August 9, 2025 • 55 mins
In May 1999, two detectives followed a trail of suspicious missing persons cases to an old, red-brick bank in Snowtown, South Australia.
As they head inside, they head straight for the bank’s vault where they find six large plastic barrels containing human remains. They also find handcuffs, knives, a saw, boxes of disposable gloves and bottles of hydrochloric acid.
They’d come to realise they'd found the dumping grounds of Australia’s worst serial killings, crimes that would see four men sent to prison with lengthy sentences.
But now, one of these men, the youngest of the killers, has been granted parole.
THE END BITS
Guest: Jeremy Pudney
You can find more info about his book Snowtown: The Bodies in Barrels Murders here.
Host: Gemma Bath
Executive Producer: Gia Moylan
Audio Producer: Scott Stronach
The story is not the first time we've covered the Snowtown Murders. Hear our past episode with Debi Marshall here.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. You've probably seen
in the news this week the name Snowtown resurfacing and
with it the story of one of Australia's most infamous
and let's be honest, most disturbing crimes. We're talking about
the Snowtown's serial killings. Now you might also know it
(00:28):
as the Bodies in the Barrels murder. It's a case
that shocked the entire nation back in the late nineties
and now it's back in the headlines for one reason.
James spirit and Versacus, the youngest of the four killers,
has just been granted parole. But before we bring you
the interview that your host, Jimma Barth recorded last year
with reporter and author Jeremy Pudney, who has spent years
(00:51):
investigating this case, I'm going to set the scene for you.
In May nineteen ninety nine, police discovered something chilling human
remains sealed inside barrels hidden in an old bank vault
in the small South Australian town of Snowtown. Among those
involved was James Lasarkus.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
He was just eighteen years old at the time, the
youngest of the group, the ring leader, John Justin Bunting,
was dating his mother at the time. Under Bunting's influence,
Lasarkus took part in four of the eleven murders, One
of them was his very own half brother, Troy Eude.
He'd also helped kill Fred Brooks, Gary O'Dwyer, and David Johnson.
(01:33):
In two thousand and two, Blasarkus was sentenced to life
in prison. He got a non parole period of twenty
six years backdated to when he was taken into custody
in June nineteen ninety nine. That term has now expired,
and while he hasn't been released yet, on Tuesday, the
Parole Board officially approved his parole. According to Parole Board
(01:53):
chair Francis Nelson Casey, Lasarkus is considered genuinely remorseful and
does meet the legal requirements for release, but it will
not be a simple walkout of prison situation. If he
is to be released, won't be directly back into the community. Instead,
he'll first go through what's called a careful resocialization program.
(02:14):
It's a slow reintegration process into society. Also, under parole conditions,
he won't be able to change his name without special approval,
and Nelson says frankly, it is very unlikely that he
would get that approval. There's now a sixty day window
where authorities can challenge the prole board's decision, so nothing
is guaranteed just yet. This case is complex and very confronting.
(02:39):
To help make sense of it, he's a conversation that
dives deep into the story behind the headlines of the
bodies in the barrels.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
It's an unseasonably warm day in May nineteen ninety nine
and detectives Greg Stone and Steve McCoy have just pulled
up in front of an old bank in Snowtown, a
tiny wheat belt town in South Australia. It's a plain
red brick building with big steel front doors, and it's
been closed to the public for more than four years.
(03:15):
The detectives have followed a trail of clues here and
suspect they're closing in on a group of serial killers.
As they head inside, they head straight for the bank's vault,
where they're hit by an unmistakable and pungent smell rotting remains.
Inside they find six large plastic barrels. They're black with
(03:38):
a screw top lid. They also find handcuffs, knives, a saw,
boxes of disposable gloves and bottles of hydrochloric acid. McCoy
calls back to the Major Crime Office in Adelaide. We've
found bodies, he tells them, but exactly how many and
(04:00):
who they are is unclear. Little the Stone and MCCOYO,
They've just stumbled on the dumping grounds of Australia's worst
serial killings. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime
(04:29):
Conversations Amom of Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious
crimes by speaking to the people who know the most
about them. All up police found twelve victims, eight of
which were found dismembered and with signs of torture in
the barrels in the bank. The ringleader of the group
responsible was a man called John Bunting. He loved killing
(04:55):
and relished in the torture and elimination of people he
deemed unworthy of life. He recruited the rest of the group.
His right hand man, Robert Wagner, was known as the
must Mark Hayden, who became his cover up guy, and
James Flesarkus, his mother was dating Bunting, and over time
(05:16):
he was gradually drawn into helping with the murders. The
group's murderous rampage was brought to an end in nineteen
ninety nine and all of the men were given lengthy
prison sentences, But in twenty twenty four, the Snowtown murders
are once again making news. The night before I recorded
this interview with Today's Guest, it had been revealed that
(05:38):
Mark Hayden had been released from prison. His maximum term
is expiring in late May twenty twenty four, which means
he's due to be released without any supervision or conditions.
Given the nature of his crimes, the Parole Board decided
to grant him a strict version of parole early so
(05:58):
that they could monitor Hayden is the only one of
the four men who is technically not a convicted killer,
but his crimes are extensive for the people of South
Australia in particular, his release feels all too soon. To
discuss Hayden and the fate of the other three men
who remain behind bars. We're joined by Jeremy Pudney. He
(06:21):
was one of the first journalists on the scene in
Snowtown when news of the Bodies in the Barrels broke.
He followed the case closely and has written a book
called Snowtown The Bodies in Barrel's Murders, and now as
the Adelaide News director at nine years his team is
responsible for the latest update, in this case, the exclusive
on Hayden's early release. Jeremy joins us now to take
(06:45):
us back to the start of the story. As far
as towns go, Snowtown, it's not just small, it's tiny,
and they now have this insane reputation even twenty five
(07:05):
years later. Tell us about the people of Snowtown.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Well, the sort of people you'd expect to find in
a small town like that, a town that is essentially
surviving on the farming activities that goes on around it,
and had probably lived through more prosperous times before that
and had become a little bit set aside, I guess,
being in off the main highway that heads north through
(07:30):
South Australia, and so it's a quiet place. It's a
tranquil place. Before this discovery was made, it would probably
be fair to say that no South Australians didn't know
where Snowtown was. And there's good people there. There were
good people there. Then there's good people there now. And
I think a really important part of this story is
that this has become known as the Snowtown murders, but
(07:51):
in actual fact, only one murder happened at Snowtown. It's
just where this discovery was made that turned it into
what we know it to be today. And the people
of Snowtown, some of whom watched as police went into
the bank that day and removed the arrels that night,
were just as shocked and surprised and disgusted as everybody else.
And so, to answer your question, they're good people there.
(08:14):
They always have been, they always will be, and I
think they've done a really admirable job of living beyond
the stigma that this has given them.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
As you say, it's a shame Snowtown murders, it's the
phrase that we use to remember this crime. But the
story actually mainly resides in Adelaide, and it starts in
the early nineties with a man called John Justin Bunting.
Tell me a little bit about him and his background
and life in Salisbury, North Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Well, John Bunting was actually born in Brisbane in Queensland,
and he appeared troubled as a child. I think he
had some of the traits that people might expect him
to have displayed as a child, given what we now
know he was capable of. He was a school dropout.
He did have loving parents, but he exhibited some disturbing
traits even as a child. He liked to catch insects
(09:06):
and drop them into acid and watched them die, and
some of his behavior was bizarre or violent as a
child and as a young man, he moved to Adelaide,
to South Australia, and he began living in the northern
suburbs of Adelaide and working on and off and befriending
people in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and he worked
(09:28):
at one point at an abatoir and used to brag
to some of his friends about how he enjoyed killing
the animals. And so there was some real alarm bells ringing,
some warning signs if you like, around John Bunting and
his personality and his behavior from a very early age.
And really what happened was he came to Adelaide, he
(09:48):
set himself up in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and
he began doing what he did for his entire adult
life until he went to jail, and that was finding
vulnerable people, manipulating them, and in some cases preying on them.
So he moved from one partner to another vulnerable people,
and then befriended his accomplices who were in some ways
(10:11):
vulnerable people, and embarked on the evil that we all
now know about.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I'm curious to get your thoughts on where this charm
comes from two befriends people.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
I'm not sure he's someone that you or I would
find charming, but he certainly had some kind of charisma that,
having never met him in person, I can't describe accurately,
except to say that he did appear to have this
ability to captivate people, or manipulate people, or get them
(10:46):
to take part in things that they otherwise wouldn't have,
and that you and I would be horrified by what
we know about everybody that he did that too, the
people that he manipulated into taking part in murder with him,
the people that he manipulated into covering it up, or
the people that he prayed on. We know that they
were all vulnerable in some way. They'd either had terrible
(11:09):
lives and needed someone or they had intellectual disabilities, or
they had some other form of difficulty that made them
easier for him to manipulate and easier for him to
pray on.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Let's talk about that more specifically, because two of the
men he befriended, Mark Hayden and Robert Wagner, he went
on to offend with. Let's start with Wagner. What was
his story?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So, Robert Wagner did genuinely have a terrible childhood. He
was sexually abused at a very early age, and it
absolutely had a profound effect on him, There's no doubt
about that. It does not excuse what he did, but
it explains where he came from. He then ends up
in the northern suburbs of Adelaide with his mother who's
(11:58):
struggling really to raise him and control him, and he
is lured groomed, if you like, we would call it
now by a pedophile by the name of Barry Lane,
who ultimately becomes one of the victims. Now, Barry Lane
leures Robert Wagner, and by the time Robert Wagner is
(12:19):
fourteen years old, he's living with Barry Lane and essentially
being sexually abused by a pedophile and being controlled by him,
and he disappears with Barry Lane and his mum, hears
nothing of him, only for them to resurface in the
northern suburbs of Adelaide in Salisbury North, which is where
John Bunting comes to meet Robert Wagner and Barry Lane,
(12:43):
and that association begins. And John Bunting had this burning
hatred of homosexual people and had this warped inability to
differentiate between someone who was homosexual and someone who was
a pedophile. He, in many regards, believed that that was
one and the same, and he absolutely would have seen
(13:05):
Barry Lane for what he was and hated him right
from the beginning, and had some empathy for Robert Wagner
as someone who was young and being controlled by Barry Lane.
And so from a very early stage after meeting them,
he was manipulating Barry Lane to help him with things,
at the same time befriending and persuading Robert Wagner to
(13:28):
his way of.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Thinking, How about Mark, how does he come into contact
with him?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
So that happens a little later, and it's as simple
as John Bunting and Mark Hayden meeting at a welding course,
because these are people who are in and out of
work and sometimes undertaking training in the hope of finding
new work. And they met at a worlding course. And
once again, I think it's fair to say that John
(13:53):
Bunting identified Mark Hayden as someone who could be of
use to him and as someone who was easily manipulated.
And I think everything that you ever read or see
about Mark Hayden is that he is not a particularly
intelligent man and he was easy for John Bunting to control.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
There's a fourth member of this group that later go
on to be convicted for these crimes, twenty three year
old James or Jamie Lasarkus. What was his connection to Bunting.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
This is the real tragedy, one of the real tragedies
in this story, because James Lasarkus is another person in
this story, and it's so common in this story. He
was abused as a child. By the time he crosses
paths with John Bunting, is living with his mother who's
by herself in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and there's
(14:45):
another brother living there too. In fact, there's three or
four at any given time. So James Lasarkus's mother Elizabeth
Harvey is living in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and
meets John Bunting and they begin a relationship, and so
John Bunting becomes James Blasarkus's stepfather. Now, James Barkus had
(15:06):
had been abused by his own father, who he then
saw die of a heart attack right in front of him,
and he was a really troubled kid as a result
of everything that had happened to him and that he
had seen. And then, as fate would have it, this
troubled kid, who could have been set on the right path,
ends up with John Bunting as his stepfather, and that's
(15:27):
where it all goes wrong for him.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
You mentioned before Bunting's kind of hatred that underpins everything.
He hates homosexuals, he hates pedophiles. Tell us about his
wall of spiders.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah. Look, and I think it's really important to put
John Bunting's behavior into context because there's no justification for
what he did. And he did hate pedophiles. As a teenager,
he was interested in Nazism, white supremacy, Adolf Hitler, and
he also had this hatred of pedophiles, and he hated
homosexual people. When he saw them, as I said, as
(16:01):
the same thing in a really warped way. And so
he had almost adopted by the time he's living in
the northern suburbs of Adelaide, this vigilante mindset towards anyone
he thought was a pedophile who was praying on children.
And so in his home in Salisbury North he had created,
using string and post it notes, what he described as
(16:24):
a wall of spiders, a term he would use to
refer to pedophiles, where he would keep small snippets of
information on people that he perceived were pedophiles or a
risk to children. And of course some of these people
were not. They had done nothing wrong. In his warped view,
he had honed in on them, and he was using
in particular Barry Lane to collect information on these people,
(16:48):
or in some cases they were just people in the
immediate area. And so it was a kind of manifestation
on the wall in his house of his warped view
of the world and the reason he hated people.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
It sounds like something from criminal minds, you know, when
they close in and they've got all the pictures.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And I'm sure later on he was at the center
of something very similar in a police headquarters somewhere. But yeah,
it was just a real display of his warped view
of people who had done nothing wrong, some had, some
had not, and of the world. And it was just,
I guess, a reflection of the hatred that he had.
And this is a man who began by justifying his
(17:28):
killings in this way, but by the end of this
killing spree, he was killing people for pleasure. He was
killing people for money. That's one of the most difficult
things about this story. There's no clear motive. There's absolutely
no justification. What we've got here is one human who
just liked to kill people who happened to find a
couple of others who were prepared to help him do it,
(17:51):
and in at least one case, that of Robert Wagner,
appeared to enjoy it just as much.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
This killing spree started, as far as we know, in
nineteen ninety two. Tell us about that first victim, because
that body actually went un id identified for tight some time.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That's right, So that's clinton trecize. He was a young man,
twenty two, and he was an openly gay man, and
he was a little bit disenfranchised from his family. He
was living in the same area that we talk about,
which is the epicenter for this in the beginning, Adelaide's
northern suburbs and that Salisbury North area, and he was
(18:29):
friends with or known to Barry Lane. He was known
in the area by nickname Happy Pants because he would
wear these colorful pants. It was kind of his thing.
And this was really where John Bunting's hatred of people
who are homosexual came to the fore. And he had
decided in his own mind, probably fueled by the sort
(18:50):
of vile nonsense that Barry Lane would speak and that
Robert Wagner would echo, that Clinton Trecize was a pedophile,
and so on a visit to John Bunting's home, he
was attacked from behind with a hammer and murdered right
there in the house. And then his remains were taken
(19:13):
by Bunting with the assistance of Wagner and Lane, and
dumped in a paddock at a place called lower Light,
which is north of Adelaide and not found for some time.
I think it was nineteen ninety four by a couple
of old farmers who were just tending to their paddock.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
So he was originally a missing person, and then it
wasn't until the disappearance of Barry Lane that police started
to kind of at least link the two tell us
about that tell us about Lane.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
That's where the story's quite complicated, because there was a
couple of things happening in parallel in terms of the
police investigation. The first thing is that Elizabeth Hayden, who
was Mark Haden's wife, had gone missing, and her brother
had refused to accept the explanation that she had just
up and left that he was being given, and he
reported her missing. But at the same time, there was
(20:05):
already a cold case missing person's review underway, and that
had begun really with a Clinton precise and also Barry
Lane who had vanished, and then also Susanne Allen, another
person from the Northern Suburbs who had vanished, and Ray
(20:27):
Davies who had lived in a caravan in her backyard
who had also vanished. And what had come up when
a particular missing person's officer started to look through one
file and then the next and then the next was
this overlap of addresses or associates and the same names
kept coming up, and that was John Bunting and Robert Wagner.
(20:50):
John Bunting and Robert Wagner in relation to having had
contact with these people, or having been friends of these people,
or having been last seen with these people. So that's
happening in background in the major crime missing person's officers.
At the same time, some detectives in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide are investigating the disappearance of Elizabeth Hayden, and
(21:12):
because that becomes a missing person's case, that information makes
its way into headquarters. And then there's this connection between Wagner, Bunting,
the husband of the missing woman, Mark Hayden, and these
other files, and that's when the police investigation really gathers
significant momentum. This is a time where perhaps the technology
(21:35):
wasn't what it is now, and some of these connections
might be made using elaborate computer programs, these were connections
that had to be made by humans looking through different files.
It's something that perhaps would have been more quickly detected
in this day and age than back when this was.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Let's fill in some of the gaps here, because I
think it's worth pointing out at this point that all
of these victims have some kind of connection to Bunting
or some of his associates. They're all kind of interwoven.
What about Susan and Ray?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So Suzanne Allen lived in the same general area as
John Bunting where he's already living with a partner, and
it appears they had some sort of romantic connection or
in some sort of relationship, And it appears Suzanne Allen
became infatuated with John Bunting and perhaps also had some
(22:30):
knowledge of things that John Bunting had done in relation
to Clinton drecise. And so she became a problem for
John Bunting in that she had become a pest to
him in relation to her unrequited love for him, and
he was also concerned that she knew too much. Now,
(22:51):
John Bunting has never been convicted of her murder. This
is the twelfth victim, if you like, whose remains were found,
but the jury was never able to be sure that
he killed her. But he killed her and her body
was membered, and she was one of the two victims
whose remains were found buried in the backyard of the
(23:12):
house that he had lived at at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
The other gap I want to focus in on is
the disappearance you mentioned of Elizabeth Hayden, Because as we've
mentioned she's the wife of Mark. What were the circumstances
around her disappearance and will we find out murder?
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So she's living with Mark and her children in their
house in Smithfield, which is also in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide. John Bunting and Robert Wagner are thick as
thieves with Mark Hayden. They're coming and going from there
all the time. John Bunting is unable to not brag
about some of the things he's done. And there's a
(23:50):
strong belief that Elizabeth Hayden had some knowledge of things
that had been going on, and also was just perceived
as an annoyance, as a pest, someone who was disposable
by these people. And by this time John Bunting and
Robert Wagner had developed quite the enjoyment of killing, and
(24:11):
Elizabeth Hayden became their next target, and so she was murdered,
and her husband has never been convicted of taking part
in that murder, of being an accomplice to it, of
covering it up along with six others, and her body
was one of those that were found in the barrels
in the Snowtown Bank.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me Jemma Bath.
I'm speaking with journalist Jeremy Pudney about Australia's notorious Snowtown murders.
There's so many victims in this story, it's hard to
even comprehend, and there's so many different lives here, and
(24:59):
as you mentioned, it feels like as time has gone on,
they've killed just for the sake of killing. One of
the victims troyyud Well.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Troy Jude was the half brother of James Losarkus, and
there is some suggestion that Troy Eude and James Lasarkus,
as half brothers, didn't get along. There was a suggestion
that he may have in some way been abusive towards
James Lasarkus. But also Troy Jude was an annoyance to
(25:32):
John Bunting. Of course, troyud is the son of Elizabeth Harvey,
who Bunting is in a de facto relationship with. He
was also a drug user, and that's something else that
Bunting despised, and he became an irritation and at this
point just an obvious target to John Bunting. And so
like so many of the victims here, it was someone
(25:55):
that John Bunting decided should be murdered and was murdered
with the help of others, in this case, not only
Robert Wagner, but with the help and understanding of his
brother James Lesarkas.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
When did Lasarkus start being included in this murderous rampage.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
It began with the murder of Gavin Porter. Now, I
think from memory. Gavin Porter was murdered in nineteen ninety eight,
and he was a friend of James Lasarkus. He was
also a drug user. James Lasarkus had his challenges with drugs,
but Gavin Porter was otherwise an apparently decent person who
(26:35):
was just struggling with an addiction and was enduring a
difficult life. And Bunting had viewed him as a waste
of space, an annoyance, like he did with so many
of these people. There's no suggestion Gavin Porter had really
done anything bad to anyone, and Bunting had decided that
he should be murdered. And Porter was murdered by Bunting
(26:57):
and Wagner, and the body dragged into the house and
Vlasarkus brought into the room to be shown his dead friend.
And that was really the beginning of this indoctrination into
the killing by Bunting off James Lasarkus. So he sees
his dead friend laying there, he knows that he's been
murdered by Bunting and Wagner. And he has always said
(27:20):
that from that point on he not only was under
bunting spell, but was living in fear that he would
be the next victim. And the only way to not
be the next victim was to do what he was
told to do. And this is a young man who's
already broken and is not strong in any way, and
so it's difficult for right minded, right thinking people to
(27:42):
see how he couldn't just raise the alarm. But it's
a different set of circumstances, and so that's how it began.
And so from that point on he was roped into
the murders and often involved in luring victims. Or was
the connection between Bunting and Wagner and the victims. It
was through Vlassarcus's associations that some of these people became
(28:05):
obvious to the killers.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
What were the other men's roles. We've got Bunting, who's
obviously the ring leader. Wagner was often referred to as
kind of the right hand man. He was also doing
a lot of the brutality, wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, Well, Bunting's not a big man. He's not a
particularly strong man. He's not weak, but he's not big.
He's not intimidating in any way. Robert Wagner's a big man, tall, imposing,
and so he was the muscle, if you like. And
so in that initial moment where they begin to murder someone,
(28:41):
it typically started with Robert Wagner overpowering them and then
John Bunting taking part. And one of the really terrible things,
if things like this can be more terrible, is the
torture that some of these victims endure it. And so
in the beginning, these were murders, and they very quickly
developed into torture and then murder and some extended periods
(29:05):
of torture. That was conducted by John Bunting and Robert Wagner,
and that was witnessed by a James Lasakas. And these
people were killed slowly, in some cases very slowly, and.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
There was a cruelty. Obviously torture is cruel, but they
were making their victims call them names. So some of
the ones in your book that you mentioned Lord, Sir
and God and kind of humiliating their victims in the process.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Humiliation but also power. For John Bunting, you know, like
I said, he had this warped view of the world,
this evil perspective, and he honestly believed that he was
there to impose justice on people and to protect other people,
and he viewed himself as God like, and so he
would make his victims refer to him in this way.
(29:55):
It was also a form of humiliation, a form of torture.
You know, they would laugh at their victims, they would
relish in the pain that they are experiencing. And you know,
this is something that is probably one of the most
resounding aspects for me of the case. This was not
a moment of rage. This was sustained serial killing with
(30:15):
torture and killing for pleasure. They would also do things
like force their victims to make voice recordings that they
would try and use to fool relatives over the phone,
for example, into believing that the victims were still alive.
And they would also torture them for financial information like
(30:35):
banking pin numbers and other information because really, as an
aside to what they were doing, they would pil for
some of their victims bank accounts afterwards, and sometimes in
an ongoing way. Some of these victims were on welfare
benefits regular payments into their bank accounts, and the killers
would often be withdrawing that money as it was deposited
(30:57):
and sharing it amongst themselves.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Where were these murders taking place.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Obviously the early murders those of Clinton Tressize and Ray
Davies and Susann Allen, even though there was never a
formal conviction for murder, Michael Gardner, Barry Lane as well
and Thomas Trevillian. They all happened in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide, so in and around where John Bunting was living,
because that's really how these people came to his attention
(31:24):
and how these people were in the circle in the realm,
if you like. But then at some point John Bunting
and Elizabeth Harvey, with James Flosarkus and Troy Yude on
and off, moved to a town called murray Bridge to
the east of Adelaide, and then that's where some of
the murders occurred and some of the victims were living.
And again this is occurring justin Bunting's realm. If you
(31:47):
were someone who was down on your luck, if you're
somehow made friends with his steps on James Flasarkus, if
you somehow did something to offend him, you were on
his radar in that area, and that put you a risk.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
What was Mark's role We've touched on Wagner. What was
Mark's role in these killings?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I think that'll always be a point of conjecture. I
think it's important to stress that he's never been convicted
of murder. He was originally charged with murders. He's never
been convicted of murder. What he has been convicted of
is assisting or covering up in seven cases of murder,
two of which he confessed to and five of which
(32:28):
he was found guilty of. And so Mark Hayden, although
he's never been convicted of murder, has blood on his hands,
As is the case with any crime that's repeated, if
someone speaks up and it's stopped, it won't happen again
and again. And so it's I think very clear to
say that if Mark Haden had done the right thing,
(32:49):
people would still be alive today who were murdered. And
I think that it's very difficult for the relatives of
some victims to accept that Mark Haden was only ever
convicted of covering up in seven cases of murder.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Let's get back to the police investigation. So, by February
nineteen ninety nine, the deaths of Clinton Tracized, Barry Lane,
Suzanne Allen, and Elizabeth Hayden were all officially declared major crimes.
They're all working away in the background. How did they
go from that to a few months later ending up
in Snowtown.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
So essentially, as I described to you earlier, there's this
missing person's investigation, this review of cold case missing persons
files that starts to join the dots between these missing individuals,
and these names that keep coming up in relation to them,
John Bunting and Robert Wagner keep coming up. And at
the same time as this is happening, Elizabeth Hayden disappears.
(33:47):
Her brother is rightly suspicious of the way in which
she's vanished. His adamant she would never leave her children
behind and just leave like Mark Hayden was saying that
she had. And so as the police attention fixates on
Mark Hayden in relation to the disappearance of his wife,
it becomes clear to those investigators that John Bunting and
(34:09):
Robert Wagner are friends with Mark Hayden, and then the
match occurs with these other missing people, and so the
heat is then very much on this group of John Bunting,
Robert Wagner and Mark Hayden. While the police are investigating
Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance, they are given witness accounts of a
four wheel drive at the property where people are seen
(34:30):
placing garbage bags into the four wheel drive. And they're
already thinking they're investigating a murder, and they're obviously thinking
along the lines of human remains in those bags as
a distinct possibility, and so that four wheel drive is
put on a trailer and toad away at some point. Now,
(34:50):
through various means of surveillance, the police determine that their
three suspects are traveling to and from Snowtown, which is
in the mid north of South Australia, and they focus
on a particular house where they've been visiting with a friend.
And so some detectives are given the job of going
to Snowtown and visiting this house and making some inquiries
(35:14):
with the friend, particularly in relation to this four wheel
drive and it's when they speak to that friend, when
they interviewed that friend at the house, that he indicates
to them that the contents of the four wheel drive
was now being stored in a bank across the rail
line in town, an old bank building which was being
rented by Bunting and Wagner. And so they essentially go
(35:38):
to the bank and they open it up and they
find inside the bank vault these barrels, and being experienced
police having smelled the odor of death before they knew
exactly what they were dealing with.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
I want to bring you into the story now because
you were a reporter. You were one of the first
on the scene when all of this started breaking. What
was that like for you? What do you remember of
that time?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Well, I remember I was a police reporter at the
Adelaine advertise and I was covering some ina minor story
early in the day and I received a phone call
from the newsroom to say that there had been bodies
found in barrels in a bank in Snowtown. And of
course I didn't believe that would be right. I didn't
think that's how the story would pan out. But I
(36:24):
decided it would be best if I got back to
the office in a hurry, and then made plans to
head to Snowtown. Actually got pulled over for speeding on
the way back from the Inane Story to the office,
and then myself and a photographer, another journalist and photographers
made our way to Snowtown. This story breaks the morning
after the barrels have been removed from the bank. So
(36:44):
the police have done a really very good job of
keeping that initial operation secret, and I remember speaking to
some of the Snowtown locals, including some people who had
sat on the balcony of the pub which is across
the road from the bank, and were sitting there watching
as these barrels were being brought out and taken away
by the police, and they thought it was a mega
drug bust. They had no idea what was going on,
(37:06):
and so by the time we got there, it was
quiet and there weren't many police, and the bank was
a crime scene, but a subdued one, and so it
was a little bit anticlimactic, if you like. But that
was the same morning that the arrests were occurring, and
it became very apparent, very quickly through that day and
in the days that followed, the scale of what had
(37:27):
happened and what had been discovered there and what was
being alleged. But the fascinating thing about this is that
at this point, this is a missing person's investigation, maybe
five maybe six. At the point in which the police
walk into that bank and discover those barrels, they ultimately
find that there's eight bodies in there. This is more
(37:47):
than they're expecting. This is the beginning of an investigation,
not the end. And there's so much work that happens
in the months that follow where they're trying to determine
who these people are, who these victims are, some of
whom were never reported missing because they were so disenfranchised
from their families.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
So you mentioned the arrests were going down at a
similar time that was the arrest of Bunting, Wagner, and Hayden.
How did they react because obviously they've been getting away
with this for years.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yes, Look, I think because these are not very smart people.
John Bunting is cunning rat cunning. Robert Wagner and Mark
Hayden are not very smart people. They are followers and
they really genuinely have no idea how much heat is
on them at this point. And if John Bunting did
have an inkling he didn't care because his lust for
(38:40):
killing was overriding all of that, and so there was
certainly an element of surprise when their homes were raided
by police at dawn and they were told that they
were being placed under arrest for murder. Wagner and Hayden
had very little to say. Bunting was being a smart
ass right from the beginning and appeared nonchalant about the
(39:03):
whole thing. So I think they they were genuinely surprised
to be caught at that time, but really because two
of them were too stupid to know that that was
about to happen, and because one was so deluded that
he believed he would never be caught.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Is it Vlassarkus that ends up being there undoing because
he ends up confessing to a lot.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, he does. So. Vlasarkus is a suspect very early on,
and there's some intense interviews occurring involving major crime detectives
and Lasarkus, and he's in and out of their custody.
He is arrested for murder at some point subsequent to
that and is being investigated, and eventually it gets to
(39:46):
the point where he's ready to confess to everything that
he knows, and this is a grueling, grueling interview with
police where he details everything that he knows about the
murders that predated his involvement or even his contact with
Bunting by way of the bragging or the things that
he'd come to learn, and he details everything that he
(40:09):
knows about the murders he was involved in, including the
things that he witnessed himself and the things that he
did himself. And so what that does is it provides
the police with a roadmap to this complex web to
these crimes at a point where they're still really trying
to piece together a lot of this information themselves. They
(40:32):
would have eventually identified these victims, and they very probably
would have eventually had enough evidence to convict Bunting and
Wagner of these murders and vleisarcus. But what he did,
by way of his confession and his evidence as a
witness was expedite that process significantly and probably lead to
(40:54):
some convictions where they otherwise may not have been able
to occur.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
And he's the one as well that kind of points
them because we've mentioned eight bodies were found in the barrels,
but there's a level twelve murders, and he points them
to those other bodies as well.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That's right. And so the excavation begins in the backyard
at Salisbury North and two bodies are found there again
dismembered in plastic bags, and it enables the police to
piece together information about the other murders as well. The
murder of Clinton Precise, which had been a missing person's
case and fraught with error from the beginning, including an
(41:34):
inability by a forensic expert to match the skeletal remains
with an image of Clinton res Ice. In fact, it
was ruled out rather than ruled in, which really slowed
down that process. And even the murder of Thomas Trevellian,
which had been staged to look like a suicide and
had been accepted by authorities as a suicide for such
(41:55):
a long period of time. And so it was this
confession that really did point police in the direction of
those other murders, as you say, and not just the
murders of those people whose bodies were found in the barrels.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
And I want to ask you this question because it's
an important question to ask to understand Hayden's conviction. Why
(42:28):
or when were the bodies moved to Snowtown because they
weren't always there, No, they.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Weren't always there. The belief is that they were moved
to Snowtown from Hayden's house at Smithfield when they were
coming under some heat subsequent to the murder of Elizabeth Hayden.
So they're explaining away Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance. Mark Hayden is
(42:54):
telling her brother or that she's left, and her brother
is not accepting that explanation, and they want to keep
killing Bunting and Wagner, and they decide they need to
move these bodies. Now. One thing that there's never been
a lot of discussion about is why do they still
even have these bodies in barrels? And it's because it
(43:15):
would appear John Bunting wanted to keep them. They were
trophies of sorts. And you know, one thing that I
think lots of studies the world over have established about
serial killers is that they like trophies reminders of what
they've done. Either that or they were just incredibly stupid
in their attempts to cover up their crimes. And so
they had this problem these barrels that they were storing
(43:36):
there could no longer be kept there because of the
intensity on an address where Elizabeth Hayden had vanished from,
and so moving them to their mate's place at Snowtown,
and there was another property nearby where they are kept
for a short period of time, and then finding another solution,
which became that bank in Snowtown was their plan.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
You would think that you'd lie low after that, that
you would kind of pause, knowing that people are looking
at you, but their lastekdom is actually killed in Snowtown.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah, that's right, And I mean the rate at which
John Bunting was killing. If you look at nineteen ninety eight,
where there's I think five victims, but then you move
into nineteen ninety nine where there's one before their court.
Certainly the pressure that they're under, the overt investigations that
are now occurring slow the rate of killing, which John
(44:33):
Bunting found frustrating because he had developed quite the appetite
for it. And so they had decided because like I
said earlier, Robert Wagner's not a smart man, and John
Bunting had a deluded belief that he was the smartest
person in the room. They arrived at this position where
they felt they were safe to do this, where they
(44:55):
felt that they could get away with murder again. And
why wouldn't they because they had gotten away with so
many murders before. And so yes, the final victim, David Johnson,
who was James Flosarkas's step brother, is selected as the
target and a plan is hatched to lure him to
(45:15):
Snowtown to the bank under the guise of buying a computer,
and Robert Wagner and John Bunting they're waiting there.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
There's obviously so much evidence in this case to lead
to a conviction with these men, I want to jump
to the court proceedings because the trial of Bunting and Wagner,
it was a joint trial two thousand and two. I'm
revealing my age here. I was a bit too young
to pay attention, but that I can imagine would have
(45:45):
been a huge story. A double trial involving two serial killers,
multiple victims.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Oh look, it's one of, if not the biggest criminal
trial in South astral history. The level of public interest was,
as you would expect, enormous. The special facilities that had
to be created in the court complex and the scale
of it and complexity of it was enormous. And what
you really had were two serial killers side by side
(46:13):
on trial for murders they had committed together that they
really weren't remorseful for in any way that they were
proud of, and it was almost as though they were
enjoying their moment relishing it all over again. And so
there was this fight, There was this contest, this legal contest,
but ultimately the evidence was overwhelming and Bunting was convicted
(46:36):
of eleven murders and Wagner of ten.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Hayden's trial went ahead a few years later, and it
took the jury quite a while to make that decision.
Can you take us more into that, the final verdict,
the sentence, how that all played out.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I think the complexity of this case and the need
to prove well, really twelve murders and how actively each
person participated or didn't participate in each act of murder,
that was an incredibly difficult exercise for the police. This
is in an era where forensic science was advanced but
(47:17):
not as advanced as it is now, and involved a
lot of people who were in some way removed from
their families, and so the alarm wasn't raised as early
as it could be, And so all through this process,
as the police interviewed those who knew the suspects and
those who knew the victims, there was this common theme
(47:37):
that would come out about Mark Hayden, that he was
a quiet man, that he wasn't an assertive man, that
he always was just kind of hanging around, And so
in relation to what role he played, there was never
any strong evidence that he had taken part in any
of these murders. He knew that Elizabeth Hayden had been murdered,
(47:59):
he lied to her family, and he lied to the
police about it, and he covered up for these killers.
In six other cases, he admitted because the evidence was
overwhelming his role in two of those, and ultimately the
police were able to approve by virtue of witness accounts
and forensic evidence and circumstantial evidence that he had knowledge
(48:22):
of or some involvement of that five others. And so really,
for someone who at the beginning was a suspect in
multiple murders, but where the evidence was not strong to
have him convicted of assisting in so many cases, was
still a significant result in terms of the investigation, and
so he is sentenced to spend up until the year
(48:47):
twenty twenty four in prison, which brings us to where
we are today in relation to Marcaden.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah, because with Wagner and Bunting were able to file
them away. They're not getting parole. They're in jail.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
No, they're not getting parole. They're in jail. And so
to be clear, in South Australia and in relation to
their sentence, they were sentenced to life in prison, which
is the mandatory sentence for murder, and the judge declined
to set a parole period. So there is technically no
such thing here as never to be released. It's just
(49:18):
that the judge has decided not to set a parole period.
That decision is still reviewed or can be reviewed by
the Parole Board of South Australia. And only recently while
speaking about the Hayden case where there are marks that
came to the fore about John Bunting in particular, and
those remarks were about the fact that he is not
(49:38):
remorseful and that he is proud of what he's done.
And I think it's fair to say that John Bunting
and Robert Wagner will never be released.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
But twenty twenty four is here, and Hayden's parole date
is upon us. Tell us about what's happening now, because
he's back in the news.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
He is, and that's because in a few weeks time,
in May of twenty twenty four, his maximum term expires.
So forget about his non parole period. His maximum term exis.
And as I think most people understand, when you finished
your maximum term, you are released and there can be
no restriction placed on you and no monitoring placed on you.
(50:18):
What could have happened is he could have been given
parole some time ago and that didn't occur. And so
only recently has the Parole Board decided that it's a
good idea to give Mark Caden parole. But really in
the context of having some facility with which to monitor
him by way of parole conditions before that sentence expires.
(50:39):
The community expectation is different. The community this feels like yesterday.
It's our Australians and I think it's fair to say
very uncomfortable with the prospect of him being released at
all in any way, but in particular with absolute freedom.
And so the state government has launched a legal bid
to have him declared a serious offender and therefore be
(51:00):
able under the law to be monitored beyond his maximum
prison term. So he's getting out. He's already started to
be given day release now as we speak, and he's
getting out. It's just a question now of how he'll
be monitored and where he can and can't go, and
what he can and can't do post May twenty twenty four,
and only yesterday it came to light that the parole
(51:22):
process had reached to the point where he is already
able to go out during the day that's happening now
under supervision, and only has to go back to a
corrections pre release center at night. And don't forget James Lasarkus,
who was convicted of several murders, was given a non
parole period of twenty six years, and so the community
(51:42):
will have that to grapple with in the not too
distant future.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
You mentioned that through that parole process we've found out
that there's no remorse when it comes to Bunting or Wagner.
What about the other two, Because obviously we've got Hayden
getting out this year, we're potentially going to be having
this same conversation in twenty twenty five with Lasarkus. What
can we expect from them? Is there any signs of rehabilitation.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
I think what we have to do as a community
is accept what we're being told by the authorities who
are assessing these people. And the Parole Board is clear
in its view that Mark Hayden has shown considerable remorse
and understanding of what he did, and has done nothing
wrong in all his time in prison, and has done
(52:31):
everything right in terms of rehabilitation and his time in prison.
Their only concern about him is whether he can make
a meaningful transition back into society, because he literally doesn't
may how to function in it, and frankly, he didn't
function in it particularly well before he got caught up
in all of this. This is twenty five years later
and a lot's changed, and so the answer in relation
(52:52):
to Marc Haden is yes, he's remorseful, and yes he
has served his time, and yes he's rehabilitated. It's just
a question now of whether the community and the victims
can accept the fact that that time has come.
Speaker 3 (53:07):
I think uncomfortable is a good word, because this is
the way justice goes. We have to let these people,
once they've served their time, have the chance to show
that they've changed have a new life. But I can
see why South Australia would be on edge.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yes, and more so I think that will be the
case in relation to James Vasakas, because as we've spoken about,
it's a terrible story. What he endured was terrible. He
really was made a killer by his environment. I think
it's fair to say, that's my assessment of it. And
he was full of remorse from the moment he confessed,
(53:47):
all through his own trial and during the gut wrenching
sentencing submissions that were made by his defense lawyer in
relation to what he had done, what he had seen,
and what he regretted. And so he by the time
he is released, if he's ever released, will have endured
twenty six years of remorse. The question is can someone
(54:08):
who has been found guilty of four murders, four serial killings,
should they ever be released, should they ever be given parole?
And I'm not sure how soon we'll see James Lesarkas free.
I know that twenty six years is his non parole period,
but I think it's going to be a lot longer
than that before the community has to grapple with that issue.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Thanks to Jeremy for assisting us to tell this story.
You can find his book Snowtown The Bodies in Barrel's
Murders linked in our show notes. True Crime Conversations is
a Mumamea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath,
with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is
Giam Moylan. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you
(54:56):
have any feedback or thoughts you'd like to share, you
can email us at true Crime at mammamea dot com
dot au, or you can head to the survey LinkedIn
our show notes to go in the running to win
one of five one hundred dollars gift vouchers. Thanks so
much for listening. I'll be back next week with another
True Crime Conversation
True Crime Conversations acknowledges the traditional owners of land and
waters that this podcast was recorded on. You've probably seen
in the news this week the name Snowtown resurfacing and
with it the story of one of Australia's most infamous
and let's be honest, most disturbing crimes. We're talking about
the Snowtown's serial killings. Now you might also know it
(00:28):
as the Bodies in the Barrels murder. It's a case
that shocked the entire nation back in the late nineties
and now it's back in the headlines for one reason.
James spirit and Versacus, the youngest of the four killers,
has just been granted parole. But before we bring you
the interview that your host, Jimma Barth recorded last year
with reporter and author Jeremy Pudney, who has spent years
(00:51):
investigating this case, I'm going to set the scene for you.
In May nineteen ninety nine, police discovered something chilling human
remains sealed inside barrels hidden in an old bank vault
in the small South Australian town of Snowtown. Among those
involved was James Lasarkus.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
He was just eighteen years old at the time, the
youngest of the group, the ring leader, John Justin Bunting,
was dating his mother at the time. Under Bunting's influence,
Lasarkus took part in four of the eleven murders, One
of them was his very own half brother, Troy Eude.
He'd also helped kill Fred Brooks, Gary O'Dwyer, and David Johnson.
(01:33):
In two thousand and two, Blasarkus was sentenced to life
in prison. He got a non parole period of twenty
six years backdated to when he was taken into custody
in June nineteen ninety nine. That term has now expired,
and while he hasn't been released yet, on Tuesday, the
Parole Board officially approved his parole. According to Parole Board
(01:53):
chair Francis Nelson Casey, Lasarkus is considered genuinely remorseful and
does meet the legal requirements for release, but it will
not be a simple walkout of prison situation. If he
is to be released, won't be directly back into the community. Instead,
he'll first go through what's called a careful resocialization program.
(02:14):
It's a slow reintegration process into society. Also, under parole conditions,
he won't be able to change his name without special approval,
and Nelson says frankly, it is very unlikely that he
would get that approval. There's now a sixty day window
where authorities can challenge the prole board's decision, so nothing
is guaranteed just yet. This case is complex and very confronting.
(02:39):
To help make sense of it, he's a conversation that
dives deep into the story behind the headlines of the
bodies in the barrels.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
It's an unseasonably warm day in May nineteen ninety nine
and detectives Greg Stone and Steve McCoy have just pulled
up in front of an old bank in Snowtown, a
tiny wheat belt town in South Australia. It's a plain
red brick building with big steel front doors, and it's
been closed to the public for more than four years.
(03:15):
The detectives have followed a trail of clues here and
suspect they're closing in on a group of serial killers.
As they head inside, they head straight for the bank's vault,
where they're hit by an unmistakable and pungent smell rotting remains.
Inside they find six large plastic barrels. They're black with
(03:38):
a screw top lid. They also find handcuffs, knives, a saw,
boxes of disposable gloves and bottles of hydrochloric acid. McCoy
calls back to the Major Crime Office in Adelaide. We've
found bodies, he tells them, but exactly how many and
(04:00):
who they are is unclear. Little the Stone and MCCOYO,
They've just stumbled on the dumping grounds of Australia's worst
serial killings. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime
(04:29):
Conversations Amom of Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious
crimes by speaking to the people who know the most
about them. All up police found twelve victims, eight of
which were found dismembered and with signs of torture in
the barrels in the bank. The ringleader of the group
responsible was a man called John Bunting. He loved killing
(04:55):
and relished in the torture and elimination of people he
deemed unworthy of life. He recruited the rest of the group.
His right hand man, Robert Wagner, was known as the
must Mark Hayden, who became his cover up guy, and
James Flesarkus, his mother was dating Bunting, and over time
(05:16):
he was gradually drawn into helping with the murders. The
group's murderous rampage was brought to an end in nineteen
ninety nine and all of the men were given lengthy
prison sentences, But in twenty twenty four, the Snowtown murders
are once again making news. The night before I recorded
this interview with Today's Guest, it had been revealed that
(05:38):
Mark Hayden had been released from prison. His maximum term
is expiring in late May twenty twenty four, which means
he's due to be released without any supervision or conditions.
Given the nature of his crimes, the Parole Board decided
to grant him a strict version of parole early so
(05:58):
that they could monitor Hayden is the only one of
the four men who is technically not a convicted killer,
but his crimes are extensive for the people of South
Australia in particular, his release feels all too soon. To
discuss Hayden and the fate of the other three men
who remain behind bars. We're joined by Jeremy Pudney. He
(06:21):
was one of the first journalists on the scene in
Snowtown when news of the Bodies in the Barrels broke.
He followed the case closely and has written a book
called Snowtown The Bodies in Barrel's Murders, and now as
the Adelaide News director at nine years his team is
responsible for the latest update, in this case, the exclusive
on Hayden's early release. Jeremy joins us now to take
(06:45):
us back to the start of the story. As far
as towns go, Snowtown, it's not just small, it's tiny,
and they now have this insane reputation even twenty five
(07:05):
years later. Tell us about the people of Snowtown.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Well, the sort of people you'd expect to find in
a small town like that, a town that is essentially
surviving on the farming activities that goes on around it,
and had probably lived through more prosperous times before that
and had become a little bit set aside, I guess,
being in off the main highway that heads north through
(07:30):
South Australia, and so it's a quiet place. It's a
tranquil place. Before this discovery was made, it would probably
be fair to say that no South Australians didn't know
where Snowtown was. And there's good people there. There were
good people there. Then there's good people there now. And
I think a really important part of this story is
that this has become known as the Snowtown murders, but
(07:51):
in actual fact, only one murder happened at Snowtown. It's
just where this discovery was made that turned it into
what we know it to be today. And the people
of Snowtown, some of whom watched as police went into
the bank that day and removed the arrels that night,
were just as shocked and surprised and disgusted as everybody else.
And so, to answer your question, they're good people there.
(08:14):
They always have been, they always will be, and I
think they've done a really admirable job of living beyond
the stigma that this has given them.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
As you say, it's a shame Snowtown murders, it's the
phrase that we use to remember this crime. But the
story actually mainly resides in Adelaide, and it starts in
the early nineties with a man called John Justin Bunting.
Tell me a little bit about him and his background
and life in Salisbury, North Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Well, John Bunting was actually born in Brisbane in Queensland,
and he appeared troubled as a child. I think he
had some of the traits that people might expect him
to have displayed as a child, given what we now
know he was capable of. He was a school dropout.
He did have loving parents, but he exhibited some disturbing
traits even as a child. He liked to catch insects
(09:06):
and drop them into acid and watched them die, and
some of his behavior was bizarre or violent as a
child and as a young man, he moved to Adelaide,
to South Australia, and he began living in the northern
suburbs of Adelaide and working on and off and befriending
people in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and he worked
(09:28):
at one point at an abatoir and used to brag
to some of his friends about how he enjoyed killing
the animals. And so there was some real alarm bells ringing,
some warning signs if you like, around John Bunting and
his personality and his behavior from a very early age.
And really what happened was he came to Adelaide, he
(09:48):
set himself up in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and
he began doing what he did for his entire adult
life until he went to jail, and that was finding
vulnerable people, manipulating them, and in some cases preying on them.
So he moved from one partner to another vulnerable people,
and then befriended his accomplices who were in some ways
(10:11):
vulnerable people, and embarked on the evil that we all
now know about.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
I'm curious to get your thoughts on where this charm
comes from two befriends people.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
I'm not sure he's someone that you or I would
find charming, but he certainly had some kind of charisma that,
having never met him in person, I can't describe accurately,
except to say that he did appear to have this
ability to captivate people, or manipulate people, or get them
(10:46):
to take part in things that they otherwise wouldn't have,
and that you and I would be horrified by what
we know about everybody that he did that too, the
people that he manipulated into taking part in murder with him,
the people that he manipulated into covering it up, or
the people that he prayed on. We know that they
were all vulnerable in some way. They'd either had terrible
(11:09):
lives and needed someone or they had intellectual disabilities, or
they had some other form of difficulty that made them
easier for him to manipulate and easier for him to
pray on.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Let's talk about that more specifically, because two of the
men he befriended, Mark Hayden and Robert Wagner, he went
on to offend with. Let's start with Wagner. What was
his story?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So, Robert Wagner did genuinely have a terrible childhood. He
was sexually abused at a very early age, and it
absolutely had a profound effect on him, There's no doubt
about that. It does not excuse what he did, but
it explains where he came from. He then ends up
in the northern suburbs of Adelaide with his mother who's
(11:58):
struggling really to raise him and control him, and he
is lured groomed, if you like, we would call it
now by a pedophile by the name of Barry Lane,
who ultimately becomes one of the victims. Now, Barry Lane
leures Robert Wagner, and by the time Robert Wagner is
(12:19):
fourteen years old, he's living with Barry Lane and essentially
being sexually abused by a pedophile and being controlled by him,
and he disappears with Barry Lane and his mum, hears
nothing of him, only for them to resurface in the
northern suburbs of Adelaide in Salisbury North, which is where
John Bunting comes to meet Robert Wagner and Barry Lane,
(12:43):
and that association begins. And John Bunting had this burning
hatred of homosexual people and had this warped inability to
differentiate between someone who was homosexual and someone who was
a pedophile. He, in many regards, believed that that was
one and the same, and he absolutely would have seen
(13:05):
Barry Lane for what he was and hated him right
from the beginning, and had some empathy for Robert Wagner
as someone who was young and being controlled by Barry Lane.
And so from a very early stage after meeting them,
he was manipulating Barry Lane to help him with things,
at the same time befriending and persuading Robert Wagner to
(13:28):
his way of.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Thinking, How about Mark, how does he come into contact
with him?
Speaker 2 (13:33):
So that happens a little later, and it's as simple
as John Bunting and Mark Hayden meeting at a welding course,
because these are people who are in and out of
work and sometimes undertaking training in the hope of finding
new work. And they met at a worlding course. And
once again, I think it's fair to say that John
(13:53):
Bunting identified Mark Hayden as someone who could be of
use to him and as someone who was easily manipulated.
And I think everything that you ever read or see
about Mark Hayden is that he is not a particularly
intelligent man and he was easy for John Bunting to control.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
There's a fourth member of this group that later go
on to be convicted for these crimes, twenty three year
old James or Jamie Lasarkus. What was his connection to Bunting.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
This is the real tragedy, one of the real tragedies
in this story, because James Lasarkus is another person in
this story, and it's so common in this story. He
was abused as a child. By the time he crosses
paths with John Bunting, is living with his mother who's
by herself in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and there's
(14:45):
another brother living there too. In fact, there's three or
four at any given time. So James Lasarkus's mother Elizabeth
Harvey is living in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and
meets John Bunting and they begin a relationship, and so
John Bunting becomes James Blasarkus's stepfather. Now, James Barkus had
(15:06):
had been abused by his own father, who he then
saw die of a heart attack right in front of him,
and he was a really troubled kid as a result
of everything that had happened to him and that he
had seen. And then, as fate would have it, this
troubled kid, who could have been set on the right path,
ends up with John Bunting as his stepfather, and that's
(15:27):
where it all goes wrong for him.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
You mentioned before Bunting's kind of hatred that underpins everything.
He hates homosexuals, he hates pedophiles. Tell us about his
wall of spiders.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah. Look, and I think it's really important to put
John Bunting's behavior into context because there's no justification for
what he did. And he did hate pedophiles. As a teenager,
he was interested in Nazism, white supremacy, Adolf Hitler, and
he also had this hatred of pedophiles, and he hated
homosexual people. When he saw them, as I said, as
(16:01):
the same thing in a really warped way. And so
he had almost adopted by the time he's living in
the northern suburbs of Adelaide, this vigilante mindset towards anyone
he thought was a pedophile who was praying on children.
And so in his home in Salisbury North he had created,
using string and post it notes, what he described as
(16:24):
a wall of spiders, a term he would use to
refer to pedophiles, where he would keep small snippets of
information on people that he perceived were pedophiles or a
risk to children. And of course some of these people
were not. They had done nothing wrong. In his warped view,
he had honed in on them, and he was using
in particular Barry Lane to collect information on these people,
(16:48):
or in some cases they were just people in the
immediate area. And so it was a kind of manifestation
on the wall in his house of his warped view
of the world and the reason he hated people.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
It sounds like something from criminal minds, you know, when
they close in and they've got all the pictures.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
And I'm sure later on he was at the center
of something very similar in a police headquarters somewhere. But yeah,
it was just a real display of his warped view
of people who had done nothing wrong, some had, some
had not, and of the world. And it was just,
I guess, a reflection of the hatred that he had.
And this is a man who began by justifying his
(17:28):
killings in this way, but by the end of this
killing spree, he was killing people for pleasure. He was
killing people for money. That's one of the most difficult
things about this story. There's no clear motive. There's absolutely
no justification. What we've got here is one human who
just liked to kill people who happened to find a
couple of others who were prepared to help him do it,
(17:51):
and in at least one case, that of Robert Wagner,
appeared to enjoy it just as much.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
This killing spree started, as far as we know, in
nineteen ninety two. Tell us about that first victim, because
that body actually went un id identified for tight some time.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That's right, So that's clinton trecize. He was a young man,
twenty two, and he was an openly gay man, and
he was a little bit disenfranchised from his family. He
was living in the same area that we talk about,
which is the epicenter for this in the beginning, Adelaide's
northern suburbs and that Salisbury North area, and he was
(18:29):
friends with or known to Barry Lane. He was known
in the area by nickname Happy Pants because he would
wear these colorful pants. It was kind of his thing.
And this was really where John Bunting's hatred of people
who are homosexual came to the fore. And he had
decided in his own mind, probably fueled by the sort
(18:50):
of vile nonsense that Barry Lane would speak and that
Robert Wagner would echo, that Clinton Trecize was a pedophile,
and so on a visit to John Bunting's home, he
was attacked from behind with a hammer and murdered right
there in the house. And then his remains were taken
(19:13):
by Bunting with the assistance of Wagner and Lane, and
dumped in a paddock at a place called lower Light,
which is north of Adelaide and not found for some time.
I think it was nineteen ninety four by a couple
of old farmers who were just tending to their paddock.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
So he was originally a missing person, and then it
wasn't until the disappearance of Barry Lane that police started
to kind of at least link the two tell us
about that tell us about Lane.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
That's where the story's quite complicated, because there was a
couple of things happening in parallel in terms of the
police investigation. The first thing is that Elizabeth Hayden, who
was Mark Haden's wife, had gone missing, and her brother
had refused to accept the explanation that she had just
up and left that he was being given, and he
reported her missing. But at the same time, there was
(20:05):
already a cold case missing person's review underway, and that
had begun really with a Clinton precise and also Barry
Lane who had vanished, and then also Susanne Allen, another
person from the Northern Suburbs who had vanished, and Ray
(20:27):
Davies who had lived in a caravan in her backyard
who had also vanished. And what had come up when
a particular missing person's officer started to look through one
file and then the next and then the next was
this overlap of addresses or associates and the same names
kept coming up, and that was John Bunting and Robert Wagner.
(20:50):
John Bunting and Robert Wagner in relation to having had
contact with these people, or having been friends of these people,
or having been last seen with these people. So that's
happening in background in the major crime missing person's officers.
At the same time, some detectives in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide are investigating the disappearance of Elizabeth Hayden, and
(21:12):
because that becomes a missing person's case, that information makes
its way into headquarters. And then there's this connection between Wagner, Bunting,
the husband of the missing woman, Mark Hayden, and these
other files, and that's when the police investigation really gathers
significant momentum. This is a time where perhaps the technology
(21:35):
wasn't what it is now, and some of these connections
might be made using elaborate computer programs, these were connections
that had to be made by humans looking through different files.
It's something that perhaps would have been more quickly detected
in this day and age than back when this was.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Let's fill in some of the gaps here, because I
think it's worth pointing out at this point that all
of these victims have some kind of connection to Bunting
or some of his associates. They're all kind of interwoven.
What about Susan and Ray?
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So Suzanne Allen lived in the same general area as
John Bunting where he's already living with a partner, and
it appears they had some sort of romantic connection or
in some sort of relationship, And it appears Suzanne Allen
became infatuated with John Bunting and perhaps also had some
(22:30):
knowledge of things that John Bunting had done in relation
to Clinton drecise. And so she became a problem for
John Bunting in that she had become a pest to
him in relation to her unrequited love for him, and
he was also concerned that she knew too much. Now,
(22:51):
John Bunting has never been convicted of her murder. This
is the twelfth victim, if you like, whose remains were found,
but the jury was never able to be sure that
he killed her. But he killed her and her body
was membered, and she was one of the two victims
whose remains were found buried in the backyard of the
(23:12):
house that he had lived at at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
The other gap I want to focus in on is
the disappearance you mentioned of Elizabeth Hayden, Because as we've
mentioned she's the wife of Mark. What were the circumstances
around her disappearance and will we find out murder?
Speaker 2 (23:30):
So she's living with Mark and her children in their
house in Smithfield, which is also in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide. John Bunting and Robert Wagner are thick as
thieves with Mark Hayden. They're coming and going from there
all the time. John Bunting is unable to not brag
about some of the things he's done. And there's a
(23:50):
strong belief that Elizabeth Hayden had some knowledge of things
that had been going on, and also was just perceived
as an annoyance, as a pest, someone who was disposable
by these people. And by this time John Bunting and
Robert Wagner had developed quite the enjoyment of killing, and
(24:11):
Elizabeth Hayden became their next target, and so she was murdered,
and her husband has never been convicted of taking part
in that murder, of being an accomplice to it, of
covering it up along with six others, and her body
was one of those that were found in the barrels
in the Snowtown Bank.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me Jemma Bath.
I'm speaking with journalist Jeremy Pudney about Australia's notorious Snowtown murders.
There's so many victims in this story, it's hard to
even comprehend, and there's so many different lives here, and
(24:59):
as you mentioned, it feels like as time has gone on,
they've killed just for the sake of killing. One of
the victims troyyud Well.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Troy Jude was the half brother of James Losarkus, and
there is some suggestion that Troy Eude and James Lasarkus,
as half brothers, didn't get along. There was a suggestion
that he may have in some way been abusive towards
James Lasarkus. But also Troy Jude was an annoyance to
(25:32):
John Bunting. Of course, troyud is the son of Elizabeth Harvey,
who Bunting is in a de facto relationship with. He
was also a drug user, and that's something else that
Bunting despised, and he became an irritation and at this
point just an obvious target to John Bunting. And so
like so many of the victims here, it was someone
(25:55):
that John Bunting decided should be murdered and was murdered
with the help of others, in this case, not only
Robert Wagner, but with the help and understanding of his
brother James Lesarkas.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
When did Lasarkus start being included in this murderous rampage.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
It began with the murder of Gavin Porter. Now, I
think from memory. Gavin Porter was murdered in nineteen ninety eight,
and he was a friend of James Lasarkus. He was
also a drug user. James Lasarkus had his challenges with drugs,
but Gavin Porter was otherwise an apparently decent person who
(26:35):
was just struggling with an addiction and was enduring a
difficult life. And Bunting had viewed him as a waste
of space, an annoyance, like he did with so many
of these people. There's no suggestion Gavin Porter had really
done anything bad to anyone, and Bunting had decided that
he should be murdered. And Porter was murdered by Bunting
(26:57):
and Wagner, and the body dragged into the house and
Vlasarkus brought into the room to be shown his dead friend.
And that was really the beginning of this indoctrination into
the killing by Bunting off James Lasarkus. So he sees
his dead friend laying there, he knows that he's been
murdered by Bunting and Wagner. And he has always said
(27:20):
that from that point on he not only was under
bunting spell, but was living in fear that he would
be the next victim. And the only way to not
be the next victim was to do what he was
told to do. And this is a young man who's
already broken and is not strong in any way, and
so it's difficult for right minded, right thinking people to
(27:42):
see how he couldn't just raise the alarm. But it's
a different set of circumstances, and so that's how it began.
And so from that point on he was roped into
the murders and often involved in luring victims. Or was
the connection between Bunting and Wagner and the victims. It
was through Vlassarcus's associations that some of these people became
(28:05):
obvious to the killers.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
What were the other men's roles. We've got Bunting, who's
obviously the ring leader. Wagner was often referred to as
kind of the right hand man. He was also doing
a lot of the brutality, wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, Well, Bunting's not a big man. He's not a
particularly strong man. He's not weak, but he's not big.
He's not intimidating in any way. Robert Wagner's a big man, tall, imposing,
and so he was the muscle, if you like. And
so in that initial moment where they begin to murder someone,
(28:41):
it typically started with Robert Wagner overpowering them and then
John Bunting taking part. And one of the really terrible things,
if things like this can be more terrible, is the
torture that some of these victims endure it. And so
in the beginning, these were murders, and they very quickly
developed into torture and then murder and some extended periods
(29:05):
of torture. That was conducted by John Bunting and Robert Wagner,
and that was witnessed by a James Lasakas. And these
people were killed slowly, in some cases very slowly, and.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
There was a cruelty. Obviously torture is cruel, but they
were making their victims call them names. So some of
the ones in your book that you mentioned Lord, Sir
and God and kind of humiliating their victims in the process.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Humiliation but also power. For John Bunting, you know, like
I said, he had this warped view of the world,
this evil perspective, and he honestly believed that he was
there to impose justice on people and to protect other people,
and he viewed himself as God like, and so he
would make his victims refer to him in this way.
(29:55):
It was also a form of humiliation, a form of torture.
You know, they would laugh at their victims, they would
relish in the pain that they are experiencing. And you know,
this is something that is probably one of the most
resounding aspects for me of the case. This was not
a moment of rage. This was sustained serial killing with
(30:15):
torture and killing for pleasure. They would also do things
like force their victims to make voice recordings that they
would try and use to fool relatives over the phone,
for example, into believing that the victims were still alive.
And they would also torture them for financial information like
(30:35):
banking pin numbers and other information because really, as an
aside to what they were doing, they would pil for
some of their victims bank accounts afterwards, and sometimes in
an ongoing way. Some of these victims were on welfare
benefits regular payments into their bank accounts, and the killers
would often be withdrawing that money as it was deposited
(30:57):
and sharing it amongst themselves.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Where were these murders taking place.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Obviously the early murders those of Clinton Tressize and Ray
Davies and Susann Allen, even though there was never a
formal conviction for murder, Michael Gardner, Barry Lane as well
and Thomas Trevillian. They all happened in the northern suburbs
of Adelaide, so in and around where John Bunting was living,
because that's really how these people came to his attention
(31:24):
and how these people were in the circle in the realm,
if you like. But then at some point John Bunting
and Elizabeth Harvey, with James Flosarkus and Troy Yude on
and off, moved to a town called murray Bridge to
the east of Adelaide, and then that's where some of
the murders occurred and some of the victims were living.
And again this is occurring justin Bunting's realm. If you
(31:47):
were someone who was down on your luck, if you're
somehow made friends with his steps on James Flasarkus, if
you somehow did something to offend him, you were on
his radar in that area, and that put you a risk.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
What was Mark's role We've touched on Wagner. What was
Mark's role in these killings?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
I think that'll always be a point of conjecture. I
think it's important to stress that he's never been convicted
of murder. He was originally charged with murders. He's never
been convicted of murder. What he has been convicted of
is assisting or covering up in seven cases of murder,
two of which he confessed to and five of which
(32:28):
he was found guilty of. And so Mark Hayden, although
he's never been convicted of murder, has blood on his hands,
As is the case with any crime that's repeated, if
someone speaks up and it's stopped, it won't happen again
and again. And so it's I think very clear to
say that if Mark Haden had done the right thing,
(32:49):
people would still be alive today who were murdered. And
I think that it's very difficult for the relatives of
some victims to accept that Mark Haden was only ever
convicted of covering up in seven cases of murder.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Let's get back to the police investigation. So, by February
nineteen ninety nine, the deaths of Clinton Tracized, Barry Lane,
Suzanne Allen, and Elizabeth Hayden were all officially declared major crimes.
They're all working away in the background. How did they
go from that to a few months later ending up
in Snowtown.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
So essentially, as I described to you earlier, there's this
missing person's investigation, this review of cold case missing persons
files that starts to join the dots between these missing individuals,
and these names that keep coming up in relation to them,
John Bunting and Robert Wagner keep coming up. And at
the same time as this is happening, Elizabeth Hayden disappears.
(33:47):
Her brother is rightly suspicious of the way in which
she's vanished. His adamant she would never leave her children
behind and just leave like Mark Hayden was saying that
she had. And so as the police attention fixates on
Mark Hayden in relation to the disappearance of his wife,
it becomes clear to those investigators that John Bunting and
(34:09):
Robert Wagner are friends with Mark Hayden, and then the
match occurs with these other missing people, and so the
heat is then very much on this group of John Bunting,
Robert Wagner and Mark Hayden. While the police are investigating
Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance, they are given witness accounts of a
four wheel drive at the property where people are seen
(34:30):
placing garbage bags into the four wheel drive. And they're
already thinking they're investigating a murder, and they're obviously thinking
along the lines of human remains in those bags as
a distinct possibility, and so that four wheel drive is
put on a trailer and toad away at some point. Now,
(34:50):
through various means of surveillance, the police determine that their
three suspects are traveling to and from Snowtown, which is
in the mid north of South Australia, and they focus
on a particular house where they've been visiting with a friend.
And so some detectives are given the job of going
to Snowtown and visiting this house and making some inquiries
(35:14):
with the friend, particularly in relation to this four wheel
drive and it's when they speak to that friend, when
they interviewed that friend at the house, that he indicates
to them that the contents of the four wheel drive
was now being stored in a bank across the rail
line in town, an old bank building which was being
rented by Bunting and Wagner. And so they essentially go
(35:38):
to the bank and they open it up and they
find inside the bank vault these barrels, and being experienced
police having smelled the odor of death before they knew
exactly what they were dealing with.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
I want to bring you into the story now because
you were a reporter. You were one of the first
on the scene when all of this started breaking. What
was that like for you? What do you remember of
that time?
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Well, I remember I was a police reporter at the
Adelaine advertise and I was covering some ina minor story
early in the day and I received a phone call
from the newsroom to say that there had been bodies
found in barrels in a bank in Snowtown. And of
course I didn't believe that would be right. I didn't
think that's how the story would pan out. But I
(36:24):
decided it would be best if I got back to
the office in a hurry, and then made plans to
head to Snowtown. Actually got pulled over for speeding on
the way back from the Inane Story to the office,
and then myself and a photographer, another journalist and photographers
made our way to Snowtown. This story breaks the morning
after the barrels have been removed from the bank. So
(36:44):
the police have done a really very good job of
keeping that initial operation secret, and I remember speaking to
some of the Snowtown locals, including some people who had
sat on the balcony of the pub which is across
the road from the bank, and were sitting there watching
as these barrels were being brought out and taken away
by the police, and they thought it was a mega
drug bust. They had no idea what was going on,
(37:06):
and so by the time we got there, it was
quiet and there weren't many police, and the bank was
a crime scene, but a subdued one, and so it
was a little bit anticlimactic, if you like. But that
was the same morning that the arrests were occurring, and
it became very apparent, very quickly through that day and
in the days that followed, the scale of what had
(37:27):
happened and what had been discovered there and what was
being alleged. But the fascinating thing about this is that
at this point, this is a missing person's investigation, maybe
five maybe six. At the point in which the police
walk into that bank and discover those barrels, they ultimately
find that there's eight bodies in there. This is more
(37:47):
than they're expecting. This is the beginning of an investigation,
not the end. And there's so much work that happens
in the months that follow where they're trying to determine
who these people are, who these victims are, some of
whom were never reported missing because they were so disenfranchised
from their families.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
So you mentioned the arrests were going down at a
similar time that was the arrest of Bunting, Wagner, and Hayden.
How did they react because obviously they've been getting away
with this for years.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yes, Look, I think because these are not very smart people.
John Bunting is cunning rat cunning. Robert Wagner and Mark
Hayden are not very smart people. They are followers and
they really genuinely have no idea how much heat is
on them at this point. And if John Bunting did
have an inkling he didn't care because his lust for
(38:40):
killing was overriding all of that, and so there was
certainly an element of surprise when their homes were raided
by police at dawn and they were told that they
were being placed under arrest for murder. Wagner and Hayden
had very little to say. Bunting was being a smart
ass right from the beginning and appeared nonchalant about the
(39:03):
whole thing. So I think they they were genuinely surprised
to be caught at that time, but really because two
of them were too stupid to know that that was
about to happen, and because one was so deluded that
he believed he would never be caught.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Is it Vlassarkus that ends up being there undoing because
he ends up confessing to a lot.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, he does. So. Vlasarkus is a suspect very early on,
and there's some intense interviews occurring involving major crime detectives
and Lasarkus, and he's in and out of their custody.
He is arrested for murder at some point subsequent to
that and is being investigated, and eventually it gets to
(39:46):
the point where he's ready to confess to everything that
he knows, and this is a grueling, grueling interview with
police where he details everything that he knows about the
murders that predated his involvement or even his contact with
Bunting by way of the bragging or the things that
he'd come to learn, and he details everything that he
(40:09):
knows about the murders he was involved in, including the
things that he witnessed himself and the things that he
did himself. And so what that does is it provides
the police with a roadmap to this complex web to
these crimes at a point where they're still really trying
to piece together a lot of this information themselves. They
(40:32):
would have eventually identified these victims, and they very probably
would have eventually had enough evidence to convict Bunting and
Wagner of these murders and vleisarcus. But what he did,
by way of his confession and his evidence as a
witness was expedite that process significantly and probably lead to
(40:54):
some convictions where they otherwise may not have been able
to occur.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
And he's the one as well that kind of points
them because we've mentioned eight bodies were found in the barrels,
but there's a level twelve murders, and he points them
to those other bodies as well.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That's right. And so the excavation begins in the backyard
at Salisbury North and two bodies are found there again
dismembered in plastic bags, and it enables the police to
piece together information about the other murders as well. The
murder of Clinton Precise, which had been a missing person's
case and fraught with error from the beginning, including an
(41:34):
inability by a forensic expert to match the skeletal remains
with an image of Clinton res Ice. In fact, it
was ruled out rather than ruled in, which really slowed
down that process. And even the murder of Thomas Trevellian,
which had been staged to look like a suicide and
had been accepted by authorities as a suicide for such
(41:55):
a long period of time. And so it was this
confession that really did point police in the direction of
those other murders, as you say, and not just the
murders of those people whose bodies were found in the barrels.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
And I want to ask you this question because it's
an important question to ask to understand Hayden's conviction. Why
(42:28):
or when were the bodies moved to Snowtown because they
weren't always there, No, they.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Weren't always there. The belief is that they were moved
to Snowtown from Hayden's house at Smithfield when they were
coming under some heat subsequent to the murder of Elizabeth Hayden.
So they're explaining away Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance. Mark Hayden is
(42:54):
telling her brother or that she's left, and her brother
is not accepting that explanation, and they want to keep
killing Bunting and Wagner, and they decide they need to
move these bodies. Now. One thing that there's never been
a lot of discussion about is why do they still
even have these bodies in barrels? And it's because it
(43:15):
would appear John Bunting wanted to keep them. They were
trophies of sorts. And you know, one thing that I
think lots of studies the world over have established about
serial killers is that they like trophies reminders of what
they've done. Either that or they were just incredibly stupid
in their attempts to cover up their crimes. And so
they had this problem these barrels that they were storing
(43:36):
there could no longer be kept there because of the
intensity on an address where Elizabeth Hayden had vanished from,
and so moving them to their mate's place at Snowtown,
and there was another property nearby where they are kept
for a short period of time, and then finding another solution,
which became that bank in Snowtown was their plan.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
You would think that you'd lie low after that, that
you would kind of pause, knowing that people are looking
at you, but their lastekdom is actually killed in Snowtown.
Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah, that's right, And I mean the rate at which
John Bunting was killing. If you look at nineteen ninety eight,
where there's I think five victims, but then you move
into nineteen ninety nine where there's one before their court.
Certainly the pressure that they're under, the overt investigations that
are now occurring slow the rate of killing, which John
(44:33):
Bunting found frustrating because he had developed quite the appetite
for it. And so they had decided because like I
said earlier, Robert Wagner's not a smart man, and John
Bunting had a deluded belief that he was the smartest
person in the room. They arrived at this position where
they felt they were safe to do this, where they
(44:55):
felt that they could get away with murder again. And
why wouldn't they because they had gotten away with so
many murders before. And so yes, the final victim, David Johnson,
who was James Flosarkas's step brother, is selected as the
target and a plan is hatched to lure him to
(45:15):
Snowtown to the bank under the guise of buying a computer,
and Robert Wagner and John Bunting they're waiting there.
Speaker 3 (45:25):
There's obviously so much evidence in this case to lead
to a conviction with these men, I want to jump
to the court proceedings because the trial of Bunting and Wagner,
it was a joint trial two thousand and two. I'm
revealing my age here. I was a bit too young
to pay attention, but that I can imagine would have
(45:45):
been a huge story. A double trial involving two serial killers,
multiple victims.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Oh look, it's one of, if not the biggest criminal
trial in South astral history. The level of public interest was,
as you would expect, enormous. The special facilities that had
to be created in the court complex and the scale
of it and complexity of it was enormous. And what
you really had were two serial killers side by side
(46:13):
on trial for murders they had committed together that they
really weren't remorseful for in any way that they were
proud of, and it was almost as though they were
enjoying their moment relishing it all over again. And so
there was this fight, There was this contest, this legal contest,
but ultimately the evidence was overwhelming and Bunting was convicted
(46:36):
of eleven murders and Wagner of ten.
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Hayden's trial went ahead a few years later, and it
took the jury quite a while to make that decision.
Can you take us more into that, the final verdict,
the sentence, how that all played out.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
I think the complexity of this case and the need
to prove well, really twelve murders and how actively each
person participated or didn't participate in each act of murder,
that was an incredibly difficult exercise for the police. This
is in an era where forensic science was advanced but
(47:17):
not as advanced as it is now, and involved a
lot of people who were in some way removed from
their families, and so the alarm wasn't raised as early
as it could be, And so all through this process,
as the police interviewed those who knew the suspects and
those who knew the victims, there was this common theme
(47:37):
that would come out about Mark Hayden, that he was
a quiet man, that he wasn't an assertive man, that
he always was just kind of hanging around, And so
in relation to what role he played, there was never
any strong evidence that he had taken part in any
of these murders. He knew that Elizabeth Hayden had been murdered,
(47:59):
he lied to her family, and he lied to the
police about it, and he covered up for these killers.
In six other cases, he admitted because the evidence was
overwhelming his role in two of those, and ultimately the
police were able to approve by virtue of witness accounts
and forensic evidence and circumstantial evidence that he had knowledge
(48:22):
of or some involvement of that five others. And so really,
for someone who at the beginning was a suspect in
multiple murders, but where the evidence was not strong to
have him convicted of assisting in so many cases, was
still a significant result in terms of the investigation, and
so he is sentenced to spend up until the year
(48:47):
twenty twenty four in prison, which brings us to where
we are today in relation to Marcaden.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Yeah, because with Wagner and Bunting were able to file
them away. They're not getting parole. They're in jail.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
No, they're not getting parole. They're in jail. And so
to be clear, in South Australia and in relation to
their sentence, they were sentenced to life in prison, which
is the mandatory sentence for murder, and the judge declined
to set a parole period. So there is technically no
such thing here as never to be released. It's just
(49:18):
that the judge has decided not to set a parole period.
That decision is still reviewed or can be reviewed by
the Parole Board of South Australia. And only recently while
speaking about the Hayden case where there are marks that
came to the fore about John Bunting in particular, and
those remarks were about the fact that he is not
(49:38):
remorseful and that he is proud of what he's done.
And I think it's fair to say that John Bunting
and Robert Wagner will never be released.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
But twenty twenty four is here, and Hayden's parole date
is upon us. Tell us about what's happening now, because
he's back in the news.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
He is, and that's because in a few weeks time,
in May of twenty twenty four, his maximum term expires.
So forget about his non parole period. His maximum term exis.
And as I think most people understand, when you finished
your maximum term, you are released and there can be
no restriction placed on you and no monitoring placed on you.
(50:18):
What could have happened is he could have been given
parole some time ago and that didn't occur. And so
only recently has the Parole Board decided that it's a
good idea to give Mark Caden parole. But really in
the context of having some facility with which to monitor
him by way of parole conditions before that sentence expires.
(50:39):
The community expectation is different. The community this feels like yesterday.
It's our Australians and I think it's fair to say
very uncomfortable with the prospect of him being released at
all in any way, but in particular with absolute freedom.
And so the state government has launched a legal bid
to have him declared a serious offender and therefore be
(51:00):
able under the law to be monitored beyond his maximum
prison term. So he's getting out. He's already started to
be given day release now as we speak, and he's
getting out. It's just a question now of how he'll
be monitored and where he can and can't go, and
what he can and can't do post May twenty twenty four,
and only yesterday it came to light that the parole
(51:22):
process had reached to the point where he is already
able to go out during the day that's happening now
under supervision, and only has to go back to a
corrections pre release center at night. And don't forget James Lasarkus,
who was convicted of several murders, was given a non
parole period of twenty six years, and so the community
(51:42):
will have that to grapple with in the not too
distant future.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
You mentioned that through that parole process we've found out
that there's no remorse when it comes to Bunting or Wagner.
What about the other two, Because obviously we've got Hayden
getting out this year, we're potentially going to be having
this same conversation in twenty twenty five with Lasarkus. What
can we expect from them? Is there any signs of rehabilitation.
Speaker 2 (52:07):
I think what we have to do as a community
is accept what we're being told by the authorities who
are assessing these people. And the Parole Board is clear
in its view that Mark Hayden has shown considerable remorse
and understanding of what he did, and has done nothing
wrong in all his time in prison, and has done
(52:31):
everything right in terms of rehabilitation and his time in prison.
Their only concern about him is whether he can make
a meaningful transition back into society, because he literally doesn't
may how to function in it, and frankly, he didn't
function in it particularly well before he got caught up
in all of this. This is twenty five years later
and a lot's changed, and so the answer in relation
(52:52):
to Marc Haden is yes, he's remorseful, and yes he
has served his time, and yes he's rehabilitated. It's just
a question now of whether the community and the victims
can accept the fact that that time has come.
Speaker 3 (53:07):
I think uncomfortable is a good word, because this is
the way justice goes. We have to let these people,
once they've served their time, have the chance to show
that they've changed have a new life. But I can
see why South Australia would be on edge.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yes, and more so I think that will be the
case in relation to James Vasakas, because as we've spoken about,
it's a terrible story. What he endured was terrible. He
really was made a killer by his environment. I think
it's fair to say, that's my assessment of it. And
he was full of remorse from the moment he confessed,
(53:47):
all through his own trial and during the gut wrenching
sentencing submissions that were made by his defense lawyer in
relation to what he had done, what he had seen,
and what he regretted. And so he by the time
he is released, if he's ever released, will have endured
twenty six years of remorse. The question is can someone
(54:08):
who has been found guilty of four murders, four serial killings,
should they ever be released, should they ever be given parole?
And I'm not sure how soon we'll see James Lesarkas free.
I know that twenty six years is his non parole period,
but I think it's going to be a lot longer
than that before the community has to grapple with that issue.
Speaker 3 (54:33):
Thanks to Jeremy for assisting us to tell this story.
You can find his book Snowtown The Bodies in Barrel's
Murders linked in our show notes. True Crime Conversations is
a Mumamea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath,
with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is
Giam Moylan. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you
(54:56):
have any feedback or thoughts you'd like to share, you
can email us at true Crime at mammamea dot com
dot au, or you can head to the survey LinkedIn
our show notes to go in the running to win
one of five one hundred dollars gift vouchers. Thanks so
much for listening. I'll be back next week with another
True Crime Conversation
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