Of the four men convicted over the bodies found in barrels in the vault of the old State Bank at Snowtown in May 1999, James Spyridon Vlassakis is the only one who has ever been given a date. He was 19 when he was taken into custody on June 2, 1999, and 18 when, the year before, he helped John Bunting and Robert Wagner beat, torture and strangle his own half-brother, Troy Youde, in the family home in Adelaide's northern suburbs. In 2002 Justice Kevin Duggan of the South Australian Supreme Court gave him life with a non-parole period of 26 years, backdated to the day of his arrest, and told him plainly what the figure would have been otherwise: had it not been for his guilty plea, his extensive cooperation with police and his undertaking to give evidence for the prosecution, the judge said, he would have imposed 42 years. Bunting and Wagner have no non-parole period at all.
Vlassakis was born in 1979. His mother, Elizabeth Harvey, took up with Bunting in 1991, when the boy was about twelve, and Bunting moved in and took the place of the man of the house. The psychiatric evidence at sentencing described a child who had been sexually abused by a relative, was using amphetamines heavily by his mid-teens, and by seventeen was entirely under Bunting's control. Bunting's own preoccupations were homosexuals, pedophiles and people he decided were weak or worthless, and he gave the teenager a share of them. The Parole Board chair who eventually released him, Frances Nelson KC, put it this way in 2025: Bunting had him in his thrall, he was terrified of the man, and he would not be the first person to say so.
Eleven of the twelve deaths linked to the group between August 1992 and May 1999 were ruled murders. Vlassakis took part in four, all in the last year. Troy Youde, 21, his half-brother, was dragged from his bed in August 1998 and killed in the bathroom; Bunting recorded the victims' voices on tape so that their benefit payments could be kept alive by telephone afterward. Frederick Brooks, 18, the intellectually disabled son of a friend of the group, was lured to a house in Murray Bridge in September 1998 and tortured to death. Gary O'Dwyer, 29, who lived alone in Murray Bridge with the after-effects of a car accident, was killed in October 1998 for his disability pension. David Johnson, 24, Vlassakis's stepbrother, was driven to Snowtown on May 9, 1999, on the pretext of buying a computer, made to type his bank details into a machine, and strangled in the bank building itself. He was the last, and the only one of the twelve who died at Snowtown. The bodies of all four were among the eight found in the vault on May 20, 1999.
Arrested with the others on June 2, Vlassakis tried to kill himself in custody. Then he began to talk. Over the following two years he gave police the account that made the case: who had been killed, by whom, how, and why, and where the money had gone. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to the four murders, and when Bunting and Wagner went to trial he was the principal Crown witness against them through what became the longest criminal trial in South Australian history. Wagner was convicted of ten murders, Bunting of eleven, and in 2003 each was given life without parole. Mark Haydon, who had stored bodies at his home and helped move them, was convicted of seven counts of assisting an offender and released in 2024 at the end of a 25-year sentence.
The evidence cost Vlassakis his face and much of his time. His image and any description of him were suppressed by court order for his protection, and he served years in isolation because of what he had done to Bunting and Wagner. The suppression order was lifted by South Australia's highest court in May 2026. Justice Duggan had warned him at sentencing that his confinement would be much more restrictive than an ordinary prisoner's, and that turned out to be so.
His non-parole period expired in June 2025, and on August 5, 2025, the Parole Board approved his release. Ms. Nelson said he met the legal criteria, that his conduct in prison had been excellent, that in the board's assessment he presented no risk to the community, and that he was genuinely remorseful. He would be on parole for life, barred from a long list of places where he might meet a victim's relative, and unable to change his name without the corrections department's permission, which she doubted he would get. A former Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Pallaras, called the decision astonishing. Ronald Lane, whose relative was among the dead, called the board fools. The South Australian government sought a review, and on September 16, 2026, the Parole Administrative Review Commissioner, former Supreme Court judge David Lovell, upheld the release, noting that the power dynamic with Bunting could not be repeated and that Vlassakis, with significant drug problems when he went in, had returned three positive results in 29 prison drug tests. On September 23, 2026, at 46, he was transferred to the Adelaide Pre-release Centre at Yatala, where he is to spend up to twelve months while the board sets the conditions of his life outside. No one convicted of serial murder in Australia had been paroled before.
Justice Duggan, in 2002, described a young man who was both a perpetrator of these crimes and, in a real sense, one of Bunting's victims. Both halves of that sentence have had to be carried at once ever since: by the families who lost Youde, Brooks, O'Dwyer and Johnson, by the board that weighed a boy of eighteen against four dead men, and by Vlassakis himself, whose testimony is the reason the other two will die in prison.