Snowtown

by Jeremy Pudney

  Ten months after deciding to marry, Elizabeth and Marcus parted. The split was amicable and Marcus continued to see the boys, who would sometimes live with him.

  By October 1993 Elizabeth Harvey’s mental state had deteriorated further. She was hooked on prescription drugs and neglecting her sons, spending little time at home as she cared for her ailing mother. Thankfully a seemingly kind neighbour named Jeffrey Payne was only too happy to lend a hand. He befriended the boys, won Harvey’s trust, and before long took over the role of caring for the youngsters while their mother was away. What Harvey didn’t know was that Payne was a paedophile.

  From November 1993—the month Harvey’s mother died—until January of the following year, Payne preyed on the boys on an almost daily basis. Jamie was shown pornography and told that if he complied his younger brothers would be left alone. If he said anything to his mother, Payne warned, she would be murdered.

  When Harvey finally learned of her sons’ abuse, the police were called and on 3 March 1994, Jeffrey Edwin Payne was arrested. At first he denied the crimes but he confessed during his interview with police. Disturbingly, the sex offender whom a psychiatrist found had ‘little willpower over offending against young children’ was released on bail and allowed to return home to the street where his victims still lived. Payne would sit outside his home across the road and yell taunts at Jamie and his brothers, referring to them as ‘my boys’. Payne was eventually convicted and sentenced to four years’ jail. But the fact that Payne had been initially released on bail caused the young Jamie to develop a strong distrust of the police.

  This horrific betrayal had a devastating effect on the boys, none more so than Jamie. The fourteen year old, like his mother, plunged into depression. He struggled at school, felt ashamed even to face his family and became obsessive about showering, sometimes scrubbing himself until he bled. Jamie also turned to drugs and alcohol, which he began to use heavily. For Harvey the abuse triggered memories of her childhood ordeal and precipitated a complete nervous breakdown. She was forced to face the terrible reality that her neglect of her children had left them vulnerable and had played into the hands of a predator.

  This was a family in crisis; a mother and her children desperate for help, for someone to turn to.

  Barry Lane had watched from a distance as Jeffrey Payne stalked Elizabeth Harvey’s children. Jealous that he could not have the boys for himself, it was Lane who warned Harvey that Payne was preying on her sons.

  Lane had also told John Bunting of the young family’s plight and, fuelled by his hatred of paedophiles, Bunting decided he should be the one to protect them. It was late one afternoon when he rode to the family’s home on his motorcycle, knocked on the door and introduced himself to Harvey. He explained that she should beware of Barry Lane because he too was a child molester who wanted only to get his hands on her sons.

  By the end of 1994 Bunting was in a sexual relationship with Harvey, his marriage to Veronika all but over.

  For James Vlassakis, this man on the motorcycle who had appeared from nowhere to save his family was a hero. After all he had endured, Jamie was desperate for a father figure and Bunting had walked into his life at just the right moment. Jamie liked—even loved—John Bunting. He saw a man who was intelligent, well spoken and polite, who possessed an air of authority and power. By the time the fourteen year old asked Bunting to be his father, the pair was already very close.

  At first, Jamie’s relationship with Bunting seemed harmless, even positive. They would take motorbike rides together and go to the movies. Bunting even encouraged Jamie to return to school. But Bunting’s darker side soon emerged. Jamie began to notice Bunting’s odd traits, his fixation with his gun collection and his weird habit of searching people’s rooms when they weren’t around.

  Bunting would kill cats and dogs and encourage Jamie to watch as he skinned them. One time he played music in the background as he trapped a dog and demanded that Jamie shoot it in the head. When the young teenager baulked at pulling the trigger, Bunting did it himself.

  Perhaps most disturbing was Bunting’s maniacal hatred of paedophiles. Bunting would talk almost daily of violent retribution against child molesters and gays. These ‘dirties’, he said, didn’t deserve to live. Bunting also confided in Jamie that he too had been the victim of child abuse.

  A shrine to Bunting’s obsession was his ‘Wall of Spiders’. On a bedroom wall he would stick pieces of yellow paper, each bearing the name and personal details of a person he believed was a paedophile. He would write comments about these ‘rock spiders’—they included ‘prefers young boys’ or ‘plays Santa Claus at Christmas and has been banned by the stores’. The papers were linked together with lengths of blue string, forming a wall chart which more closely resembled a spider’s web.

  Bunting’s suspects were also his targets. He would randomly select a person’s name from the wall and then torment them. Most often it was nuisance phone calls, although sometimes Bunting would take Jamie and they would graffiti the person’s house or pour brake fluid on their car.

  In addition to his Wall of Spiders, Bunting kept detailed dossiers in which he meticulously recorded people’s personal details, interests and what he believed was their ‘type of deviance’. Most of this information was gleaned from Barry Lane—it was the very reason Bunting had befriended him. The dossier on Lane was by far the most extensive:

  Interests: Hanging around toilet blocks looking for young children, wearing poofter pants that show all his wares, punching dung with anyone and everything, making a constant nuisance of himself and flaunting the great side of homosexuality if anyone is stupid enough to listen.

  Type of Deviance: Rock spider, dobs in other rock spiders for the ego, denies that he is one, known toucher of children especially around the age of 12–14. Would not torture victims but psychologically changes by playing power games. He believes that it is a form of love to do this to children. He has no conscious [sic] and cannot make up his/her mind if he is straight or gay or male or female. Takes hormones to create breasts and hormones to remove hair from its body.

  Now acquainted with the real John Bunting, Jamie’s love for him was overtaken by fear. The teenager’s mother also experienced the terror John Bunting could instil. Early in their relationship Harvey made the near-fatal mistake of assuming it was merely a casual fling. When she began seeing another man, John held a pistol to his head and made the man beg for his life.

  ‘John rocked up at my place while Mervyn and I were in the kitchen and he came strutting in with his gun and ranting and raving,’ Harvey said later in an interview with police. ‘I stood in front of Mervyn and John fired the gun but there were no bullets in the gun.’

  For Harvey and her sons, there was no escaping John Bunting. From late 1995 they lived as a family, the older boys drifting in and out of home. Over the next four years the family moved from one house to the next, spending most time in the rural township of Murray Bridge, just over an hour’s drive east of Adelaide. It was not until 1999 that John Bunting and Elizabeth Harvey moved back to town.

  FIVE

  Tuesday, 16 August 1994, was a warm and sunny day—the kind that makes office workers stare out of their windows knowing that by five o’clock the best part of the day will have passed them by.

  This was never a problem for Jack Finch and his brother, Ron. For their entire adult lives the brothers, aged seventy-nine and seventy-six, had worked the land. The Finch family was a well-known farming clan in the district of Lower Light, 50 kilometres north of Adelaide. The family was highly regarded by locals, who knew Jack and Ron as a colourful duo whose friendliness and warmth was matched only by their never-ending array of witty one-liners. The brothers were always happy to stop for a chat and never too busy to lend a hand, even to complete strangers.

  For Jack and Ron, the absence of wind and rain on that Tuesday meant that conditions were perfect for spraying the noxious weeds which often spread over their properties. It was
tough work—Jack and Ron were no strangers to that—and, worst of all, time consuming.

  At 8 a.m. the brothers set off for a 4000-acre property which was home to a sizable proportion of their 2000 sheep. Leased by the family from various owners for almost sixty years, the property was about 4 kilometres west of Jack’s rustic homestead and about 9 kilometres in the same direction from the small, shabby town of Lower Light. The Finch family leased the property from the federal government, which once had plans to build an airstrip there. It was a project that would never be completed, although a radio communications tower remains to this day.

  The brothers worked all morning, Jack driving his beaten-up Toyota utility, a tank filled with poison on the back. Ron walked beside, armed with the weed-spraying gun. Sweat dripped from the men’s brows as they laboured through ankle-high scrub, consisting mostly of saltbush and weeds. After a lunch break the pair returned to the same paddock but began spraying in a different area, not far from a dirt track running towards the radio tower. Jack was taking care to avoid getting thorns in the ute’s tyres when Ron yelled at him to stop. ‘There’s a fox burrow there,’ he said. ‘And you’re almost in it.’

  Jack steered around the obstacle, neither of the men taking much notice. A few metres further on Ron spotted what he at first thought was a sheep bone, the sharp white colour attracting his interest. On closer inspection there was no doubt: this was a human skull.

  Ron picked up the skull, cradled it in his hand and looked carefully. At the back there was a large dent. Whoever this person was, they’d been dealt a fierce blow. ‘That’s somebody’s grave back there,’ Ron said to his brother, as they returned to the ditch they had steered around moments before.

  It was a shallow grave, about 10 centimetres deep. There were no clothes, just the skeletal remains, and no obvious signs of identification such as a wallet or jewellery. Whoever had dumped the body had made only a cursory attempt to bury it, and bones had since been scattered as far as 50 metres away by foxes and birds.

  Not far from where the Finch brothers made the find there is a road often travelled by locals, which leads to a nearby beach. Along the way the road changes from firm graded stone to a dirt strip on which even some four-wheel drives cannot travel in the wet. Jack figured that whoever had discarded the body had most likely planned to do so at the beach, but found the road too boggy to continue. Their only other option was the Finch brothers’ paddock.

  Within an hour of the find a large portion of scrubland had been cordoned off and specialist crime scene police were on their way. Also travelling from the heart of Adelaide were detectives from the South Australia Police Major Crime Branch.

  The discovery attracted immediate media interest and, after a cursory examination by a pathologist, police publicly confirmed they were investigating a murder.

  The media speculated that the bones could those be of a twelve-year-old girl, Rhianna Barreau, who had vanished two years before from Adelaide’s southern suburbs. It was one of the most notorious cases of suspected abduction and murder in the state’s modern history. Her body has yet to be found.

  The find also prompted a media mention of one of Australia’s worst serial murders, the so-called ‘Family’ killings in which five young men were abducted, sexually abused, mutilated and murdered. In 1982 the body of one of the suspected victims, fourteen-year-old schoolboy Peter Stogneff, was found not far from Lower Light at a place called Middle Beach. As quickly as the media speculated on such connections, however, detectives ruled them out. The following day police, crawling on hands and knees, combed the land surrounding the shallow grave for any clues that may be lying nearby. Even at this early stage detectives knew that finding a wallet or some other clue to the victim’s identity was of vital importance. It would not be that easy. Expert crime scene officers painstakingly excavated the grave, taking a series of photographs which, they believed, would one day be presented in court. In all, officers spent three days at the scene.

  The most detailed operation, however, was the one performed for the next month by forensic pathologist Ross James, who pieced together much of the skeleton to develop a profile of the ‘John Doe’. He was able to determine that this was a male, probably about seventeen years old. He had been savagely beaten about the head and dumped face down in the paddock, possibly as long ago as two years before his remains were discovered.

  The murder victim was about 172 centimetres tall and had been slightly built. Examination of the left shoulder joint, which was more developed than the right, suggested the teenager was left-handed. He had a long jaw, a narrow nose, and at the time of his death his hair was dyed copperblond. At some stage the man had suffered a broken collarbone and his teeth were in perfect condition—initially offering detectives hope that their victim would be quickly identified through dental records.

  Not long after the remains were discovered police made a public appeal, with one of the detectives on the case remarking, ‘Somebody, or a group of people, has lost a mate. He’s got friends, his friends must have missed him. Someone knows something.’

  Working on this theory, police began the arduous task of sifting through files on South Australia’s missing persons, at the time numbering about 135. Missing persons from other parts of Australia also could not be ruled out. Was this man a backpacker? Was he a hitchhiker?

  Forensic experts using facial reconstruction techniques came up with an image of a man’s face they believed was similar to the victim’s, but again no one came forward. The South Australian government posted a $100 000 reward, also without success.

  Eventually the remains the Finch brothers had discovered in their paddock at Lower Light were placed in storage at the State Forensic Science Centre in Adelaide, and the case took a back seat to more recent murders.

  One senior officer would later describe the John Doe case as one of the most frustrating he had encountered:‘It is the only case we have on our records where we have determined murder is the cause but we are unable to identify the victim. The fact that no one has come forward is mystifying. We have checked hundreds of missing persons files throughout Australia and overseas.’

  What the police didn’t know was why their tireless efforts to match John Doe with a name on a missing person’s report had been futile: he hadn’t yet been reported missing.

  It was the afternoon of 26 October 1995, when the missing person’s report rolled off the fax machine: Clinton Douglas Trezise, date of birth 5/12/1973.

  The Missing Persons Section received reports like this almost every day. What made this case peculiar, though, was the length of time it had taken Clinton’s family to report him missing. The young man’s relatives had not seen nor heard from him since 1992. Owing to a volatile family history, they’d assumed he had chosen to leave.

  Police checks revealed that their last record of Clinton Trezise was in May 1992. Interstate searches yielded nothing. Inquiries with the state government’s Family and Community Services Department showed Clinton had last sought its help in July 1992, when he attended a department office for financial counselling. That same month, on the 22nd, was the last time Clinton withdrew money from his bank account. While his disability pension continued to be paid in, the funds remained untouched.

  An obvious line of inquiry for missing persons investigators was the discovery of a young man’s skeleton in a paddock at Lower Light a year before. A photograph of Trezise was sent to the Forensic Science Centre, where it was compared with the Lower Light skull.

  Twice an expert deemed the remains to be not those of Clinton Trezise. Sadly, the expert had made a mistake. The missing teenager and the remains were, in fact, one and the same. The error would not be detected for another four years—and after another eleven murders.

  SIX

  In Australia around 30000 people are reported missing every year. Close to 5000 of those cases are in South Australia. Some missing people engineer their own disappearances—often for domestic or financial reasons—while othe
rs, tragically, have taken their own lives.

  Then there are those who have met with foul play.

  In close to half of the missing persons cases investigated by the South Australian police, the subject is located within forty-eight hours. Ninety-nine per cent are found, dead or alive, within twelve months. It was the remaining 1 per cent that bothered Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm.

  Soon after taking control of the Police Major Crime Branch, Schramm decided that the ‘one per centers’ needed closer scrutiny. Too often, Schramm believed, old missing persons cases were allowed to collect dust in a detective’s filing cabinet while family members gave up hope. It was not good enough to assume that these people had vanished of their own free will—there was always the chance they had been murdered and that their killers remained at large.

  Such attention to detail had been a trademark of Paul Schramm’s career. No matter what he chose to do with his life, he would undoubtedly have excelled. It just so happened that, as a fresh-faced teenager in 1965, he had chosen to become a cop.

  By twenty-two Schramm was a detective, first assigned to suburban investigation units, then to the Major Crime and Fraud branches. At thirty-three, he was promoted to the rank of commissioned officer and served as head of the Drug Squad before returning to Fraud, this time as its boss.

  In 1995, now a Detective Superintendent, Paul Schramm was appointed to one of the police department’s most coveted and prestigious positions—officer in charge of the Major Crime Branch.