Reeling from a netherworld

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - As John Bunting and Robert Wagner spend the first days of the rest of their lives in jail, Australia is still coming to terms with the monstrosity of a crime that exceeds all others in the nation's history in scale and barbarity.

Although other mass killers have slain more victims - the 35 killed by Martin Bryant at Port Arthur in Tasmania among them - no serial murderer has claimed more lives and in more sadistic fashion.

The 11 people tortured, killed and dismembered by Bunting with Wagner and others in the series that gained international notoriety as the Snowtown "bodies-in-the-barrels" murders died horribly for their perversions and associations.

It was an intense, sad and disadvantaged world in which the killers roamed and preyed among themselves, able to continue the slaughter over the best part of a decade because it was contained within a community that operated at the very fringes of society.

There have been questions over the failure of the police to uncover the killings before they broke into the charnel house at the old South Australian State Bank in Snowtown, a gently declining town on the road out of Adelaide to Port Augusta.

Some concerns have also been expressed that early leads were overlooked and, with the guilty verdicts delivered against Bunting and Wagner on Monday, at the A$15 million ($16.8 million) cost of the 11-month trial.

During the trial, the court was told that pressure on already-stretched police resources had diverted attention away from Wagner after he had been filmed withdrawing money from one of his victims' bank accounts, and that other demands had prevented the tapping of Wagner's and Bunting's phones before they had committed the final three murders.

But the trial also showed that police had tried hard to break into the shadowy world in which killers and victims moved, finally establishing that a number of disappearances were more than the normal comings and goings of Adelaide's twilight zone.

It was the initial filming of Wagner taking money from missing paedophile and transvestite Barry Lane that first put them on the track of the killers, and the later linkages uncovered between Wagner and Bunting, and between Bunting and Elizabeth Haydon, another missing person eventually established as a victim.

Police investigators later tracked the four-wheel-drive used to transport the bodies first to a farm outside Adelaide and finally to the State Bank vault.

But nothing prepared police for what lay behind a black plastic curtain in the vault, nor Australia for the tale that was to unfold of a society beyond the understanding of most, and deaths simply horrible beyond comprehension.

The key to the killings was Bunting, sexually abused as a child in Brisbane and a drifter who finally arrived as a fringe dweller in Adelaide in 1984 with a burning, cruel, hatred of homosexuals and paedophiles.

It was this bitter obsession that led to his conviction on 11 counts of murder - the worst serial killer in Australia's history - and to the involvement of Bunting, also the victim of abuse who had been lured away at 14 to a life of forced homosexuality with Lane.

Bunting met Wagner when he moved to Waterloo Corner Road, north Adelaide in 1991. Wagner, then 18, lived with Barry Lane in the same street. Bunting's anger and violence led to seven murder convictions, equalling those of the infamous Ivan Milat, who killed seven hitchhikers near Sydney between 1989 and 1992.

The first victim, Clinton Trezise, was killed a year later at Bunting's house and was buried in a shallow grave outside the city. Trezise, one of Lane's male lovers, was nicknamed "Happy Pants" by Bunting, whose bloodlust and obsession increased as the decade wore on.

In his home he had the now infamous "spider wall" - a schematic plan for persecution and ultimately murder on which the details of people Bunting believed to be child abusers were linked by strands of wool.

Lane's name was at the centre of Bunting's maze, included both as an eventual victim and as a prime source of information on other paedophiles. He was to die horribly in 1997 at the hands of Bunting, Wagner and Thomas Trevilyan, a schizophrenic former lover of Lane.

But before Lane there were Ray Davies, a drifter stabbed, strangled and buried in the back yard of Bunting's home for allegedly abusing the young children of a friend; Suzanne Allen, whose remains were found in 11 garbage bags, although Bunting claimed she had been dismembered after dying of natural causes, and Michael Gardiner, strangled in 1997 and the first body to be deposited in the eventual stack of six plastic barrels in the Snowtown vault.

After Lane was one of his killers, Trevilyan, whose body was later found hanging from a tree, and Gavin Porter, a drug-addicted fried of James Vlassakis, who in 2001 pleaded guilty to four murders and became the key prosecution witness against Bunting and Wagner.

Vlassakis helped to torture and kill his half-brother Troy Youde, who had raped him as a child, his step-brother David Johnson, Fred Brooks - an enemy of Bunting - and Gary O'Dwyer, apparently killed because he looked like Youde.

Bunting and Wagner also strangled Elizabeth Haydon, the mother of eight children by different men, who Bunting found repulsive but who had fatally tried to sexually attract him.

The details of their deaths that emerged after the dismembered parts of eight bodies were found in the Snowtown barrels have appalled Australia.

Johnson was killed to ritual music, with a piece of his flesh sliced off, fried and eaten by Wagner. Handcuffs, beatings and electric shock machines were used for the pleasure of the killers and to extract confessions. Pleas for mercy were later to be played down phone lines to convince family and friends that the victims were alive.In a final indignity, the tiny bank accounts and welfare payments of the victims were cleaned out by killers more evil than any Australia has ever seen.