Читать книгу The Best New True Crime Stories - Mitzi Szereto - Страница 8
ОглавлениеI remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame. A few stray locals eyeballing us suspiciously as we rolled down the main street, windows down, past the disused bank where they found the acid-filled barrels.
Where they found the bodies.
December 1999. It lingers in the memory. Roasting hot. Like Australian summers always are. A dry, scorching, unforgiving, relentless heat. I was moving from the Australian capital city of Canberra, back across the desert 3,718 kilometers (2,310 miles), to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia.
Just for fun, I decided to forgo the airlines and drive my car across the Nullarbor Plain, that vast, flat, empty, dry expanse that divides our major cities, east and west. My Perth-based buddy Scott flew across and came along for the ride. I mapped it out as a comfortable nine-day drive, stopping every night to rest and refuel.
The subsequent peripatetic journey went off without a hitch, bar one punctured tire, which I changed on the edge of the desert highway, while Scott kept watch to make sure a passing road train didn’t dissect my legs as they jutted out from under the car.
We took a few detours here and there to do some sightseeing. One such detour stands out to this day.
South Australia has an unfair reputation as the serial killer capital of Australia. It is their misfortune to have experienced quite an eclectic collection of serial murders over the decades. Perhaps none more bizarre than the ones that ended in the tiny northern town of Snowtown, population 467 (according to the last national census taken in 2016), some 152 kilometers (ninety-four miles) north up the A1 National Highway from the quaint capital city of Adelaide, known as the “city of churches.”
The case broke and made national and global headlines in May 1999. Eight murder victims found in six plastic barrels in a disused bank on the main street of sleepy Snowtown. When it was over, there were twelve bodies in total and four perpetrators in the most prolific case of serial murder in Australian history to date.
The murders really started in 1992 and weaved their way toward Snowtown down a long, twisted road. The perpetrators were John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and James Vlassakis. A fourth person, Mark Haydon, was later implicated in helping to dispose of the bodies.
There was no real reason for the murders, although an effort was made to use some of the victims’ identities to access social security (unemployment) payments and bank accounts. The victims were all known to the killers, all friends or casual acquaintances.
John Bunting was the ringleader in the killings. A former abattoir worker who professed a hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals, and who, like many ignorant people, thought they were one and the same. He accused many of the victims of these supposed sins. Like many individuals who become serial killers, Bunting had a childhood filled with neglect and abuse. Sexual abuse, in his case. No doubt it was the shame from the memory of it that led him to develop sociopathic tendencies, to detect weakness in others and exploit it. To hate anyone he suspected of being a deviant. History would show that Bunting’s psychopathic behavior and delight in torture increased as the cooling-off period between the murders decreased.
Robert Wagner, another damaged individual with a history of childhood abuse, was a neighbor Bunting befriended before the murders started. Mark Haydon was another neighbor roped in later down the path. James Vlassakis was the son of one of Bunting’s de facto lovers.
The murder spree itself was long and convoluted, a tale tinged with poverty, neglect, ignorance, addiction, and despair. Let’s start at the beginning to get a chronological understanding of how this whole mess transpired.
John Bunting had a terrible upbringing. Born in Queensland in 1966, at the age of eight he was sexually assaulted and beaten up by a friend’s older brother. Naturally this had an indelible effect on his psyche, as the incident was suppressed and never treated. In his early twenties, Bunting found work in an abattoir, where he derived great pleasure in slaughtering animals.
By the early nineties, Bunting was married but estranged from his wife, Veronica. They had no children. He moved into a rental property in Salisbury North, thirty-five kilometers (twenty-two miles) north of Adelaide, where he befriended two of his neighbors, Barry Lane and Robert Wagner. He quickly formed a bond with the two, using his domineering personality to get into their heads.
He impressed on them his hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals. This despite the fact that Lane was a practicing homosexual himself. The three social outcasts were united by poverty and unemployment.
Wagner had a very troubled upbringing, suffering at the hands of a violent stepfather. Lane was a crossdresser who called himself “Vanessa.” He groomed Wagner as a thirteen-year-old, and the two began a relationship. Lane was initially excused by Bunting because of his links to Wagner, who was totally under Bunting’s spell.
When they weren’t hanging around at Bunting’s ramshackle rental property listening to his anti-gay-and-pedophile rants, Lane and Wagner were befriending a young neighbor named Clinton Tresize, who had recently moved into the area. Clinton was outgoing and flamboyant in nature. When they described him to Bunting, the latter asked to be introduced. Obviously believing that Tresize was a homosexual, and therefore a pedophile, Bunting invited him round for tea on August 31, 1992. At this point Bunting had reached the stage where his inner rage was ready to boil over. As the young man sat unsuspecting on a sofa, Bunting snuck up behind him and bashed his head in with a shovel.
The killer called his two mates over, and they put the body in a car and drove it to a remote farm, where they interred it in a shallow grave. Despite Clinton’s sister attempting to file a missing persons report, most people thought he had willingly disappeared to start a new life. A report would not be filed until his mother did so three years later. Clinton Tresize’s skeletal remains were discovered on August 16, 1994. It would be another five years before he was officially identified.
In the months after this first murder, Bunting roped another gullible neighbor, Mark Haydon, into his cabal of misfits. Around this time, Bunting found himself a new sexual partner, Elizabeth Harvey, a divorcee. She moved into Bunting’s place with her two sons from a previous marriage, Troy Youde and James Vlassakis. Both boys had been sexually abused by their father, and Troy, the older brother, had also sexually abused James. Bunting quickly asserted his will over James, seeing in him another vulnerable, damaged soul to exploit.
Ray Davies was a twenty-six-year-old disabled pensioner living in a caravan not far from Bunting’s place. In December of 1995, he was falsely accused by his landlady of molesting a local child. Word got around the community, and it was a good enough excuse for Bunting to fly into a psychopathic rage. Bunting and Wagner dragged Davies into a car and drove him into the bush, where they gave him a severe beating. Then they took him back to Bunting’s house, where Bunting, Wagner, and Elizabeth Harvey tortured him and strangled him to death with some automotive jumper cables. As he grew more comfortable with the act of murder, Bunting started to get into the humiliation and torture of his victims, orchestrating his minions in how to do it and reveling in his power over life and death. He goaded Elizabeth into stabbing the already-dying victim.
Davies’s body was buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of Bunting’s house. He was not reported missing.
Bunting then met another woman who fell under his psychopathic spell. Suzanne Allen started to hang around his group of misfits, and the two quickly became lovers. Over time Bunting grew tired of her sexual demands, and, in November 1996, Allen disappeared. Years later, her dismembered body would be found in a shallow grave buried in Bunting’s backyard at the Salisbury North property, but her actual cause of death was never established. Bunting would claim that he and Wagner found her dead from a suspected heart attack and dismembered and disposed of her body so they could continue to claim her social security payments.
In 1996, Bunting, with Elizabeth Harvey and her two teenage sons in tow, moved one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) inland to the big country town of Murray Bridge. He kept in contact with Robert Wagner. By this stage, Bunting had fallen deeper into his obsession with outing and disposing of people among his casual acquaintances who he had convinced himself were pedophiles. He stuck a diagram on his kitchen wall with a list of names, linking them to imaginary crimes. He was also motivated by the ease of accessing their social security benefits.
In September 1997, Wagner alerted Bunting to the presence of a young homosexual he had recently befriended in Salisbury North. Nineteen-year-old Michael Gardiner was another youth with a history of neglect and abuse. He was just starting to get his life together after coming out as gay. An unfortunate but probably innocent turn of events (involving Gardiner playing a game of chase with one of the children of a woman Wagner was having an affair with) led to false accusations of abuse, and of course gave Bunting all the excuse he needed.
Bunting and Wagner abducted Gardiner and took him to a shed in the backyard of Bunting’s rental house. There they abused, tortured, and strangled him to death. They then hacked off his hands and threw the body into an acid-filled barrel in the shed.
Bunting next turned his attention to Barry Lane, who he had only tolerated because of his prior relationship with Wagner. Lane was in a new relationship with a younger man, eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan. They still associated with Wagner.
Bunting heard that Lane had told a casual acquaintance about his involvement in the original murder of Clinton Tresize and decided it was his turn to be dealt with. In October 1997, Bunting, Wagner, and Trevilyan, who had been roped into Bunting’s ideology, cornered Lane at his house and subjected him to hours of torture and abuse. Bunting forced Lane to call and berate his own mother and tell her he was moving away to Queensland and to never contact him again. Growing ever more perverted, Bunting used pliers to crush Lane’s toes before he instructed Wagner to strangle him while he and Trevilyan held him down. Lane’s body was later dismembered and stuck in a barrel of acid in Bunting’s shed.
Lane’s disappearance was reported to the police by a female friend ten days later—the same friend he had told about the murder of Clinton Tresize. However, the recording of Lane’s message to his mother put them off the trail. They assumed Lane had just moved away.
After Lane’s murder, Trevilyan moved in with Wagner and his girlfriend. The youth was concerned for his own safety, and he confided to a cousin his involvement in Lane’s murder. Bunting and Wagner were also concerned that the mentally unstable youth would give them away, so, in November 1997, the two of them abducted Trevilyan, took him into the remote Adelaide Hills, and staged a fake suicide by hanging him from a tree.
The next victim was Gavin Porter, a friend of James Vlassakis’s. By early 1998, still living in Bunting’s house with his mother and brother Troy, James had become addicted to heroin. Porter was a fellow addict who James invited to move into the house. A fatal move, as Bunting had suddenly decided to add drug addicts to his hate list. After befriending Porter and obtaining his bank and social security details, Bunting and Wagner tortured and strangled him in April 1998, storing his body in a barrel in the shed out back of Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge, along with the others.
At this point, Bunting showed Vlassakis the bodies in the barrels, traumatizing the young man enough to force him to take part in his quest to rid the world of the type of people he personally despised. Next to die, and the perfect victim to introduce James to the art of murder, was his own half-brother, Troy Youde.
Bunting convinced James that he needed to avenge himself for the sexual abuse he had suffered at Troy’s hands. In August 1998, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis armed themselves with jack handles and other makeshift weapons and assaulted Troy in his bed. They dragged him into the bathroom and used a tape recorder to record his torture and death. His body was also dumped in a barrel in the shed.
Despite being sickened by these events, James still accessed his dead brother’s accounts to feed his heroin habit. Bunting knew he had a psychological hold over the kid.
Bunting had maintained a casual friendship with Mark Haydon, but had taken an intense dislike to Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth. Perhaps because of this, he selected as the next victim her eighteen-year-old nephew, Fred Brooks, a mate of James’s.
Barely a month after Troy Youde was killed, in September 1998, Fred Brooks was invited over to the Bunting house. There, he was stripped naked and tortured by Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. They burned him with lit cigarettes and a cigarette lighter. Bunting brought out a new toy he had found, a variac transformer, used to administer voltage. They attached clamps to Brooks’s genitals. After that, Bunting produced a box of sparklers, inserted one in the head of Brooks’s penis, and set it alight. He enjoyed it so much he did it again. They then used a syringe to inject water into the youth’s testicles. At this point, Brooks mercifully died.
Brooks’s body was taken to Mark Haydon’s house in north Adelaide, where the other barrels had been transported as well. The gang then accessed Brooks’ social security payments. By this stage, the police were aware of a number of missing persons reports and a spate of suspicious activity in accessing these people’s social security payments. They were slowly closing in.
The murder process was accelerating and becoming more random. At the same time, Bunting’s level of sick perversion was getting out of control. The next victim was Garry O’Dwyer, a twenty-nine-year-old disabled pensioner who had the misfortune of crossing Bunting’s path on a public street in October 1998. Observing his physical incapacity, a limp resulting from a car accident and seeing him as an easy mark, Bunting befriended O’Dwyer and secured an invite to his house for himself, Wagner, and Vlassakis.
Once there, they attacked and tortured O’Dwyer, forcing him to give them his bank and social security details. They elicited statements under torture on a voice recorder to throw family members off the trail. Then Wagner strangled him to death; the body was dismembered and thrown into a barrel.
Next, Bunting decided it was time to get rid of Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth, for the simple fact that he didn’t like her. While Mark Haydon was conveniently away from home, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis murdered her on November 21, 1998, and her dismembered body also ended up in a barrel of acid.
However, Elizabeth was reported missing by her brother within a few days. He did not believe the contradicting messages Mark Haydon gave for her absence and was highly suspicious of his seeming lack of concern. Nor did he believe she would abandon her two young sons.
When the police were alerted, they noted Elizabeth’s association with Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. In late 1998, Bunting moved house again, this time to Snowtown, a rural area north of Adelaide. Concerned about the police questioning Haydon over his wife’s disappearance, the barrels were placed in two vehicles and driven to Snowtown, where Bunting and Mark Haydon rented a disused bank building under a false name. The presence of two unfamiliar vehicles and the activity around the empty bank building were noted by locals and, eventually, the police.
In the interim, Bunting persuaded Vlassakis to lure his stepbrother David Johnson to the Snowtown bank vault on the pretext of buying drugs. On May 9, 1999, he became the only victim to be murdered in Snowtown.
By this time the police had been able to establish links between some of the missing persons and Bunting, Wagner, Vlassakis, and Haydon. The latter’s phone was tapped. After a tipoff, police broke into the bank vault and discovered the barrels, where the stench was overpowering. The mummified remains of eight victims were recovered.
Unfortunately, Bunting wasn’t too bright, because he stored the bodies in hydrochloric acid, which preserved them rather than dissolved them. If he had used sulfuric acid, it might have achieved the desired effect.
The four perpetrators were quickly arrested. Bunting was initially charged with one murder, that of Johnson. Fearing for his life, Vlassakis quickly rolled over and spilled the beans. Bodies were disinterred from the backyards of properties Bunting had previously rented, and it was eventually established that there were twelve victims, making this the serial murder case with the biggest body count in Australian history to date.
However, it is not so much the detail of the murders that interests me here, but rather the lasting impact: the stigma of this shocking event on the tiny rural town of Snowtown.
The immediate effect was to lead to a short-term economic boom as curious onlookers like me came to gawk at the bank building in the otherwise uninteresting out-of-the-way locale.
Some local businesses started producing and selling souvenirs, T-shirts, and fridge magnets featuring gallows humor, images and slogans punning around the use of the barrels—a form of what is known as “dark tourism.” People are fascinated by death and murder. Every city across Australia has its own crime tour. They are as popular as ghost tours. Grim reminders of our nation’s dark past. No different to most countries.
However, in addition to the morbid fascination of passersby, the town also became tainted by the lingering stench of death. The awful memories of what they found in that empty bank vault. In 2011, the local community proposed changing the name of the place to Rosetown to dissociate itself from the stigma of the infamous “Bodies in the Barrels” case.
That same year, a feature film based on the events was released across Australia on May 19. Simply called Snowtown, the film centered on a semi-fictional autobiographical account of John Bunting’s troubled background leading up to his becoming a serial killer.
The following year, 2012, saw the region’s only newspaper, the Broughton Star, close its doors, as if the town itself was putting up the shutters. Nothing of interest to see here anymore, folks. Move along.
So, the question that interests me is what the mood is like in Snowtown today, some twenty years removed from its moment of infamy. To try and find answers, I reached out from a great distance to the Wakefield Regional Council in rural South Australia to try and obtain some feedback.
The response I promptly received from a helpful staffer read:
“Thank you for your email. This was a horrible thing for our community to be involved in and the locals of Snowtown do not like to rehash and discuss the matter. As there were no locals physically affected by the murders, they would prefer to just leave it in the past.”
So, I did some digging of my own. One entity that asked a similar question and did get a response was the national broadcaster, the ABC network (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). They sent reporters in to gauge the mood of the town by chatting with some of its residents. The result is an online piece posted in 2019, “Life after Death: Dark Tourism and the Future of Snowtown” (Daniel Keane and Patrick Martin).
Dark tourism, also known as black tourism, grief tourism, and thanatourism, is a phenomenon only recently categorized, but which has been around for some time in an unofficial capacity. It is an expression of the desire of people to visit locales where terrible or evil events transpired. Such places have a certain dark aura about them and are appealing to tourists on a certain level.
Some of the more prominent examples are the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, Chernobyl in the Ukraine, Hiroshima in Japan, and the site of the twin towers of 9/11 infamy in New York. No further explanation of these sites is needed, as the events surrounding them are firmly lodged in the human collective psyche. In the specific Australian context, there is Port Arthur in Tasmania, site of a terrible case of spree killing that almost singlehandedly led to casual gun ownership being banned in Australia. There is the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales, site of the Ivan Milat backpacker murders, and now there is Snowtown.
It is worth mentioning that the Australian attitude toward gun ownership is the antithesis of the American practice. There is no Australian equivalent of a powerful lobby group like the NRA (National Rifle Association). In fact, after the Tasmanian Port Arthur massacre in 1996, the Australian government experienced intense public pressure to ban casual gun ownership. This was rapidly achieved across the country, with every state and territory government falling into line. Gun ownership is now heavily restricted to farmers on remote properties who need them for vermin control. In the time since Port Arthur and as of this writing, there have been zero gun-related massacres in Australia.
The old disused bank building still stands on Fourth Street today, despite the wishes of some locals for it to be demolished. Over the course of 2019, there has been much public debate in Snowtown as to whether the town should officially attempt to profit from its infamy.
While many locals would prefer to bury the past and ignore it, others hold the opposite view, that like it or not, the very name Snowtown will always be associated with the “Bodies in the Barrels” murders, and the townsfolk should trade on the infamy. As such, there have been moves to turn the abandoned bank building into a grisly museum, hosting props reflecting the murders and, of course, selling all manner of murder-related souvenirs.
Why not? some argue. Whitechapel, in the formerly neglected East End of London, is forever stained by memories of Jack the Ripper and has been cashing in on the fact for decades. Almost every night, dozens of Ripper walking tours plow the streets of the old East End, bumping onto one another, retracing the steps of the unfortunate women who met their terrible end at the Ripper’s blade. This writer has taken one such tour and enjoyed it immensely.
The contrasting view holds that the events in Snowtown still hold tragic memories for many people (though not necessarily those actually living in Snowtown) and dredging it all up again in the form of dark tourism could have a debilitating effect on the mental health of family, friends, and loved ones of the victims. This is also a fair point, which needs to be taken into consideration.
The obvious difference between Snowtown and Whitechapel is that the Ripper mythology was not cashed in on until around a century after the events of 1888. There was no one left connected to the crimes to be upset.
In another report broadcast on air in May 2019, the ABC spoke to several residents and former residents to gauge their opinion on the impact of the murders on their town. One individual commented that the producers of the movie based on the events did not even consult the local community before producing their factual account. This only served to further stigmatize the town and traumatize its residents.
The town suffers a double misfortune in that it bears the mark of the locale of the worst case of serial killing in Australian history and yet only one actual murder took place there. Eight other bodies were transported in to be discovered later. Bunting moved into the remote town and shipped the barrels in just as the police net was closing in. Those barrels could have been discovered in any of the various locations they were previously stored in, but the fact that the case broke in Snowtown will haunt them forever.
Snowtown was established in 1878, its main purpose to provide agricultural crops—cereal, wool, and livestock. It also sits on the cusp of a large salt mine at nearby Lake Bumbunga. Like many rural communities, it suffers the vagaries of distance and economic downturns. As of 2020, Snowtown is battling a persistent economic decline and a resultant dwindling population as young people in need of work move away to look elsewhere.
The town now faces the dilemma of deciding whether it should risk exploiting its dark past to possibly secure a brighter future. The problem stems from the recent proximity of the crimes. At just twenty years down the road, it may be too soon for Snowtown. Jack the Ripper, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, even Chernobyl, are all further in the past.
Every day, remaining locals are slightly perturbed by the numbers of dark tourists who still cruise the town’s main street, gliding by the bank building and taking selfies, much as I did twenty years ago. The question they now ask themselves is not so much how to stop them coming, but rather, whether to cash in on their presence.
