Bunting: Cool, that’s okay.
Vlassakis: Okay?
Bunting: Okay.
Vlassakis: They want to hear his voice to make sure he’s all right.
Bunting: Oh, no dramas.
His computer equipped with an array of recordings in David Johnson’s voice, Bunting set about designing a passage which could be played to the troublesome Linda.
He called Vlassakis to give the recording a test run. This exchange too was tapped by police:
Bunting: While I’ve got you on the phone, just listen to this, okay…let me find it.
David Johnson recording is played: Fuck off. Hey this is David. Linda how fucken hard is it? I’m not interested, fuck off.
Bunting: How did that sound?
Vlassakis: Yeah, it just has to be a bit louder, a bit closer, sounds a bit hollow.
The conversation continued while Bunting experimented with the recording, trying to make it sound more genuine. David Johnson’s voice, however, was never played to Linda. Bunting devised an alternative plan.
On Bunting’s instruction, Vlassakis bought a prepaid mobile phone and then gave Linda the number, telling her she could use it to contact David.
Bunting had arranged for his girlfriend, Gail Sinclair, to answer the call, posing as David’s ‘new’ young lover. Sinclair had no idea she was concealing a murder.
When Linda called the mobile phone number, she encountered a nervous female voice on the other end of the line:
I said, ‘Hello, is David there?’
She said, ‘Who is this?’
I said, ‘A friend, Lyn.’
She called out, ‘David, David’, as if calling out to him.
She spoke to me again and said, ‘He must be on the toilet, I’ve got to go now, bye.’
She then hung up.
Linda again dialled the mobile later that day, leaving a voicemail message asking David to call. Her next attempt was seven days later—amid news reports that bodies had been found in barrels in an old Snowtown bank.
PART THREE
JUSTICE
TWENTY-TWO
‘Never before in the history of South Australia has the challenge been so great—to investigate a series of crimes as a single event.’
South Australia’s Acting Police Commissioner, Neil McKenzie, delivered these words to a packed media conference. Sitting alongside him was the Major Crime boss, Detective Superintendent Paul Schramm. It was 24 May 1999, and the pair had just announced the formation of Taskforce Chart. A team of thirty-three officers, headed by Paul Schramm, was to investigate the worst case of serial killing in Australian history.
‘We have taken this extraordinary step in bringing all our skills together in one place at the one time [the taskforce]. It doesn’t have a finish date, but it certainly has a problem to contend with.’
Within weeks, the task force had uncovered what it suspected were twelve murders. The remains of eight victims had been found in barrels, hidden in the vault of an old bank building in the small community of Snowtown. Two more bodies were then found buried in the back yard of a suburban house. In addition, investigators had linked to the case a skeleton found in a paddock almost five years before and the death of a young man which had previously—and mistakenly—been deemed a suicide. Responsible was a group of killers which had even ‘preyed on themselves’.
The ‘Snowtown Murders’, as they were dubbed within hours of the story breaking, attracted almost instant national and international media coverage. Journalists from every major Australian newspaper, television and radio station were churning out stories on the latest developments, sniffing around for a new angle, an ‘exclusive’.
The story was carried by media outlets around the world, receiving most attention in nearby Asia, the United Kingdom and United States. In London, BBC news coverage included live updates from Australia. Four days after the story broke, the Hong Kong Standard ran with the headline ‘Acid-vat killings worst on record’. In the United States, where serial killers are more common than they are in the land ‘Down Under’, one news service compared the murders with serial killings in California in the mid-1980s. In both cases, the newspaper claimed, the motive had been social security fraud—killing for pensions.
A television crew rushed to Adelaide from Japan, only to find that their initial information had been incorrect: one of the victims was, in fact, not a Japanese backpacker. They promptly flew home.
Paul Schramm, a veteran cop and lecturer in the management of serious crime, had expected the media avalanche. What’s more, he had planned for it, even consulting the commander of Britain’s ‘House of Horrors’ case on how to handle the information flow.
With three men charged and before the courts, it was a sensitive process. Within days of the Snowtown discovery, police and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Rofe QC, were becoming concerned about the media’s activities. They were worried that the eventual trials of the accused would be prejudiced by the widespread media coverage. Some reporters were nosing around in areas the police had yet to cover. Rofe took the unprecedented step of calling a media conference to warn journalists about their legal obligations in covering the story. A media release was issued immediately afterwards:
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Rofe QC, today issued a warning to all media outlets that prosecutions for contempt of court would follow if the media published material which tended to prejudice the prosecution or defence…
Persons charged with criminal offences are presumed innocent until and unless their guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt after a fair trial according to law. Trial by media will not be tolerated under any circumstances.
Apart from the sheer magnitude of the so-called Snowtown Murders and the public’s fascination with serial killing in general, the Australian media had another reason to be attracted to this story: South Australia’s reputation for bizarre murders.
One newspaper had gone so far as to brand South Australia the ‘Little State of Horrors’.
In the early 1980s, long before the bank vault discovery, world-renowned author Salman Rushdie visited the state’s capital, Adelaide, known as the ‘City of Churches’. Rushdie later wrote that Adelaide is a perfect setting for a horror novel or film, because sleepy, conservative towns are the sorts of places where such things happen.
Adelaide’s reputation had begun with the 1972 murder of homosexual university lecturer Dr George Duncan. He was set upon by a group of men prowling the banks of the River Torrens, near the heart of the city, which was a known haunt for homosexuals. Duncan, along with another man, was thrown into the river. With only one lung, as a result of tuberculosis, Duncan drowned. Three police officers, members of the Vice Squad who’d been at a drinking session to farewell a colleague, were charged with manslaughter fourteen years later. The charges were laid only after a coronial inquest, two local police investigations and a probe by detectives from Scotland Yard. All three accused were eventually acquitted.
In June 1979, nine years after the Duncan drowning, teenager Alan Barnes disappeared. A week later his body was found on the banks of a river northeast of Adelaide. Barnes, seventeen, had died of blood loss caused by a shocking injury to his anus. Barnes was to be the first of five young men to become victims of the so-called ‘Family’ murders between 1979 and 1983. All were abducted, drugged, sexually abused and mutilated. The final victim, fifteen-year-old Richard Kelvin, was kept alive by his captor or captors for as long as five weeks before being murdered.
To this day suspicions remain that the killings were the work of a gang of men dubbed ‘The Family’. Only one man was ever convicted, and for only one of the killings, that of Richard Kelvin. In 1984 Bevan Spencer von Einem was sentenced to life in prison. Four years later, von Einem was also charged with the murders of Barnes and eighteen-year-old Mark Langley, another of the Family victims. Those charges were dropped after vital evidence was ruled inadmissible.
Three years before the first Family murder, anoth
er spate of serial killings had begun in South Australia. The abduction, sexual assault and murder of seven young women in late 1976 and early 1977 were to become known as the Truro murders. Two men were responsible for these killings: a bisexual named Christopher Worrell and his lover, James Miller. Worrell was killed in a car crash in February 1977, but Miller was later charged with the seven murders and convicted of six. He subsequently wrote a book claiming he had been infatuated with, yet frightened by, the much younger Worrell, who was actually responsible for the killings. Miller claimed his crime was not murder; he was merely driving the car while Worrell picked up the victims.
So then, in 1999, when the bodies were discovered at Snowtown, South Australia was once more being judged from outside—and from within—as some kind of meeting place for perverse murderers. On the day he announced the formation of Taskforce Chart, a reporter asked Acting Commissioner McKenzie about South Australia’s ‘reputation’.
‘My impression of this is that it is not out of keeping with unusual and bizarre things that happen around the world,’ he replied. ‘What the media tends to do in these circumstances is to get out the record books and produce a chronicle of unusual or bizarre crimes that have occurred in one place or another.’
One thing was for certain, though: no amount of searching through Australia’s criminal history would find a crime quite as staggering, or as gruesome, as this.
In South Australia the wheels of justice move slowly, and the sheer magnitude of the Snowtown serial killings case served only to retard the wheels even further. At times they even threatened to come to a grinding halt. While Bunting, Haydon and Wagner were arrested in May 1999, and Vlassakis the following month, the committal hearing for the four accused did not begin for another nineteen months.
Typically a committal hearing is designed to test the evidence against an accused. Such hearings are presided over by magistrates, who must decide whether or not the evidence before them is strong enough for the accused to stand trial in a higher court.
It was 11 December 2000 when the Snowtown committal hearing began. By this time detectives from the police Chart taskforce had amassed a mountain of evidence; enough, they believed, to charge Bunting, Wagner and Haydon with ten of the twelve murders and Vlassakis with five.
During the Snowtown committal, sixty-eight witnesses were called and a staggering 1458 witness statements—known as declarations—were tendered. The hearing lasted a marathon eight months.
For prosecutors the committal was a tumultuous affair during which they were dealt two significant blows. The first was the exposure of major shortfalls in the evidence linking Mark Haydon to many of the murders. It was becoming clear that his role in the crimes had been a peripheral one—he was no prime mover. It seemed almost certain that Haydon’s legal team would use later pre-trial hearings in the Supreme Court to attack the prosecution case. It became apparent, too, that Haydon’s lawyers would almost certainly launch a bid to have several murder charges dismissed while seeking a separate trial on any remaining charges.
Second, a star witness for the prosecution died during the committal before being able to give evidence. Elizabeth Harvey was the mother of accused James Vlassakis and victim Troy Youde and the stepmother of victim David Johnson. She had been Bunting’s partner of five years. Harvey’s evidence would have been critical: she had helped Bunting steal money from victims’ bank accounts but had been granted immunity in return for her testimony.
Elizabeth Harvey died of cancer on 5 February 2001. She had been diagnosed with the disease less than two years before—in the same month as the bodies in the barrels were discovered by police.
However, despite this setback, and almost on cue, prosecutors were able to add to their arsenal an even stronger witness: one of the killers themselves.
It was Thursday, 19 June 2001, and the Snowtown committal was under way, although this morning it had been adjourned. Instead the media was gathering outside South Australia’s Supreme Court, just across the road. The legal precinct was abuzz with rumours of a major development in the Snowtown case. Inside, the courtroom was packed with media, detectives and victims’ families.
James Vlassakis’s lawyer, Rosemary Davey QC, stood alongside the dock as her client responded to each charge as it was read aloud.
‘You are charged that between August 25 and September 8, 1998, at Snowtown or another place, you murdered Troy Youde.’
Vlassakis’s response was swift: ‘Guilty.’
‘You are charged that between September 16 and September 24, 1998, at Snowtown or another place, you murdered Fred Brooks.’
‘Guilty.’
‘You are charged that between October 27 and November 24, 1998, at Snowtown or another place, you murdered Gary O’Dwyer.’
‘Guilty.’
‘You are charged that between May 8 and May 13, 1999, at Snowtown you murdered David Johnson.’
‘Guilty.’
As he pleaded his guilt in the horrendous crimes, Vlassakis wiped tears from his eyes and his voice began to waver. The final plea was delivered in a whisper. He slumped back into his seat as a court official again read aloud:
‘James Vlassakis, you have pleaded guilty to four counts of murder.’
Vlassakis stood as Justice Brian Martin delivered sentence:
‘The law prescribes only one penalty for the crime of murder, and that is life imprisonment. Accordingly, for each of the four counts on which you have pleaded guilty, I sentence you to imprisonment for life. I will now hear further submissions about a non-parole period.’
Vlassakis’s admissions stunned those on the periphery of the case, as well as the defence teams for his co-accused. Behind the scenes, however, the guilty pleas had been a long time coming. A deal had been done between prosecutors and Vlassakis’s lawyers. While Vlassakis maintained his innocence in the murder of Gavin Porter—the charge was later withdrawn—he pleaded guilty to four other killings. He would also become the Crown’s star witness, testifying against his co-accused.
James Vlassakis was hoping the truth would set him free. In return for his cooperation the young man was given the prospect that, one day, he would be released from prison on parole.
The end of the Snowtown committal hearing came just under a month later, with Magistrate David Gurry setting the stage for one—or even two—of the most sensational criminal trials in Australia’s legal history.
‘Over a number of months, having had the opportunity to consider the declarations and consider the oral evidence of various witnesses, I have formed the view that the evidence is sufficient to place each of the defendants on trial for each of the offences as charged and I accordingly rule to that end.’
TWENTY-THREE
South Australian law dictates that the crime of murder is punishable with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. However, in each case the judge has the power to set a non-parole period, after which time the offender can be considered for conditional release from jail. Defence lawyers, along with the prosecution, make submissions as to the appropriate length of the non-parole period.
Under the terms of Vlassakis’s deal—kept secret until the last possible moment—the prosecution had agreed not to oppose the setting of a non-parole period, in return for Vlassakis’s guilty pleas and testimony against Bunting, Wagner and Haydon.
Amid fears for his safety after he’d decided to turn star witness, James Vlassakis was shifted to another jail and given a new identity. The media was forbidden from showing his image within South Australia: there was a risk that other inmates would not take kindly to someone who’d turned informer—among prison inmates he would have been branded a ‘dog’ and targeted with violence.
Sentencing submissions for James Vlassakis, before Justice Kevin Duggan, began eight months after the guilty pleas. It was the job of defence counsel Rosemary Davey to present a spirited case as to why her client should one day be released into the community.
‘On the twenty-first of June last
year [2001], James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four counts of murder. I said at that time he has, by his pleas, acknowledged his involvement in horrific crimes; but they were more than that. The events leading to the death of four people were evil, marked by unparalleled barbarism, cruelty and sadism. That these acts have affected so many people and the whole community of South Australia, there can be no doubt at all.
‘But the story of James Spyridon Vlassakis is not the story of an evil young man. It is the story of a person who participated in evil and why he did so. I can hear the sceptics say, “Oh, another tale of a hard-done-by life to excuse criminal behaviour”. But this man had an appalling and completely dysfunctional upbringing, a complete absence of what some people would call a normal life. Sexual abuse, a lack of appropriate intervention and care for him. The submissions on behalf of my client tell the story of a relationship between a teenage boy and the man who filled the role of a father. That man was John Bunting.
‘John Bunting is a depraved, disturbed if not a deranged, vicious and dangerous killer. The relationship was one of power and corruption of my client. This young man had the courage to speak to police initially and, over time, broke the bonds of John Bunting and pleaded guilty.’
As she stood before the court, Rosemary Davey detailed James Vlassakis’s tragic life. His sexual abuse as a child, his mother’s mental illness and, finally, his involvement with John Bunting.
‘James Vlassakis liked, even loved, John Bunting. He thought John Bunting was intelligent, well spoken and polite; he had an air of authority and power. He worshipped John Bunting. He was a hero…the only father figure he had. John Bunting encouraged James Vlassakis to consider resuming his schooling. In 1995/96 he attempted to return to adult education.
‘At first blush it was not an abusive relationship; it appeared to be a benign, if not positive relationship. They were going riding on his BMW motorbike together, they would go to movies together and they got on well.
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