Snowtown

by Jeremy Pudney

  Bunting’s workmates also remembered his ‘wild claims as to being able to steal power tools to order’. He spoke of taking part in ‘ram raids’ but those around him dismissed the stories as Bunting simply big-noting himself.

  Nonetheless Bunting was a valued employee who was dismissed only because there wasn’t enough money to keep him. A reference written for Bunting when he left the museum’s employ described him as a ‘very diligent, willing and intelligent worker, who carried out the work required of him in a thorough and enthusiastic manner’.

  By late 1988 Bunting was living in a house in Adelaide’s northern suburbs which he was sharing with friend Kevin Reid and Kevin’s then partner, Michelle White. Kevin worked at the nearby SA Meat Corporation and managed to get Bunting some casual work there. Company records indicate that at first Bunting worked at the abattoir’s ‘southern works beef hall’. Employees were required to have basic knife skills for working at the evisceration table, where a beast’s liver, spleen and other intestinal areas were sliced out for offal production. Later he was shifted to the by-products area, where a general labourer such as Bunting would spend his shift bagging meat meal or on general rendering duties. It was horrid, bloody work but John Bunting seemed to enjoy it. Every afternoon he would come home stinking of the putrid slaughterhouse odour but not be aware of it, because a childhood illness had robbed him of his sense of smell. While there is no record of John Bunting’s duties having included the actual slaughter of animals, he would often brag that this was the part of his job he enjoyed most. Sitting at the dinner table, Bunting would describe how he used a stun gun to immobilise an animal before cutting its throat.

  In the time they shared the house with him, both Kevin and Michelle witnessed Bunting’s darker side first-hand. He spoke openly of his hatred of homosexuals and paedophiles and still seemed unable to differentiate between the two. On one occasion Bunting spoke of a man he knew to be a convicted paedophile and how he planned to bash him with an iron bar.

  Michelle, in particular, found John Bunting to be a strange and frightening man. ‘I can remember him reading things on making your own…poisons and what they do,’ she said later. ‘He had guns, big guns, shotguns, some had magazines on them. He kept them under his bed. I remember he bought a petrol blowtorch. I remember him playing in the back garden with it.’

  Another time Kevin discovered—in the ceiling above the laundry—a selection of items including a bottle of poison, rope, a balaclava and a knife with a long, curved blade. He and Michelle had planned to report it to the police but Bunting objected.

  Michelle also recalls the time Bunting decided to kill Kevin’s bull terrier dog because it had attacked his blue heeler. ‘About lunchtime John came round to see me and asked me to come out to the shed as he wanted to show me something. I asked him what it was. He told me it was Kevin’s dog—he had killed it and it was hanging in the shed.’

  Later she watched from the kitchen window as Bunting dragged the dog, in a green plastic bag, to his car. Before Bunting drove off the pair decided to tell Kevin the dog had run away. When he returned, the lower left leg on his jeans was torn. ‘I had some trouble,’ Bunting explained. ‘It was lying on the floor of the front passenger side and it woke up and started to attack me while I was driving.’ Bunting told her he had kept kicking the dog as he tried to control the car, eventually booting the animal from the vehicle and taking off.

  Even long after moving from the shared house, Michelle encountered John Bunting’s mean streak as she spoke of an ex-boyfriend she was having trouble with. ‘You know, I could do him in if you like,’ John told her, before demonstrating how he could use chlorophyll to render a person unconscious.

  It was during a slow period at the abattoir in January 1989 that John Bunting undertook a metalwork course which involved on-site training at a factory. It was here he met the eighteen-year-old woman who would become his wife. Veronika Tripp was a fragile, dependent teenager who lived at home with her parents. She had been completely deaf until undergoing surgery at eight years of age, and her vision was poor. Veronika also suffered intellectual difficulties and was barely literate.

  At the beginning of their relationship the couple would go out on regular dates. Sometimes Bunting would take his new girlfriend for rides on his motorbike, at other times to the movies. ‘We used to go to the pictures together,’ Veronika said recently, ‘and saw mainly horror films, as that was what John wanted to see. I never got to pick the pictures, he always did. He liked movies with blood and guts, war movies and people being shot.’

  After her nineteenth birthday Veronika moved into the house Bunting shared with Kevin and Michelle. It was here that Veronika became acquainted with Bunting’s aggressive nature when they argued. ‘He never got actually physical with me but used to throw objects at me like plastic cups and plates.’

  In September 1989, the pair were married at the local registry office but continued to live in the house they shared with Kevin and Michelle.

  John and Veronika Bunting’s first home together was a government-owned rental house in one of Adelaide’s poorest northern suburbs. The address was 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbury North. Records show the couple began renting the semi-attached house on 14 December 1991.

  THREE

  Robert Joe Wagner was only seven years old when he tried to kill himself. He took an overdose of his mother’s sleeping pills.

  In the months beforehand, Wagner’s mother had noticed a dramatic change in her son. He had become quiet and introverted, and seemed to shy away from teenage males. Wagner would not tell his mother what was troubling him, nor would he speak to a psychologist. It was only after the failed suicide bid that his mother learned the truth: a teenage family friend had sexually abused her son.

  Until the abuse Wagner had been a normal child, in the words of his mother, ‘one minute mischievous, one minute naughty and the next minute lovable’. Born in New South Wales on 28 November 1971, he was only six months old when his father walked out of his life, leaving him and his older sister to be raised by their mother. Wagner was three when the family moved to Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

  The abuse had a profound effect on Robert Wagner. He would never be the same. At school he struggled to learn even basic reading and writing and was held back for an extra year in primary school. He started high school in 1984 but would regularly skip classes and often not turn up to school at all. By the end of his first year the school had given in to his truancy and he was allowed to stay home. At thirteen years old, and with little to occupy his time, Wagner would disappear from home for days in a row, his worried mother regularly reporting him missing to police. During one of these absences some of Wagner’s young friends told his mother that her son had been spending time at a stranger’s house in a neighbouring suburb.

  Eventually Wagner took his mother to meet this stranger he’d befriended. To her horror, her son introduced her to a transvestite calling himself Vanessa Lane. The man’s real name was Barry Lane; he was a paedophile. Using gifts to lure Wagner, Lane had taken a physical and psychological grip on the teenager and, despite his mother’s pleas, Wagner refused to stop seeing Lane. The following year, when Wagner was fourteen and Lane thirty-one, the pair disappeared. Wagner’s mother reported her son missing but heard nothing for four years.

  Barry Lane led a bizarre and perverse life. He was a predator who, ultimately, would become the prey.

  Born Barry Wayne Venables on 7 August 1955, he was a sickly baby. Suspecting that he was malnourished, child welfare authorities took him from his parents when he was eight months old. After a short stint in foster care Lane’s grandmother won custody of him, raising her grandson in the rural town of Port Pirie, SA, where his mother also lived. Lane was given what outsiders described as a ‘good Christian upbringing’, but his childhood compulsion to dress up in girls’ clothing worried his grandmother.

  By the time he was sixteen, Lane was openly homosexual and pursuing sexual relati
onships with other teenage boys. At one point, concerned he had upset his grandmother, Lane attempted a relationship with a girl named Kathy. It quickly ended.

  At seventeen, Lane left home and travelled Australia, living in Sydney, Melbourne and then Adelaide. He was employed for a period as a gardener but had little full-time work and eventually went onto a disability pension after apparently suffering a back injury.

  While Lane maintained contact with his family, his relationship with his mother was strained. Perhaps unable to accept his sexuality, Sylvia Lane believed he was not her real son. Her child, she suspected, had been ‘mixed up’ with another baby when he was taken into foster care.

  As a young man Barry Lane grappled with sexual confusion and perversion. He felt he wanted to be a woman, and to that end became a transvestite. He would wear women’s clothing, carry a handbag and insist on being called Vanessa or Kim. He even took hormones to stimulate breast growth and reduce body hair.

  Lane also harboured sexual desires towards young boys. In 1980, having previously fronted court on similar charges, Lane was sentenced to four months’ jail after being convicted of indecently assaulting two boys under the age of twelve. During sentencing the judge warned him that he must change his ways or face the prospect of a long time behind bars: ‘I am aware…that you have medical problems and problems in establishing your own identity. Now, people can understand and have sympathy for that but it does not permit you to go around doing these sort of things for your own gratification,’ the judge cautioned. For his part, Lane blamed his behaviour on his family, whom he said ‘prevent me from living my lifestyle as I wish to live it…If I done [sic] such a foolish thing again…I’d rather be chucked away for life and the keys chucked away.’

  But Lane had no intention of curbing his behaviour. For him, a young truant like Robert Wagner was easy prey.

  It was not until the end of 1989, after four years in hiding, that Robert Wagner and Barry Lane reappeared as suddenly as they had vanished. Pleased to be reunited with her son, Wagner’s mother would visit regularly, although Lane—who no longer dressed in drag—was never far away. Wagner told his mother that Lane had whisked him away so that authorities could not separate them. Now that he was eighteen, there was nothing they could do.

  Lane and Wagner were sharing a small house in the northern Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North. The yards were unkempt and the home filthy. Anyone who visited could barely stand the putrid odour coming from inside the house, the result of their pet cats having soiled the carpets and floors.

  Obviously gay, the couple was constantly harassed by bigoted locals who would spray graffiti on their front fence, eventually forcing them to invest in two large Rottweiler dogs for protection. Other neighbours were more friendly, some lending Lane money or giving him cigarettes.

  Lane and Wagner would spend much of their time wandering through the neighbourhood, and one day late in 1991 they met a young couple moving into a house not far from theirs. The man introduced himself as John Bunting; his wife’s name was Veronika.

  With his burning hate of homosexuals and paedophiles, it’s likely John Bunting initially despised both Robert Wagner and Barry Lane. However, after getting to know them a little better, he saw opportunity.

  Bunting’s own childhood sexual abuse caused him to feel sympathy for Wagner, who he suspected was not homosexual by choice but had been coerced by Lane, the paedophile. Bunting decided to take the young man under his wing, to rescue him.

  At the same time, Bunting did not want to merely cast Lane aside—he was far too useful for that. As he developed a close bond with Wagner, Bunting feigned friendship with Lane in order to extract information from him about other paedophiles.

  John Bunting had found the perfect way to feed his obsession.

  About the time he befriended Wagner and Lane, Bunting had also met a man named Mark at a welding course and the pair had become mates. Mark Haydon—who had changed his surname from Lawrence—was a quiet man, almost withdrawn, but with a foul temper. He had not been blessed with a sharp intellect, or a fortunate life.

  Haydon was raised almost single-handedly by his father, Edward Lawrence. His mother suffered schizophrenia and was forever checking in and out of hospital. She died in 1996. Haydon’s only sibling, an older brother, had been killed in a car crash in 1972.

  As a young man Haydon shared the family home with his father, and his first job was at the car manufacturing plant where Edward had been a spray painter for more than a decade. After less than two years Haydon was sacked for stealing. He worked little from then on.

  Haydon had few girlfriends but in 1992 he moved in with a woman named Christina. The couple had a son, but their relationship soured within months of the birth. In 1994 he began a relationship with Verna Sinclair.

  Verna—who often went by her middle name, Audrey—had endured an unsettled childhood. She was the youngest of seven children and most of her brothers and sisters had been fostered or adopted out. As a young woman Verna had led a nomadic existence, drifting around Australia. Between 1978 and 1988 she gave birth to seven children, six boys and a girl, who were fathered by five different men. Devoid of any maternal skills or instincts, Verna placed her first three children into care, dumped the next two with one of her sisters and kept only the two youngest, William and Christopher.

  Not long after the relationship began, Verna and her sons moved into the house Haydon shared with his father. The following year Edward shifted into a nursing home, having suffered a fall while the others were on holiday. In 1997 Mark and Verna married and, concerned that one of her ex-partners might try to find her, the new bride changed her name to Elizabeth Audrey Haydon. In 1998 the couple sold Mark Haydon’s family home and bought another, in the northern suburb of Smithfield Plains.

  FOUR

  While tragedy touches the lives of many, it stalked Elizabeth Harvey throughout her forty-seven years of life, striking not only at her but at those she loved.

  Her birth name was Christine Anne Youde, and would change many times. One of three children to parents Dennis and Joyce Youde, Elizabeth had a miserable life almost from the day it began in September 1953. She was young when her mother left her father for a man who was an abusive drunk, taking her children with her. The children were rid of their stepfather only when he died suddenly.

  Harvey grew up to be an intelligent woman but the horrors she had endured at the hands of her stepfather meant that in adulthood she suffered almost constantly from depression. From this stemmed a weakness which would destroy her life: Harvey could not be without a man.

  Harvey’s first child, Troy Youde, was born on 30 August 1976, but his father left her to cope with motherhood alone. Within two years Harvey had met and married another, much older, man. Spyros Vlassakis had been born in Greece and lived in Egypt, before taking a job on a cargo vessel and jumping ship in Australia.

  Spyros was accepting of Troy at first, even agreeing to have his name placed on the toddler’s birth certificate. On Christmas Eve 1979, Harvey gave birth to the couple’s first son, James Spyridon Vlassakis. Adrian Vlassakis was born two years later and the youngest, Kristoffer, in 1985.

  The family lived in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, both parents failing to hold down a regular job, preferring instead to rely on government welfare payments. They would even joke that Kristoffer had been ‘born for the benefit’.

  The family led a troubled life, with Harvey and Spyros often separating. In addition, there was the family’s dark secret—Spyros’s sustained, brutal sexual abuse of both Troy and Jamie. In a disturbingly similar story to that of their mother’s abusive childhood, the brothers escaped Spyros’s abuse only when he died suddenly in the winter of 1986. Spyros Vlassakis suffered a massive heart attack as he fetched Jamie a glass of water, the young boy watching as paramedics lost the battle to save his father’s life.

  Now a widow, Elizabeth Harvey (then named Christine Vlassakis) wasted little time in mourning. She once again yearned
to have a man in her life, and while at a friend’s party met her new love. His name was Marcus Johnson.

  Many men would be quick to shy away from a recently widowed mother of four, but Marcus liked Harvey from the moment they met. In any case, he too had ‘baggage’.

  In 1971 Marcus had married a young girl named Carlyne Heitmann and together they had three sons—the first, Nigel, and twin boys David and Michael. By 1980 the marriage had crumbled and the pair divorced. Carlyne was granted sole custody of the boys and would later remarry, then move interstate. Gradually Marcus lost contact with his sons.

  Marcus and Elizabeth’s union was as peculiar as it was tumultuous. They were in no rush to get married, instead opting for a de facto relationship. There was a string of brief separations, brought on at least in part by Troy and Jamie’s rejection of Marcus. Troy especially resented Marcus’s relationship with his mother and spent time living with his grandmother. Throughout this period the family moved house more than a dozen times, almost always at Harvey’s instigation, often forcing the boys to change schools. Their academic achievement suffered as a result.

  Despite the irregular lifestyle, Marcus held down a job at a local car manufacturing plant, and stood by Harvey and her boys. In 1992 the couple officially married. Wedlock did nothing to improve the stormy relationship, which deteriorated even further as depression took a hold on Harvey’s life. The news that her mother was dying of cancer pushed her to the brink of a nervous breakdown and she became hopelessly addicted to shopping and gambling on poker machines. Strangely, she also became obsessed with arts and crafts, enrolling in class after class.