Snowtown, Part Two

Listener warning: this episode will discuss paedophilia, sexual abuse, murder, torture, dismemberment, and other gross things we’ve managed to repress from our psyches. If you want your psyche to remain intact, consider not listening to this episode. It’s fine, we understand.

This week, we look back on how the Snowtown murders all began, what made John Bunting and Robert Wagner the people they would become, and the evidence that Jamie Vlassakis gave at trial that put them behind bards for good. The facts of the case that came out at trial would cement the Snowtown murders as one of the most twisted and brutal serial killing cases in all of Australian history.

EPISODE NOTES:

The small country town of Snowtown, north of Adelaide, will forever be entwined with the bodies that were found there in 1999. But all the murders bar one actually occurred in Adelaide’s poverty-stricken northern suburbs. Drug addiction, violence, and abuse were rife within the area.

John Bunting, Robert Wagner, Mark Haydon, and Jamie Vlassakis were aided in their crimes by the fact that many of their victims were isolated, suffering from mental health or substance abuse issues, and reliant on government support.

Clinton Trezise was one of these vulnerable people. Missing since 1992, it was only when his cold case file landed on the desk of Major Crimes Unit Detective Craig Patterson in 1997 that a connection was made between him and several people who were missing from the area. Slowly but surely, Detective Patterson would make connections between these cases, and the two names that kept cropping up in each – John Bunting and Robert Wagner.

Eventually it would be uncovered that these people weren’t missing, but tortured, murdered, and dismembered, their bodies stored in barrels full of acid. John Bunting spoke openly of his desire to kill “dirties” - his term for homosexuals and paedophiles – but it became apparent that a ‘dirty’ was simply anyone John Bunting didn’t want to live any more. The victims ranged from actual paedophiles, to harmless mentally ill neighbours. He murdered his wife Elizabeth’s oldest son, as well as the wife of one of his best mates. He liked to look in the eyes of his victims as they were strangled to death, so he could see the moment the life left their eyes.

Our main source this week was Jeremy Pudney’s Snowtown: The Bodies in the Barrels Murders. It can be purchased here https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/snowtown-the-bodies-in-barrels-murders-by-jeremy-pudney-and-merriman-and-jeremy-pudney-9780732267162 or on other fine internet book dealers.

A thorough though somewhat editorialised version of the events can be found at Crime Library, accessed via the Wayback Machine here https://web.archive.org/web/20070527222342/http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/snowtown/index_1.html?sect=3

An article from the time of the discovery of the murders can be found here https://www.smh.com.au/national/from-the-archives-1999-up-to-six-bodies-found-in-barrels-in-snowtown-20190517-p51ojx.html

Rulings from various trials can be found here https://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bunting-john-justin-dec.htm and here https://jade.io/article/178045

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