Snowtown, Part One

Be warned, this episode covers some seriously fucked up shit. This episode will discuss paedophila, sexual abuse, assault, torture, murder, dismemberment, and many other horrific things. Listener discretion isn’t just advised, it’s mandatory.

We explicitly stated at the start of this season that we weren’t gonna cover Snowtown… and yet here we are.

The Snowtown murders, or the Bodies in the Barrels murders, is the name given to a series of killings committed in the nineties in Adelaide, South Australia. Only one of the murders occurred in Snowtown itself.

In a state known for its weird murders, Snowtown was something else. The bodies of eight people were found in barrels full of acid in a disused bank in the small country town, and four other murders would later be linked to the crime. The investigation would reveal that the crimes were the work of a man named John Bunting and his group of friends, motivated by Bunting’s twisted obsession with killing paedophiles. Only two of the twelve were paedophiles, though. The others were killed because they had knowledge of the murders, or to access their Centrelink payments, or simply because John Bunting didn’t like them.

In this episode, we’ll discuss the police investigation that led to the discovery of the bodies in the barrels. In part two, we’ll go into detail about the murders and the subsequent trial.

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.

The Snowtown murders are considered Australia’s most horrific crimes, and for good reason. The torture the victims were subjected to is literally too horrible to mention. We glossed over it as much as we could in the episode, but be warned – other sources aren’t so gentle.

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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