km  to an isolated country town.

And Snowtown  would become forever associated with one of Australia’s most barbaric killers.

In February   1999 detectives investigating the disappearance of five people were focusing their  attention’s on Adelaide’s  Northern  suburbs,

the area where the missing people were last seen alive.

Adelaide then as it is today  is a great place to live and do business, great scenery,beaches ,wine , second to none in the world.

But like other cities , some of the lower socioeconomic areas do have slightly hugher unemployed youth.

There were families for whom  employment was unthought of , so it wasn’t a case of people wanted to get jobs and couldn’t get them.

But rather thaere were whole communities in which it was unthinable to hold a job.

And with that , you get crime.

Detectives were beginning to strengthen the links between the five  missing people.

Many were having money taken from their bank accounts by strangers, but what was more worrying was that they were all linked  to the same two individuals

Robert Wagner and John Bunting.

John Bunting didn’t have a criminal  history , nothing that was serious , there were no serious assaults  or anything like that just minor, minor matters, Robert  Wagner the same, nothing serious.

John Bunting grew up in the suburb of  Inala ,his parents were good honest people  and they loved him and they  cared for him.

But he showed some really concerning traits as a child from very early on and one of those was the pleasure he used to take in killing things, it started  with insects .

and he’d experiment with dropping insects into different types of acids or chemicals and see how quickly they died .

And as  he got older as a teenager and young adult , he took a bit more pleasure than you would expect from killing animals and things like that .

So, there were some early signs that this was a fello who was  definitely not right.

As he  grew a bit older he also developed an interest in Nazism and white supremacy .

To the point where he read a copy of Mein Kampf.and upset his mom by painting a swat sticker on the inside of his car boot.

But by his own account he also suffered a  horrible moment of sexual abuse at the hand of a brother’s friends, where he was assaulted or so he would tell years later.

But probably  that had a significant impact on him as well.

Wagner was also sexually abused as  young man.

Bunting to some extent also prayed on that ,Wagner was  very much Bunting’s henchman , he was a tall man and provided bunting with a physical backup that he needed .

He needed someone who wouldn’t question him or challenge him, Wagner fullfilled thar role.

As police attempted to untangle the complex web of missing people that surrounded Bunting and Wagner .

Their attention focused on Elizabeth Haydon, she was reported  missing by her brother  on the 25th of November 1998 and she hadn’t been seen since.

Elizabeth  Haydon was the wife of Mark Haydon .

She was  not a particularly intelligent person ,she had endured a difficult life and she was someone who existed at close Quarters with John bunting because he was friends with her husbands and she eventually  began to irritate John Bunting.

He found  Elizabeth Haydon irritating and Mark Haydon obviously developed a dislike for his wife.

Mark Haydon is a down on – you luck kind a guy, he’s a working class person  ,not very intelligent at all

And Bunting like he would with other people would  hold court with Mark Hayden talk to him about things he’d done, boast about violent things he done or crimes  he’d committed.

And Mark Hayden was a weak and an easily led person and quickly fell under John Bunting’s  spell.

On the 6th of  February  1999, what started as a straightforward missing  person’s case review was  reclassified as a major  crime .

This meant police investigating the five disappearances were given more resources and investigators stepped up the surveillance of the two men at the heart of the police  operation .

At this  stage of the investigation the police had sufficient evidence to go to a judge and to get some telephone intercepts, some lisening device warrants.

The detectives who were investigating the case were contacted by their surveillance section who was surveilling Mr Wagner and Mr  Bunting and they found that they  were heading to Snowtown .

Snowtown is a small rural community  about an hour and a half north of Adelaide,population in the low  hundreds,it’s probably flull mostly retirees and farmers from  the surrounding  district.

Now, this was the first time that Snowtown had come to the  authorities  attention.

They learned that there was a person living in Snowtown hat they were visiting, so , it was that time of the investigation that they thought they should  pay Snowtown  a visit.

When detectives arrived at Snowtown in Railway Terrace there was a lot of cars and bearing  stages of disrepair in the front yard.

And to their surprise..

There was the missing  Land Cruiser  that they’ve been looking for all over Australia.

So that was a significant step in the investigation.

now they had a link between Bunting and  Haydon and Wagner and the Land Cruiser.

The Land Cruiser found in Snowtown

was last seen at Elizabeth Haydon’s house in Adelay 6 months earlier.

Given that it had disappeared at the same time as her, police  were keen to found out where it had been,So they  opted to go and speak to the owner of the premises

And he told them that , infact that person knew Mr Bunting, Mr Wagner and a person called  Haydon  and that in fact these people had rented  an old bank building in Snowtown.

They then told the detectives that there had been some large black barrels that have been kept in the Land Cruiser, and those large black barrels had been moved into the bank vault.

It’s an old small Country Bank.

Disused apart from being used now for storage of old electrical items computers and things like that were broken.so, once they got in..

the side door leads you into the now vacant sort of kitchen  area of the bank, to the right of that was another door that takes you into the area behind the bank counters.

The vault door was then just to the  left as you went in behind the counter, once they got the door open .

They were confronted with a just a solid wall of black plastic , that was sticky taped heast all the way around, neverbefore seen footage .

Filmed as detectives entered the infamous bank vault for the very first time.

So, under the tape ,just peered into the darkness of the vault and they filmed six large black barrels.

Packets of rubber gloves,  some  bottles of acid .

When they  took the  lid off…

The first barrel they could see what appeared to be a mummified foot and  that was sort of sticking up.

They could see the sole of the foot, there was dirty clothing

and a hunched up items sort of filing 3/4 of this barrel.

At that stage they were all shocked they knew as the case was developing that  it was more probable that they were  dealing with homicide  investigation.

But it wasn’t  until  they saw what was in the barrels as to it was definitely a murder investigation.

They could see  that there  were body parts and as the lids were lifted of the barrels , all of the barrels were full of body parts.

The difficult was  how many bodies did they have there.

Police in  South  Australia had made a gruesome discovery inside a bankvault in Snowtown, 150  km North of Adelaide.

In May 1999 six barrels  containing a  number of body parts were found and police realized that a missing person’s investigation.

which had begun 2 years earlier may well have just ended inside the disfused bank .

First they didn’t know how many bodies were there , they could see that there were a lot of body parts so they knew it was going to be a complex  job for the forensic Pathologists to literally piece it together.

They also wanted to know who these people were.

Were they the missing people who had already been reported ? Or were there other people who in fact had never been reported missing?

 As the forensic team got to work detectives arrested John Bunting , Robert Wagner and Mark Haydon  the men liked to all the missing people, all three refused to say anything to the arresting officers.

Immediately after the arrests a press conference prompted phone calls into the police department.

They  received a lot of call from Crime Stoppers , but one in particular was of particular interest .

And that call basically said ” we think that you should go to Salsbury North to a particular address because  we think  that you’ll find a body out there”

They used ground  penetrating radar which told them wheter or not soil had been distrubed.

And under a tank stand, they found a such a place.

so they commence to dig there 

and about a meter down they discovered a number of plastic bags which they subsequently learned to be the remains of Susan Allen.

Only hours later , yet another body was found on the  address in Salsbury North.

The skeletal remains of Ray Davies

  who’d been missing since  1995 were found buried in a disused Cellar, and the name of the las known resident at the address came as no suprise to the police .

the address where the bodies were found Ray Davies And Susan Allen

Was where John Bunting had been living.

As investigations continued  at the house in Salsbury North the police forensic teams carried on the grim task of determining who was  contained inside the barrels retrieve from the Snowtown bank vault.

So , one by one  they brought the bodies stil lin the barrels into still in  into the morgue and took the lid off and  then they decanted the fluid which  left the remains.

And then they basically just reached in  and took the bodies and the body parts out.

It says  it  was like a grotesque jigasaw puzzle in a way.

They had used acid to try  and dissolved the bodies, but you need a lot of acid to dissolve  bodies and bodies have a tremendous percentage of water content.

And so the water really neutralized the acid  so the bodies were just sitting in this  almost sterile oxygen deprived environment.

And that’s why they could actually get some  identification.

There  were tattoos present, there were fingerprints still that could be taken and also they could see some of the methods that used to kill these victims.

They had three cases,

that had ropes around the neck and that suggested they were strangled with the ropes.

They also had gags, there were also evidence of maltreatment one of the victims had handcuffs still on , There were some thumb cuffs present in the barrel with him

  one of the victims  certainly had burns across the chest  and a couple had  blackened areas,one on the scrotum and one on the feet that could have been  from burns as well.

What had begun as an investigation into five missing people

had turned into a multiple murder   inquiry.

Police had already established that two of the five were dead 

with the three remaining  individuals still unaccounted  for .

Detectives were shocked when the forensic team reported there were actually  eight bodies contained in the barrels were the thtee missing people among them  and if so …who were the others?

Just days after the arrests of the three suspects ;

Robert Wagner, John Bunting and Mark  Hayden detectives would find out the  answer.

They become aware in the investigation up to this point in time that there was a young man called  James Vlassakis who was an associate of the other  offenders.

The identity of James Vlassakis is still protected by a court issued suppression order.

James Vlassakis like a lot  of people  in this story was a person who endured a horrific childhood, he was a young man, who was born into a troubled  family, whose father sexually abused him and then died when he was very young.

At that point in his life John Bunting  walked in , John Bunting became a huge part of his life,became the father he never had.

Like so many  other people that John Bunting exerted influence over he was a shining light , he was a way out, he was a rescuer, a white night if you like, and that was the dynamic early on between them .

So , James Vlassakis was right there watching and listening as these events started  to unfold and as he gre older and became more useful John bunting involved him in his crimes.

Over the course of several interviews culminating in a 2,000 page statements ,Vlassakis would recount a tale of death  and destruction spanning almost 8 years.

He would also go on to implicate someone else in the killing -himself.

With that knowledge and under the white of  guilt and shame and despair, he began detailing what he knew about all of the murders that predated his involvement.

And all of the murders that he took part in or was a witness to in some way  and what that did was provide police with a road map to this entire series of crimes.

His statement would form the basis of the biggest criminal investigation in Australian  History.

From the first murder until the last ,Vlassakis laid out who the victims were and how and why they had died.

Starting with Bunting’s first victim ,Clinton Trezise, Clinton was murdered by John Bunting ,he was attacked  inside John Bunting’s house at Solsbury North.

He was knocked down and he was attacked with a hammer and he had his skull caved in.

Ray Davies  found buried i nthe garden of Bunting’s house, was murdered in 1995  because he was suspected of abusing  children.

It emerged that  Vlassakis’s mother  had helped in the killing.

Susanne Allen also found buried at the house died a year later, Bunting and Wagner admitted  cutting up her body.

Vlassakis could also  put names to the bodies founds in the barrels to the shock of the detectives those names included the killer’s own family members.

There was a suggestion by Vlassakis that his brother Troy Youde had molested him when he was young and that angered John bunting.

He was at home, he was in his bedroom when Bunting Wagner, Vlassakis and Hayden all turned up at the house and then took him into the bathroom where he endured horrific acts of torture.

Burns,toes crushed with pliers and was eventually murdered in there.

As the horrific unfolded the scale of depravity got worse.

Fred Brooks vanished in September 1998, his mother had a relationship with Bunting and he wrongly suspected that Fred was a pedophile.

The murder of Fred Brooks was truly horrific, it was very  possibly one of if not the most horrific of all of these crimes.

He endured unspeakable acts of torture before he was finally murdered, he was burnt with cigarettes  ,he had his toes crushed with pliers.

He even had a lit sparkler forced forced down the eye of the penis and he was restrained as it burned down towards his own flesh. 

It was a truly horrific enduring moment of torture and so when  he was finally murdered it was probably some point of relief for a young man who must have known that he was going to die.

Friends too died at the hands f the coldblooded killers .

Michael Gardner died in Sepstember 1997 because Robert Wagner found his homosexuality offensive.

Gavin Porter  an acquaintance of james Vlassakis was strangled to death in April 1998 because his drug addiction meant Bunting deemed him a wast.

Gary O’Dwyer  was targeted in October 1998 simply because Bunting said it had been a while since he’d killed anyone.

There was  also  a sense that people were murdered as the killers covered their tracks or they simply outlived their usefulness.

Barry Lane was an  pedophile,

aparently it was  because of that  background that made Lane a target for for.

Bunting knew what Barry Lane was in his own mind right from the start ,but he tolerated Lane because he wanted information from him about other people he knew , other pedophiles.

People Bunting wanted to pinpoint punish , maybe even kill ,So , John Bunting used Barry Lane for information and when he was done  or when he could no longer tolerate Barry Lane ,he killed him.

Thomas Trevilyan  was involved  in the murder of Barry lane and helped dispose of Barry Lane’s body.

Trevilyan  was a marked man from that point on because his behavior was so erratic and so unstable that there was a risk that he would tell  people about what had happened.

And Wagner and Bunting knew that and  they killed him by hanging him to make it look like a suicide.

Elizabeth Haydon , the wife of Mark Haydon whose disappearances ignited the investigation  was also found in Snowtown killed

because Bunting thought she knew too much her death marked a slowing in the pace of the killings as police operation intensified.

Tragically the 12th  and final victim murdered as the net closed in on the killers was  David Johnson

 Johnson  was James Vlassakis’s stepbrother, Johnson had interest in computers, he wanted to by a new computer and he was told that there was a computer for sale at Snowtown.

But that computer didn’t exist.

He was lured there and when he was taken inside that bank building he was ambushed byWagner and Bunting.

He was tortured into giving his pin number of his credit card.

Several of the offenderes were sent off to a nearby town to test whether or not the information was in fact correct.

And when they returned to the vault, infact Johnson had been murdered by Bunting.

Just  11 days after Johnson was killed police entered the vault of  the bank for the first time and discovered the barrels.

Now, with the victims identified for the police the question remained  what could possibly have motivated these murders , the answer to that…

lay in the dark and twisted mind of John Bunting,Bunting and his accomplices Wagner, Haydon and Vlassakis had been charged with multiple  counts of murder.

After police were convinced that thay lay at the center of a web of torture and sadism ,that resulted in the deaths of 12 people.

The question that would overshadow any trial what could have motivated the killers?

The key  to what happened with these murders is Mr Bunting.

He sits at the center of it .

He had a hatred of people , pedophiles, homosexuals and infact  he was inferring that was one of the reasons as to why he was committing these murders.

And clearly that wasn’t the total reason as to why Bunting was committing these murders as his crimes unfolded he killed people for the sake of killing people.

The first murder is a quick attack with a hammer, he caves in the skull of his victim.

By the time  you get to the sixth ,seventh murder in these crime series, John Bunting is binding people, torturing them, crushing their toes with pliers.

Burning them with  cigarette lighters and sparklers.John Bunting loved to inflict pain, he enjoyed torturing his victims

And it culminated in the bit that he relished the most and that was Killing them taking their life.

But  what  exactly enabled John bunting to manipulate and even  encourage his associates to commit such a shocking crimes?

Bunting clearly had an ability to attract certain kinds of people,

 To convince them and to establish himself as a powerful leader within that group, but you got to remember the group that he establish himself within they’re are very vulnerable bunch of people.

He surrounded  himself by the weak ,the vulnerable.

And those who’d been abused, people who are desperately looking for someone really to look after them.

He’s someone who takes great delight in power over other  people.Not just power over his followers.

But when you look at the terrible torture and killing went on,this wasn’t  simple murder ,these was the most dreadful extended sessions of torture.

And that’s also about exerting power and control .

Police investigating the bodies in the barrels case as it was now dubbed had uncovered what they alleged were 12 brutal murders.

Now , in December 2000,  the commital hearing  began ,designed to test all the evidence before trial by jury, the process would involve almost 70 witnesses.

There was an enormous amount of  information an enormous amount of evidence that they had against these offenders , Something like, 2,000  witness statements, almost 5,000 exhibit.

6 months into the committal hearing and with  the whole of Australia if not the world watching news broke of a dramatic development in the case.

On Thursday  the 19th of June 2001,Vlassakis , pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and was  sentenced in Adelaide Supreme Court to 26 years for his part in the killings.

He accepted his punishment and went on to become the star witness against his co- accused.

Whilst they had lost of pieces of evidence  ,Vlassakis was the storyteller, james Vlassakis could tell the story of how thiscould possibly happen.

He put the personalities into equation, he could tell them  the wise not just what  by why it happened and how this could happen.

Yes, of course it was to his advantage that he assisted, yes, it meant he got lesser sentence.

But some believe that he was also  personally motivated by guilt and a desire to actually do the right.

After years of legal arguments the trial of John Bunting and Robert Wagner began on the 16th of  October 2002,both men were charged with numerous counts of murder.

Mark Haydon was charged with two counts of murder and several acounts of assisting an offender.

He would face trial separately.

When John Bunting and Robert Wagner stood in the  court almost always  their mood and their appearance was defiant , they were not people who looked like they had any remorse in any way.

They were not people  who looked like they were emotionally overcome by the  things that they’d done or by hearing about it again.

They were defiant.

The prosecution’s case was as convincing as it was shocking.

Forensic evidence found in the banks,

Placed Bunting, Wagner and  haydon inside the the vault  in contact with both the bodies and variety of weapons and tools used to torture and dismember their  vicitms.

They could also prove that Bunting and Haydon had rented the bank vault and financial records Illustrated that the trio had gone to great  lengths to steel their victims money.

But perhaps the most chilling evidence was found on a series audio cssettes uncovered during the investigation ,the court  were partway through the trial ,

they had a  phone call from the police saying they had something  they needed to hear,and that was a tape recording which purported to be the voice of Suan Allen.

And when that was played, it was basically saying;

” don’t worry about me, i’ve found a boyfriend and i’ve gone  overseas”

And in fact , they found some witness later on that had listened to that tape in a telephone call and they  believed to be  the missing person.

So that did influence police’s belief that in fact she was still alive,they of couse subsequently  found out that was  part of their method of  operation.

They would make them read certain things out and say certain things which were recorded.

And then these were put togther so as to make what appeared to be phone messages to friends and relatives from the person who was now dead..

Given their graphick nature ,the audio recordings have never been publicly released.

and  also of couse he extracted information  from tthem about their pensons and their banks cards and things like that .

So, there was a  small element of the pragmatic thief but a large element of the vile sadist.

During trial , the jury ha to here about the most horrific details in terms of what hapened to these victims, that involved torture,electrocution, decapitation and at one stage canibalism .

It was following the final murder in this crime  spree and that was the murder of David Johnson .

And  Robert Wagner and John Bunting removed  a portion of his flesh in the bank vault at Snowtown and took it across the road in a  plastic  glove to their friends house and told him that they had some raw  meat to cook .

And they  fried ths piece of flesh in a fry pan on the stove and cut it up and served it not only to themselves but also this friend of theirs.

And he ate it and they ate it, and it was a distrubing moment but the friend didn’t know what it was .

The prosecution rested their  case after 174 days of arduous and extremely graphic detail,in comparison the defense team contesting the charges took just 18 minutes.

If the court or the media expected hear any revelations from the killers themselves ,they would be disappointed .

At the conclusion of the prosecution case each of the accused for entitled to give evidence both elected not to give evidence and remained silent.

On  Monday the 8th of September 2003 the Jury reached their verdicts.

Bunting and Wagner were found guilty on all counts  expet the murder of Suzanne Allen .

On that count they couldn’t reach a verdict, Bunting and Wagner claimed that she had died of natural causes and they had burried her.

The evidence wasn’t solid enough to prove other wise.

The  judge commented that they had been involved in killing for pleasure, there was little likelihood of their  rehabilitiation,So, two of the offenders Mr Bunting and Mr Wagner were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.

The Jury verdicts confirm Bunting and Wagner as Australia’s worst serial killers ,theirs was a remorseless and relentless campaigne od murder.

Justice Martin adopted the only course  that was really open to him,

the crimes that were committed were so horrific so beyond human comprehension that these men can never be released back into the community.

Mark Hayden was  eventually  convicted  of assisting in the murders.

The Jury  were not satisfied that he had been involved in the murders himslef but were satisfied that he had certainly assisted in them .

As a consequence he was received a sentence of 28 years.

One of the forgotten victims in the whole sworded Saga is the very place that has become inextricably  linked to these criems,the reality is that an old bank in a quiet Country Town.

Has now in many ways become a shrine to the victims  of Australia’s worst serial killer.

It’s such a shame that Snowtown will always be synonymous with these horrific crime, when in fact none of the people charged ever lived there none of the victims ever lived there.

And only one  of the murders was carried out in Snowtown.

Could something like this happen again?

well ,you would hope not but  human nature being as it is … it’s possible.