The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  The now twenty-year-old Robert Wagner continued to be Bunting’s main informant on the local gay community. Using information gleaned from him, Bunting set about designing what he called his ‘spider wall’ – a collection of names, linked by pieces of string to indicate who knew whom. It was over this map that Bunting endlessly plotted his future killings.

  In the meantime Bunting had taken a new lover, a middle-aged mother of two called Elizabeth Harvey. This did not end his friendship with Suzanne Allen, however, and it was through her that he found his next victim. In 1995 Allen had rented out the caravan in her garden to a mentally handicapped man called Ray Davies. Allen’s daughter accused Davies of being a paedophile, and this alone was enough evidence to convince Bunting. In December 1995, he and Elizabeth Harvey kidnapped and tortured Davies, then murdered him. His body was buried in Bunting’s back yard.

  It is not known if Suzanne Allen knew about or objected to Bunting’s killing of her tenant. She herself disappeared in 1996. Bunting later claimed that he and Wagner had found her lying dead in her home of an apparent heart attack. So the pair of them dismembered her corpse and buried it in the same unmarked grave in which they had dumped Davies.

  In 1997 Bunting in stigated three killings. The first, in April, was nineteen-year-old Michael Gardiner whose only ‘crime’ seems to have been that he was openly homosexual – Bunting described him as ‘the biggest homo’.

  Next Bunting decided to kill Robert Wagner’s former abuser, Barry Lane. For this killing he and Wagner recruited another of Lane’s ex-lovers, eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan. Lane was tortured by having his toes crushed with a pair of pliers before he was strangled.

  Finally, that year Bunting and Wagner killed their fellow murderer, Thomas Trevilyan. He had spoken in public about the murder of Lane, so they decided to silence him with a fake suicide. They hanged him from a tree in the hills near Adelaide.

  Over the past few years James Vlassakis – the teenaged son of Bunting’s lover and fellow murderer Elizabeth Harvey – had also fallen under the older man’s charismatic spell. It therefore must have come as something of a surprise to him when, in April 1998, he came across Bunting and Wagner stuffing the corpse of James’ friend, 29-year-old Gavin Porter, into a barrel full of acid.

  Porter was neither a homosexual nor a paedophile, but he was a drug addict and had made the mistake of leaving a spent needle on the sofa in Elizabeth Harvey’s house. Bunting decided that this was enough reason for Porter to die, and strangled him in his parked car.

  If James Vlassakis had found Bunting with just Porter’s body, he might have been kept out of the murderous conspiracy. Unfortunately Bunting and Wagner had decided to also get rid of the corpses of Barry Lane and Michael Gardiner in nearby barrels. Since they could hardly pretend that Porter was their only victim, they decided to let James into the secret of their ‘vigilantism’. He seems to have been more than willing to keep their secret, but it was decided that James had to be involved in a killing too, just to make sure he had no incentive to go to the police.

  James told Bunting that his half-brother, 21-year-old Troy Youde, had abused him when they were both children. The two boys and their mother were both living in Bunting’s house at the time, so it was a simple matter of dragging Troy out of bed and helping James to murder him. This took place in September 1998.

  It remains uncertain how Elizabeth Harvey reacted to the disappearance of her son – she must have been at least suspicious knowing, as she did, that Bunting was a predatory murderer – but Harvey died of cancer in 2001, before her involvement in the torture and killing of Ray Davies had come to light.

  Now that there were three regular members of the murder gang – Bunting, Wagner and Vlassakis nicknamed themselves ‘the Three Amigos’ – they dropped any pretence that they were acting in the name of justice. A woman called Jodie Elliot had fallen in love with Bunting, and the gang decided that her mentally handicapped son, Fred Brooks aged eighteen, would be a nice, safe target for their next murder. Within a month of the killing of Troy Youde, they lured Fred to Bunting’s house. There they spent a long time torturing him – with electric shocks, cigar burns and a lighted sparkler forced up his penis – before they killed him. Bunting then, with her demanding son out of the way, proposed marriage to the unsuspecting Jodie Elliot.

  In November 1998 they spotted another target: 29-year-old Gary O’Dwyer who had been disabled in a car accident and was living on a pension. As with Fred Brooks, the Three Amigos had no vigilante reason to torture and kill O’Dwyer; they didn’t even know who he was. But he looked like he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a struggle and, Bunting pointed out, O’Dwyer looked a little like James Vlassakis’ dead half-brother.

  In that same month Bunting also killed Elizabeth Haydon – the sister of Jodie Elliot. He had two reasons for killing Elizabeth: she had outraged his moral sensibilities when, despite being married to his friend Mark Haydon, she had admitted to being attracted to Bunting . . . and she was obese. Bunting killed her while Mark Haydon was out of the house, but admitted the crime when he got back. Haydon had already been involved in at least the covering up of one of the previous murders, and apparently took the killing of his wife with equanimity. The two friends dumped her body in a barrel full of acid.

  The last victim of the gang was the step-brother of James Vlassakis, 21-year-old David Johnson. By this time, in May 1999, the gang had moved the barrels containing most of their victims to the abandoned vault in the Snowtown bank. They evidently meant this secret crematory to also be their new base of operations, as they lured Johnson there, then tortured and murdered him. In this case, their motive seems to have been purely financial – they forced him to reveal his cash card PIN number before they killed him, then emptied his bank account.

  In the meantime, the police were at last closing in on the murderers. Elizabeth Haydon’s brother hadn’t believed Mark Haydon’s contradictory explanations for his wife’s disappearance, so called in the law.

  Officers were immediately suspicious that a mother of two small children had gone missing, yet her husband had not bothered to report the matter. Perusal of their unsolved files for the area then turned up the fact that Barry Lane and Clinton Trevise had been lovers, and that both had known Wagner and Bunting. Since Mark Haydon was a close associate of Bunting and Wagner, the police suddenly saw that they might have two (or more) disappearances and one death, all linked in the case. Close surveillance of the group led officers to the Snowtown bank vault and the horrific discovery that they had, in fact, discovered the worst known case of Australian serial killing.

  Tried in 2003, Bunting and Wagner claimed total innocence. Bunting was convicted of eleven murders. In the case of Suzanne Allen – Bunting’s 47-year-old lover, who he claimed to have found dead of natural causes – the jury could not come to a verdict: the body’s dismemberment and decomposition made it impossible to determine the cause of death. Wagner was convicted of being involved in seven of the murders. Both were sentenced to life with no chance of parole. Vlassakis, who had turned Queen’s evidence and pleaded guilty of involvement in three of the murders, was given 26 years.

  Mark Haydon eventually admitted to assisting in two murders after-the-fact – that of his wife and of Troy Youde. Further charges were dropped for lack of evidence and Haydon was convicted on seven counts of assisting murder and was sentenced to 26 years.

  The impact of the killings on the Snowtown and the North Adelaide areas was grim. Residents of the tiny Snowtown even considered changing the municipality’s name in the hopes of putting off the steady stream of ghoulish sightseers who wished to see (and smell) the vault that had contained the half-dissolved bodies.

  And fans of Australian rules football, when watching games played against Adelaide’s team, have been heard to chant derisively: ‘BODIES IN A BARREL! YOU KEEP YOUR BODIES IN A BARREL!’

  The Washington DC Sniper

  The classic 1971 cop movie, Dirty Harry, was large
ly based on the real-life ‘Zodiac’ murders that took place around the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s (see here). However, the script writers made one significant change to the modus operandi of their fictional serial killer: he used a sniper rifle to kill from a distance.

  Fortunately this seemed to be more of a flight of fantasy – perhaps inspired by the frequent sniper killings made by both sides during the Vietnam War – than something that a real serial killer might do. As the reader will have seen again and again in this book, serial killers are typically sadists who like to be close to their victims to more intensely enjoy the sense of power they get from ending lives. No serial killer has been known to use sniper rifle as their main method of killing . . . until the turn of the 21st century, that is.

  On the 2 October 2002, James D Spring, a program analyst at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was crossing a car park in the Weaton district of Washington DC. There was the crack of a gunshot and Spring was hurled to the ground; he had been shot dead by a single, high-velocity rifle bullet.

  It was immediately plain to investigators that this was no ordinary murder – even in crime-riddled DC, police rarely see murders by sniper fire. The high velocity rifle is a specialist weapon demanding specialist skills; it’s not the sort of gun used in gang drive-by shootings. Moreover, whoever had killed James Spring had done so expertly with a single shot, suggesting either military or paramilitary training. Given the events of 11 September, just over a year before, some officers feared that the murder had been a terrorist incident.

  Over the following 24 hours – between 3 and 4 October – five more DC residents were killed by long-range sniper shots. James Buchanan, aged 39, was killed while cutting the grass at a car dealership in the White Flint area. Prenkumar Walekar, a 54-year-old taxi driver, was killed as he filled up with petrol at a station in the Aspen Hill area. Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old mother, was killed while reading a magazine on a bench outside a post office in the Silver Spring district. Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, aged 25, was killed as she vacuumed her van at a petrol station in Kensington district. The last fatality that grim day was a retired 72-year-old carpenter, Pascal Charlot, who was killed while standing at a bus stop in the inner city – however, he was not the last victim. A 43-year-old woman was also shot while crossing a parking lot in Fredericksburg – a town 40 miles south of Washington DC – but fortunately she survived.

  The assassin clearly liked to move about and had wasted no time. One harassed police officer grimly commented that his local county homicide rate ‘just went up 25 per cent today’.

  This concentration of murders in such a short period suggested either a terrorist operation or a so-called ‘spree killer’. At this stage, few police officers thought it likely that they had a serial killer on their hands.

  The difference between a spree killer and a serial killer is not just one of time, but of motive. Serial killers are cold and ruthless hunters, taking a lone victim at a time, cautiously, usually over a period of weeks, months, years and even decades. Spree killers, on the other hand, murder lots of people then, after a few hours, generally turn the gun on themselves.

  What evidence we have (since such murderers are almost never taken alive to give confessions) is that spree killers egotistically decide to sacrifice others, before they kill themselves, as a bloody and final act of defiance to the world that they are rejecting. The difference seems to be that serial killers are essentially sadistic perverts (disinclined to risk their liberty, let alone physically endanger themselves) while spree killers are often social misfits who become homicidally violent after suffering a massive mental breakdown. Leaving aside the actual killing, the difference in motivation between a serial killer and a spree killer is as wide as the difference between that of a rapist and a suicide bomber.

  Panic spread across Washington DC as soon as the story hit the broadcast news: a sniper was stalking the capital and nobody was safe. Some people refused to leave their homes and many didn’t dare use self-service petrol stations as these seemed one of the killer’s favourite hunting areas. Suddenly, DC residents had a horrible taste of what life had been like in Sarajevo during the 1990s Yugoslav civil war.

  After a few days’ pause, the killing began again. A thirteen-year-old boy was shot in the stomach as he got off his school bus in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. Surgeons struggled to save his life, but he died of massive internal injuries. The following day, the killer returned to the scene of the boy’s murder and left a tarot card with the words: ‘Dear Mr Policeman. I am God’ written on it.

  On 9 October, the sniper once again moved away from the suburbs of Washington DC, killing civil engineer Dean Harold Meyers, 53, at a petrol station in the Virginia town of Manassas. Two days later, Kenneth H Bridges, 53, was shot dead at a petrol station near the town of Fredericksburg. On 14 October, the sniper killed Linda Franklin, aged 47, who was shot as she and her husband loaded their car outside a shop at the Seven Corners Shopping Centre, on one of northern Virginia’s busiest intersections. Ironically, Linda Franklin was an FBI analyst.

  On 19 October, the sniper attacked what was to be his last victim. A 37-year-old man was shot once in the stomach as he left a restaurant in the town of Ashland, 70 miles south of Washington. He suffered severe damage to his internal organs, but survived.

  Suspicion that the sniper might be an Islamic terrorist seemed partly scotched by the bizarre tarot card note left at a crime scene: no radical Moslem would claim to be ‘God’, not even in jest. More evidence to this effect came in the form of a letter found at the Ashland crime scene. The writer again referred to himself as God, and accused the police of incompetence – adding that it was their fault that five people had had to die. Presumably this indicated that he had expected to be caught after the first two days of his killing spree. The letter demanded a $10 million ransom to stop the killings and added chillingly: ‘Your children are not safe anywhere or at anytime.’ So, the sniper was apparently a murderous extortionist, not an Islamic terrorist.

  By this stage the police were, understandably, becoming desperate. In an attempt to pacify the sniper they even complied with a bizarre demand he had made. A police spokesman read the statement ‘we’ve caught the sniper like a duck in a noose’ on national television. This was a cryptic reference to a folk tale in which an overconfident rabbit tried to catch a duck, but ended up noosed itself. The sniper evidently wanted the authorities to feel that they were his playthings as much as his murder victims were.

  Then, on 24 October, the police caught him . . . or rather, them. There turned out to be two perpetrators working together: John Allen Muhammad, aged 41, and John Lee Malvo, aged 17, the older Afro-American, the younger Afro-Jamaican. A member of the public had noticed a car parked for a long time in a road stop on the Virginia Interstate Route 70, and had become suspicious. The police were informed and investigated as a matter of routine – having little thought that they were about to catch the Washington Sniper. Muhammad and Malvo were found fast asleep in the car, but fortunately the officers did not simply move them on. Closer inspection of the vehicle showed that it had been modified to allow a man to lie inside it and to aim a rifle while remaining unseen.

  Muhammad, who seems to have done all the actual killing, turned out to have been an ex-US Army soldier who had served in the 1992 Gulf War and had subsequently converted to Islam. Lee Malvo was a Jamaican who lived with Muhammad and evidently regarded the older man as a father figure (nobody has ever suggested there was a sexual relationship between the pair). Both were convicted of murder, extortion and terrorism charges in 2003. Muhammad was sentenced to death and Malvo to life imprisonment without chance of parole.

  Malvo originally claimed to have been the sole killer – called the ‘triggerman’ in Virginia state law – but later retracted this confession, admitting that he had only made it to move the potential death sentence onto his own shoulders. This was rather less heroic than it at first sounds because, being
a minor at the time of the killings, he was much less likely to actually be executed.

  Malvo also claimed that Muhammad was a convert to the Nation of Islam – an Islamic black separatist movement – and had told him that the killings were solely to extort money from the white-dominated US government. This money, he went on, would be used to fund a separate nation that could be populated solely by young black people (and the middle-aged Muhammad himself, presumably).

  The fact that such a goal was patently impossible – given international law, the certain tracing of the extortion money and numerous laws that protect young people of all races – suggests that Muhammad was spinning a tale to his young friend to justify his urge to kill. It seems certain that Muhammad was simply a serial killer – a man addicted to murder. Support for this explanation came when it was suggested that the Washington DC killings had not been his first. Investigating police believed that Muhammad was responsible for several as yet unsolved murders.

  Bibliography

  All His Father’s Sins (The Gallego Case), Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox, Prima Publishing Co., 1988.

  Federal Bureau of Investigation: Criminal Investigation.

  Analysis/Sexual Homicide, 1985 (Law Enforcement Bulletins, 1980, 1985, 1986).

  The Boston Strangler, Gerold Frank, New American Library, 1966.

  Before I Kill More (The Heirens Case), Lucy Freeman, Award Books, 1955.

  The Trial of Brady and Hindley, edited by Jonathan Goodman, David and Charles, 1973.

  Killing for Company (Nilsen), Brian Masters, Jonathan Cape, 1985.

  The Nilsen File, Brian McConnel and Douglas Bence, Futura Macdonald, London 1983.

  Serial Killers: The Growing Menace, Joel Norris, Doubleday, New York, 1988.