On May 20, 1999, police officers forced open the vault of a disused bank on the main street of Snowtown, a farming town of a few hundred people about ninety miles north of Adelaide. Inside were six plastic barrels filled with hydrochloric acid, and in them the dismembered remains of eight people. None of the dead had come from Snowtown. They were men and women from the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and nearly all of them had known the man who rented the building, John Justin Bunting, or the men around him. Only one of them had died there.
The case became known as the Snowtown murders, or the bodies in the barrels. The name has always been slightly misleading. The killings began seven years earlier and ninety miles away, in a public housing district around Salisbury North and Elizabeth, among a loose network of poor families, neighbors, relatives and former partners. Most of the victims were known to the people who killed them, and several were members of their own families.
Bunting was born on September 4, 1966, in Inala, Queensland, and had worked in an abattoir. In Adelaide he built his social life around an obsession with pedophiles and homosexual men, between whom, the sentencing judge found, he made very little distinction if any. He kept a chart on the wall of his house connecting the names of people he believed to be one or the other with lines of string. The people he drew into that world included Robert Joe Wagner, a friend who shared his hatreds and, like Bunting, had been active in neo-Nazi groups; Mark Haydon, who stored bodies for him; and James Vlassakis, a teenager who lived in his house with his mother and half-brother and came to look on Bunting as a father. Victims were made to address him as Lord Sir.
Clinton Douglas Trezise was the first. He was invited into Bunting's living room in Salisbury North for a social visit on August 31, 1992, and beaten to death with a shovel; Bunting had accused him of being a pedophile. His age is recorded as twenty in some accounts and twenty-two in others. His skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave at Lower Light, north of Adelaide, on August 16, 1994, and for years nothing connected them to anyone. When Trezise's case was featured on the television program Australia's Most Wanted in 1997, Bunting watched it with Vlassakis and his mother and told them it was his handiwork.
Ray Davies, twenty-six, a man with an intellectual disability who had been in a relationship with Bunting's former girlfriend Suzanne Allen, was killed in December 1995 and buried in the backyard of the Salisbury North house. Allen herself died in November 1996, and her body, cut apart and wrapped in eleven plastic bags, was later found in the same grave.
The pace quickened in 1997. Michael Gardiner, nineteen, who lived as Michelle and was sharing a house with a relative of Wagner's wife, was killed in September. Barry Lane, forty-two, who lived as Vanessa and had once been Wagner's partner, was killed in October. Thomas Eugenio Trevilyan, eighteen, who was linked to the same circle through a former partner (the accounts differ on whose), was found hanging from a tree at Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills on November 5, 1997; the death was recorded at the time as a suicide. In April 1998 the group killed Gavin Allan Porter, twenty-nine, a friend of Vlassakis's who had schizophrenia and used drugs.
By then Vlassakis was part of the killing himself. In August 1998 he helped torture and kill his half-brother, Troy Youde, twenty-one. Frederick Brooks, eighteen, a nephew of Mark Haydon's wife, was tortured and killed in September. Gary O'Dwyer, twenty-nine, a physically and mentally disabled neighbor of Bunting's, followed in October. On November 20, 1998, Elizabeth Haydon, thirty-seven, Mark Haydon's wife and Brooks's aunt, disappeared from the Haydon home at Smithfield Plains.
The motive, as the court found it, was two things at once. There was the hatred Bunting preached to the others, which he applied to anyone he decided was a pedophile or homosexual, and which widened in practice to drug users and people with disabilities. And there was money. Victims were forced before they died to record their voices on tape, and their social security payments continued to be drawn by their killers afterward. The dead were people living on disability and unemployment benefits, and their benefits were what the killers collected.
Elizabeth Haydon's disappearance was the thread that unraveled it. Police had been looking into missing-persons reports around Salisbury North without connecting them. In October 1998 they had begun tapping Bunting's phone, and after she vanished they placed a listening device in the Haydons' house. By early 1999 the bodies, stored in several places over the years, had been moved to the bank at Snowtown, which Bunting had rented.
David Johnson, twenty-four, Vlassakis's stepbrother, was the last. On May 9, 1999, Vlassakis drove him to Snowtown and led him into the bank building, where Bunting and Wagner were waiting. He was killed there, the only one of the victims to die in the town. The court heard that part of his flesh was later fried and eaten by Bunting and Wagner. Eleven days later police opened the vault. Bunting, Wagner and Haydon were arrested on May 21, and over the following days two more bodies, those of Davies and Allen, were dug from the backyard of Bunting's former house. Vlassakis was arrested soon afterward and charged with Johnson's murder.
Vlassakis confessed in 2001 to four killings, including those of his half-brother and his stepbrother, pleaded guilty and agreed to give evidence for the Crown. Justice Kevin Duggan sentenced him in 2002 to four terms of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of twenty-six years, and said that without the plea and the cooperation the period would have been forty-two. His testimony, tested against the surveillance recordings and the forensic evidence, became the center of the prosecution case.
The trial of Bunting and Wagner opened in the Supreme Court of South Australia on October 14, 2002, under extensive suppression orders, and lasted nearly a year. The prosecutor, Wendy Abraham, called more than 230 witnesses and put more than a thousand exhibits before the jury. Vlassakis told the court that Bunting would look into the eyes of his victims as they died. On September 8, 2003, the jury convicted Bunting of eleven murders. Wagner, who had pleaded guilty to three, was convicted of seven more. On the twelfth count, the murder of Suzanne Allen, the jury could not reach a verdict, and the charge was later dropped.
At sentencing Wagner stood and made a short statement: pedophiles were doing terrible things to children, the authorities had done nothing, and he had decided to take action. Justice Brian Martin found that both men were driven by an intense hatred of homosexuals and of people they perceived to be pedophiles, and that their crimes were marked by brutality, depravity and cowardice. He said he had deliberately kept his description of the crimes spare, because words used to describe them could be turned to the killers' glory in prison. He sentenced each man to life imprisonment on every count, cumulatively, without a non-parole period. "I cannot make an order that you are never to be released," he said. "If I had the power to make an order that you are never to be released, I would unhesitatingly make that order."
Mark Haydon was tried separately over the murders of his wife and Troy Youde. The jury could not agree on either murder, and he was convicted on counts of assisting offenders, seven in all by the end of the proceedings, for storing bodies and helping to move them. He was sentenced to twenty-five years with an eighteen-year non-parole period and was released under strict supervision in 2024. Elizabeth Harvey, Vlassakis's mother, who had known about the killings and with Bunting's encouragement took part in one of them, died of cancer after the arrests and was never tried.
No one in Australia has been convicted of more murders than Bunting. Wagner has applied without success to have a non-parole period set, and Bunting has made no such application; both remain in prison. Vlassakis's parole became a long legal fight. The Parole Board decided in August 2025 to release him when his non-parole period expired, and the Parole Administrative Review Commissioner, Michael David, overturned that decision in December. The board challenged the ruling in the Court of Appeal, which sent the matter back to the commissioner's office, and in September 2026 the new commissioner, David Lovell KC, found that the attorney-general had not shown any reason to overturn the board. The board's chair, Frances Nelson KC, said Vlassakis had served more than twenty-six years, had given evidence at nineteen against his co-offenders at great risk to himself, had spent many years in solitary confinement as a result, and had always been remorseful. On September 23, 2026, at forty-six, he was moved to the Adelaide Pre-release Centre at Yatala, where he can be held for up to twelve months while the board sets the conditions of his release. Ronald Lane, the nephew of Barry Lane, called the sentence very soft. Snowtown, which had nothing to do with the killings except the building in which the bodies were kept, has lived with the name ever since.