James Spyridon Vlassakis was born on July 21, 1979, into a household of extreme instability in Adelaide's northern suburbs. His mother, Elizabeth Harvey, took up with John Bunting in 1991, when Vlassakis was twelve. He had been sexually abused as a child by a relative, was using amphetamines heavily by his teens, and was, on the psychiatric evidence given at his sentencing, entirely under Bunting's control by the time he was seventeen.
He took part in four of the eleven murders between 1997 and 1999. Two of the victims were his own family: his half-brother Troy Youde, whom he helped kill in 1998, and his stepbrother David Johnson, in May 1999, the last of the series.
The four were his stepbrother David Johnson, his half-brother Troy Youde, Gary O'Dwyer and Frederick Brooks.
He was arrested in June 1999 and, after an attempt on his own life in custody, began to cooperate. He pleaded guilty to four murders in June 2001 and gave evidence against Bunting, Wagner and Haydon over months of the longest trial in South Australian history. Without it the case would have been very much harder to prove.
He was sentenced to life with a non-parole period of twenty-six years, reduced in recognition of the assistance, which makes him the only one of the Snowtown group with any prospect of release. The sentencing judge described him as both a perpetrator and, in a real sense, one of Bunting's victims.