John Justin Bunting was convicted on September 8, 2003 of eleven murders committed in and around Adelaide, South Australia between August 1992 and May 1999. He is serving eleven consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole. The case is known as the Snowtown murders, or the bodies in the barrels.
He was born in Inala, Queensland on September 4, 1966 and worked in an abattoir. He was fixated on paedophiles and homosexuals, between whom he did not distinguish, and kept a wall chart at his house in Adelaide's northern suburbs naming people he believed to be one or the other, connected by string. The court found the motives to include that hatred, and financial gain.
Between August 1992 and May 1999 he, Robert Wagner and James Vlassakis killed eleven people; a twelfth death was charged and not proved against him. Almost all the dead were relatives, neighbours or acquaintances drawn from the same small network of disadvantaged families around Salisbury North. Several were tortured for hours. The group forced victims to record their voices onto tape so that the killers could keep drawing their social security payments afterwards, which is what most of it was for.
The eleven were Clinton Trezise, twenty-two; Ray Davies, twenty-six; Michael Gardiner, nineteen; Barry Lane, forty-two; Thomas Trevilyan, eighteen; Gavin Porter, twenty-nine; Troy Youde, twenty-one; Frederick Brooks, eighteen; Gary O'Dwyer, twenty-nine; Elizabeth Haydon, thirty-seven; and David Johnson, twenty-four. A death in November 1997 was successfully passed off as a suicide at the time.
Suzanne Allen's remains were found buried at Bunting's Salisbury North house, wrapped in eleven plastic bags. Her pension had gone on being collected, some seventeen thousand dollars of it, on the account that she had died of a heart attack. The murder charge over her death was dropped for want of evidence, and she is not among the eleven.
David Johnson was the last. Wagner and Vlassakis drove to Port Wakefield to get at his bank account, leaving Bunting and Mark Haydon with him at the disused bank; they could not withdraw the money, and when they returned he was dead. Bunting and Wagner dismembered the body and ate part of it.
On May 20, 1999 police opened plastic barrels in the vault of a disused bank at Snowtown, two hours north of Adelaide, and found the remains of eight people preserved in hydrochloric acid. Three days later two more bodies were recovered from the garden of the Salisbury North public housing property where Bunting had lived. Nine of the ten had been identified by the end of June. Four men were arrested and charged; the discoveries followed a long covert police operation, and two deaths already known to the authorities were reclassified as murders in the course of it.
The Supreme Court trial of Bunting and Wagner opened on October 14, 2002 and ran eleven months, the longest and most expensive in South Australian history, under heavy suppression orders. The jury had difficulty: at least one juror withdrew because of the evidence, and some accounts put the number at three. Vlassakis became the principal Crown witness and told the court that Bunting would look into the eyes of his victims as they died.
On September 8, 2003 Bunting was convicted of eleven murders and Wagner, who had already pleaded guilty to three, was convicted of seven more. Justice Brian Martin sentenced each to life on every count, to be served cumulatively, and said the men had been in the business of killing for pleasure and were incapable of true rehabilitation. Both appealed. Vlassakis received four life sentences with a twenty-six-year non-parole period for his cooperation. Mark Haydon was tried separately in 2004 and 2005 over two murders and six counts of assisting offenders; the jury could not agree on the two murders and convicted him on five counts of assisting, for which he received twenty-five years with an eighteen-year non-parole period.
He is held in permanent protective custody. Eleven convictions stand, which makes him, on court findings, the most prolific convicted murderer in Australian history.