Snowtown

by Jeremy Pudney

  We will not be issuing you with a caution and, as a result, the statement you make will not be used against you in any proceeding. Once this statement has been completed it will be forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions. This statement will then be checked and assessed, for example, as to the accuracy and completeness in light of all the evidence available. It is only then that a decision will be made by the Director of Public Prosecutions as to whether or not full immunity will be granted to you.

  The harrowing interview spanned ten days. Throughout it Vlassakis was visibly distressed—often crying, sometimes physically ill.

  Police had discovered eight bodies in Snowtown, but Vlassakis detailed twelve murders, some of which he’d been told about, others he’d taken part in. During a break the confessions became too much and the nineteen year old overdosed on heroin and almost died. He had been using drugs heavily and it seemed the only way out.

  The murders Vlassakis recounted were bizarre and ritualistic. Victims had been chosen, then killed. They had been tortured, sometimes with music playing in the background. Some were given electric shocks, burned, injected. Toes were crushed with pliers. Those about to die had been forced to subjugate themselves to their attackers—refer to them as ‘Lord’ or ‘Master’.

  Vlassakis described how Bunting and Wagner delighted in the pain and suffering; how they feverishly anticipated the kill. Bunting liked to stare into his victims’ eyes.

  James Vlassakis’s off-the-record confessions ended on the afternoon of 2 June 1999. At 5.40 p.m. he was arrested, then taken to the police cells, searched and formally charged with murder. Vlassakis was medically examined—blood and hair samples were taken—then transferred to a secure ward at Adelaide’s Glenside Psychiatric Hospital.

  The following day, having attempted suicide twice in a week, Vlassakis was moved to the Correctional Service Department’s secure psychiatric facility, James Nash House. It would be another ten months before the young man was officially told he would not be granted immunity.

  The revelations made by James Vlassakis could not be used as evidence against him. Still, they were invaluable. The information he had volunteered provided police with a kind of a road map for their investigation.

  Indeed, it was information from Vlassakis which had prompted police to revisit 203 Waterloo Corner Road, making a second discovery of human remains.

  More importantly, Vlassakis had detailed a dozen murders—and provided a list of victims’ names.

  Detectives from Task Force Chart—as the operation had been named—were now in the midst of the single biggest criminal investigation in Australian history. They were to follow countless leads, interview thousands of witnesses and collect volumes of evidence.

  Over the next three years, and even as the accused stood trial, a team of dedicated police worked tirelessly in their search for answers. They would leave no stone unturned—every fact was needed so justice could be done and the victims’ families could know the terrible truth.

  What emerged was a horrid story. It was beyond most rational people’s imaginations.

  PART TWO

  THE MURDERS

  THIRTEEN

  James Vlassakis will never forget the look of delight on John Bunting’s face. It was as though the thrill of the kill had come rushing back.

  The pair was watching television, a true-crime show called Australia’s Most Wanted. This episode detailed the discovery of a skeleton at a place called Lower Light. The young man had been murdered several years before and the case remained unsolved. As he spoke, Bunting could hardly contain his excitement.

  ‘That’s my handiwork!’

  Clinton Douglas Trezise was the first of the serial killing victims; he was murdered in August 1992 by John Bunting. The scene of the crime was the lounge room of Bunting’s home at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Salisbury North. The motive had almost certainly been Bunting’s warped hatred of homosexuals.

  Bunting bludgeoned the teenager to death with a hammer, caving in the back of his skull. Forensic evidence indicated that Clinton was lying face down on the floor as the blows rained down on him. The attack was so ferocious that the front of the victim’s skull was also shattered. A fracture to his left hand suggested that he’d tried to protect himself in his final moments of life.

  With the killing done, Bunting wrapped the victim’s body in garbage bags and then enlisted the help of two friends: Robert Wagner and Barry Lane. The body was loaded into Barry Lane’s station wagon.

  Unaware of the day’s events, Bunting’s then wife, Veronika, went with her husband to Lane and Wagner’s house—supposedly for dinner:

  John, Robert and Barry were talking. They were talking in the lounge room when the three of them got up and Barry asked me if I could look after the dogs and cats…while he could go off somewhere with John and Robert. Before Barry left, he locked me inside the house. I saw them walking off towards our house at 203 Waterloo Corner Road.

  Within days a terrified Barry Lane had visited Veronika Bunting to tell her what had happened. But Lane cautioned Veronika against asking her husband too many questions. She ignored his advice—curiosity had got the better of her:

  John told me parts of what they did. John said that he took someone up to Lower Light and buried them in a hole. His name was Clinton Trezise and he was a friend of Barry and Robert’s. He met him at Barry and Robert’s house and took an instant disliking to him.

  I have never told anybody else about this conversation as I didn’t want to get killed. I believed that if I did tell somebody, John would kill me.

  Around the time of his murder Clinton Trezise had been leading a solitary life. A slightly built lad with brown hair, a freckled face and crooked teeth, the only striking thing about the eighteen year old was the brightly coloured pants he often wore. At the time they were known as ‘Happy Pants’.

  Openly homosexual, Clinton lived by himself in a small unit in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, his only furniture a kitchen table, bed and portable television.

  Loneliness was nothing new to Clinton. The young man had few friends and only occasional contact with his family. Clinton’s parents, Doug and Marilyn, had divorced when he was three. With younger brother Scott, Clinton had been placed into foster care while the boys’ sister, Sherie, stayed with their mother. Clinton spent his childhood with other families, barely knowing his own.

  In his teens Clinton attended an adult re-entry school in a bid to get his life on track. He formed a bond with classmate named Steven, the pair spending much of their time ‘hanging out’ in the city. The boys eventually became flatmates, but their arrangement came to an abrupt end when Clinton made a sexual advance towards his friend.

  At about the same time Clinton had come to know two other men—a couple who lived in the nearby suburb of Salisbury North. The older man was Barry Lane; his young partner, Robert Wagner. One neighbour remembers Clinton visiting regularly.

  I remember that Barry introduced Clinton as someone he was looking after for someone else, rather than looking after for himself. Clinton didn’t say hardly anything and seemed quite shy…I thought Clinton might have been some sort of street kid they were helping out.

  After a month I hadn’t seen him and I asked Barry where he had gone. I can’t remember the exact words, but Barry said something like ‘it didn’t work out’.

  Barry Lane’s interest in this teenager was almost certainly a sexual one. Lane needed a new, submissive partner because he could no longer have his way with Robert Wagner.

  Wagner had turned against Lane—he had become John Bunting’s protégé and now shared Bunting’s extreme views on paedophiles and, ironically, homosexuals.

  Tragically, Clinton’s association with Barry Lane most likely cost him his life. It had drawn him to the attention of John Bunting—and Bunting didn’t like what he saw.

  Ray Davies had exhibited unusual sexual behaviour from an early age. At first it was harmless: playing with his sister’s dolls, wearin
g her clothes. But his peculiarities attracted attention at school, where he was constantly mocked and harassed by classmates.

  Born James Leslie Davies (he later changed his name), Ray’s parents were intellectually disabled. Those who knew Ray regarded him as ‘slow’ but ‘cunning’. He spent much of his childhood living in country South Australia, being cared for by his aunt. It was she who discovered how profoundly perverted the boy she called Jamie had become:

  I treated James as my son; I used to call him Jamie. So the first time I realised that Jamie had a sexual problem was when he was about thirteen or fourteen years of age; he was in high school.

  This one night the family came around to my house and I was told that Jamie had been teased at school and was upset and didn’t want to come around to my place, so I got on my pushbike and rode around to where they lived.

  When I walked around the back of the house I caught Jamie playing with the family’s dog; he looked as though he was having sex with it.

  I told him he was a dirty boy and to get to my place straightaway.

  By the time he was twenty Ray Davies was a petty criminal, with convictions for stealing and assault. And there was another incident involving a dog, for which he was charged with indecent behaviour.

  In 1989 Ray moved to Adelaide’s northern suburbs, where he shuffled from one address to the other. At one time he lived with a gay couple named Barry Lane and Robert Wagner, often visiting local homosexual haunts with Lane.

  Through Barry Lane, Ray Davies met a woman named Suzanne Allen. She lived nearby and the pair soon formed a relationship. Ray and Sue moved in together and became engaged to be married. Ray, however, continued his sexual liaisons with other men, including Barry Lane, and by 1993 the relationship with Sue was over. The couple remained friends, though, and Sue allowed Ray to live in a caravan in her back yard.

  Still, Ray’s sexual behaviour was a problem. Neighbours complained that he would hide in bushes and masturbate as school children walked by.

  Sue Allen’s next serious boyfriend was John Bunting; Bunting was also involved with Elizabeth Harvey. He lived up the road from Sue and would visit regularly, often with his mate Robert Wagner.

  It didn’t take long for Bunting and Wagner to learn of Ray Davies’s lewd behaviour towards local children. Barry Lane had also warned them that Davies was a paedophile.

  Ray Davies’s fate was sealed the day after Christmas, 1995, when he was accused of molesting two young boys who had been staying at Sue Allen’s house. Devastated, Sue ordered Ray to leave. She almost certainly told John Bunting what Davies had done.

  Within days, Ray Davies had disappeared.

  Handcuffed and terrified, Ray Davies was forced into the boot of the car. As he slammed the boot shut, John Bunting warned Ray Davies to ‘be good’. Robert Wagner started the car as Bunting jumped in. Their destination was a little over two hours away—a small town called Bakara.

  When the car pulled up outside the old house, Bunting knew the coast would be clear. He was renting the Bakara house, living there with Elizabeth Harvey and her four boys. The family had gone back to Adelaide for Christmas and New Year, so the place was empty.

  Bunting and Wagner grabbed their prey from the boot. They marched him, still handcuffed, into the bathroom and forced him into the bath. It was to become their murderous routine. Ray Davies was savagely beaten about the groin and thighs with a metal pole. Bunting would later brag that his victim’s testicles swelled to ‘the size of golf balls’ by the time the torture was over. Struggling to walk, Ray was put back in the boot.

  It was late morning, perhaps lunchtime, when they returned to Adelaide. Bunting still rented the house at 203 Waterloo Corner Road and Elizabeth Harvey was inside. ‘We’ve got a present for you,’ Bunting said as he walked in. ‘It’s in the car.’

  Harvey watched in stunned silence as Ray Davies was dragged through the door:

  He was obviously in a lot of pain, he was handcuffed. I couldn’t think…they took him into the bathroom and they started yelling and screaming at him. Calling him a faggot and a baby rapist and things like that.

  Ray was then forced into a bedroom. It was the same room where his name was displayed on Bunting’s paedophile chart: the Wall of Spiders.

  Bunting called for Elizabeth Harvey to ‘come in’. She and Robert Wagner then wrapped car jumper leads around Ray’s neck and twisted them until he was dead. Starved of air, their lifeless victim slumped to the floor. Bunting turned to Harvey, smiling: ‘Do you like your present?’

  Elizabeth Harvey did not know why she had joined in. Perhaps it was fear of Bunting. She had seen what he was capable of, after all. Or perhaps it had been anger over her children’s abuse at the hands of men like Ray Davies. Whatever the reason, she too was now a killer.

  Ray Davies’s body was thrown into a large hole in the back yard at 203 Waterloo Corner Road. The hole, under a brick stand built for the rainwater tank, had been dug by John Bunting.

  Originally the deep chasm had been intended as some kind of underground room. Such a secret place had been a strange childhood fantasy of John Bunting’s; lights and a ladder had even been installed.

  The hole seemed the perfect place to dump a body. Bunting would later joke that Davies was ‘still holding his balls’ as he was thrown in.

  To cover their murderous tracks, Bunting and Wagner later told Sue Allen a story to explain why Ray Davies had suddenly disappeared, leaving behind his caravan and possessions. The killers wanted it to appear as though they had punished Ray Davies for what he had done and now he was too scared to return. The conversation was overheard by Sue’s daughter. She recalled that Robert Wagner was there at the time:

  I heard John say to…Mum [Sue Allen] words to the effect—‘We took Ray for a drive in the car.’ John said while he was driving, ‘Robert was pounding him down and trying to keep him down so that no one could see what was going on in the back seat.’ He made hand movements indicating punching down. It sounded like Ray was on the floor of the car. He said that they ‘dropped him off in the middle of the scrub somewhere and made him walk back towards town’. They didn’t say if he was hurt or bleeding or anything. John was laughing about it. Robert had a big cheesy smile on his face. He didn’t say much apart from saying it was really good.

  At the time of the Ray Davies murder, Bunting’s affair with Sue Allen was going strong. Distance was Bunting’s protection: his de facto and her children were living in the country, first at Bakara, then at Murray Bridge.

  Still Bunting rented the house at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, where he and his de facto family would sometimes stay.

  However, Bunting broke off his relationship with Sue Allen sometime in 1996. One of Sue’s daughters tried unsuccessfully to get them back together:

  Mum used to give me notes to give him. They were about how she still loved him and missed him and wanted him back.

  I know Mum would often drive past his place. John knew about this and mentioned it to me that she was driving past virtually every day.

  He did tell me to tell her to stop the notes and to stop driving past.

  One of the notes, a lipstick-marked two-page love letter, was discovered later by police:

  Dear John,

  I am finding it hard to be away from you all the time. I wish that you would be stay with me for good because I love you so much…I hope you are feeling the same way about me.

  So my darling John, please do not take too long to come back to me, I will always wait for you.

  The letter was signed ‘all my love, Suzanne’.

  Sue’s attention was becoming an irritation to Bunting, however, and their relationship had become hostile. It was possible, too, that she knew too much. Bunting had bragged to Sue Allen about the time he and Robert Wagner took Ray Davies ‘for a drive’. And Davies had not been seen since.

  Sue Allen’s disappearance was first noticed by her brother, John, in November 1996. Her usually tidy home looked as though it had bee
n ransacked, much of her furniture was gone and Sue’s starving pets had been collected by the RSPCA. Not long after her brother reported her missing, Sue’s car also disappeared.

  Despite the stories told by Bunting and Wagner, it appears almost certain that Sue Allen was murdered in her own home, 3 Ghent Street, Salisbury North, by Robert Wagner and John Bunting. She was most likely strangled, as Ray Davies had been.

  Rather than brag about the latest killing, Bunting concocted a story to explain Sue Allen’s death. The first to hear the far-fetched tale was James Vlassakis. Living with mates at the time, Vlassakis had gone to Murray Bridge to visit Bunting and his mother. Inside their house he had noticed Sue Allen’s belongings:

  I queried Mum. I said, ‘This is Sue’s stuff’, and she said, ‘No it’s not.’

  That night I had a conversation with John about it…he just told me that…he was knocking on Sue’s front door. There was no answer. He went round the back or something, got in the house and she was lying on the bathroom floor. He said that he had to open a door, couldn’t actually get the door open because she was in the way, and when he got the door open she was dead, absolutely naked, dead on the floor in the bathroom.

  I got told she died of natural causes.

  While claiming they had found Suzanne Allen already dead, Bunting and Wagner were only too happy to detail for Vlassakis how they had ‘sliced and diced’ Sue Allen, dismembering her body in her bathtub:

  Robert used the head as a puppet and told John to kiss it, kiss the head…

  Sue Allen’s body parts were placed into garbage bags and taken to Bunting’s house at 203 Waterloo Corner Road. The bags were thrown into the same hole where Ray Davies had been buried a year before. Later, it was filled in.