By Greg Ansley
Canberra bureau chief
The toll in Australia's worse serial killing case is likely to rise to 11 as police track down missing members of a closed group that preyed upon itself and stole social welfare benefits that continued to flow to some of its victims' bank accounts.
South Australian police yesterday continued their search for two men they fear have also fallen victim to the bizarre acid-barrel deaths uncovered by accident during a missing person's investigation.
Another body, believed to be that of a man missing for 18 months, was yesterday found at Dry Creek in Adelaide's North, but police have not yet linked this apparent murder to the other deaths.
Nine bodies, some dismembered and all in a state of such decomposition that DNA and dental experts have been called in to help identify them, have already been recovered from an old bank vault in Snowtown, northwest of Adelaide, and in the backyard of a suburban Adelaide house.
The toll has eclipsed that of the New South Wales backpacker murders in which road worker Ivan Milat lured seven young hitchhikers to brutal deaths in Belanglo's Forest, southwest of Sydney.
Three men, one married to one of the Snowtown victims, and another engaged to a sister, have been charged with murder and will appear in court in early July.
Police said yesterday that further arrests were possible.
The resources of the South Australian police have been stretched by the killings, with the formation of a 33-member task force, codenamed Chart, to unravel what Deputy Commissioner Neil McKenzie described as the most challenging case in the state's history.
Yesterday police enlisted the help of a forensic psychiatrist, a dental expert and an anthropologist to determine the sex and identity of the victims, a process that could take weeks.
Most are believed to have been men, although police named one suspected victim as 37-year-old mother of eight Elizabeth Haydon, who was married to one of the accused, Mark Ray Haydon, 40.
Elizabeth Haydon vanished from Adelaide late last year.
Another of the accused, John Justin Bunting, 32, is engaged to Haydon's sister Gail Sinclair, and lived at the Salisbury North Adelaide home where police used ground-penetrating radar to locate a body buried in garbage bags.
Sinclair, who met Bunting last year through her sister, told the Adelaide Advertiser that the three accused had been friends for years.
The third accused, 28-year-old Robert Joe Wagner, had once lived in a homosexual relationship with one of the men police are now searching for as a suspected victim, 40-year-old convicted paedophile Barry Wayne Lane, a transvestite who dressed in blond wigs and called himself Vanessa.
Lane, who disappeared in 1997, later formed a relationship with the other missing man, 22-year-old Clinton Douglas Trezise.
It was a search for Lane and Trezise, and the emerging tangle of an apparent social security fraud, that led police last week to Snowtown, a tiny farming community of about 500 people, 150km northwest of Adelaide.
In the vault of the former State Bank branch, closed four years ago but later rented by one of the accused, police found six plastic barrels filled with what is believed to have been acid and the badly decomposed bodies of eight as yet unidentified people.
Although police have given no single, clear motive, for the deaths, they said that some of the victims had been receiving benefit payments and that "it may not have been the missing persons collecting the money."
Police also said the killings involved only people who knew each other.
