Less than an hour after their arrests, all three prisoners had arrived at the Adelaide police station, where each was seated in a separate interview room. The interview rooms were small; a table against one wall and chairs at either side. Each room was equipped with video and audio recording equipment. At 7.45 a.m. Detective Stapleton activated the video camera and tape recorders in the room where John Bunting was sitting. Detective Presgrave was with them.
‘Mr Bunting, a short time ago when we entered the room and I indicated to you to move closer to the microphone you said to me that you don’t want to do an interview, is that correct?’
‘Yeah.’
Stapleton then summarised the morning’s events and offered to replay the tape recording of Bunting’s arrest. Bunting didn’t respond.
‘Is that a refusal to answer my question?’
‘I told you I’m not doing this. I would like my phone call now. I wish to ring Legal Aid.’
‘Right, I will organise a phone call for you straightaway.’
Several attempts were made to contact the government’s Legal Services Commission to find Bunting a lawyer. He was again told of his rights before being taken from the interview room to the police city watch house. At 8.19 a.m. John Justin Bunting was formally charged with one count of murder.
At 9 a.m., Detective Stapleton led Bunting into the police medical examination room. Bunting was cautioned that their conversation was being recorded. The police medical examiner, Dr Ernest Flock, took over.
‘Okay Mr Bunting, I’m Dr Flock, as the officer said, and I’ve been asked to just do two things, that is take a sample of your blood, all right, and also take some hair samples. This will be for comparison purposes as part of the investigation. Right, now, just a couple of things I have to ask you. You don’t have to answer them if you don’t want to. Making sure of your surname, all right, Bunting, is that correct? And John Justin?’
‘Right,’ Bunting replied and nodded his head.
‘Can I have your date of birth, please?’
‘Four, nine, sixty-six.’
‘We will be taking blood with a needle from one of the arms, so I have to know if you suffer from any bleeding or, like, haemophilia, like where you bruise or bleed easy?’
‘No.’
‘Fine, we will just pull your chair a bit closer to here and then we will get you to rest your arm, get a couple of things ready and then we’re in business.’
Bunting then turned to Detective Stapleton. ‘Do I have to give a blood sample?’
‘Yes, you are required to give a blood sample and we are able to use as much force as necessary to obtain that sample.’
‘It’s not necessary, I’m just asking.’
‘And I’m just advising you.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I have to be present.’
‘You’re not the doctor.’
‘I’m required to be present during the examination.’
Dr Flock took the blood from Bunting’s arm, placed a small dressing over the wound and asked Bunting to hold it down.
‘Next we will just pluck a few hairs out from your head at the back. It’s a bit uncomfortable but it’s not bad. We need about ten at least.’
Bunting’s blood and hair samples were placed in a refrigerator and would later be used to obtain his DNA profile and, perhaps, vital evidence. Robert Wagner, a lawyer with him, objected to his medical examination but offered no physical resistance. He too had blood and hair samples taken.
Mark Haydon’s examination was more thorough, Dr Flock taking not only blood and hair, but also scrapings from under his fingernails and toenails. He was also asked to remove his clothes and place his T-shirt and shorts into separate bags before being given white paper overalls to wear.
By 11.43 a.m.—almost five hours after the teams of police had swooped on their homes—Bunting, Wagner and Haydon had been charged with the murder of a person unknown. All three had refused to answer questions about the crimes they were suspected of committing.
Another target of the morning’s operation was John Bunting’s de facto, Elizabeth Harvey. Police suspected she had helped Bunting steal money from the missing people’s bank accounts and might have knowledge of their murders.
Harvey had been in bed when police arrived at the home she shared with Bunting. Two detectives asked her to go with them to the local police station and she agreed.
Though not under arrest, Harvey was interviewed by detectives Jennifer O’Donohue and Malcolm Williams for more than two hours. Harvey told them she’d been in a relationship with Bunting since 1994 and now he was caring for her as she died of cancer. She identified Robert Wagner as a friend of Bunting’s.
Harvey told the detectives she had four sons, but hadn’t seen her eldest, Troy, for close to eight months. She confirmed that David Johnson was her stepson and was visibly shocked when told his wallet had been found in the Snowtown bank vault. He could be one of the victims.
Detective Williams listed the names of the missing people police had been seeking. Harvey admitted to knowing three of them—Barry Lane, Elizabeth Haydon and Suzanne Allen—but not Ray Davies or Clinton Trezise.
‘The fact that I’ve told you that we believe these people have been murdered, and we believe yesterday we found their bodies and that Bunting and Wagner are involved in this, does that surprise you?’
Harvey shook her head: ‘Um, I don’t believe it. I’m sorry, I just can’t, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. I honestly do, I can’t—I, I’m stressed out about—I’m not, I’m not amazed, I just don’t believe it.’
‘If I was to tell you he [Bunting] has been videotaped at different money outlets…getting money paid into these missing persons’ accounts, they were on social security benefits…and he’s used their cards to access their accounts—’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about it.’
‘Did you ever…change Suzanne Allen’s pension type or address?’
‘No.’
Harvey’s denials were emphatic, but she was lying. When detectives searched her handbag they found a letter addressed to Suzanne Allen which had been sent to a house at Murray Bridge where Harvey and Bunting had lived. The letter was from Centrelink.
Detective Williams went on the offensive: ‘Can you explain to me what you are doing with that document?’
‘No I can’t, sorry.’ Harvey was squirming.
‘Can’t or don’t want to?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You sure you haven’t kept this for identification?’
‘No.’
‘You sure you haven’t been obtaining Suzanne Allen’s benefits?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Knowing that she’s been murdered?’
After the interview was over, the detectives were driving Elizabeth Harvey home when she decided to change her story. They were back in the police interview room within minutes. This time there were no denials, but no admissions of murder.
‘I was taking you home when you said something about John Bunting coming home and saying that he’d found Suzanne Allen in the bath and she was dead. Could you just reiterate or go over what you told me in the car?’
‘I only very vaguely knew Sue, and he [Bunting] came home and said that he found Sue dead, slumped over the bath. I asked him what he was doing around there and he said he was robbing her place while she was in Tasmania and that he and Robert [Wagner] came into the house and Sue was slumped over the bath, dead.’
Harvey explained that when she asked Bunting what they’d done with Suzanne Allen’s body, he told her to ‘shut up’.
‘I asked him if he notified the police and he said no, because he would have got lumbered with the robbery.’
Elizabeth Harvey’s confession was extensive. She told the detectives that after Bunting had found Suzanne Allen dead—apparently of natural causes—her property was stolen and sold off. Bunting kept Allen’s credit union card but couldn’t steal
money from her account because he didn’t have the personal identification number (PIN). By snapping the card and impersonating Suzanne Allen, Harvey obtained a new card and PIN. For the next twelve months she stole Allen’s pension, which Centrelink paid into the bank account every fortnight. After that, Harvey gave the card back to Bunting.
By the end of her interview, police had enough to charge Elizabeth Harvey with fraud. However there was nothing to implicate her in the murders and she had emerged as a vital witness. Harvey was free to go—at least for now.
Media crews had been perched on ladders for close to six hours; nobody wanted to surrender their position. From their respective vantage points, television cameramen and newspaper photographers could see through the mesh and razor wire into a secure courtyard. It was through this area that prisoners were marched from police cells—the city watch house—to the Adelaide Magistrates Court.
The media was eagerly awaiting the court appearance of three men. Court documents had revealed their names: John Justin Bunting, Robert Joe Wagner and Mark Ray Haydon. The trio had been arrested early that morning. The arrests followed the discovery of bodies in barrels at an old bank the day before—Thursday, 20 March 1999—at a place called Snowtown. The small town north of Adelaide was by now crawling with police and news crews.
It was a little before three-thirty in the afternoon when the watch house door swung open and the cameras began flashing. Each of the men was handcuffed at the front, Wagner first to emerge followed by Bunting and Haydon. Their looks were sullen, although both Bunting and Wagner allowed themselves a glance at the media pack behind the wire. The look on Bunting’s face made it seem as though, ever so slightly, he had enjoyed the moment.
Within minutes the trio stood in the high-security dock of Court Seventeen. Reinforced glass separated them from the rest of the room; guards were standing inside and out.
The men looked at the magistrate as he read the charge aloud: ‘You are charged with the murder of a person unknown between August 1, 1993, and May 20, 1999.’ The magistrate’s voice was steady, the packed courtroom silent. The police were still reeling from their discovery the day before.
Within four minutes the hearing was over. As they were led to a waiting prison van, Bunting and Wagner smiled pleasantly at their guards. If they were worried about their predicament, it didn’t show.
TWELVE
At first, John Bunting had been like a father to James Vlassakis, arriving just as Jamie’s life was in crisis. The teenager’s family was impoverished; his mother a psychiatric mess addicted to drugs and gambling. Bunting was Jamie’s saviour, offering protection to a boy who’d been the repeated victim of sexual abuse from his own father.
However, as time passed John Bunting’s darker side emerged and Jamie became frightened. Bunting would rant incessantly about paedophiles, describing them as ‘dirties’ who deserved to die. Jamie watched in horror as Bunting killed animals for pleasure, some of them skinned alive.
The teenager stood by, knowingly, as Bunting’s prey became human. Eventually, through a combination of fear and weakness, Jamie joined the killing spree and thus became a murderer, turning to drugs in an effort to forget.
It was James Vlassakis who answered the knock at the door the day Bunting was arrested. As Jamie watched Bunting being led away in handcuffs, his stomach was churning. His mother, too, had been taken away for questioning. Sooner or later, Jamie believed, the police would be back for him.
Distraught, he turned to his friend Wally Fitzgerald for help:
He rang my place just after 7 a.m., he was crying and said that his mother and John had been arrested for fraud and murder. He wanted me to go and get his heroin. I thought he was bullshitting so I hung up.
At about 8 a.m. he again rang up and said that he was coming round in a taxi. He arrived about 8.30 a.m. He came in, I sent the kids off to school, asked him what was going on, he was crying, he said that his mother and John had been arrested for fraud and murder. I made him a cup of coffee; I asked him if it was true. He said it was.
During his emotional outpouring, Jamie told Wally much of what he knew about the murders. Among his revelations was that bodies were buried in the back yard of a house where John Bunting had once lived.
The following day Wally Fitzgerald telephoned the police Crime Stoppers line, alerting them to the secret suburban gravesite.
The ground-penetrating radar looked more like a common lawnmower: a wheel-mounted device which, when passed over a section of ground, detects disturbances in the earth, indicating whether or not something is buried there. Similar technology had been used five years earlier to help pinpoint nine bodies entombed in the concrete foundations of the house of serial killers Fred and Rosemary West in Gloucester, England. The ‘House of Horrors’ case had received worldwide attention.
It was a Sunday morning, 23 May 1999, when teams of police converged on the small, unremarkable home in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Curious neighbours and media formed a crowd in the street.
The address was 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbury North. It was a house where John Bunting had once lived. The police were looking for bodies.
With the assistance of State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers a large tent was erected in the back yard, covering the area of interest to detectives. In a corner of the yard, under 7 centimetres of earth, was a concrete slab on which a rainwater tank had once stood. The technician slowly wheeled the radar over the suspect site as apprehensive police watched on. Waiting. The results were encouraging—there was something down there.
Detective Sergeant Brian Swan was in charge of the operation. At 11.30 a.m. he gave the order to start digging. Police and SES workers used crowbars, sledgehammers and spades to break up the concrete slab. Getting through the earth below was only marginally easier.
Almost five hours later, at a depth of 1.37 metres, police caught sight of a green garbage bag. Delicate digging revealed ten more. One of the bags was opened, releasing the distinctive smell of rotting flesh and revealing what appeared to be human remains. Each garbage bag was marked for identification, photographed, and delivered to the Forensic Science Centre.
The next morning, forensic pathologist Dr Roger Byard began his examination. The eleven bags were first X-rayed, then opened one by one.
Inside one bag was a human torso—the chest and abdomen. Tissue and skeletal muscle were still present, along with some internal organs. Dr Byard noted that the overlying skin had been removed, with the exception of three small areas. The head had been crudely cut off, the arms and legs also sliced away. The chest was compressed and the genitals were missing.
Another of the bags contained two feet cut off at the ankles, and a head. Tangled within the medium-length black hair was a piece of blue nylon rope. The severed legs, arms and hands were in other bags. Dr Byard concluded that the limbs, like the torso, had been ‘defleshed’:
The body had been disarticulated through the joints, most likely with a knife, with no evidence of sawing of bones. The defleshing of the limbs and torso was also most likely done with a knife, as several of the skin fragments demonstrated clean incised edges.
Reconstructing the body indicated that, apart from autolytic and possibly previous surgically removed internal organs, no other body parts were missing. The limbs were symmetrical and appropriate for the size of the torso. The hands and feet were also symmetrical. This indicated that the body parts were most likely derived from a single body. The body was an adult white female.
Three days after their first discovery, police returned to 203 Waterloo Corner Road. Children climbed a tree to peer over a fence, traffic slowed to a crawl and a crowd again gathered; locals were joined by a frenzied media throng, hungry for another instalment in this sensational story. At one point even a catering van stopped outside, cashing in on the morbid spectacle.
In the back yard police used a backhoe to excavate the same area where the woman’s remains had already been unearthed. Detectives believ
ed they would find another body if they dug deeper.
Almost 2 metres further down, a skeleton was uncovered. Crime scene officers began taking photographs as bones were carefully removed and placed in clear plastic evidence bags. Detective Patterson, wearing long gloves, was given the tedious task of sifting through the dirt. He used a sieve to ensure even the smallest bones were found. Behind him Detective Swan, a clipboard cradled in his left arm, logged every piece of evidence.
Dr Ross James, another forensic pathologist, examined the skeletal remains the following day:
The remains consisted entirely of essentially dried skeletal material apart from a hood of a parka, khaki in colour, covered with dirt and encompassing the skull vault.
The skeletal materials were those of an adult male and the skeletal tissue was essentially complete. There were no personal effects or other items of clothing present.
The bones were all dry and clean, without soft tissue or any obvious odour of decay. The mouth contained a complete set of teeth with numerous amalgam fillings.
Cause of death is not apparent. The bones are free of injury and no ligatures were present around the neck.
There were no visible injuries nor mutilations. Dr James found no restraints on the skeleton, and concluded that the man had died at least two years before, possibly more.
In the days after Bunting’s arrest, James Vlassakis and his mother were feeling the pressure. The teenager was struggling to come to terms with his guilt, while Elizabeth had endured hours of police questioning.
Wally Fitzgerald, a petty criminal, put them in touch with his lawyer, whom they met on the same day detectives began digging at Waterloo Corner Road. Within hours the lawyer had contacted police. His clients would tell all, but they wanted immunity.
A solicitor at his side, the interview with James Vlassakis began at 5.32 p.m. on Monday, 24 May 1999. The detectives were Steve McCoy and Greg Stone. It was McCoy who outlined the terms of the meeting:
Snowtown Page 7