Snowtown

by Jeremy Pudney

  Taking charge of Major Crime meant a high profile and intense pressure. The Major Crime boss had to not only supervise investigations into the state’s most serious crimes—mostly homicides—but also cope with constant attention from superiors and demands for swift justice from victims’ families. As well, there was the glare of the public spotlight and the hungry hordes of media following almost every investigation.

  It was a challenge to which Paul Schramm was well suited. He possessed years of experience combined with a flair for leadership. A tall, slender man, always impeccably dressed, Schramm is highly intelligent, meticulous and a true strategist. Renowned as a national expert in the management of serious crime investigations, he has superior powers of analysis and communication. Every word that passes Paul Schramm’s lips is carefully considered and delivered to great effect.

  When he was first handed the missing persons file, Detective Senior Constable Craig Patterson didn’t have a lot of time to look it over. Having not long ago been transferred into Major Crime, he already had several current cases to work on. However, Superintendent Schramm had decided that major crime detectives were to use their ‘downtime’ to re-examine cases where the trail had gone cold. This missing persons file had been assigned to Patterson and he would have to deal with it.

  Patterson may have been new to major crime, but he was no rookie: he’d been in the job for eighteen years and a detective for more than a decade. It was July 1997 when he first looked over the file which bore the name Clinton Douglas Trezise.

  Clinton Trezise had been reported missing by his mother in October 1995 but had apparently vanished some considerable time before. The family had not been close, which explained the amount of time elapsed between Clinton’s disappearance and the report to police.

  Patterson began his investigation by reviewing the inquiries already undertaken by officers in the police Missing Persons Section. At the time Trezise vanished the eighteen year old had been living in a flat in the northern Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth. His television and other electrical goods vanished when he did, but Trezise had left behind other belongings, including personal papers. Later the flat was cleared out by his family.

  Clinton had been on welfare benefits, having suffered an injury which prevented him from working. Checks with government agencies revealed the last contact with him was on 10 July 1992. The last withdrawal from his bank account had been twelve days later. There was no record of Clinton Trezise with other police departments around Australia, nor did the Immigration Department have any record of him leaving the country. He didn’t even have a passport.

  Patterson noted with interest a reference in the Trezise file to the skeletal remains of a young man which had been discovered in a paddock at Lower Light in 1994. Initially it was thought that these may have been the remains of Clinton Trezise, but a forensic expert had compared the skull with a photograph of Trezise and concluded that they were not the same person.

  For another four months Patterson made no progress in his search for Clinton Trezise. It was a low-priority case and he was able to devote only small periods of time to it. The first breakthrough came in November 1997, when the Missing Persons Section informed Patterson of yet another disappearance. A man named Barry Lane had also vanished. He had known Clinton Trezise.

  Joanna Smith* met Barry Lane through the Salvation Army. Together they would attend services and church outings. Soon after the couple first met, Lane, forty-two, confessed that he was homosexual and had once been a transvestite. He explained that he had since been ‘cleansed’.

  Lane and Joanna enjoyed each other’s company, and within two months the couple was engaged, although they continued to live apart. It was a step Joanna would never have taken had she known Barry Lane was a convicted paedophile. Her suspicions about Lane were aroused only when child welfare authorities stepped in to ensure he was never alone with Joanna’s three young children.

  From that point on, Lane and Joanna’s relationship deteriorated. The final straw came on 26 April 1997, when Lane allowed a young man named Thomas Trevilyan to move in with him. It was Thomas’s eighteenth birthday.

  As far as Joanna was concerned, this teenager named Thomas was nothing but trouble. Her opinion seemed justified when Lane complained to her about Thomas’s violent nature, in particular an incident when the young man had slashed him with a knife.

  Despite their split, Joanna kept in contact with Lane. The last she heard from him was a telephone call in October 1997. He and Thomas had been stranded in a country town north of Adelaide. Their car, Lane explained, had broken down and they wanted her to check the mail and feed their dogs.

  A few days passed and Joanna became worried—a neighbour told her only Thomas had returned. A week later there was still no sign of anyone at Lane’s house. After waiting a couple more days Joanna again spoke to the neighbour, who revealed that Thomas’s grandmother had called in to collect his belongings. The teenager had killed himself.

  Confused and worried about the strange series of events, Joanna went to the police to report Lane missing. Not only did she tell them that Thomas had committed suicide, but she related a story which Lane had told her only a few months before he vanished.

  Barry had confessed to Joanna that he had once helped Robert Wagner dispose of human remains which had been wrapped in garbage bags and dumped somewhere ‘up north’. Lane believed that the remains were those of Clinton Trezise.

  The mention of Clinton Trezise in the Lane case triggered alarm bells within the police department. Detective Patterson, still assigned to the Trezise investigation, was told immediately. He asked to be informed the minute Barry Lane was located.

  For seven months officers in the Missing Persons Section conducted routine inquiries to trace Barry Lane, but to no avail. The investigation intensified after a phone call from his sister, Krystal. She said her family had heard nothing of Lane since the time he was reported missing and she feared for his safety. Krystal explained that her brother was homosexual, a cross-dresser and a paedophile.

  Constable Janet Forrest decided it was wise to have another look at Lane’s disappearance and, using police records, managed to locate a former neighbour of Lane’s. The man said he hadn’t seen Lane for more than a year, but he knew someone who had: John Bunting.

  John Bunting, also a former neighbour of Lane’s, had been telling friends he’d seen Barry Lane in the town of Murray Bridge, east of Adelaide. Bunting now lived in the town with his partner, Elizabeth Harvey. When Constable Forrest telephoned to follow up the lead, it was Harvey who took the call.

  An agitated Harvey told Forrest that Lane was a paedophile and couldn’t be trusted. She said her partner, Bunting, had seen Lane three weeks before, but they didn’t know where he was living. The best person to ask, Harvey suggested, was Robert Wagner. After all, Wagner and Lane had lived together for many years.

  Wagner was little help. He told Constable Forrest that, by choice, he had no contact with Lane and had not spoken to him for some time. But Wagner claimed to have seen Lane at a local shopping centre ‘a couple of weeks ago’. It was not the last time police would encounter Robert Wagner. Soon he would become the focus of their investigation.

  The series of facts created a sinister picture:

  Clinton Trezise—vanished in 1992.

  Barry Lane—vanished October 1997.

  Lane had been an associate of Trezise.

  Lane had confessed to involvement in Trezise’s disappearance.

  Soon after Lane vanished, his teenage lover Thomas Trevilyan was found dead. Apparently suicide by hanging.

  Detective Patterson viewed this picture with great suspicion. He wasted little time arranging a meeting with the suburban detectives investigating the Lane and Trevilyan cases. He would review these cases too—perhaps something in the files would provide a lead. Something did: a statement given by a woman named Lenore Penner.

  Lenore Penner was Thomas Trevilyan’s cousin. They were related only by m
arriage, but Lenore had a soft spot for Thomas, whom she knew to be a deeply troubled teenager. He was mentally ill and would drift in and out of reality. Thomas dressed in army clothing and outwardly lived a fantasy in which he had served in the armed forces. Sometimes he was a sergeant, other times a major, even a lieutenant.

  Lenore had learned to listen to her cousin Tommy but believe little of what he said. After his death, however, she feared one of his tales might have been true. It was a story she recorded in her diary the very day Thomas had told it to her—30 October 1997:

  Tommy came over tonight. He swore me to secrecy. He told me that he and two other friends killed Barry Lane because Barry had abused them.

  They wrapped him in tape and in a garbage bag and left him there for four days.

  Then they came back and put his body in the trunk of the car—killed his dogs and cats and put their guts in the trunk as well.

  Then they drove somewhere and put Barry’s body in a 40-gallon drum and left it. Now they have to dispose of the drum.

  He’s thinking either to dig a hole and bury the drum or get a speedboat and drop it in the ocean.

  I don’t believe him because none of these ‘crisis’ stories he tells me ever seem to be his own experience.

  Lenore knew Thomas had been living with a man named Barry and, after learning of Thomas’s death only a month after he’d told her the story, immediately went to the police. She recounted the story in even greater detail: ‘Thomas said that they tortured Barry so that he would tell them his social security numbers, then they would withdraw the money and divide it between them. The reason they did this was so the police wouldn’t find what they had done to Barry and that everything would seem as normal.’ Thomas also told his cousin that he feared the other two killers were now ‘after him’. Four days later, Thomas was dead.

  After initially passing on this bizarre tale of murder, Lenore was told by one detective not to worry. Barry Lane, the police believed, was in Queensland.

  However, by the time he visited Lenore Penner, Detective Patterson was not so sure. It was time to step up the investigation.

  The suggestion that Barry Lane’s bank account was being pilfered by the men who’d killed him established an obvious line of inquiry for Detective Patterson. Checks with the government’s Social Security Department confirmed that Lane received a fortnightly pension of $353.20. The cash was paid directly into an account he held with Bank SA.

  Patterson then discovered a disturbing pattern in Lane’s bank records. Prior to Lane’s disappearance in October 1997, he would withdraw his pension from automatic teller machines (ATMs) near his home. Immediately after the date Lane was reported missing, the withdrawals began to occur from outlets some distance away. Most were from an ATM at the BP Express service station in the northern Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth Vale.

  Either Barry Lane had moved—without telling his family and friends—or his bankcard had moved without him. Detective Patterson figured there was one easy way to find out.

  The camera was hidden. Only staff at the BP Express knew it was there and they’d been asked to keep quiet. Police had installed the camera saying it was part of an ongoing investigation and management was assured it had nothing to do with any employees. The police technicians had come on 1 July 1998 and exactly a week later the trap was sprung.

  Oblivious to the watchful lens of the law, the tall redhaired man stood at the ATM and inserted the card at precisely 6.21 a.m. The card number was 5602 6500 0704 0960. It belonged to Barry Lane.

  The man punched in a personal identification number that only Lane should have known, then hit a single key to select ‘account balance’. The printed receipt showed $367.95. The man then pushed the receipt into the disposal slot and pressed a key for ‘another transaction’ at 6.22 a.m. Withdrawal. $360. The receipt again went into the rubbish.

  Four days later, perched in front of a television screen in the Major Crime offices, Detective Patterson replayed the tape. There were only a few minutes of vision but the camera had yielded exactly what he’d hoped for: a suspect. The ATM receipts were later recovered for fingerprinting and still photographs were extracted from the video. Within a few days a northern suburbs patrol cop, one of many who’d been asked to look at the pictures, identified the man using the ATM as Robert Joe Wagner.

  Investigations by the Missing Persons Section had previously established Robert Wagner as an associate of Barry Lane’s. Now he’d been caught taking money from Lane’s account.

  A fortnight later police set another trap—this time they used a full-scale surveillance operation. From the early hours of the morning on Wednesday, 22 July, undercover police were watching Robert Wagner. They trailed him as, just before 5.30 a.m., he drove his brown Ford station wagon to the BP Express service station and withdrew another $360 from Barry Lane’s account.

  Later that day Wagner was followed to the town of Murray Bridge, where he visited a friend named John Bunting, also flagged in police records as an associate of Lane.

  Over the next few months, surveillance was infrequent. There was no direct evidence of murder, so the case took a back seat to current homicide investigations. Despite Detective Patterson’s requests, surveillance teams were continually assigned to other cases. There simply weren’t enough people to go round.

  In October 1998 Patterson applied to intercept Wagner and Bunting’s home telephones, but resources were again a problem. There were only six intercept lines available and none could be spared.

  SEVEN

  John Justin BUNTING

  Robert Joe WAGNER

  In a perfect world, alarm bells would have been ringing. Someone would have noticed sooner or a computer database would have alerted police.

  John Justin BUNTING

  Robert Joe WAGNER

  The two names had come to the attention of detectives investigating the disappearance of Clinton Trezise and Barry Lane. They were suspects.

  John Justin BUNTING

  Robert Joe WAGNER

  However, the detectives weren’t aware of a sinister coincidence. The two names also featured in another missing persons case: Suzanne Allen, whom Bunting and Wagner both knew, had vanished in 1996.

  Suzanne Allen’s family and friends remember her as a warm, friendly woman. Sadly, she drifted through life hoping for something better, only to meet with a horrific end.

  Suzanne was ‘a little slow’, according to friends, and more than a little vulnerable. Easily led and, ultimately, easy prey.

  Born on 26 June 1949, Suzan (later changed to Suzanne) Phyllis Martin was one of seven children raised in the Victorian town of Mildura. She moved out of the family home at fourteen and crossed the border into New South Wales, where she worked on a sheep station.

  In 1983, with two failed marriages and four children behind her, Suzanne decided to seek out a new life.

  She travelled to South Australia, settling in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Her children remained with their fathers and Suzanne had little contact with them, visiting once or twice a year and sending cards for birthdays and Christmas.

  Suzanne’s ‘new’ life consisted of one failed relationship after another. She would meet men at singles’ clubs, throw herself into love, then come crashing out.

  In 1993 Suzanne’s live-in lover was a young man named Ray Davies. At one point the couple was engaged, although Ray was sleeping on the lounge at the time. Davies had a slight intellectual handicap, was unemployed and nineteen years Suzanne’s junior. The pair passed the time collecting cans and bottles, using the extra cash to boost their government welfare pensions. When their relationship floundered, Suzanne allowed Ray to live in a caravan in her back yard.

  It may have been Suzanne Allen’s unique lifestyle or bizarre friends like Ray Davies. Perhaps it was the fact that her mostly jobless neighbours had nothing better to do.

  Whatever the reason, Suzanne Allen became a local spectacle from almost the moment she moved into 3 Ghent Street, Salisbury N
orth.

  One neighbour, Marilyn Nelson, would later detail for police the strange goings-on at Suzanne Allen’s house:

  Whilst she lived there, she had a few really odd blokes visit her. She used to pick them up from the karaoke club…

  They were all mentally retarded, they weren’t normal people as such, they all had some form of mental problems. Suzanne too had some form of mental problems, she was a bit backward.

  I know that she did have a young guy stay with her for some time, his name was Ray. He was in his mid-twenties, he was mentally retarded, the neighbours were scared of this person because he would hide in the bushes and when the young girls would walk past he would play with himself. He would expose himself to the young girls, there was a complaint made to the police about him. We eventually told Suzanne and she kicked him out.

  Suzanne used to keep to herself. She was friendly with all the neighbours.

  Marilyn Nelson was among the first people to notice that Suzanne had disappeared. At first she thought nothing of it—after all, Suzanne had talked about moving.

  It was a visit from Suzanne’s brother, John Martin, which got Marilyn thinking all might not be well. John explained that his sister had vanished, leaving behind her pets and most of her possessions. Only her car was gone.

  Marilyn agreed to keep a lookout. Six days later, on 3 December 1996, the watchful neighbour noticed a truck parked in Suzanne’s driveway and confronted one of the strangers inside the house:

  I asked him if I could speak to her brother John. He said he didn’t know anybody by that name and that is when I became suspicious, so I went to the phone box and rang the police.