In March 2019 Robert Joe Wagner, twenty years into a life sentence for ten murders, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of South Australia in his own hand asking for a non-parole period. He said his behavior in prison had been reasonably good, that he held a trusted job inside, and that having a date, even a distant one, would greatly assist his mental wellbeing. He had a son of twenty-one whom he had not seen outside a visiting room since the boy was eighteen months old. He appeared in person to argue it, complained that Corrections was holding his mail and turning away a visitor, and pointed out that James Miller, Bevan von Einem and the Bourke Street killer James Gargasoulas had all been given release dates. He would not say he was sorry. There was no point, he told the court, because the prosecution would say he was only saying it to get the date. On May 9, 2019, exactly twenty years after the last of the killings, Justice Greg Parker dismissed the application in a hearing that lasted about ten seconds. The bodies-in-the-barrels murders, he wrote, were the worst crimes ever detected in South Australia, none of Wagner's ten showed a single mitigating feature, and the absence of even a bare assertion of remorse bore out what the sentencing judge had said in 2003: that this man was incapable of true rehabilitation.
Wagner was born on November 28, 1971. His childhood was badly disturbed, and from the age of thirteen he was living with an older man, Barry Lane, a transvestite with a long record of sexual offenses against boys. In the early 1990s, in Salisbury North on Adelaide's northern fringe, Lane introduced him to John Justin Bunting. Bunting hated homosexuals and pedophiles with an intensity that extended to anyone who fitted his idea of one, and to the weak, the fat, the addicted, and anyone who had money he wanted. Wagner became his closest associate and his muscle. Both men moved in neo-Nazi circles. Between August 1992 and May 1999 Bunting killed eleven people and Wagner was part of ten of those killings; the victims were almost all people they knew.
The dead were Clinton Trezise, 22, killed in 1992 and buried in a paddock at Lower Light; Ray Davies, 26; Michael Gardiner, 19; Barry Lane, 42, the man Wagner had lived with as a boy; Thomas Trevilyan, 18, hanged from a tree in the Adelaide Hills in 1997 to look like suicide; Gavin Porter, 29; Troy Youde, 21; Frederick Brooks, 18; Gary O'Dwyer, 29; Elizabeth Haydon, 37, the wife of the fourth accused; and David Johnson, 24, killed inside the Snowtown bank building itself on May 9, 1999. Several were tortured for hours with pliers, electric shocks and burning while Bunting recorded their voices so that their welfare payments could be kept flowing by telephone afterward. Justice Parker's 2019 judgment summarized the motives the trial had established: pleasure, profit, personal dislike, vigilantism, and the avoidance of discovery. Wagner, he found, had shown pleasure in inflicting pain, had boasted and joked about his part in some of the killings, and had personally dismembered several bodies afterward. The trial also heard that he and Bunting had cooked and eaten flesh from one victim.
Eight of the bodies were found on May 20, 1999, in six acid-filled barrels in the vault of the disused State Bank at Snowtown, a wheat town in the mid-north that had nothing to do with the case except that Mark Haydon had rented the building. Two more were dug from the back yard of Bunting's former house in Salisbury North; Trezise had been found at Lower Light in 1994 and not identified until the arrests. Wagner, Bunting and Haydon were charged on May 20, 1999; James Vlassakis, the teenager Bunting had drawn in, followed on June 2 and became the Crown's principal witness.
Wagner pleaded guilty to three of the murders. The jury convicted him of seven more on September 8, 2003, at the end of the longest trial in South Australian history, and Bunting of eleven. In the dock Wagner said that pedophiles were doing terrible things to children, that the government was not protecting them, and that he had. Justice Brian Martin sentenced both men to life and declined to set any non-parole period. He said he could not make an order that Wagner was never to be released, but that if he had the power to make such an order he would unhesitatingly make it. In South Australia a life prisoner without a non-parole period may later apply to the sentencing court to have one fixed, and the court may refuse on the gravity of the offense. That is the application Wagner made in 2019 and lost; the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Commissioner for Victims' Rights and the victims' families all opposed it, and the families told the court that even a period so long he would die first would be symbolic of a right to freedom he should not have. Bunting has never applied. Haydon, convicted of assisting, served twenty-five years and was released under supervision in 2024; Vlassakis was granted parole in 2025. Wagner is held in protective custody and, as things stand, will die in prison.