Snowtown

by Jeremy Pudney

  It’s unclear whether Gary O’Dwyer’s body was still in the laundry when the neighbours were taken into his house. Within days of the murder, his remains became part of the gruesome collection contained in barrels in Mark Haydon’s garage.

  NINETEEN

  John Bunting was mates with Mark Haydon, but he had always despised Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth. Behind the couple’s back Bunting spoke openly of this hatred, referring to her as ‘disgusting’, and a ‘dirty bitch’.

  It’s unclear exactly why Bunting finally chose to murder Elizabeth Haydon—perhaps because of his repulsion or his urge to kill again.

  There was also the likelihood that Elizabeth Haydon knew too much. It’s possible she had become curious about the barrels stored in her garage and the foul smell emerging from them.

  There was also the fact that Mark Haydon had revealed details of the first murder to his wife, relaying information John Bunting had told him about how Clinton Trezise—whom Bunting dubbed ‘Happy Pants’—had been dumped in a paddock. The revelation had angered Bunting, who conveyed his feelings to James Vlassakis:

  He did say to me that Mark had told [Elizabeth] about Happy Pants being murdered and how Happy Pants was taken to…Lower Light and buried. John said she knew too much. [She] told John of what she knew…and how Mark told her.

  John said to me…that Mark had a big mouth.

  Whatever the motive, John Bunting had decided it was time for Elizabeth Haydon to die. The night of her murder was sometime between November 20 and 26, 1998—almost certainly Saturday the 21st. With Mark Haydon and Gail Sinclair out of the house, Bunting and Wagner were free to begin their murderous routine.

  There is no eyewitness account of this killing, but the evidence suggests that Elizabeth Haydon’s death was as horrific and brutal as those before her. Afterwards Bunting would joke among his group about how Elizabeth had at first thought being taken captive was some kind of joke.

  Like the other victims, she was overpowered and handcuffed. Elizabeth was led to her own bathroom and forced to sit in the bathtub. What occurred next was undoubtedly a barrage of beatings and torture.

  Death came in the form of asphyxiation. A sock had been stuffed into her mouth, forcing back her tongue, and tape wrapped around her head. A rope, fashioned into a noose, was slipped around her neck.

  Once the deed was done, Elizabeth’s body was carried to her garage and placed into a barrel which stood alongside four others.

  While his wife was being murdered, Mark Haydon had taken her sister for ‘a drive’ into Adelaide’s southern suburbs. The trip had been prompted by a series of false stories concocted by John Bunting.

  Gail Sinclair would later detail for police the events of that night:

  We drove home, we got onto Port Wakefield Road and pulled into a service station…and he [Mark] said, ‘I’ll ring home and let them known we’re not far away’. He came back to the car and said, ‘All hell’s broke loose at home’.

  When the pair arrived home, Bunting claimed Elizabeth had made a pass at him, sparking a fight. She was in her room, upset, and should be left alone. Gail went with Bunting to get some dinner, and when they returned Mark Haydon claimed his angry wife had gone out with ‘a boyfriend’.

  The following day Haydon reported that his wife had come home in the early hours, drunk, and then run off with her boyfriend for good. To Gail Sinclair, it sounded plausible:

  To me it didn’t seem really a lot out of the ordinary because there were times when she was prone to keeping a boyfriend secret and disappearing from the ex [former partner]. Like when she left Ian…her husband at the time, when she left him she kept the guy that she was seeing secret and just disappeared.

  So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me at the time, but the longer she was gone without any contact with the family [it] didn’t seem to sit right. But everyone was saying to me that, you know, she didn’t want any contact…and she wouldn’t contact me because I was in the same house as Mark.

  Elizabeth’s brother was not so convinced. That weekend Garion Sinclair had been babysitting Elizabeth’s two boys, William and Christopher. They were the only two of her seven children still in her care, but Elizabeth often unloaded them onto family.

  On the Sunday evening, 22 November, Mark came alone to collect the boys. He explained that Elizabeth was at home sleeping.

  The next morning, however, the children arrived back on Garion’s doorstep. Upset, they had walked there after Mark dropped them at school. The boys said their mother wasn’t at home and they didn’t want to stay. Worried, Garion kept William and Christopher with him, setting off to seek advice from child welfare authorities:

  On our return…Mark was there. The boys did not want to speak to Mark, so I sent them inside whilst I spoke to Mark out the front near his car.

  I asked him why [Elizabeth] was not at home on Sunday. He said [she] had come home drunk at about 4.30 a.m. on Sunday morning. She apparently slept it off, and on waking later that morning, she packed a few bags of clothing and then telephoned her boyfriend to come pick her up.

  I asked Mark why he did not try to stop her and he replied that her boyfriend had brought his friends with him and that he could not do anything about it.

  I thought it was strange [Elizabeth] had a boyfriend, considering the fact [she] never went anywhere without Mark. He also said [she] had cleared his bank account out, along with his father’s.

  Garion suggested to Mark Haydon he should report Elizabeth missing, and tell police about the stolen money. He refused.

  The following night Garion called round to see if his sister had come home. Finding she was still not there, he waited until morning to report Elizabeth missing to police. It was 25 November.

  As time passed Garion became increasingly suspicious of his brother-in-law. His concerns heightened when, a week after the disappearance, Mark Haydon inexplicably changed his story:

  Mark said [Elizabeth] had accused him of sleeping with Gail. They had an argument about the allegation and he had denied it. He said he had gone out to see his father at the nursing home…when he came home, she was gone.

  There was no mention of [her] alleged boyfriend from Mark’s earlier version.

  Haydon also paid a bizarre visit to Elizabeth’s mother, as she told police:

  Mark turned up at my house, he sat on my lounge and the only thing he said was, ‘She’s gone.’ He couldn’t look at me; he just couldn’t look at me. He then stood up and walked out. He didn’t say anything else. I have no idea why he came around, that is all he told me. He was at my house for about five minutes—that was the last time I saw Mark.

  The missing persons file tagged ‘Elizabeth Haydon’ landed on Detective Greg Stone’s desk the day after the report was made. The senior constable, based in the northern suburbs, wasted no time beginning his investigations. He was on a late shift, so it was about eleven o’clock at night when he knocked on Mark Haydon’s door. From the start Stone thought it odd that Haydon hadn’t been the one to report his wife missing.

  There was a brief conversation, after which Haydon and Gail Sinclair agreed to visit the police station that night to give statements about Elizabeth’s disappearance.

  Inside the police complex Mark Haydon was handed a pen and paper. He was asked to record his version of events in writing; the last time he’d seen his wife, where he believed she was. In the space of one and a half messy, error-ridden pages, Haydon wrote about taking Gail for a drive, returning to find his wife had made a pass at John Bunting. Robert Wagner had been there as well. Haydon claimed he fought with his wife that night, then she went out with a ‘boyfriend’, only to return drunk. The next day the couple apparently clashed again. Haydon said he left and, on his return, his wife was gone. Their marriage was over.

  At the same time, in a nearby room, Gail Sinclair was interviewed about her sister’s last known movements. She told a similar story, her answers recorded on video and audio cassettes. The interview finished at
12.20 a.m.

  Next to be questioned were John Bunting and Robert Wagner. In a written statement, Bunting claimed Elizabeth had tried to kiss him while her husband and sister were out of the house. She became angry when he spurned her advance, then sulked in her bedroom. Bunting said Robert Wagner had walked in on the incident. Wagner’s version of events was the same.

  Detective Stone, however, suspected murder and began to apply pressure to his suspects. Over the next few weeks, Mark Haydon’s home was repeatedly searched. During one search, under a pile of clothes, Detective Stone discovered Elizabeth’s purse, documents and bankcards still inside.

  On another occasion Elizabeth’s gold wedding band and diamond engagement ring, which she always wore, were found in a dressing table drawer. Some of her soiled clothes were found in a garbage bag.

  Expert crime scene officers were called in to examine Haydon’s home. Using Luminol spray—which highlights traces of blood under ultra-violet light—they detected a small blood stain on the laundry wall. Mark Haydon and Gail Sinclair said it was from one of their dogs, which had given birth to pups in the laundry. A sample was taken nonetheless.

  Also searched was Haydon’s garage. In the pit—designed for working under cars—officers noted a foul odour and what appeared to be insect casings. Unbeknownst to the detectives, it was the same place where the bodies in the barrels had stood only days—perhaps only hours—before.

  TWENTY

  It is a trait of most serial killers to keep ‘trophies’ from each of their crimes. For John Bunting, these trophies were the victims’ bodies. While his earliest victims had been buried—and Trevilyan hanged to look like a suicide—the others were kept in large plastic drums. Occasionally Bunting would peer into each barrel, remarking about how well the contents were rotting, sometimes reliving the murder of that particular victim.

  Bunting’s barrel collection began while he was living at Murray Bridge. Eventually the bodies of Michael Gardiner, Barry Lane, Gavin Porter and Troy Youde came to be stored there.

  Bunting had no sense of smell, so he did not notice the pungent odour created by the decomposing remains. He would regularly ask Vlassakis how bad the smell was, and use air fresheners in a bid to disguise it. Some visitors to the house noticed the stench regardless:

  In the back garden they had a shed big enough to fit a car in. It really smelt around the back of the shed. It smelt like dead cats. It smelt like rotting flesh, like what you smell when you see a dead cat on the side of the road.

  When Bunting, Elizabeth Harvey and her sons moved out of the house, the landlord too noticed something on the nose:

  I do remember, on returning to the premises…detecting a horrible smell, which smelt like a rotting and decaying sheep. It was a smell similar to rotting meat. I only say sheep because for years [we] lived on a farm where we had smelt rotting sheep in the paddocks.

  The landlord also spotted strange dark stains on the garage’s cement floor. They appeared to be circular in shape.

  Bunting and Wagner used a truck to shift the barrels from Murray Bridge. They were destined for the garage at Mark Haydon’s house, in the northern Adelaide suburb of Smithfield Plains. James Vlassakis recalls coming home late at night, stumbling across the move:

  As I walked up the driveway, John and Robert were actually in the truck…they were tying the barrels into the truck at that stage. I sat there, had a bit of a conversation with John, and in that conversation he told me that they were going to Mark’s place.

  When John Bunting realised Elizabeth Haydon had been reported missing, he was enraged—and he panicked. It was only a matter of time, he assumed, before the police would want to search Mark Haydon’s house, and that meant the barrels in his garage would have to be shifted—and fast.

  By this time, late November 1998, there were five barrels containing seven victims: Michael Gardiner, Barry Lane, Gavin Porter, Troy Youde, Fred Brooks, Gary O’Dwyer and Elizabeth Haydon.

  Bunting decided that the best way to transport the barrels would be in the old Toyota Land Cruiser sitting in Mark Haydon’s yard. Gail Sinclair was told to stay inside and keep watch for the police while the barrels were being moved:

  John turned up that night and they seemed pretty edgy for some reason and I couldn’t figure it out. I thought…they might have had stolen property or something on the premises.

  They just said they had to get—get stuff that would get them arrested if the cops did a search of the house.

  They had stuff they had to move, right, and they got me to stay in the family room and keep an eye out in case the police came back or something. And they reversed the Land Cruiser…through the gates and towards the shed. And they took some stuff out of the manhole in the house and they got a whole heap of old blankets and wrapped stuff in old blankets and put that into the Land Cruiser.

  It would have been midnight till three in the morning.

  John went and got the trailer while they [the others] were doing something, and then he came back with the trailer, and they put the Land Cruiser onto the trailer and took it away, right. They used Robert’s car to tow the trailer away.

  The Land Cruiser had to be towed because it was unregistered and might have attracted police attention on the road. The old four-wheel drive’s destination was a property in the small rural district of Hoyleton, almost two hours north of Adelaide.

  Friends of Bunting rented the property and they had agreed to let him store the vehicle there. Bunting had telephoned at ten o’clock that night, but it was in the early hours of the morning when Kathy Jones* peered out her window to see that Bunting—and Robert Wagner—had arrived. She followed her husband, Simon, outside.

  I immediately smelt a foul smell. It smelt like a really bad rotting meat smell. I saw John’s [Bunting’s] blue Ford Marquis in the driveway with a car trailer attached to the rear. There was a khaki-coloured Toyota four-wheel drive parked behind the car trailer with the…winch still attached.

  I saw Robert Wagner unhook the winch from the Toyota whilst John Bunting and Simon stood nearby.

  I asked John whether the Toyota was stolen and he said it wasn’t. I believed him because there were number plates still attached to it. On asking what the smell came from, John told me it was kangaroo carcasses. He mentioned the kangaroo carcasses were in the drums. I said he could leave the Toyota there, but he had to put it at the southwestern corner of the block so that the smell didn’t bother me.

  A couple of days later I was outside checking on the lambs when I tried to approach the Toyota four-wheel drive. As I walked towards it I smelt the foul odour again. I was not able to get closer than about 20 feet…because of the smell coming from it. It was then that I noticed there was what appeared to be sheets and blankets over the windows.

  John continued to come up to my place about every two weeks. Sometimes Robert Wagner…I think it was the first visit since dropping the Toyota off that John spoke about kangaroo shooting. He mentioned that Robert…and himself had this little business going where they shot kangaroos, minced the meat up and sold it for pet food. The remaining carcass was what he had then placed in the barrels he had stored in the Toyota. I suggested he empty the carcasses down the creek where, if someone else saw them, it wouldn’t appear unusual on a sheep station.

  Bunting claimed he could not dump the carcasses, because they had been shot with unregistered guns, and they could be traced back.

  Several times Kathy Jones telephoned Bunting to complain about the stink the ‘kangaroos’ were creating. He made repeated promises to move the four-wheel drive, but never did.

  When Simon, Kathy and their children moved to a rented house in nearby Snowtown in January 1999, Bunting and Wagner helped them. The four-wheel drive moved too—into the family’s driveway. And if the wind blew in the wrong direction, the stench would drift into the house.

  At this point, four barrels were locked inside the vehicle. The killers hadn’t been able to squeeze in the fifth, as they hurredly shifte
d evidence from Mark Haydon’s home. The final barrel was taken elsewhere: stashed in an old car in the back yard of James Vlassakis’s Murray Bridge home.

  It was not until John Bunting found a new hiding place that all five of his ‘trophies’ were again stored together.

  Snowtown’s former State Bank building was a reminder of the town’s demise. The plain red-brick structure once housed a thriving branch. In its day it had been the hub of a burgeoning farming community.

  When times on the farms got tough and the rot set into Snowtown, the branch was doomed. In August 1995 bank staff closed the doors for the last time. Four months later the building was sold for a mere $43 000. Its buyers, local farming couple Andrew and Rosemary Michael, believed the building’s prime location would make it a sound investment.

  It was a secure building with large metal front doors. Inside there was a kitchen, toilet, manager’s office and customer counter. In the centre of the building was a strongroom—the vault—with a thick steel door and an old-fashioned combination-and-key lock. Attached to the bank building, but with no internal access, was a small residence which had been the bank manager’s home.

  An elderly local woman leased the building from the Michaels and was living in the residence while running a plant shop from the main building. Within a year or so the shop’s popularity waned; the old woman stayed in the house but the Michaels were forced to find new tenants for the main building.

  In January 1999 the Michaels received a call from a man named John. He wanted to rent the bank, and met with Rosemary Michael the next day, as she later recalled:

  He was waiting outside the bank in a small white station wagon and was with another man whom he introduced to me as Mark. Neither of them gave their surnames. I showed John through the old bank. John did all the talking and I think Mark hardly said anything at all. John told me that he needed to store equipment, that they made…alloy parts for old motorbikes and cars.