Grisly vault find leads to tangled web of misfits

The old Snowtown bank became the keeper of murderous secrets, GREG ANSLEY reports.

CANBERRA - The old South Australian State Bank branch at Snowtown is an unremarkable building, squatly built of red brick at the beginning of the century across the road from the rail line that fed grain from surrounding farms to Adelaide, 150km to the south.

The branch closed in July 1995, a victim of the management crisis that tore the bank apart, and it remained unused at the centre of the town of 500 people until John Justin Bunting and a friend rented it some time late in 1998.

This week, in sensational committal proceedings in Adelaide, the significance of that lease has become gruesomely clear in a tale of wasted, drug-filled lives, deadly avarice, torture, murder and mutilation committed by a tightly bound circle of misfits.

It was in the vault of the old bank last May that police, wearing overalls and rubber gloves, discovered the dismembered bodies of seven men and one woman packed into six acid-filled plastic barrels.

Within weeks police had disinterred two more bodies from a grave in the backyard of a house in Adelaide's northern suburbs. It also seemed that unidentified remains discovered in a field outside the city in 1994 might have been an 11th victim.

With the possible exception of Alice Mitchell, a nurse suspected of killing 37 babies in the first decade of the last century, these are Australia's worst serial killings, beginning in 1995 and continuing to within days of the Snowtown discovery.

Beyond the bizarre and twisted relationships that led to the killings is another chilling warning - the bodies were discovered almost by chance, the result of what started as a routine inquiry into missing persons cases.

Snowtown gave force to warnings by criminologists that no one knows how many serial killers are, or have been, at large.

An Australian Institute of Criminology report says that as many as 250 people are listed as missing at any one time on state police files around the country.

The trail to Snowtown began with the disappearances of three people - Barry Wayne Lane, aged 40, Clinton Douglas Trezise, 22, and Elizabeth Haydon, 37.

Lane was a transvestite who for much of his adult life called himself Vanessa and wore long blond wigs. He had a penchant for pink pants, and indulged in paedophilia and adult homosexual relationships.

But, by 1995, Lane had become engaged to a woman and was reportedly hoping to have a court order restricting his access to children - imposed because of convictions for paedophilia - lifted so he could marry and share a home with his fiancee and her three children, all aged under 10. About this time Lane vanished.

His mother, Sylvia Lane, later told South Australian TV that her son had feared for his life after helping to dispose of a body, a claim she later said had been twisted by the media.

Lane's body was among those in the Snowtown barrels identified by DNA tests.

Police became suspicious when they reopened Lane's file and found that his disability benefit had continued to be paid - after his disappearance, and that he had earlier been involved in a relationship with another missing man, Trezise.

Suspicions grew when Gordon Sinclair reported his sister Elizabeth missing.

Elizabeth had four years earlier moved in with Mark Roy Haydon, 40, an unemployed car enthusiast who lived with his father in Adelaide's northern suburbs.

The couple married two years later and moved into their own home with Elizabeth's two small boys, the youngest of eight children to different fathers and the only ones not to have been removed by welfare officials.

By this time, Snowtown's tangled web was becoming apparent.

Haydon was a close friend of Robert Joe Wagner, 28, who had lived in a long-term relationship with Lane, sharing a house with four large doberman dogs and a circle of friends that also included John Bunting.

Bunting had been involved in a relationship with Elizabeth's sister and lived in a house formerly occupied by Lane.

Neighbours said Elizabeth had disappeared shortly after a fight with Haydon.

By March last year, police believed they were investigating a triple murder.

Although the full story has yet to emerge and proceedings in Adelaide continue to be the subject of legal battles to lift orders suppressing prosecution evidence, it is clear that the killings started in 1995.

Police allege that Haydon, Bunting and Wagner - who are charged with 10 murders - killed their victims and initially stored the remains in barrels at Haydon's home in Smithfield Plains.

They buried two other victims, Ray Davies, 26, and Suzanne Allen, 47, in a single grave at the rear of the Haydon house.

Six months before their discovery, the bodies were moved first to a farm near Snowtown, and then to the bank vault.

When police opened the foul-smelling vault their worst fears were exceeded. As well as Lane, Trezise and Elizabeth Haydon, they found five other bodies, identified by DNA testing as Michael Gardiner, 19, Gavin Porter, 31, Troy Youde, 21, Gary O'Dwyer, 29, and David Johnson, 24.

Johnson was a tragic addition, the stepbrother of a deeply disturbed and suicidal fourth accomplice, James Spyridon Viassakis, 20, the son of Bunting's de facto partner now charged with five murders and held in a maximum security psychiatric facility.

Police allege that Viassakis joined the killing in 1998, and enticed his stepbrother to Snowtown just weeks before the bodies were discovered. Johnson was the only victim to be killed in the vault.

Inside the vault police found thumb restraints, handcuffs, a machine capable of giving electric shocks, electrical alligator clips, knives, tapes and rope.

South Australian chief pathologist Ross James told this week's hearing that bodies were mutilated, the mouths of some stuffed with rags and taped, some left with ropes around their throats.

The limbs of a number had been removed, and Gardiner's scrotum and upper left arm showed blackened marks likely to be the result of burns.

The victims, like the alleged killers, were trapped in lives fenced by unemployment, welfare benefits and various drugs.

Police say the suspects went to extraordinary lengths to disguise their crimes and commit frauds that even at their peak could have provided only $A2000 ($2545) a week.

It is alleged that the suspects forged signatures, impersonated their victims, and forced some to tape messages to convince friends and families they were still alive.

taped such a message before she died.

nteA friend, Sharon Ball, called Elizabeth on her mobile when she became concerned at her disappearance and was told on a first call "I'm all right. Leave me alone. Get lost," and on a second "You're a slut. You're nothing but a dirty slut."

By then, Haydon was dead.

The hearing will continue next week.