After Lane’s murder, Trevilyan moved in with Wagner and his girlfriend. The youth was concerned for his own safety, and he confided to a cousin his involvement in Lane’s murder. Bunting and Wagner were also concerned that the mentally unstable youth would give them away, so, in November 1997, the two of them abducted Trevilyan, took him into the remote Adelaide Hills, and staged a fake suicide by hanging him from a tree.
The next victim was Gavin Porter, a friend of James Vlassakis’s. By early 1998, still living in Bunting’s house with his mother and brother Troy, James had become addicted to heroin. Porter was a fellow addict who James invited to move into the house. A fatal move, as Bunting had suddenly decided to add drug addicts to his hate list. After befriending Porter and obtaining his bank and social security details, Bunting and Wagner tortured and strangled him in April 1998, storing his body in a barrel in the shed out back of Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge, along with the others.
At this point, Bunting showed Vlassakis the bodies in the barrels, traumatizing the young man enough to force him to take part in his quest to rid the world of the type of people he personally despised. Next to die, and the perfect victim to introduce James to the art of murder, was his own half-brother, Troy Youde.
Bunting convinced James that he needed to avenge himself for the sexual abuse he had suffered at Troy’s hands. In August 1998, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis armed themselves with jack handles and other makeshift weapons and assaulted Troy in his bed. They dragged him into the bathroom and used a tape recorder to record his torture and death. His body was also dumped in a barrel in the shed.
Despite being sickened by these events, James still accessed his dead brother’s accounts to feed his heroin habit. Bunting knew he had a psychological hold over the kid.
Bunting had maintained a casual friendship with Mark Haydon, but had taken an intense dislike to Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth. Perhaps because of this, he selected as the next victim her eighteen-year-old nephew, Fred Brooks, a mate of James’s.
Barely a month after Troy Youde was killed, in September 1998, Fred Brooks was invited over to the Bunting house. There, he was stripped naked and tortured by Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. They burned him with lit cigarettes and a cigarette lighter. Bunting brought out a new toy he had found, a variac transformer, used to administer voltage. They attached clamps to Brooks’s genitals. After that, Bunting produced a box of sparklers, inserted one in the head of Brooks’s penis, and set it alight. He enjoyed it so much he did it again. They then used a syringe to inject water into the youth’s testicles. At this point, Brooks mercifully died.
Brooks’s body was taken to Mark Haydon’s house in north Adelaide, where the other barrels had been transported as well. The gang then accessed Brooks’ social security payments. By this stage, the police were aware of a number of missing persons reports and a spate of suspicious activity in accessing these people’s social security payments. They were slowly closing in.
The murder process was accelerating and becoming more random. At the same time, Bunting’s level of sick perversion was getting out of control. The next victim was Garry O’Dwyer, a twenty-nine-year-old disabled pensioner who had the misfortune of crossing Bunting’s path on a public street in October 1998. Observing his physical incapacity, a limp resulting from a car accident and seeing him as an easy mark, Bunting befriended O’Dwyer and secured an invite to his house for himself, Wagner, and Vlassakis.
Once there, they attacked and tortured O’Dwyer, forcing him to give them his bank and social security details. They elicited statements under torture on a voice recorder to throw family members off the trail. Then Wagner strangled him to death; the body was dismembered and thrown into a barrel.
Next, Bunting decided it was time to get rid of Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth, for the simple fact that he didn’t like her. While Mark Haydon was conveniently away from home, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis murdered her on November 21, 1998, and her dismembered body also ended up in a barrel of acid.
However, Elizabeth was reported missing by her brother within a few days. He did not believe the contradicting messages Mark Haydon gave for her absence and was highly suspicious of his seeming lack of concern. Nor did he believe she would abandon her two young sons.
When the police were alerted, they noted Elizabeth’s association with Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. In late 1998, Bunting moved house again, this time to Snowtown, a rural area north of Adelaide. Concerned about the police questioning Haydon over his wife’s disappearance, the barrels were placed in two vehicles and driven to Snowtown, where Bunting and Mark Haydon rented a disused bank building under a false name. The presence of two unfamiliar vehicles and the activity around the empty bank building were noted by locals and, eventually, the police.
In the interim, Bunting persuaded Vlassakis to lure his stepbrother David Johnson to the Snowtown bank vault on the pretext of buying drugs. On May 9, 1999, he became the only victim to be murdered in Snowtown.
By this time the police had been able to establish links between some of the missing persons and Bunting, Wagner, Vlassakis, and Haydon. The latter’s phone was tapped. After a tipoff, police broke into the bank vault and discovered the barrels, where the stench was overpowering. The mummified remains of eight victims were recovered.
Unfortunately, Bunting wasn’t too bright, because he stored the bodies in hydrochloric acid, which preserved them rather than dissolved them. If he had used sulfuric acid, it might have achieved the desired effect.
The four perpetrators were quickly arrested. Bunting was initially charged with one murder, that of Johnson. Fearing for his life, Vlassakis quickly rolled over and spilled the beans. Bodies were disinterred from the backyards of properties Bunting had previously rented, and it was eventually established that there were twelve victims, making this the serial murder case with the biggest body count in Australian history to date.
However, it is not so much the detail of the murders that interests me here, but rather the lasting impact: the stigma of this shocking event on the tiny rural town of Snowtown.
The immediate effect was to lead to a short-term economic boom as curious onlookers like me came to gawk at the bank building in the otherwise uninteresting out-of-the-way locale.
Some local businesses started producing and selling souvenirs, T-shirts, and fridge magnets featuring gallows humor, images and slogans punning around the use of the barrels—a form of what is known as “dark tourism.” People are fascinated by death and murder. Every city across Australia has its own crime tour. They are as popular as ghost tours. Grim reminders of our nation’s dark past. No different to most countries.
However, in addition to the morbid fascination of passersby, the town also became tainted by the lingering stench of death. The awful memories of what they found in that empty bank vault. In 2011, the local community proposed changing the name of the place to Rosetown to dissociate itself from the stigma of the infamous “Bodies in the Barrels” case.
That same year, a feature film based on the events was released across Australia on May 19. Simply called Snowtown, the film centered on a semi-fictional autobiographical account of John Bunting’s troubled background leading up to his becoming a serial killer.
The following year, 2012, saw the region’s only newspaper, the Broughton Star, close its doors, as if the town itself was putting up the shutters. Nothing of interest to see here anymore, folks. Move along.
So, the question that interests me is what the mood is like in Snowtown today, some twenty years removed from its moment of infamy. To try and find answers, I reached out from a great distance to the Wakefield Regional Council in rural South Australia to try and obtain some feedback.
The response I promptly received from a helpful staffer read:
“Thank you for your email. This was a horrible thing for our community to be involved in and the locals of Snowtown do not like to rehash and discuss the matter. As there were no locals physically affected by the murders, they would prefer to just leave it in the past.”
So, I did some digging of