by Gordon Kerr
Their speculation was confirmed to be correct when it was announced that two bodies had been found and that they belonged to the two English girls, Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters. They had been killed by a powerful individual, undoubtedly a man, and Joanne had been stabbed with such power that her spine had been cut and two ribs had been completely severed. Caroline had also been stabbed, but he had also shot her in the head several times. Chillingly, it was found that she had been shot from three different directions as if the killer had used her head for target practice.
He seemed to have hung around for a while. There was a fireplace, built with stones, and a number of cigarette butts lay around on the ground. Trying to build a profile, police surmised that the killer was a local man who knew the area. Given that Caroline had been killed in what seemed to be an execution style and had not been sexually assaulted, it seemed likely that he was the kind of man who liked to exert control over people. The murder of Joanne had been very different, however. The killer – or killers; they believed that more than one person had possibly been involved – had launched a frenzied attack on her that had a sexual element. Her shirt and bra were pushed up and the zipper of her jeans was undone, although the button was still fastened. She was wearing no underwear and it was presumed that the killer had taken it away with him as a trophy.
According to the profiler, the girls had been killed purely for pleasure.
Police knew that they were looking for a very dangerous killer and a massive search of the area was launched. Nothing further was found, however, and the police announced that they were confident that there were no more bodies in the forest.
They were wrong.
A few months later, as Bruce Pryor was driving along an unfamiliar and unused road in the forest, he came to a bare, rocky spot in which was a small fireplace built from rocks. He stopped the car and climbed out to stretch his legs and take a look around. On the ground, not far from the fireplace, he noticed a bone which, if he were not mistaken, resembled very closely a human thigh bone. He walked around to see if there was anything else and sure enough, hidden amongst some undergrowth, he saw something gleaming white. He took a closer look and was horrified to discover a human skull.
The clearing hid two bodies that were soon identified as the missing Victoria couple, James Gibson and Deborah Everist, who had disappeared on a backpacking trip in 1989. Strangely, James’s backpack and camera had been found seventy-eight miles north of Belanglo Forest after they had disappeared. It seemed as if the killer had dumped them there in an effort to divert attention from the forest and confuse the investigation.
Only the couple’s bones remained, but it was soon evident that they had each received multiple stab wounds. Deborah’s skull had been fractured several times and there were slash marks on the forehead of her skull. Her bra was found and it had a stab wound through one of its cups. Police also found a pair of tights that looked as if they may have been used to tie up one of the victims.
Embarrassed at having been wrong in their assertion that there were no more bodies in the forest, the police launched another massive search, accompanied by special sniffer dogs.
It was established that the bullets and casings found at the scene of James’s and Deborah’s deaths had been fired from a Ruger repeating rifle. The bad news was that this was one of the most popular rifles in Australia, with around 5,000 of them in private ownership. Nonetheless, gun clubs and local gun-owners were questioned. One man provided officers with descriptions of a couple of vehicles he had seen in the forest the previous year. He claimed that he had seen a man and woman in one of them and that he had thought for a moment that they were bound but could not be sure. He knew the name of the owner of the vehicle. It was Alex Milat.
Meanwhile, however, the search revealed more bodies. Twenty-six days after the last two had been found, a search team entered a small clearing where they found a pair of women’s pink jeans and a length of blue and yellow rope. There was also the trademark fireplace. One officer stopped as he almost stepped on what looked like a human bone. A little further on lay a human skull. On closer inspection, the officer noticed something wrapped around its forehead – a distinctive purple headband.
German backpacker Simone ‘Simi’ Schmidl had travelled the world and had last been seen hitch-hiking on the Hume Highway out of the town of Liverpool in the direction of Sydney. Now her bones lay in the forest, partially clothed, her shirt and underclothes pushed up around her neck. She had died from multiple stab wounds. The pink jeans were not hers, though. They belonged to another German girl, Anja Habschied, who had gone missing with her travelling companion, Gregor Neugebauer, from Sydney’s Kings Cross area just after Christmas 1991.
Gregor had been strangled and shot, and the bullets matched up with the ones that had been used in the other killings. Anja’s death had been most horrific of all, however. Her top two vertebrae and her head were missing. She had been decapitated with a sharp instrument such as a sword or a machete. She had been made to kneel for it to be done. The killer had turned her death into a horrific ritual execution. This was one of the most extraordinary series of murders that had ever been encountered. Serial killers generally find a method that works for them and stick to it. This serial killer seemed to want to experiment with a variety of methods – beating, strangling, decapitating, stabbing and shooting. Men and women had been sexually assaulted in some way. Their zippers were often down but always the top button of their trousers was fastened. The killer also appeared to spend time with his victims, piling on the cruelty and confirming the sadistic nature of the murders.
The authorities were flooded with information but began to develop suspicions about the Milat family and Ivan Robert Marko Milat in particular. He was born in 1944 into a large Yugoslavian immigrant family, but little is known about his childhood except that his family lived in an isolated, rural spot and he had thirteen siblings. From an early age, he had an interest in guns and hunting, and he and his brothers had gained a reputation for wildness and lawlessness. They had had many brushes with the law.
In 1971 Ivan Milat had been arrested and charged with raping two woman hitchhikers but he was acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
Astonishingly, he could have been arrested for kidnapping backpackers some time before the bodies were found. On 25 January 1990, Englishman Paul Onions was on his way to find work fruit-picking in the Riverina area, a couple of hundred miles south-west of Sydney. Onions had taken a train from Sydney to the city of Liverpool and had then walked out of the city to hitchhike on the Hume Highway.
After a few hours by the side of the road, he walked to a small shopping centre to buy a drink and as he stood there drinking, a well-built man came up to him and asked if he was looking for a lift. Paul was delighted to accept and was soon sitting in a four by four beside the man, who told him his name was Bill. Bill threw a lot of questions at Paul about his time in Australia and at first seemed pleasant enough. As the journey went on, however, Bill started to become irascible, making racist comments and making Paul feel uneasy. Eventually the man went silent and seemed morose.
Just outside the town of Mittagong, Paul became even more uneasy as Bill’s driving seemed to be getting erratic. He seemed edgy and was constantly looking in his rear-view mirror. Suddenly, he stopped the truck, saying he wanted to get some cassette tapes from the back. He climbed out, ordering Paul to remain in the vehicle. Paul was puzzled because there was a pile of cassettes in a space between the seats. He decided to get out as well but, as he did so, Bill growled at him to get back in. He did as he was told, but when Bill climbed back in he reached down beneath his seat and drew out a large black revolver and pointed it at Paul. ‘This is a robbery,’ he snarled at him, also pulling out a length of rope. Paul made a grab for the door handle, pulled the door open and leapt from the car. He jumped into oncoming traffic that swerved wildly to avoid him. A van approached and, waving his arms, he threw himself in front of it, forcing its driv
er, Joanne Berry, to stop. He ran round, opened her passenger door and jumped in. He screamed that the man in the four-wheel drive had a gun. Joanne considered for a split second. In the back of the van were her sister and her four children. She slammed her foot hard on the accelerator and sped off to the nearest police station.
Tragically, however, no one took any action. Paul made a statement and waited to hear something but there was no contact. He returned to England and put it down to experience. Then in 1994, the police called him and asked him to return to Australia. There was someone they wanted him to take a look at.
Early on the morning of 22 May 1994, police spread out around the Milat property. They shouted to Ivan to come out and give himself up. He had nowhere to run and was under arrest shortly after.
Inside they discovered a huge amount of evidence implicating him in the murders, including sleeping bags, clothing and camping equipment. There was also an arsenal of guns and ammunition. A long, curved sword was later found in a locked cupboard at the house of Milat’s mother. It had probably been the weapon that was used to behead Anja Habschied.
Milat was charged with seven murders and with the attack on Paul Onions.
His trial was the most sensational in Australian legal history, especially when Milat claimed that he had been framed by other members of his large family. However, he was found guilty and given seven life sentences.
Having sworn that he would try to escape at every opportunity, he almost succeeded in 1997. The breakout was foiled and Milat’s accomplice was found mysteriously hanged in his prison cell next morning.
Ivan Milat has been questioned about countless other disappearances and it is almost certain that he had killed a number of times before 1989. His brother, Boris, in hiding from the other members of his violent family, has told the media, ‘the things I can tell you are much worse than what Ivan’s meant to have done. Everywhere he’s worked, people have disappeared, I know where he’s been’. No further charges have been made, however.
The Snowtown Murderers
As they killed, they played a CD of the song Selling the Drama from Live’s album Throwing Copper, turning the murder into a ritual of sorts, although they didn’t call it murder. It was ‘playing’. Playing for high stakes, too. They murdered nine people in Australia’s worst case of serial killing, in the seven years during which the slaughter took place, making $95,000 from welfare and credit card fraud. Now and then they even turned on each other, in order to keep their secrets within the circle.
Their first murder was relatively straightforward – a twenty-two-year-old homosexual, Clinton Trezise, was hit on the head with a heavy instrument, possibly a hammer, and then buried in a shallow grave in a remote spot in the agricultural hinterland of Lower Light, about fifty kilometres north of Adelaide.
Gradually, however, they became more elaborate, not to mention more horrific, in their methods. Dismemberment, removal of limbs, de-fleshing and torture all became part of the game of death they enjoyed playing. It was so gruesome that when the case eventually came to trial, three jurors had to drop out, unable to bear the gorier parts of the testimony, while others required counselling after the conclusion of the trial.
At the centre of it all was thirty-two-year-old John Justin Bunting, a man filled with hate. When he was young, he whiled away his time by burning insects in acid, and as a teenager was linked to neo-Nazi groups. As an adult, his hatred was directed at homosexuals and paedophiles. At his home in Waterloo Corner Road, in the northern Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, Bunting devised a large chart on a wall in one of the rooms. On it, using paper and lengths of wool, he had created a network of the names of people he suspected of being paedophiles or homosexuals. Now and then, he would vent some of his anger and disgust by selecting one of the names at random and making an offensive telephone call to them.
The police had become concerned about the number of missing persons cases in the Adelaide area and a task force, named Chart, was assembled to try to get to the bottom of them. The trail led to a disused bank in the town of Snowtown, one hundred and fifty kilometres north of Adelaide.
Once, it had been a bustling small town branch of the State Bank of South Australia, home to the savings and mortgages of the farmers who owned local farms and the businessmen who serviced the needs of the families who lived in the area. Now, it was long closed and dust had settled on its fixtures and fittings. It had recently been used for other purposes, however. On 20 May 1999, as police entered the red-brick building in the town’s main street at the culmination of their long and complex missing persons investigation, anticipation hung heavy in the air. They would not be disappointed.
The main area of the bank contained electrical and computing equipment, but as police opened the door to the bank vault’s ten centimetre-thick metal door, a horrific smell was unleashed from within. Behind the door they found the source of the stench. Six black plastic barrels stood there ominously. Inside them was acid in which floated human body parts from eight different people. The remains included fifteen human feet.
At the same time, police found evidence in a rented house not far from the bank, home to a suspect in the case. The occupants had very much kept themselves to themselves and neighbours were unable to provide any information about them.
In the early morning of the following day, police raided houses in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. Three men – John Bunting, twenty-seven-year-old Robert Joe Wagner and forty-year-old Mark Ray Haydon – were arrested and charged with the murder of an unknown person between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999. It was almost certain that more charges would be made as the investigation proceeded. They were remanded in custody until 2 July 1999.
The media, of course, were having a field day, speculating wildly about the motives for the killings. Some suggested that the neo-Nazi links of one of the accused might provide the reason, while others posited that there might be psychosexual motives. To the police, however, it seemed clear that there was a financial motive behind them. They believed the answer lay in social security payments. The Australian agency responsible for these, analysed the list of missing persons provided by the police and discovered that a number had never been reported to them as missing or dead. Their payments, therefore, were still being issued and were being collected years after their real beneficiaries had disappeared.
On 2 June, police raided another property in the northern suburbs and arrested nineteen-year-old James Spyridon Vlassakis. Vlassakis had met John Bunting when he was just fourteen after his mother moved in with him. He worshipped him and was entirely in thrall to Bunting’s overwhelming personality. He attempted to kill himself twice during his first week in custody, adding even more sensational elements to an already sensational case. For his own safety, they locked Vlassakis up in James Nash House, the South Australian Department of Correction's maximum security psychiatric clinic.
Meanwhile, more houses were raided and searched, possibly as a result of information provided by Vlassakis.
Six of the eight bodies found in the Snowtown bank vault had been identified by 3 June but the names were withheld. Furthermore, another body was still expected to be found. Police searched back through cold case files until they discovered that an as-yet unidentified corpse had been found by a local farmer in a field in the rural agricultural area of Lower Light, fifty kilometres north of Adelaide, on 16 August 1994. As DNA cross-matching was begun, police raided another two properties, one in Riverland, near the Murray River, the other to the north of Adelaide.
The names of some of the dead began to be released to the media and the public, revealing a fascinating network of relationships with the accused. The Acting Police Commissioner stated that this was a group that ‘preys upon itself’.
Forty-year-old Barry Lane was a convicted sex offender and transvestite who went under the name ‘Vanessa’. He had lived for eight years with one of the accused, Robert Wagner, at 1 Bingham Road in Salisbury North, just a street away from John
Bunting’s house at Waterloo Corner Road, where bodies would later be found. Wagner would help to kill Lane.
Lane had also had a relationship with Clinton Trezise whose disappearance had begun the investigation. John Bunting, for his part, was engaged to Gail Sinclair, sister of another victim found at the bank, Elizabeth Hayden, who was the wife of another accused man, Mark Hayden.
The remains found at Lower Light were identified as those of Clinton Trezise. It was a significant breakthrough.
The search for bodies was not over, however. On 23 June, the former address of John Bunting, on Waterloo Corner Road, was searched. Officers used ground-penetrating radar, developed from technology created by the British Army for finding land mines during the Falklands War. It had already proved its worth in criminal investigation during searches of the property owned by English serial killer, Fred West.
A concrete slab, once covered by a rainwater tank, outside the house’s back door was smashed and the device was wheeled over the exposed earth. It showed that an area about two metres square had been disturbed sometime in the recent past. A short while later, a body was found buried a couple of metres down. It had been dismembered, put into two plastic bags and buried, and had been in the ground for three or four years. The ground radar discovered a second body a few days later, beneath the location of the first. This one was not wrapped in plastic.
Another of the accused, Mark Hayden, had lived in Elizabeth East with his father, close to Waterloo Corner Road. Haydon was remembered by neighbours as quiet and unassuming and would spend most of his time under the bonnet of his car. Neighbours also remember his rough-looking visitors but there was never any noise or trouble. In 1995, Elizabeth Sinclair arrived, marrying Hayden a couple of years later. In 1998, the couple moved to another north Adelaide suburb, Smithfield Plains. Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth Hayden disappeared. On 22 November, Mark went to pick up two of her sons who had been at the house of Elizabeth’s brother, Garion, and informed him that he and Elizabeth had had a row and she had left him. Next day he claimed that she had run off with a boyfriend and before leaving had cleaned out a bank account held jointly by him and his father.
