Robert Joe Wagner was born on November 28, 1971. He had an extremely disturbed childhood and was living, from the age of thirteen, with an older man, Barry Lane, who had a long record of sexual offences against boys and who would eventually become one of the victims.
He met John Bunting in Salisbury North in the early 1990s and became his closest associate. Bunting supplied the ideology, an obsessive hatred of paedophiles and homosexuals which extended to people who merely fitted his idea of one, and Wagner supplied physical force. Between 1992 and 1999 the two of them killed ten people together, most of them known to them, several tortured over hours with pliers, electrical devices and burning.
The eleven dead in the series 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. He was convicted of ten of them.
Eight of the bodies were found in acid-filled barrels in the vault of a disused bank at Snowtown in May 1999, and others at a house at Salisbury North.
He pleaded guilty to three murders and was convicted of seven more in September 2003, and was given life with no non-parole period. In court he said that paedophiles were being protected by the government and that killing them was justified. He is held in permanent protective custody in South Australia.