Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Her defence attorney Kevin Clymo said, ‘I think you can only truly understand why so many people testified and asked you to spare Dorothea’s life only if you have ever fallen down and stumbled on the road of life and had someone pick you up, give you comfort, give you love, show you the way. Then you will understand why these people believe Dorothea’s life is worth saving. That is mitigating. That is a human quality that deserves to be preserved. It is a flame of humanity that has burned inside Dorothea since she was young … That is the reason to give Dorothea Puente life without the possibility of parole.’

  After the jury was deadlocked, she was spared. One juror said, ‘Executing Puente would be like executing your grandma.’

  Puente was given two life sentences without the possibility of parole along with a concurrent 15-year-to-life sentence. She died in prison in Chowchilla, California – on 27 March 2011, at the age of 82 – from natural causes, still protesting her innocence.

  Her former boarding house – and its garden – were open to the public as a grim spectacle in 2013. It featured a mannequin dressed in Puente’s red coat, holding a shovel. Among those who have taken the tour when it opened was Detective Cabrera, who had since retired.

  ‘I wanted to come back when the house is redone, when it’s happy,’ Cabrera said. ‘I’m grateful that now the community can come and see it.’

  He pointed out where the bodies and evidence were found. Giving local TV station KCRA a guided tour, he said, ‘And this is what we would call “The Death Room”. This is where she brought her victims, after she had induced drugs or alcohol. And she would place them here on the floor, and they would lay here for up to days or weeks, we don’t know.’

  It was there that she let their bodily fluids drain. Cabrera found the blankets, sheets and plastic sheeting pile up. She used them to wrap the bodies.

  ‘There was a bookshelf and a day bed,’ he recalled. ‘The room had two carpets and I pulled the carpet and saw there were stains. I knew right away it was body fluid.’

  The back stairs led from the rear of her bathroom. Puente used these to carry the bodies down to the back garden. Cabrera thought that someone helped her do this. At the time, another resident was arrested, but later released. He also said that Puente had hired parolees to dig holes in the yard for her, telling them that she needed to have new plants in the garden.

  ‘She was an ex-con hiring ex-cons,’ he said.

  In the back garden, he pointed out where Montoya’s fully clothed body was found near the back fence. Another was unearthed close to what is now the step of a new shed; a third body was found underneath a timber outhouse. Tickets for the tour sold for $20–$30.

  Cabrera told the Sacramento Bee that he was impressed with the renovations that had been done to the house. ‘I’m very happy to be back and happy to see the changes,’ he said. ‘I love this house. It’s happy. This veil of darkness has been lifted.’

  One visitor, 65-year-old Susan Fishel of Sacramento said, ‘I think you have to have a sense of humour if you’re going to live in a place like this.’

  6

  AUSSIE RULES

  On 20 May 1999, the sleepy bush town of Snowtown, South Australia, came to world attention when the police entered a disused redbrick building on Main Street. It had once been the Snowtown branch of the State Bank of South Australia which, like many rural branches, had long been closed. What led them there was a year-long investigation of the state’s growing number of missing person cases. Behind the 4-in steel door of the bank’s vault, they found six black plastic barrels that gave off a stomach-churning smell. The acid-filled drums contained partly dissolved human body parts. Among them were 15 feet, leading the police to conclude that the drums contained the remains of at least eight murder victims.

  The following day, three homes in a blue-collar area nearby were raided. Three men were arrested and charged with the murder of an unknown number of people between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999. They were 40-year-old Mark Haydon of Smithfield Plains; 32-year-old former abattoir worker John Bunting of Craigmore; and 27-year-old Robert Wagner of Elizabeth Grove. They were denied bail. Meanwhile, the police, convinced there were more bodies, continued their search.

  They were contacted by Wally Fitzgerald who called the Crime Stoppers line, alerting them to secret suburban graves. Fitzgerald was a friend of 19-year-old James (Jamie) Vlassakis; Bunting had offered a helping hand to Jamie.

  But Jamie soon became aware of Bunting’s darker side. While ranting about paedophiles, Bunting would skin animals alive for fun. Gradually, Vlassakis had been drawn into Bunting’s circle and began taking heroin in an effort to block out what he had witnessed. When Bunting had been arrested, a distraught Vlassakis had turned to Fitzgerald for emotional support and told him that bodies were buried in the backyard of the house where Bunting used to live.

  On 23 May, a task force of officers under Detective Sergeant Brian Swan arrived at 203 Waterloo Corner Road in North Salisbury, Adelaide, the site of Bunting’s old semidetached house which had since been demolished. The police were convinced that the house, though flattened, might still yield vital evidence, and they brought with them sophisticated ground-penetrating radar equipment, first developed to detect plastic landmines laid during the Falklands War. Similar equipment had been used to scan the garden at Fred and Rosemary West’s ‘House of Horrors’ in Cromwell Street, Gloucester.

  First, a large tent was erected in the back garden, covering the detectives’ area of interested. Three inches below the surface in the corner of the yard, there was a concrete slab that had once supported a rainwater tank. The technicians rolled the radar detector over the area and found that there was something down there.

  Officers began digging. They used sledgehammers and crowbars to break up the concrete slab, and kept digging through the compacted earth below. It took them five hours to get down another 4ft. There they caught sight of a green garbage bag. As they proceeded cautiously, they discovered another ten garbage bags. One of them was opened, releasing the stench of rotting flesh. Inside were what appeared to be human remains.

  The bags were tagged, photographed and taken to the Forensic Science Centre in Adelaide, where they were X-rayed by Dr Roger Byard. Inside one bag he found a human torso with some of the internal organs attached; the skin had been stripped off. The chest had been crushed and the genitals were missing. The feet were found in another bag, along with the head. A length of blue nylon rope was tangled in the hair. The arms, hands and legs were in other bags. The skin had again been stripped from the limbs with a knife. A knife had also been used to disarticulate the joints. When the body was reconstructed, it was clear that all the body parts found belonged to one individual, an adult white female.

  Three days later, the task force returned to the backyard of 203 Waterloo Road. Digging down a further 6ft, they found a skeleton. The bones were removed one by one, along with the hood of a khaki parka that covered the skull. None of the bones were broken. No ligature was present and no cause of death could be discerned. The death toll was now in double figures.

  The police missing-persons’ task force, codenamed Chart, had initially been set up to investigate the disappearance of just three people – 22-year-old Clinton Trezise, who disappeared in 1993; his friend, the 40-year-old flamboyant transvestite and convicted paedophile Barry Lane – aka Vanessa – who went missing in October 1997; and 37-year-old mother of eight Elizabeth Haydon, who had vanished earlier that year. She was the wife of the accused, Mark Haydon, whose car had led the now 33-man police task force to the bank building in Snowtown. Cars from out of town tend to attract attention in a small community like Snowtown and sightings of the other unfamiliar vehicles had led detectives to the other suspects.

  The barrels found in Snowtown had done the rounds before ending up in the bank vault there. They had first been kept in a shed behind Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge in April 1998. Three were then moved to Haydon’s house at Smithfield Plains. Later, one
was stored in the back of a Mitsubishi Sigma at Murray Bridge, while five were kept in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser at Hoyleton on the Adelaide Plains. They were moved to the bank after complaints about the smell. The accused had claimed that they contained kangaroo meat.

  Forensic scientists had the distasteful task of trying to identify the victims from their dental records and fingerprints. This was difficult as the body parts were partially dissolved. So the, then new, and expensive technique of DNA profiling was used. Even body parts that had been left dissolving in acid for some time rendered useful DNA that could be extracted and compared with hair from combs of suspected victims or samples taken from their soiled clothing. It transpired that some of the victims were collecting Disability Support Benefit and the authorities had not been informed of their deaths. And others, who had formally been declared dead, were still, apparently, collecting their benefits.

  There may have been other motives for the killings. The accused, Robert Wagner, was a white supremacist and a vociferous hater of homosexuals. But the primary reason for the murders was financial – the killers were drawing AUS$100,000 a year intended for their dead victims.

  Meanwhile, the police were interviewing James Vlassakis; he was feeling the pressure. In a taped phone call played at the trial, he told his teenage girlfriend Amanda Warwick about the bodies in the barrels and said that he would soon be arrested. She asked if he had anything to do with the murders. He replied, ‘It’s too big, I can’t tell you.’

  Vlassakis was not cautioned. He was told that, as a result, any statement he made could not be used against him in court. It would be forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions, where it would be checked for accuracy. Only then would the decision be made to offer him full immunity.

  The interrogation continued for the next ten days. During that time, Vlassakis frequently broke down. He overdosed on heroin and nearly died. Then he cracked and told the detective a harrowing tale of ritualistic torture and murder, sometimes with music playing in the background. Vlassakis related how much Bunting and Wagner enjoyed the pain and suffering they were inflicting. Bunting liked to stare into the eyes of a victim who knew they were about to die. He also described the kick Bunting got when the true-crime show Australia’s Most Wanted reported the discovery of a skeleton at a place called Lower Light, 20 miles north of Adelaide. The case remained unsolved, but Bunting announced, with excitement, ‘That’s my handiwork.’

  The interview finished on 2 June 1999. Afterwards, James Vlassakis was arrested. Initially, he was only charged with just one murder that had taken place on 4 May 1999, although the name of the victim was suppressed. After his arrest, Vlassakis repeatedly attempted suicide and was moved from prison to the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital.

  Another house in Murray Bridge was raided and an 11th body was unearthed. The police then went through their ‘unsolved crimes’ file and tied the current murder investigation to the bones found in the field at Lower Light in 1994 and the body of a man found hanging from a tree in 1997. Initially, his death was thought to have been a suicide, but he was later implicated in the murder of Barry Lane. Gavin Porter, a missing man from the neighbouring state of Victoria, also appeared to be a victim and the police began to suspect that the gang’s murder spree had begun in 1992.

  More properties were raided in the wheat belt around Snowtown and along the Murray River and there was press speculation that the gang extended much further that the four already in custody. Indeed, the gang had once been bigger. It became clear that some of the victims had once been perpetrators. The gang had turned in on itself and began killing its own. The transvestite Barry Lane had lived with the accused Robert Wagner – a neo-Nazi who, purportedly, hated Asians and gays – just a block away from Bunting’s demolished house where the two corpses had been unearthed. They were on Disability Support, like many of the victims.

  It was suspected that Lane had had a hand in the murder of his boyfriend Clinton Trezise. His were the bones found in Lower Light in 1994 and eventually identified by comparison with an X-ray held by a former employer. Trezise had been butchered in Bunting’s living room in Salisbury North. Bunting had also been engaged to Gail Sinclair, sister of the murder victim Elizabeth Haydon, Mark Haydon’s wife.

  The four accused went on trial in November 2000. Bunting, Wagner and Haydon were charged with ten counts of murder, but remained silent and refused to plead. Vlassakis, then charged with five counts of murder, reserved his plea. The evidence given in court was so gruesome that suppression orders were used to keep much of it from the public. The Snowtown murder case was subjected to over 150 suppression orders in all, some of which have not been lifted. However, some of the horrendous details were reported by newspapers in the UK.

  While the prosecution asserted that the murders had been carried out as part of a benefit fraud, the Daily Telegraph revealed that the victims had been sadistically tortured. Some victims had burn marks on their bodies; others had ropes around their necks. Several were gagged and one died with his legs tied together and his arms handcuffed behind his back. A machine that delivered electric shocks was found in the bank vault in Snowtown, along with rubber gloves, ropes, tape, handcuffs, knives and a bloodstained saw. One victim had received electric shocks to the penis and testicles. A burning sparkler had been push into his urethra. His nose and ears were burnt with cigarettes and his toes were crushed before he was left to choke to death on his gag. Another had been put in a bath and assaulted with clubs. He had been beaten around the genitals and had had his toes crushed with pincers, before being garrotted with a length of rope and a tyre lever.

  Victims’ bodies had been mutilated and dismembered. Mrs Haydon had had her head and arms cut off; her torso had been stripped of its flesh and her breasts and genitals removed. The final victim, David Johnson, had been cooked and partially eaten.

  Before they died, victims had been forced to call their tormentors ‘Lord Sir’, ‘Chief Inspector’, ‘Master’ and ‘God’. They had also been forced to record carefully scripted phrases, which were then left on the telephone answering machines of friends and relatives to allay suspicion. Gang members then impersonated their victims at benefit offices to collect their money.

  In July 2002, Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and was given a life sentence with the stipulation that he would serve 26 years before he was eligible for parole; he had struck a deal with the prosecution. Otherwise, he would have had to serve 42 years before he was eligible. By then, the charges against Bunting, Wagner and Haydon had increased to 12 counts of murder.

  On 8 September 2003, after an 11-month trial in front of the South Australian Supreme Court, Wagner was found guilty of the murder of seven people, on top of the three murders he had admitted to earlier; Bunting was convicted of eleven murders. The jury was hung on a 12th charge – the murder of 47-year-old Suzanne Allen, whose body had been found wreathed in plastic under Bunting’s demolished house. The defence claimed that she had died of natural causes.

  Many of the charges against Haydon had been dropped due to lack of evidence. He was not convicted of any of the murders, but pleaded guilty to having helped dispose of the bodies. Both Wagner and Bunting refused to stand when the judgment was read, while Bunting protested loudly that details of the deal that Vlassakis had made in return for giving evidence against them had not been revealed to the jury, some of who had undergone counselling after hearing his testimony. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  Vlassakis’s testimony had lasted 32 days. He had claimed that he had been dragged into the murders during the killing of his half-brother Troy Youde, stepbrother of the last Snowtown victim David Johnson. He vomited when he recalled how he had found Wagner cooking Johnson’s flesh in a frying pan and offered him some.

  The victims, Vlassakis said, were relentlessly tortured. The eighth victim, Fred Brooks, had been beaten in a bath and had had lit cigarettes stuck in his ear and nos
e. Wagner and Bunting, the prosecution said, boasted that ‘the good ones’ never screamed. Their targets, they said, were primarily homosexuals, whom they claimed to loathe.

  The murders had given Snowtown a terrible notoriety. With street hawkers selling Snowtown Snow Shakers featuring body parts and barrel-shaped fridge magnets bearing the logo ‘Snowtown – you’ll have a barrel of fun’, the inhabitants are worried that the town may never shake off its sick image. There has even been a proposal to change the name to Rosetown. Few think it will help. It would, perhaps, have been better if they had buried all the bodies in the back garden.

  7

  MACABRE MARGATE

  In May 2007, 60-year-old Peter Tobin was found guilty of the rape and murder of 23-year-old Polish student Angelika Kluk and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 21 years. Tobin was a known sex offender and it was suspected that he had been responsible for other offences, including rape and murder. Police forces across Great Britain began opening their Cold Cases files and started searching the houses Tobin had lived in.

  The following month, the police searched Tobin’s old home at 11 Robertson Avenue in Bathgate, West Lothian, in connection with the disappearance of 15-year-old schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton, who was last seen less than a mile away on 10 February 1991, waiting for a bus home to Redding near Falkirk.

  Vicky’s father, Michael, has always maintained that his daughter had not just run away. He said, ‘She was a bright and bubbly teenager, tall for her age, who was starting to strike out on her own. I believe she was abducted and murdered. I hope the police will knock on my door some day soon and finally let me know what happened.’

  Tobin left Bathgate soon after Vicky went missing.