Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 422 - The Snowtown Murders: Seven Years of Insanity in South Australia
Episode Date: September 30, 2024In an episode about the most infamous series of murders in the history of the state of South Australia, somehow the murders are the least interesting part of the story. The characters in this tale, co...llectively, are some of the most dysfunctional we've ever covered. No one is even remotely normal, healthy, or well-adjusted in an episode that comes across like an advertisement for why you should never, ever, ever visit the suburbs north of Adelaide. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. And you get the download link for my secret standup album, Feel the Heat.
Transcript
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John Justin Bunting was a vigilante pedophile hunter.
Or rather, that's what he told himself.
And that's what his band of murderous friends believed.
The Snowtown Murders Killers all lived in the suburbs north of Adelaide, Australia,
in highly impoverished neighborhoods where crime was rampant, dysfunction was everywhere.
They had tragic pasts full of so, so much sexual abuse,
which is why they were initially so passionate about stopping sexual predators.
They identified their targets, attacked them, tortured them to death in ritualistic fashion,
and then stuffed their dismembered bodies into barrels or buried them.
And they got away with murder after murder after murder for seven years.
Which is pretty surprising considering they didn't seem that smart and all the victims
were connected to the killers in some way often closely.
Romantic partners, a spouse, best friends, even siblings. Not a good way
to avoid being caught. The Snowtown murders, also known as the bodies and barrels murders,
were a series of murders committed by four men. The ringleader, John Justin Bunting,
and his lackeys, Robert Joe Wagner, Jamie Vlasakis, and Mark Hayden. And they all occurred
in the state of South Australia. This is considered Australia's worst serial murder case and the trial was one of the
longest in Australian history. The police believed there were 12 victims killed in
total. Eight of their bodies were found in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in
Snowtown about 87 miles north of Adelaide but only one victim, the last one, was
actually killed in Snowtown. They initially targeted known or suspected
pedophiles but then began to rationalize killing anyone John disliked. If John
Bunting thought somebody was dirty or weak they just weren't safe. They needed
to be taken to the clinic and cured. A code for murder. John created a rock
spider wall in his home. An interconnected web of names of people he
suspected were pedophiles or who deserved to be punished on his terms.
Rock Spider, slaying for a pedophile born out of Australia's prison culture.
After the murders, efforts were made to steal the victims' identities, social security
payments and access their bank accounts.
The killers were finally caught May 20, 1999, an infamous day in Australian history, when
the police opened a bank vault in Snowtown and found barrels full of bodies. I got a wild one for you this week. So much just
what the fuck was going on in South Australia in the 90s? Coming your way on
another true crime, serial killing, so much this is gonna feel like I'm making
it up because it is so unbelievably outrageous edition of Time Suck.
This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck.
You're listening to Time Suck.
Well, happy Monday and welcome to the Cult of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins, Succumus Prime,
guy with quite a few tattoos at this point,
but both pinkies, so you know I'm not Yakuza. Or I'm a really good Yakuza. Angel Investor in
Bob's bountiful bonsai fruit dot bits. And you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod, hail
Lusifena, praise B to good boy Bojangles, and glory B to triple M. No real announcements today,
other than I'm just very excited about Night fuel the fictional horror short series the fictional horror
Short stories. I've been writing this year up to 16 installments now on the scared to death feed
Just me narrating stories. I've written
Logan Keith scoring them as if they're standalone little horror movies
The most recent story as I record this now is called the wishing. A man named Doug Burns stumbles into a strange little antique shop
in downtown Santa Monica, California called Relics and Curiosities
where he purchases the wishing box as a birthday gift for his wife Olivia. And he quickly learns the box truly does grant wishes.
But will those wishes be worth the terrible price he must pay for them?
So check it out.
Load up on some spooky stories as we head into October and Halloween.
And that's it.
And now it's time to get started.
This is truly one of the craziest fucking stories I've ever come across.
Lindsay was just like, what are you doing?
So much during the research because I kept just laughing at just the dark absurdity of
all of it.
I was like, how, how?
How is this their lives?
So, so many characters who are so
colossally fucked up.
Almost no character, and there's actually no character. I can think of this moment in this story
has like a concept of what like normal should look like in life. So buckle up. Shit is gonna get so weird.
Starting off today with a brief introduction to the state of South Australia, where the
murders took place, followed by a full timeline of the Snowtown slash Bodies and Barrels murders.
Let's get to know our setting.
If it even is a real place, and not just a conspiracy like a small band of smooth brains
somehow able to type thoughts out and put them on the internet seem to believe.
If real, Australia has six states and two internal territories. The states are
South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and
Tasmania. And the internal territories are the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. The Australian Capital Territory isn't a
state because it's home to Australia's federal government. Seems very similar
to the District of Columbia here in the States to me. And the Northern Territory
is in the state because it is a barren fucking wasteland. Maybe wasteland is
harsh but despite its massive size has very very few people. Doesn't seem like a like a place that's
built for a lot of towns. It is a little bit of a wasteland in most parts. It's
over 520,000 square miles in size as a total population of just under 250,000
people. To compare that to the US it is roughly twice the size of Texas but
Texas has over 120 times as many people.
And it's hot as fuck. Temperatures soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every single
month of the year except July in the middle of the Australian winter when it
really cools off and the heat has only ever reached 99 and a half degrees. Over
half the people in the territory live in the small city of Darwin which has just
over 127,000 people. A city that has almost been entirely rebuilt four times in the last 130 years following
three devastating cyclones and Japanese air raids during World War II. Cyclone
Tracy in 1974 hit poor Darwin on Christmas Day destroyed over 70% of all
the city's buildings including over 80% of all the the homes all the
residences but on a positive note houses are pretty cheap there you know much
more cheaper than a lot of places in Australia about a third of what they
cost in Sydney so you know if you're willing to live there that's that's good
second biggest town is Alice Springs just under 26,000 people then it drops
way off down to less than 6,000 for the town of Catherine and I know we're not here to talk about Australia's Northwest Territory.
I just had no idea it was that just beaten down and kind of desolate.
We're here to focus on South Australia, the only state in Australia not completely overrun
with criminals and descendants of criminals.
Kind of kidding.
The British Empire did choose Australia to be the site of a penal colony and many
of the first European inhabitants of Australia were criminals transported
from Britain and Ireland primarily. However, state of South Australia, that's
where the good Australians settled. You need to be nervous, very nervous, every
well is in Australia, but not in South Australia. I'm kidding again, but I say
that because South Australia was actually intentionally created to be a
colony of free men who would bring good to Australian society.
South Australia the only Australian state to have ever, excuse me, to have never received any British convicts to aid in the original settlement.
Ironically the idea for a criminal free Australian state was dreamt up by a criminal in the 1830s.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, he thought of this while he
was a prisoner in London's Newgate Prison. Wakefield would become a key
figure in the colonization of South Australia. And he was in prison because he
had raped several kangaroos during his first trip to Australia. Or he actually
never went to Australia and was convicted of something still gross but
less outrageous. He abducted a 15 year old heiress, a girl half his age from her school, took her to France to wed her. The marriage
never consummated, was annulled and he was convicted of a misdemeanor and sentenced to
three years in jail. Wakefield turned his attention while in prison to colonial subjects
and considered the main causes of the slow progress of the Australian colonies in the
enormous size of the landed estates, the reckless manner in which land was dished out or doled out, given away, whatever, the absence of all systematic effort at colonization,
and the consequent discouragement of immigration and not enough labor.
He proposed to remedy this state of things by the sale of land in small quantities at
a sufficient price and the employment of the proceeds as a fund for promoting immigration.
These views were expressed in his letter from Sydney,
published in 1829 under a false name,
while he was still in prison in London,
but often quoted as if it was written in Sydney,
a city he never visited.
He had additional pamphlets published
while he was still in prison,
including one titled Sketch of a Proposal
for Colonizing Australia,
and they actually drummed up a lot of interest.
The National Colonization Society was created in 1830 once Wakefield was released in order to advocate for the type of systematic
colonization set out in Letter from Sydney based on three principles
careful selection of immigrants, the
concentration of settlers and the sale of land at a fixed uniform sufficient price to provide funding for new settlers.
Wakefield was a founding member of this group. Interestingly, while his ideas
spurred on his colonization, it seems Wakefield never made it to South Australia.
He ended up moving on to focus on New Zealand. The first ships of settlers would
arrive in South Australia in 1836 and the city of Adelaide was established in
1837 as the state's capital. Remains the state's largest city with almost one and
a half million people.
The state has a, as a whole, has only a little over 1.8 million.
Outside of Adelaide and surrounding suburbs, it is like most of Australia, once you get away from the coastline,
pretty sparsely populated.
Adelaide known for having architecture and attitudes that are overwhelmingly British.
The fifth largest city in all of Australia, for years it was considered more conservative and quieter than the nation's other major cities.
Seems to have really thrived in recent decades. Gotten pretty artsy. Looks absolutely gorgeous
now based on the YouTube videos. Architectural Digest just ranked Adelaide as the most beautiful
city in the world earlier this year. Talk about high praise. Most beautiful city on
earth. Never been but it does look gorgeous. It has an amazing park system,
super modern high-rises and art installations, tons of institutions of
higher learning. There are three public universities, one private university in
Adelaide, as well as three satellite campuses for foreign universities,
numerous research centers like a lot of them, art galleries, bunch of museums, botanical gardens, loads of festivals, live music venues, two
Australian rules football teams, great public transport, and so much more.
Apparently though when the Snowtown murders were occurring it was a lot
less cool. When author Salman Rushdie visited in the 1980s he
wrote, Adelaide is the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or horror film.
And Adelaide had a reputation for being a bit more murdery than other Australian cities,
even though the homicide rate is actually below the national average. Still has that reputation.
Some criminologists argue that South Australia had for years been unfairly described as being
more dangerous in other areas of Australia because it just happens to have had more exceptionally deviant or newsworthy murders
than other states. According to author Debbie Marshall, who wrote the 2006 book,
Killing for Pleasure, the definitive story of the Snowtown serial murders,
one of the main sources we used in the upcoming timeline, South Australia has a social atmosphere
that is distinctly its own. In this, it is very like Christchurch in New Zealand, which
is also a Wakefield-designed city, flat and ordered, and which also has a higher
percentage of deviant bizarre crime. There is a sense of correctness,
politeness, conformity in both places, a social hierarchy, and that the pioneering
families who go back generations hold the prestige and those who don't aren't
in the same league.
The social atmosphere of a city or state contributes to the crime rate.
Where people hold on to their feelings, are repressed and uptight,
you might expect that some will develop deviant behaviors that will explode in violence.
There is a sense of isolation in South Australia,
and that can also help to give rise to antisocial or psychopathic behavior.
Interesting. Not sure she's correct, but interesting.
Some of the particularly deviant crimes that have occurred in South Wales over the years
were the 1976 and 1977 Truro murders when two men fresh out of prison for rape convictions,
Christopher Worrell and James Miller, raped and killed seven girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 26.
There were also the family murders. Five murders speculated to have been committed by a loosely
connected group of individuals who came to be known as the family. The group was believed to
be involved in the kidnapping and sexual abuse of a number of teenage boys and young men,
as well as the torture and murder of five young men aged between 14 and 25 in Adelaide in the 70s and 80s. And there was the the Rowe family killings when 20
year old Jason Downey sexually obsessed with 16 year old Chantel Rowe parked
his car around the corner of her family's home on the night of November
8th 2010 then climbed through a bathroom window sexually assaulted Chantel while
stabbing her at least 33 times.
Downey then stripped the girl of her bloody clothes and redressed her. The body of Chantel's father, Andrew, found in the kitchen 29 stab wounds.
His wife, Rose, found nearby stabbed at least 50 times in two separate attacks,
the second wave of attacks likely occurring while she was crawling to get away from her killer on
her hands and knees. Pieces of the knife were found in the bodies of the victims, which speaks to how much aggression
Downey used to stab them.
And there are many other shocking crimes to have come out of South Australia specifically
over the years, but none as shocking as the Snowtown murders.
And now, let's dive into a full timeline of South Australia's most infamous and deviant
murder case and learn all about them.
Shrap on those boots soldier we're marching down a time suck timeline.
As I mentioned one of our main sources for this timeline is the 2006 book Killing for Pleasure,
the definitive story of the Snowtown serial murders by Debbie Marshall. Debbie's a freelance
journalist and author who traveled to Snowtown and studied the case
extensively. And one more quick note, most of the murders in this case took place
in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. The perpetrators and their families moved
around a lot so you'll see a lot of location shifts in the timeline. And due
to the nature of the kidnappings and the guilty parties not confessing
to the full details of their crimes,
we don't have exact dates for several murders,
just kind of a date range.
And the date ranges in the timeline
come from the appendix of Marshall's book.
Now, no more disclaimers and explanations.
Here we go.
John Justin Bunting, born September 4th, 1966
in Inala, Queensland.
Inala has been described as an impoverished southwestern suburb of Brisbane. In 1950, Inala was sold to the Queensland Housing Commission and was developed to
house veterans and their families. Many residents were migrants from Europe and the UK.
In the subsequent decades, not the UK is not in Europe, but I should have said the UK and the
rest of Europe would have been better. In the subsequent decades Inala developed a high crime and unemployment rate and John grew up there as an only child
His mother Jan has been described as upright and immaculate
So very morally rigid certainly not the worst way to be
Certainly not cause to blame her, you know for John's killings. Of course, I grew up to be a murderer
My mom was exceptionally good.
You try being raised in that shedda.
His father Tom did not wear the pants in the family, was no match for her domineering personality.
John's parents, both hard workers, law-abiding people, both held steady jobs.
None of this would rub off on their boy.
Jan was an office secretary.
Tom worked in a printing factory.
Tom's passion was playing guitar, but not very good. Had a wee bit of
trouble playing the guitar after parts of several fingers were severed off in a
freak accident with some sort of guillotine looking blade at a print
factory. Lots of fingers getting lost between last week's Yakuza episode and
Tom here. It's been a fucking hard two weeks for fingers here in the Suckers.
The Bunting family mostly kept to themselves. They weren't known for being very chatty with
their neighbors. They were private. John's sloppy habits made his mother irritable as she valued
keeping a tidy home. John felt like his mother continually invaded his privacy. When she looked
through his things and cleaned up after him. Well, maybe don't be such a fucking slob, Johnny boy.
John had a passion for collecting things as a kid. He enjoyed science, especially chemistry.
At home, he learned how to make things like rockets and stink bombs.
Oh, stink bombs. Those uh, those never get exploded in classrooms anymore.
I remember kids bringing those to school and really pissing off teachers and a lot
of their fellow classmates with the stink bombs. Not sure if they're still a thing.
My kids have certainly never talked about them. One of John's favorite things to do growing up was to experiment with chemicals like nitric acid,
brake fluid, and chlorine. He was a fucking weird kid. He also enjoyed drowning and otherwise
torturing spiders and a lot of these chemicals. But those spiders would soon get their revenge.
John claimed that when he was eight years old, he was raped by the older brother of his school
friend who locked the two boys in his room and strapped them to the bed. Some spiders had talked
him into it and they would supervise the abuse. No, that's insane. I'm pretty sure spiders had
nothing to do with this but that would be a particularly scary spider. One that does not bite
you instead talks people into raping you. I'm a little scared of a brown recluse a brown recluse and and like a black widow
I would be very scared of a sweet talking rape spider
Those kind of spiders were to exist anywhere in the world. They would probably exist in Australia. It's gotta be the world's creepy spider capital
Anyway, the brother had apparently been raping his younger brother John's friend for years. I say apparently you'll see why in a second
I don't believe this story
But John said the teen teen, this older brother,
punched John in the mouth when he cried out.
Then when it was over, John said he bragged about
what he had done to his friends who came over
and then took turns raping the boys.
The boys were also beaten and burned with cigarettes.
Then they were interrupted by the friend's father
who shouted at the teens to let the boys go
and help untie them.
And he helped untie them.
I am so skeptical when sadistic murders talk about what happened to them when they were kids. I mean, it certainly could have happened.
But very odd to me that the dad would just yell at his teen son to stop burning his little brother
and his little brother's friends with cigarettes and beating them after tying them to a bed.
Just, hey, knock it off.
How many times have I told you, stop tying your brother up, abandon him.
Or what if the dad interrupted them mid-rape?
Oi! How many times have I told you to stop rooting your brother and his friends?
Stop buggering his friends about her for fuck's sake!
No more burning him! I'm serious!
I mean, I guess his dad could have been that much of a psycho, but this detail is weird to me.
And the story gets... there's other problems as it goes on.
John said when he got home, his mom scolded him for being late before she noticed the bruises
on his face John then told her he fell off his bike he said he was too ashamed
to tell her the truth John didn't talk about what happened for many years when
he finally did he just called the rape his accident he told people that the
attacker left his house to avoid his parents and then drove off on the main
attacker like the older brother left his left his house to avoid his parents and then drove off on the main attacker like the older brother left his house to avoid his parents drove off on his
motorcycle and then crashed it into a bus and was killed but he said earlier
that the attacker attacked him at somebody else's house at his friend's
house so why is the attacker now fleeing from his house right the story doesn't
add up John said the other teen attackers followed him for months
shouting obscenities chasing him through parks once running him off the road while he was on his bike.
Also dragged him into their car and threatened, if we get a hold of you again, you're dead.
And that doesn't make any sense.
Why would these kids go through the trouble of chasing him for months?
And then they finally catch him just to tell him that the next time they catch him, that's when they're going to kill him.
And if they raped him before, why didn't they try and do anything this time?
John said he was angry and afraid but still told no one.
And did I mention that John will gain a reputation for being a notorious, outrageous liar?
Yes, he will.
However, something may have happened to him as we'll see throughout the timeline.
Many people involved in this case were truly sexually abused as children.
John though, I'm skeptical of anything John says. At the age of 13
John maybe met a man named Benny who was in his 40s and growing up Benny apparently suffered
extreme physical abuse at the hands of his father. John asked Benny to help with his problem with
these you know these kids chasing him and Benny promised him protection from those kids. But in
exchange he asked John to play bait for him.
Benny had John wait on street corners to lure child predators. And when they asked John if he
wanted to go with them and you know do something sexual, John would say yes, but he had to go tell
his older brother first. He would then, this is what he's saying, he said he would then lead the
man around the corner where Benny was just lying and wait and he would just beat the fuck out of
these guys with John's help help this 13 year old's help
No way. I wish that story was true, but no way at the age of 17 John said he got a job
This is my favorite lie of his
At the age of 17 John said he got a job putting up handball nets all around Australia
But most of the work was based in Brisbane. Get the fuck out of here
No one is gonna hire a 17 year old to put up handball nets all around a continent.
It's not like it's a highly specialized job. I'm pretty sure you can find a lot of people
in any of the cities you're going to, in Perth, wherever, just to put a fucking net up,
rather than pay to fly Johnny Netmaster all over the country.
I feel like in this bullshit story he's being sent everywhere in a private jet
too. Being driven to the handball court in a limo. Whoa who's getting out of that
limo? Oh that's the handball net wizard. How did he know if he's real? No one can
ever put up a handball net like the handball net wizard. John said he later
reunited with his friend Benny in Queensland after making all his
handball net fortune. According to future conspirator, conspirator
Jamie Vlasakis, he and Benny did a few murders. Benny taught him what to do and
I'm sure that's what John you know told Jamie but no one else other than John was
ever able to find this Benny fella or any record of him. John's only other
friend he talked about having grown up was a boy named Charles who he said died by suicide as a teenager and I'm not sure if
he's real either. John said he kept another huge secret from his parents in
addition to the for sure very real secret about the kid who tied him up and
raped him until his dad untied him and then that kid somehow ran out of John's
house when John's parents got home even though the rape occurred at the friend's
house and then sped off on a motorcycle and drove
Into a bus and died but then the other kids were also raping him
I guess just didn't leave the house just stayed there were like, oh, hey, hey Jones parents
Don't tell you that we took tens right been burning him today. He's lying. Just want you to know that
Have a great rest of your day
This new secret was that when John was 17 years old?
He got a girl named Lisa pregnant.
And she had a little girl and their daughter was named Tammy.
He said he and Lisa split up before the baby was born.
According to John's now deceased romantic partner Elizabeth Harvey,
John didn't tell his mom about the baby because she didn't want grandchildren.
She didn't want to be called grandma.
John said he would take care of Tammy for short periods while she would go on dates with a new boyfriend and
Then Tammy told her her boyfriend
And then and that Tammy excuse me told her boyfriend that the baby was his
The boyfriend's baby and that he didn't find out the truth until Tammy was two
And then he was so enraged that the baby wasn't his, this new guy that he started to physically and sexually abuse the baby.
I don't, I don't think that's how it usually works.
I don't think the one suddenly out of nowhere decides to sexually assault a toddler, like somebody is super sweet to a toddler for two years.
And they're like, what? This baby's mine? And then they just start beating and fucking the baby.
I don't think that's how it usually happens.
I guess it could, it could happen, but I haven't heard of an instance like that.
John's baby mama Lisa then asked young John to buy two plane tickets with all that, you know,
sweet handball net cash he had so that she could move to England to live with the man she planned
to marry and take, you know, John's baby so he'd never see his baby again. And John just did that.
He just bought him the tickets. And Lisa Sin Timmy just never returned to Australia.
So that totally happened.
Then John and his imaginary vigilante friend Benny
continued their violent escapades.
John said that they now started breaking into the homes of
pedophiles, known or suspected,
and ransacked their houses
with shit on their
beds,
would kill their pets, and would write
slurs on the walls with their own shit.
What?
Why would you kill a pedophile's dog?
Fucking the dog didn't diddle anybody.
And why now do this instead of beating the shit out of them like you were doing earlier?
It just seems like a weird step backwards in their vigilanteism.
John said that Benny became like family to him,
but then poor Benny developed an aggressive throat cancer and died before John turned 18.
Oh, no, Benny, no!
Rest in peace, Benny!
We'll all miss you, buddy.
May you write more slurs with your own shit on the walls of Pito's home in the life after this one.
Or it would have been cool if he did that if you were real. In 1985 when John was 18,
he decided he wanted to travel and his roommate Mark Day,
I don't know how he got his roommate all of a sudden, but whatever he agreed to go with him and
They just traveled shit where who knows the dipshit never said he did say that the next year though in February of 1986 when John
Is now 19 he and a group of nine friends of his piled into two cars and just headed west for Perth and
The real reason he was traveling. Well, John told his friends at the cop the coppers they were running him out of Queensland why he never said
probably just cuz he was such a naughty boy who refused to go peepee on the
potty probably probably cuz he was wanted for committing so many daring
courageous rock spider murders along the way to Perth John said that they had
some car trouble so they rented a spot in a caravan park in Adelaide's northern
suburbs like a trailer park and then John just stayed.
He had a job painting a concrete floor at a motor museum, kind of random.
First he's Australia's premier handball net installer, now he's painting a concrete floor.
Why couldn't he just work at a grocery store in this story?
Why couldn't he just work at Red Rooster and hang out some of those delicious pineapple
fritters?
Later John was offered a job by the South Australian Meat Corporation. This seems to be something that is actually true.
He said he loved doing this, loved working
at the butcher's place, loved working with all that meat.
Also said in spare time he collected guns and read about how to make poisons,
blow torches, and molotov cocktails. That tracks. Guns would not become
illegal in Australia until 1996.
He also said he once practiced target shooting on some unfortunate dog, then hung the animal in his
shed for a few days before putting the body in a garbage bag and tossing it into the street,
which he bragged about to his friends. I do sadly believe that. He is, as you will see, a complete
soulless fucking psychopath. Bojangles would like to him to try that shit with him. Bojangles would tear his nuts off before he could squeeze the trigger.
Go ahead, try and squeeze the trigger!
1989, within two months of moving in with his friends Kevin and Michelle, who made the journey with him from Brisbane,
he met his future wife Veronica.
18 year old Veronica Tripp, described as being a naive teenager with a noticeable intellectual disability who abandoned school at year eight. Veronica was born with a severe hearing disability on top of a cognitive
impairment that went undiagnosed till she was eight. Also born completely blind in one eye,
she was dealing with some shit. She fell behind in school, had difficulty learning to read or write,
but she was pretty good at drawing stuff. John was 21 when they met at a welding course in Torrensville, a suburb of Adelaide.
He started sitting next to her on the bus, eating lunch with her, and at the time John was living in
Piraka, another Adelaide suburb, with his friends Kevin and Michelle.
Veronica visited him as often as she could, which was pretty often since this relationship progressed real quick.
In an interview with the Sun Herald after the murders, Veronica revealed she and John were married two weeks after they met
When John proposed Veronica said she thought about it for about ten seconds and then she said quote, okay. Yep
How romantic I picture her shrugging her shoulders when she said that to you like to marry me
Okay. Yep
Fuck it. Why not? I don? I don't have a lot going on.
She moved in with John after the proposal and a short time later,
he drove her to Brisbane to meet his parents for the first time.
Just a quick little 22 hour drive.
At the same welding class where he met his bride.
John also met a young man named Mark Hayden.
8 years older than him and the two would become fast friends.
I'm guessing Mark, one of his future murderous accomplices,
would come to regret his friendship very much.
And now before we get to know a bit about the story of the two,
I want to talk about the story of the two. friends. I'm guessing Mark, one of his future murderous accomplices, would come
to regret this friendship very much. And now before we get to know a bit about
Mark, one of the Snowtown murderers killers, time for today's first of two
mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those ads. If you don't
want to hear anymore, get the entire catalog ad free and more by signing up
to be a space lizard on patreon for $5 a month.
And now let's meet one of John Bunting's oldest buds, Mark Ray Hayden.
Mark Ray Hayden was born December 4th, 1958.
As written by Debbie Marshall, barely educated, he is often described by people who know him
as backwards, slow.
Monosyllabic, when he speaks at all, but most of the time he is silent.
So John has a type.
John prefers people who are mentally impaired enough to buy his bullshit or people who have been so abused, neglected, marginalized, mistreated,
that they'll be so desperate to have, you know, friends that they will overlook his bullshit. Or both.
He wants people he can use, manipulate, and control.
Mark grew up as an only child after his brother died in a car accident.
He enjoyed working with cars in his free time
He lived with his dad in Elizabeth East yet another suburb of Adelaide
Mark's mom was diagnosed with schizophrenia
We'll be in and out of mental institutions for a few more years until she died in
1996 and then Mark would receive a pension for being his dad's primary caretaker
Mark had a Toyota Land Cruiser and he and John enjoyed going out for drives in rural areas outside Adelaide
or driving through junkyards to strip parts from abandoned cars.
Once they completed their course, they started working together at a welding factory an hour north of Adelaide.
John liked his job, but soon the factory would close down and he would have to start killing people. He had to!
He can't live on that handball net fortune money forever. Something like that.
December of 1991, John and Veronica move into their first home together at 203 Waterloo
Corner Road in Salisbury North, a South Australian Housing Trust neighborhood an hour north of
Adelaide.
This address and this community will be a central location to today's story.
The South Australian Housing Trust was established in 1936 to build housing to respond to migration and a population
boom after World War II. The trust built thousands of new homes for low-income
families. Many of people living here were unemployed on government assistance and
they were people with a lot of problems. So, so many problems as you will see. Not sure
exactly what it is now but in the 90s it's fucking terrible neighborhood,
terrible place to live.
The Age, a well-known newspaper based in Melbourne, has been around since 1854, described Salisbury
North in a May 1999 article.
Dreams fade fast and hearts break hard in Salisbury.
You can see it in sad eyes and sullen faces damaged early by booze and cigarettes.
For many, hope is gone as
they live out their lives in little brick houses the government rents out for the cut rate of $95
a fortnight. Here, kids chuck in school early and go to work in supermarkets, stack boxes in Adelaide's
fruit and vegetable markets, or more likely walk the streets, watch videos and wait for the dole.
Youth unemployment in Adelaide's northern suburbs runs at 36%
among the nation's highest levels. Salisbury is among the most deprived of the city's northern suburbs, but back in the 1950s and 1960s times were better as migrants from the United Kingdom
happily migrated to secure jobs in local industry. But the jobs of the working class have leached
away and federal politicians speak of rust belt Adelaide with the same despair as they do of Tasmania. Doesn't sound exactly delightful
and full of hope does it? Veronica would say that John bad-tempered throughout
their marriage became lazy and cranky after they moved there. He was frequently
out of a job, spent hours hanging out with his new friends every day, 20 year
old Robert Wagner and 36 year old Vanessa, who lived a few doors down.
Well, he's friends with Robert.
He didn't care for Vanessa.
Let's meet Robert now, another one of the other Snowtown murderers killers, then we'll
meet Vanessa, a big character in the story as well.
Robert Joe Wagner, so Bobby Joe, but not Bobby Willie, was born November 28, 1971, in Parameta,
New South Wales.
Robert's father would abandon the family when he was nine months old.
At the age of three, Robert's mom and sister would move from New South Wales to Adelaide.
They settled in a housing trust area in Elizabeth West, next to Salisbury North.
Robert didn't do well in school, primarily because he was dyslexic, and he never learned
how to read or write.
Robert was physically abused by his mother's boyfriend, and shortly before his eighth birthday, he was sexually abused by the teenage son of one of his mom's friends who was
staying with them and occasionally babysat him. Damn. Robert didn't tell anybody what happened
but was so upset about the abuse the poor bastard attempted suicide by overdosing on drugs he found
in his home's bathroom. After his suicide attempt his learning difficulties worsened.
Robert didn't tell his mom when he stopped attending school as a teenager. He left each morning with his backpack, returned home when all the other
neighborhood kids did. Got away with this until a truancy officer came to his
house, but it appears he still would not graduate. And this guy is just John's
type, right? As an adult Robert lacked direction, seemed incapable of holding
down a steady job. He was in a committed relationship though when John met him with Vanessa Lane, aka Barry
Lane, aka Barry Venables.
Vanessa, biologically a male, but identified as a female sometimes.
Sometimes he would dress as a male and identify as Barry.
Most sources identify him as Barry.
Seems that for most of his relationship with Robert he did primarily identify as Vanessa.
Guessing if he was alive today they would identify as by gender.
Barry was born in the little town of Snowtown on South Australia, August 1955, but he'd been
living in Salisbury North for years. Snowtown a 90-minute drive north of Salisbury North.
Lies along the main road between Adelaide and Perth. Very small farming town of only about 350 people. Bunch of grain silos, railroad
tracks. There's been a massive wind farm west of town since 2008. Barry grew up
there. The fourth of 11 children raised primarily by his god- grandmother. His
father was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat his mother Sylvia even
when she was pregnant. His dad died of a stroke before he was a teenager.
Sounds like it was too bad he didn't die sooner.
Author Debbie Marshall writes,
his two younger sisters, Suzanne and Gillian,
coped with the unrelenting grinding poverty
of their childhood by trying to fit in.
But Barry doesn't ever fit in, never tries to.
He quickly works out that the best way to escape reality
is by pretending he is someone else.
Inwardly, he is Barry Lane from a destitute family.
Outwardly, from the age of nine, he metamorphoses into a female incarnation who he calls Vanessa.
At first, Barry would only put on women's clothing when he was alone in his room.
After about two years, he considered going outside.
By the age of 15, he would often go out wearing women's clothing and makeup and identifying
as Vanessa, but again, not consistently.
Excuse me.
In 1980, 25-year-old Barry was sentenced to four months in prison for sexually assaulting
two 12-year-old boys.
Four months?
That seems so light.
His victims would still be 12 when he got out.
How insulting to his victims and their families and any other kids living
in his vicinity. Barry blamed his family for the assaults because they'd prevented him
from living his life how he wanted. He said, if I had done such a foolish thing again,
I'd rather be chucked away for life in the keys chucked away. In prison, other inmates
would spit on his food and threaten him, which is good. Pidos, rock spiders, not popular in prisons with a lot of violent inmates
who were sadly often molested themselves as kids.
After he was released, Barry was regularly seen around Salisbury
North trying to speak to young boys.
Of course, right?
Pidos don't seem to change their stripes.
Once a molester, always a molester, from what I've observed,
or at the very least, always someone who is, you know, one opportunity away from being a molester, being a molester from what I've observed. Or at the very least always someone who is you know one opportunity away from being a molester. Being a
molester again I guess. Barry was disliked by his neighbors, of course he was,
who sometimes threw rocks at him, spoke negatively negatively towards him when he
was seen outside. I'm guessing especially if they had kids they didn't care for him.
He was a sex offender. At one point Barry joined the Salvation Army, visited several
churches, trying better himself but he would not get better.
He will remain a scumbag.
He gets into a relationship with Robert Wagner, who he was 16 years older than.
They met at a party.
Barry told him, or Barry later told people that he asked Robert to suck his dick at this
party.
Sounds like some party.
Let's go to a fair amount of parties.
I don't remember asking other party goers if they could suck my dick. That wasn't a socially acceptable option
at the parties I went to. Also when they met at this party, Robert was 13 and Barry was 29.
So, Peto Bear immediately tried to molest Robert. He had not a fan of Peto Bear. Robert's mother
eventually found out he was spending time with P Peter Bear instead of going to school and she wasn't as you can imagine thrilled. Robert wanted
his mom to meet Barry though and when she did she was deeply upset by the
relationship because Barry was way fucking older than him. She also didn't
like that he dressed like a woman. Yeah so he's a pedophile and she doesn't care
for him. She tries to get her son to come back home but he refuses. She has the
police try and bring him back but he continues just to run away. He won't tell the police what Barry and him
are doing. Eventually the school tells her that Robert should drop out because he's never there
anyway. He does. He leaves town two months after he turns 14 with Barry who he normally will
introduce as Vanessa and also as his fiance although they will never marry. 14. So young.
So messed up. Robert's mom won't see her son for about four more years.
By the time Robert is 18, he and Barry end up in Adelaide and he tells his mom he will only see her
if Vanessa can see her too. Carol Wagner, Robert's mom, fucking hates Barry slash Vanessa but wants
to see her son. Also at this time, Robert and Barry are both living on disability pensions.
Barry because of back pain. Robert because of his learning disability. Robert and Barry are both living on disability pensions. Barry because of back pain. Robert because of his learning disability.
Robert and Barry's neighbors thought the couple
were very weird.
Their house was apparently disgusting
because they never cleaned up after themselves.
Never cleaned up after their many animals.
Had a bunch of pets.
And Robert would constantly disturb the piece
by playing some sort of funeral music for all to hear.
That's how they describe it, funeral music.
But they don't say exactly
what kind of funeral music he played. Like was it this?
Feels like kind of like traditional funeral music here in the States.
I just can't imagine cranking that in the neighborhood.
Or maybe, maybe this is the kind of music he was playing.
I mean you could technically play this at a funeral
Play it long enough. It'll make other people want to die
Or dang it
Or maybe he was playing uh, oh my god, what's going on here?
What is going on? There we go
Hit some weird button on the computer and couldn't get it.
How about this?
I mean, that's music that makes me want to have my own funeral.
Oh, Yoko.
There was also talk in the neighborhood that Robert and Barry committed acts of bestiality
with their dogs.
They allegedly even told a neighbor about it once.
The same neighbor said that they would often invite themselves into his house and talk
about their weird sex life.
I hope this neighbor is lying.
I don't think they are though.
Just after getting through all this information before I sat down here to record, I think
they probably were dog fuckers.
How do you bring that up to your neighbor?
Excuse me, do you have a bottle of olive oil?
What are we cooking?
Nothing, why?
No, we just keep trying to fuck Max, but his very little chocolate starfish is so fucking
tight.
Dogs, am I right?
So fun to own, but so hard to fuck.
Robert and Vanessa were also physically abusive to each other.
We get into heated fights and arguments often.
In addition to all this craziness Robert quote
Worshipped Hitler. So that's interesting.
So much so that one of their dogs was named Adolf.
He wanted it and he tried several times to get a swastika tattooed onto his fucking forehead.
But could not find a tattoo artist in the area willing to do it. There's like I said, there's some characters in this tale.
Robert would later get involved with a right-wing hate group called National Action, excuse me,
described by author Debbie Marshall as bully boys with extreme reactionary neo-Nazi views who preach racial purity and employ terror tactics
similar to the Ku Klux Klan.
What a fun group.
How do you feel superior to anyone else in any way when you are a dirty dog fucker?
Robert would only be a member for a year and a half, or about a year and a half, and then he would get kicked out for being too radical.
I picture him constantly trying to steer their racist agenda into bestiality at meetings.
What are we here for? White power! And who is our enemy?
Mostly the Jews, but also a lot of other people! and what do the Jews want to do with our dogs?
Not sure honestly didn't expect that question. They won't fuck them and why won't we let them?
What's happening getting more uncomfortable with the direction this meeting's taking by the second?
We won't let them fuck them because no one fucks our dogs, but us what power
Robert skews
John bunty the neighbor at 205 Waterloo corner Road already knew Robert Wagner and Barry Lane
And then Robert Barry and skews will all meet John and Veronica the day they moved in
Robert Joe Barry and Mark Hayden will now spend a lot of time hanging around the bunting household and
Sometimes skews will as well is very minor care to those skews fuck skews. Don't even worry about skews
They all have the tendency to visit each other's houses just anytime they please. Just people want in each other's houses,
sometimes they live with the other people, and then they swap around, and then these people are now living with those people.
It's all very strange. Robert Joe Wagner, Bobby Joe, and John get along very well. Robert admires John, but John hates Barry and calls him a freak. Yet, John and Barry will spend a lot of time together.
They're hanging around the same group of people all the time.
It's a very dysfunctional little crew.
Since none of these people almost worked,
or since almost none of these people worked,
you know, just rarely worked,
Bobby, Joe, and Barry were able to spend a lot of time
in their neighbor's homes.
And in 1991, they became friends
with 17-year-old Clinton, Clinton Tre Clinton tracise tracise there we go
tracise the crews first murder victim Bobby Joe is 19 at this time Barry is 35
Clinton was born in December of 1973 his parents divorced when he was three years
old and then neither one would raise him for many years and he would grow up
primarily in foster care but now his parents are visiting him weekly
Clinton is now seeking security and attention
He's another troubled character with another shit childhood in this tale
By mid 1991 he's living in an apartment in the northern suburbs of Adelaide
Barry and Robert will bring Clinton into their friend group and
Peto Bear starts fucking him because he's a predator who loves underage boys
And Peto Bear starts fucking him. Because he's a predator who loves underage boys.
John Bunting immediately despises Clinton
because he's letting Barry fuck him.
You know, which makes him gay
and he doesn't like gay people.
According to a 1999 article from The Age,
that newspaper based in Melbourne,
Clinton was in a sexual relationship with Creepy Barry
during his relationship with Wagner.
Yeah, okay.
So they got a little tryst going on here.
In the summer of 1992, Clinton, precise, now 18 years old, is murdered in John Bunting's
living room between July 9th and August 31st.
Why was he killed?
Not sure with this one.
We know the, we know more details about the other murders than we do with this one.
But he was bashed to death with a shovel in John Bunting's living room after being invited
inside for a little social visit.
John had accused Clinton of being a pedophile and referred to him in conversations after
his murder as Happy Pants.
Not sure why he called him Happy Pants.
It seems Robert Joe Wagner and Barry were also present when John killed Clinton.
Doesn't seem anybody else was.
Eventually people in the neighborhood noticed that Clinton has disappeared.
When asked about him, Robert Wagner will say he's a drifter, could be anywhere.
Barry spoke to Clinton's sister Sherry
shortly after he was murdered,
and Bobby Joe interrupted their conversation,
screaming, what have you been saying?
Get back inside!
Not suspicious at all.
By August of 1992, Sherry is very worried about Clinton.
She's trying to call him constantly,
obviously can't get ahold of him.
That September, she and her dad go to his apartment again
to try and see if he has showed up at home, but the housing trust informs them
that his tenancy has been terminated and they are given a key to his flat. They go inside,
there's no signs of life, the flat is dirty with rotten smell, you know, permeating the air.
Then after Clinton disappears, Barry goes to Veronica and asks her not to tell John
what he was about to share with her.
Barry tells her that John killed one of their friends but won't say who and that he helped
get rid of the body.
Veronica brings all this up to John once he comes home.
John denies it, reminds Veronica that Barry is a liar.
But Veronica has to know that John is also a liar at this point.
Month later, Barry tells Veronica the same story, but with more details this time.
He says John snuck up behind the victim in the living room with her home, hit him in the head with a shovel,
and that they then buried his body in lower light.
It's a little community about 20 miles from Salisbury North.
He said all this occurred on a night that they left her alone with the cats for a few hours at his house.
Barry pleaded with her not to tell John, saying he'll come after me if he knows I've told someone.
But Veronica does bring it up to John again and this
time when Veronica confronts him he admits yeah I killed him I killed
Clinton. Ulster didn't seem bothered at all by what he had done and he was angry
though that Barry had told her that. Veronica was now warned to keep quiet or
else. John told her quote say anything to anyone and you'll end up like the person at lower light. So shut the fuck up.
Lower light where they buried Clinton again. John and Veronica had been living
at 203 Waterloo corner road for almost a year now by late 1992 and around this
time John starts digging a big old hole in the backyard. Veronica once asked John
what the hole was for and he said it was for an
underground bunker or TV room and after that she said she just didn't ask too
many questions that's probably because she knew that you know John was a
psychopath she's afraid of John and also she didn't know that John loved to dig
holes seriously apparently as a kid he would get in trouble for digging holes
in the yard like like he was just a dog or something I just having a grown friend
who just loves to dig big holes in the yard. Oi, John, what are you doing there, buddy?
Just digging a big of a hole.
What for?
For fun, silly.
Why else do people dig big old holes in the yard?
John now gets a job at a slaughterhouse in the northern suburbs.
Perfect job for this guy.
He's back butchering, killing.
He's good at it.
He gains reputation amongst his coworkers for having exceptional knife skills and cutting
up carcasses in record time
great skill set for a murderer
Over dinner. He will speak obsessively about cutting into carcasses
How much he enjoys watching animals die? So that's some fun dinner table talk for him and Veronica
How was your day? Oh so good so good. I got to kill about a dozen cows today
Oh supposed to use his boat gun, but let me have at him with a knife Oh shit was awesome
Should have seen it about broke the blade punch stabbing those motherfuckers fucking bovine pieces of shit keep passing gravy
John smelled terrible when he'd come home from work each day
Which was a not a problem for him because another fun fact about John doesn't have a sense of smell born without one
That'll come in handy for him down the road
What a what a ghoul just a dude who can't, who loves to hurt animals, loves to kill shit, bash people in the head with shovels, dig holes in the yard.
After a few months of working on a giant backyard hole,
it is like huge. I couldn't find a picture of the hole,
but I found a picture of the crime scene later when they're like re-looking into the hole and it basically takes up the entire backyard.
So weird. Well, after a few months of working on it
John enlists Mark Hayden to help him also work on the hole. Now we got two
weirdos just digging this big old hole in the backyard. Just for fucking months.
Soon they get Robert Wagner, Bobby Joe, start digging with him. Just three
murderous weirdos shovels digging a hole in the yard. Also Bobby Joe was supposed
to be too disabled to get a job but you know not too disabled to dig a murder hole in the backyard.
Barry becomes jealous that Bobby Joe is spending too much time digging with John
and Mark. John's wife Veronica she's getting annoyed with John and all his
digging. Also he started to bring some random young people into their home
mostly teens struggling with addiction. He'll allow them to sleep at the home
give him advice. What kind of advice was that? Loon dishing out. I've learned a few things in my day.
If you don't like your boss, you just quit. You can always find another job. Better yet,
you can get money from the government. So fuck jobs, you know. Also, you don't like someone,
well, you kill them. As long as you bury the body before the cops find it, you don't get in trouble,
do you? Most importantly, you dig a hole in your backyard. Big one. Turn into a TV room,
hide bodies, might find buried treasure, a lot of benefits to holes.
John is also getting frustrated with Veronica because he wants to have kids and she does not.
He needs someone to help him with his- more help! He needs more labor for his goddamn hole, Veronica!
Just think how big this hole could be if he had a bunch of kids working on it.
At some point in the mid-90s sources don't say exactly when John stops working in the slaughterhouse
after breaking his arm and a motorcycle accident. That's good, we give him more time to
focus on his hole. After his arm heals up he does get a job with Mark at a local
foundry. John loved the work there but hated the fact that he had to cut his
long hair for for the job and he resigned eight months later due to a
back injury and he goes on disability but is able to keep digging his hole. I love that everybody's
on disability in this. These fuckers just cannot hold down a job, right?
Why work? It's not fun. Why work when you can get the government to pay to stay
home, dig holes, advise wayward teens, fuck dogs, murder people. With all his new
spare time John continues bringing many people into the house. Robert Mark and
Barry continue to be his most frequent visitors. Also continues digging his hole. Soon old
Johnny Grave Digger will somehow meet a new love interest because there really is
something for everybody or someone for everybody. Even if you're a pathologically
lying, no-smelling, homophobic, yet spends a lot of time with homosexuals, won't work
but will dig all the time in the backyard, already married piece of shit like John Bunty.
Let's now take a moment to introduce the newest character in the story, Elizabeth Harvey.
She'll at the very least be present for one of the murders and assaults the murder victim.
Elizabeth Harvey was a single mom who struggled with severe mental issues.
So she was just John's type.
Born in September of 1953, she had an extremely difficult childhood. Her father was distant, her mom was an abusive alcoholic, they divorced by the time she was just John's type. Born in September of 1953, she had an extremely difficult childhood.
Her father was distant, her mom was an abusive alcoholic, they divorced by the time she was six.
And then Elizabeth's mom, Joyce, would often leave the kids at home, go out for long periods, you know, while she would party, get fucked up.
Joyce hated her daughter Elizabeth because she had tried to abort her unsuccessfully while pregnant.
She had literally thrown herself off of a wardrobe when she found out she was pregnant.
Just fucking body slammed herself. What was unsuccessful in terminating the pregnancy.
Shortly after Elizabeth's dad left the picture, she met a man named George. Real piece of shit. He moves in.
George not only physically abuses Joyce,
he begins to sexually abuse Elizabeth when she is just seven. And when Elizabeth tells her mom at the age of seven,
Joyce slaps her
and calls her a slut. Fuck. The sexual abuse escalates over the years. George
will rape Elizabeth and her sisters often for many years. The abuse continues
until they're teenagers. Joyce was aware George was fucking her daughters for
years and she would get mad at them for being abused. She believed her daughters
were quote after her man.
She is insane and a piece of shit.
And to get some revenge on her daughter Elizabeth
for having the balls to keep getting raped by her husband
or boyfriend doesn't say if they ever got married, George.
She fucks Elizabeth's 16 year old boyfriend at one point.
Do you ever think when you hear shit like this
how incredibly lucky so many of us have been
just to not have been born into a living hell
of a home like this.
With a monster for a mom, another monster for a stepdad, a dad who's not in the picture,
I am so thankful that neither one of my parents ever tried to fuck me.
Seriously, or brought home somebody who fucked me, or neglected me to a criminal level,
or just physically abused me to a criminal level.
I did have a terrible stepmom from, you know, all the high school who was pretty cruel and insane. For sure psychologically and emotionally
abusive, but nothing like this. Not even in the ballpark. I was very lucky. If you did
grow up in a home, anything remotely like this, I am so sorry that you had to experience
this. And if you are functioning on any level at all, if you're able to hold down a job,
you know, put the work in of going
to therapy, if you are able to have a family of your own and not treat them
like you were treated, you're a fucking legend. You're a hero. I try to grade
everyone on a curve because we all start off in so many different situations in
life, some of which prepare us for a healthy normal life so much more than
others, and if you're living an A-plus life in my book after you've overcome this bullshit, oh my god be so proud of yourself
Okay at the age of 17
Elizabeth attempted to end her life. Her mom at least took her to the hospital so she wouldn't die
Maybe the one good thing her mom ever did
Elizabeth had her first child then when she was 23 her son Troy Youde born in 1976
Elizabeth sadly still living in her mom's house of horse.
Wants to get away from her controlling mom so when Troy turns two she answers an ad to be a
housekeeper in Broken Hill New South Wales. A mining town of about 25,000 people 680 miles
west of Sydney and surrounded by desert once known as the Silver City. The ad was placed by
a restaurateur named Spiros Lasakis who was 17 years Elizabeth senior. Spiros was born in Egypt came
from a wealthy family he was once married to a Dutch woman who wanted to
move to Australia to save their marriage. That didn't work out but he did end up
staying in Australia. Elizabeth did not end up working as his housekeeper at
least not for very long. She and Spiros became involved in a sexual
relationship even though she noticed that he spent a weird amount of time his housekeeper, at least not for very long, she and Spiros became involved in a sexual relationship
even though she noticed that he spent a weird amount of time around young gay men and seemed
hyper focused on her young son Troy. They married only three months after they met, yeah you can see
where this is going. And almost immediately after getting married Spiros becomes physically abusive,
the cycle continues, Elizabeth becomes pregnant with her son James, who will be called Jamie, after she said Spiros raped her.
James Spiridon Vlasakis, who again will go by Jamie, will be born December 24th, 1979. Christmas Eve.
Elizabeth and Spiros already sleeping in separate rooms by this point, the time he's born, and they get into a court battle over their son, over custody.
One day Spiros breaks into her room, rapes her, Elizabeth becomes pregnant again. She moves out
in 1981 but she loses the baby, later moves back in with Spiros and she will stay with him for years.
Then at the age of three, backing up a little bit, Jamie becomes sick. Doctors thought he had
leukemia for a little while. Whatever he really had took months for him to recover. By the age
of five, Elizabeth was noticing significant delays in Jamie's speech.
He couldn't form coherent sentences.
Doctor said he was just a late bloomer.
He will struggle all through school,
finally will be diagnosed with epilepsy when he's 15.
By then it was too late for him to get special education
and he will be labeled as being borderline
intellectually impaired.
Also Jamie and his older brother Troy do not get along.
They fight frequently. At times
pretty violently, Troy once threatened Jamie with a knife. Elizabeth, meanwhile, struggles with severe
depression, is heavily medicated. Because of her mental health issues, Elizabeth will later claim
she didn't realize her husband Spiros had begun to sexually abuse their child Jamie. Jamie said he
was seven when it started. Fuck! Lasted until his early teens, he would struggle to cope with the trauma for the rest of his life.
Spiros Vlasakis dies June 13th, 1996 at the age of 49.
Elizabeth becomes further depressed after her husband's death despite him being a piece of shit who is physically and sexually abusive.
Troy learns that Spiros is not his biological father at the funeral.
After that he starts using Elizabeth's maiden name, Yude. Yes, so I think like, yeah, some sources said
that he was Troy's dad and then some said these sources weren't. It's all so
fucking messy. Months after Spiros dies, Elizabeth starts seeing a man named
Marcus Johnson. They'll have an on-again-off-again relationship, get
married in 1992, but Elizabeth's not really in love with him. Marcus's son David from his previous marriage moves
in with them. David's 15 at the time, four years older than Jamie. They're a
blended family consisting of Elizabeth, Marcus, Jamie, Troy, David, maybe some
other kids. Some sources say Elizabeth had two other sons. Some sources say she
had numerous other kids. Most sources do not mention them and none that we could
find actually name them. So who knows if they even exist. So we can just disregard
these stupid fake-ass kids. David hadn't actually lived with Marcus until he was
a teen. He even lived with his mom. But then when he was 14 he started to ask
questions about his biological dad we had not seen in years. Right? None of
the families are doing well. And then he decides to live with Marcus. David dislikes his new stepmom Elizabeth because he feels that she treats him as an asset that brings money into the home in the form of
government assistance as opposed to a child that she cares about.
Elizabeth will say she found it impossible to get along with David, found him dangerous.
Said he once lunged at one of her kids with a Stanley knife. Everybody's fucking going after everybody in the story.
Later in life Elizabeth will be diagnosed with bipolar disorder with signs of obsessive
compulsive disorder. She has taken a lot of antidepressants and other drugs,
which she will also hand out to her kids. Around this time, she's also spending long periods of
time crying or watching TV without really processing what is going on around her, and she said that she
had no idea that Troy has begun to regularly rape
Regularly rape his half-brother Jamie
Is anyone not getting sexually abused in the story?
Jamie will tell no one what's happening
Meanwhile the family is now moving around constantly by the age of 18. Jamie will say he had moved 23 different times
fuck
roughly twice a year
Fuck! Roughly twice a year. Uh, 1991. My god. Well, it's not roughly twice a year. I don't know why I said that. I'm not. That's where... Roughly three times every two years. That's better, I think.
In 1991, the family moved into a housing trust home in Elizabeth Park, about five and a half miles from Salisbury North.
When Elizabeth's mom is then diagnosed with cancer the following year, 1992, she becomes her caretaker.
She'll spend the final years of her life sick with terminal cancer.
Being unsupervised for long periods of time while she takes care of her sick mom,
Elizabeth's boys are free to wander the neighborhood.
And they soon meet a neighbor named Jeffrey Payne, who would often sit outside his house,
not working, looking for kids to molest.
Did I mention that approximately 90% of Australian males are pedos?
It's almost nothing but rock spiders over there.
Sydney was originally called Uncle Secrets.
That was the name of the town.
Melbourne is the mashup of two aboriginal words,
mel, which means adult-sized penis,
and bern, which means child-sized hole.
In Adelaide, you actually aren't allowed to live there
unless you've molested at least one kid.
And of course I'm kidding, but goddamn
There's a lot of horrible shit happening to everybody in the story. We barely touched on the murdering
Again, Elizabeth will say she was struggling so much with her mental problems that she didn't notice Jeffrey Payne now
Was doing some molesting. Jeffrey Payne was inviting young boys into his home. Payne told Marcus Johnson
Elizabeth's husband,
that the boys were welcome to spend the night with him. And Marcus agrees. Marcus agrees
to let his kids have a sleepover with a single man, because he is also a fucking idiot.
No one is smart in this story, either. No one. Once Jamie was in Jeffrey's home, he shows Jamie
pornography and molests him. He threatens to do the same to his brothers if he won't cooperate.
Payne will later anally rape Jamie and threaten to kill his mom if he tells.
Meanwhile, Jamie's brother Troy tries to end his life when he's 14 because he's now paranoid from chronic drug use.
Doing shit like heroin.
By late 1993, Jamie is constantly missing school. He can no longer function because of all the trauma he is suffering.
He's spending hours in the shower scrubbing himself until he bleeds. He's drawing images of hell.
He's abusing drugs to self-medicate.
And now let's reconnect with another rock spider, Barry, aka, Vanessa Lane.
Right after today's second of two mid-show sponsor breaks.
Thank you for listening to those sponsors.
Now let's see what Barry Rockspider lanes up to. Oh, Peto Bear knows fellow neighborhood Peto Jeffrey Payne. Of course
he does. Two Petos in a Peto pod. They're buds. And he's legitimately angry that Payne is not
sharing young boys with him. So to get back at him, he decides to tell Elizabeth that Jeffrey's
been molesting her son Jamie. Elizabeth will soon come to hate Barry, but right now she thinks that Barry can help her convince the police to arrest Jeffrey.
And she goes to the police.
A report is filed in early 1994, but Jamie has trouble talking to the police eight weeks later when he's interviewed.
When authorities finally act on the tip, he's ashamed, doesn't provide a lot of sexual assault details.
For those eight weeks, Jeffrey Payne watches the family from his doorsteps and will sometimes sneak in and walk around their house at
night because apparently they're just not blocking their door ever. Oh my god
during these eight weeks Marcus Johnson takes his steps on Jamie to see a social
worker three separate times so at least that's kind of good. Social worker writes
in one report it is critical that Jamie have some peers who will confirm that he
is a good person worthy of friendship and trust.
Jamie presents as a pleasant, well-spoken, caring teenage boy.
A child sexual abuse expert later writes,
The disorganized and disrupted life which Mr. Jamie Velasquez experienced throughout his childhood and early adolescence
is clearly a result in large part of his mother's disturbances.
He was exposed to an inconsistent, constantly changing, and ineffectively caring environment, leaving him vulnerable, dependent, and really with
very little strength of character. Jeffrey Payne finally will be arrested in early
March of 1994, but will be released on bail. Now John Bunting shows up at
Elizabeth's home with Robert Wagner. Peto Bear had told John about Peto Jeffrey.
Some Peto infighting, some Peto backstabbing going on here.
John now warns Elizabeth that Barry is no better than Jeffrey, he's a rock spider too, and that he could also be coming for her voice.
He also tells her, that's why we're here. We are people who take care of these types of people.
Elizabeth immediately is drawn to John. She views him as a savior of sorts. And of course John likes Elizabeth, right? She's again just his type. Someone from a severely
abused background who is also mentally ill. You know, that's yeah, got a lot of
stuff going on. John now comes over to the house daily to watch over her and
the kids and keep them safe from Jeffrey Payne. And this doesn't set well with
Elizabeth's husband Marcus, who hates John and he soon quietly slips away and just leaves his marriage.
Have you ever seen the trailer park boys? It's a Canadian mockumentary, right? Ricky, Julian Bubbles, Randy, Mr. Lahey.
Ran for 12 seasons between 2001 and 2018.
This story reminds me of a much darker version of life in that fictional trailer park.
Or maybe a darker version of life in that fictional trailer park. Or maybe a darker version of Shameless.
Soon Elizabeth's kitchen now becomes home base
for pedophile vigilante meetings.
John is the ringleader of these vigilantes.
Back at his house, apparently he's got his massive
backyard hole finally finished, at least for now.
John now has time to create a detailed wall of pictures
and info on local pedophiles,
which he calls his rock spider wall. Literally has pictures of alleged pedophiles stuck to the wall with thumbtacks and there's pieces of
yarn connecting these various pictures. Like the classic conspiracy basement map where someone's
trying to figure out like what does all mean or like a war room for task force homicide detectives
trying to catch a serial killer. Except instead of task force members, every member of this group is cognitively impaired and or mentally ill and or physically disabled
and or has been severely abused their entire lives.
None of them have jobs. And at least one member of this vigilante posse
dedicated to catching pedos is a pedo, one of the worst ones in the neighborhood.
Most of this info, of the info John gets for his rock spider wall comes from rock spider Barry Lane. John,
Mark, James, Barry, Robert, later Jamie will sit around discussing who the
dirties are in their community. And I picture when John is asking like who's
the deadies? Who are the deadies around here? Mark, James, Robert, and Jamie all
do that thing when you're trying to hide your hand from the person you're pointing at.
Like you put your hand on the opposite side of your head from them, and then you just point your finger
without moving your arm just back and forth towards that person.
They're all pointing at Peto Bear.
Also maybe give him a little head tilt, like, right over here, he's right there.
It's Barry! Barry is the dirty. He's a dirty dirty rock spider
But for real, how the fuck does he end up on this committee?
John now also professes that if a woman is aware of sexual abuse going on in her home and does nothing about it She is also a pedophile and you know what? I
Don't agree, but I don't hate that. I
Know there should be exceptions when the woman is scared because she's also been horribly abused
But also number one duty of a parent father or mother protect the kids
John now indoctrinates Elizabeth Harvey into this belief system the woman he is sleeping with outside of his marriage to Veronica
Which is problematic since by his definition. She is now also a pedophile. This is also messy
Elizabeth will later say what was I to do with all this anger and hate? The stories John told me about pedophiles and what they do to kids, it
was horrific. We used to sit around the kitchen table and just feed each other
hate, hate, hate about what we're gonna do. If I get a hold of Jeffrey Payne, went
on for months. Veronica of course now notices how much time John is spending
with Elizabeth, but she feels there's nothing she can do to save her marriage
as John is drifting away. Months later, Jeffrey Payne will be convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.
But then in typical pedo fashion, paroled after two years.
Come on Australia, you're just about as bad as the US with this shit, right? Lock those rock spiders up!
Jamie is deeply upset by Jeffrey's early parole. Of course he is.
And he feels deeply abandoned by the adults in his life, the police, the court system. He also blames himself, thinks that if he would have admitted
he was raped as opposed to being fondled, Payne would have spent more time in prison.
Like his mom, Jamie is also drawn to John Bunting. He admires him, admires his hatred of pedos,
sees him as a father figure, and he will become one of his new dad's fellow murderers.
At one point during all this turmoil, Elizabeth practically moves in with John at his North Salisbury home
which of course you know angers his estranged wife Veronica who who is still
living there I'm not sure who was in the master bedroom. The first crack at this
group's the first crack in this group's criminal operations appears in 1994.
August 16th of that year the skeletal remains of John's first murder victim,
Clinton Trisise, found in Lower Light, South Australia, two years after he was murdered.
Lower Light, again, a little rural township. It's only got about 200 people. Farmers are spraying
weeds on their property when they find some human-looking bones scattered by wildlife.
A forensic pathologist determines that the bones belong to a white male around 17 years old. There is a hole in the back of the skull that indicates
traumatic brain damage and a probable cause of death. Authorities do some
facial reconstruction which is forwarded to the media and a hundred thousand
dollar reward is offered for information. The remains are not unfortunately linked
to anyone in police records and no one comes forward. Clinton Trisise's remains
will not be identified for the
next five years. Clinton Trisais' mom finally reports him missing in 1995. No idea why she
waited three fucking years to do this. Everyone is making just terribly terrible decisions in this
episode. We are not again dealing with the pack of geniuses. Sorry if this sounds harsh but we are
dealing with people trapped in cycles of multi-generational poverty and ignorance and the decisions they make
so reflect that. Three years! She told the police she hadn't seen her son in three years and that
the reason she hadn't already reached out because Clinton was a drifter. He normally didn't reach
out to his family but you know over two years was an extraordinarily long amount of time. He was 19
when he went missing lady lady, not 40.
Fuck you for not doing more to track him down, realize he was truly missing. Fuck you for not reporting him a drifter or not. Why was he drifting so much in his teen years? What are you doing?
The police had records indicating that in July of 1992, Clinton went to a community services office
for some financial assistance for his check, his monthly check, but that he had not accessed his
disability pension since then. Okay, now John,, but that he had not accessed his disability
pension since then.
Okay, now John, connecting with John again, John kicks his wife Veronica out of their
house in mid-1995, which allows him to strengthen his romantic relationship with Elizabeth Harvey.
His bond with Jamie will also grow.
Jamie's following John everywhere now and asks soon if he can also move in with him.
A social worker will later write about Jamie's relationship with John.
So at a time when Jamie Velasquez
needed appropriate peer support
and he needed trusted adults that would never betray him,
he came into the most dangerous relationship of his life.
Around this time, John, now 28,
said he experienced a personal tragedy.
He didn't, but he said he did.
Another very weird lie coming from John in 3, 2, 1.
He said his now 15 year old daughter Tammy, right? The girl he supposedly
fathered when he was 17. So the math doesn't even work in this story because he would
have had to father her when he was 13 for her to be 15 now. He said that she had
just ended her life after she was diagnosed with AIDS. As quoted later by
Elizabeth, John told me the schoolteacher had sexually molested Tammy and her girlfriend,
locked them in a classroom and raped them, and they got arrested and everything for all that.
So then Tammy was having tests because her kidneys started to act up.
And that's when they found out she had HIV and she committed suicide. And she died with her father's photo in her hand.
Why would she die with her father's photo in her hand. Why would she die with her father's photo in her hand?
The father she literally never knew, because he and her mom split up before she was born.
The man who bought her mom and her tickets to England to go live with some guy
who wanted to marry her mom, the man she never saw once.
Why does she have his photo in her hand?
She doesn't. Tammy's not real.
Now let's meet another sad character joining the story. Who is real?
Another troubled Elizabeth.
John's buddy Mark Hayden, the guy described by people who know him, is backwards and slow.
The guy described as mostly silent, but monosyllabic when he does speak.
He gets involved in a relationship with a 33 year old woman named Elizabeth Sinclair now.
Elizabeth, this Elizabeth has seven kids, lives in poverty, and is almost always unemployed.
And her childhood only a little better than the other Elizabeth.
This Elizabeth born Verna Audrey Sinclair August 29th, 1961.
Her father survived a heart attack the year after her birth, barely, but now couldn't work.
No one can fucking work in this story.
And her mom Pat, who also really worked, struggled to make ends meet.
Pat would leave home for up to two weeks at a time to go party.
She can't work, but she can party.
Isn't that how it goes oftentimes?
And her kids would have to beg or steal food to fend for themselves.
Pat once attempted suicide by taking pills in front of her children.
And she also once shot at her husband's car while her children were in it.
Jesus Christ.
Despite all that, Pat will gain custody of the kids in 1969, which shows you how much of a fuck-up Elizabeth's dad
was. Speaking of this Elizabeth's dad, unnamed in sources, he died of a combination of lung
cancer and heart disease at the age of 48, and following his death, Elizabeth will form a close
bond with her shit-for-brains worthless mom. Elizabeth will then become pregnant for the
first time at the age of 14,
but her brother will then push her off of a bicycle.
And I'm not talking about my kind of bicycle.
This isn't her body.
We're talking about...
She's on an actual honestly-god bicycle.
And her brother pushes her off of it,
and the impact of the fall aborts the baby.
How is all of this real?
She gets pregnant again by the age of 17.
The baby's dad wants her to end this pregnancy, and when she refuses, he literally throws her down the stairs.
Hoping it will cause a miscarriage, but it doesn't.
That baby will survive, and Elizabeth will give birth.
But, she doesn't have any idea how to be a mom.
And despite not being interested in learning, she will continue to have kids.
Elizabeth will give some of her kids to relatives, others will end up in orphanages. She'll have three kids by the age of 21.
Then she has a son with a family friend named Gary Gray who had previously been married to her sister Gail.
There's just no healthy boundaries and this suck.
At the age of 22 Elizabeth has another son. Marries the baby's father but the marriage only lasts five months.
Elizabeth's sister Christine now takes her oldest two kids and will raise them next year Elizabeth has another son
She and her mom now moved to New Zealand with some of the kids. I think she has some more. It's fucking confusing
To start a better life her last son is born in New Zealand, but then she doesn't work out there
They can't afford to live there anymore
And I don't think they were working and they returned Australia and they settled near Elizabeth in the northern suburbs of Adelaide
Elizabeth the city again the suburb of Adelaide too many Elizabeths in the story
there's another suburb called Elizabeth South another one called Elizabeth North and Elizabeth East and
Elizabeth Park and Elizabeth Downs
We fucking get it Australia. You loved Queen Elizabeth now stop sucking her dead tits and spice up your names already
Sorry, she's absurd how much Elizabeth has been crammed into this one story. Okay, so this Elizabeth Elizabeth Sinclair living in last with
Here's how she was introduced to John Bunting in his crew
When she first met him all she wanted to hook up with the alpha male John Bunting
But he doesn't like her he somehow found out that she had some kind of STI not sure which one I'm gonna guess herpes
Because it's easiest to detect right somebody has cold sores and he starts calling her degrading names stuff like slut
I think because he's a classy gentleman
Elizabeth now pivots away from this John
Who's with another Elizabeth, right?
She's still with the other Elizabeth and he and she focuses her attention on his quiet sidekick Mark Hayden so now John and
his sidekick can both have an Elizabeth in their life and she starts blatantly
take advantage of this Mark by doing shit like dropping off her kids at his
house and then just going out and partying I think I think it might have
just been best to literally drop a bomb on these people's neighborhood just kill
them all just so we can start over. Oh boy, Elizabeth and her two youngest boys eventually will move in with Mark
and Mark's dad, who Mark is still taking care of, kind of. Mark, apparently a
glutton for punishment, will suggest getting married two years later.
Elizabeth was in some ways pretty easygoing, I guess. She could deal with
Mark's mood swings and the constant drop-ins from all of Mark's, you know,
pedo hunter friends. Then these two kind of become Mormon, plot twist.
They were nowhere near devout,
but Mormon enough to get married to the local LDS church.
After the wedding, Elizabeth wants to move to Queensland,
and they do, but they don't have room in the car
for Mark's elderly dad,
who's completely dependent on them to live,
and they just leave him at the house.
They don't tell anybody they're leaving him. They don't organize any care for him.
I don't think they told him that they were leaving him, and they don't leave food in the house.
They just straight up abandon this sick elderly feeble man.
It takes a week for Mark's aunt to find Mark's dad lying on the floor moaning with a broken hip,
dehydratedrated and starving
Are you even surprised that shit like this is happening anymore? Oh my god mark and Elizabeth out in Queensland
They run up their credit. They don't work. They run out of money
crew a lot of debt and fucking come back to
This shithole north of Adelaide and they move back in without back in without apologizing to Mark's dad.
What a pair.
Now Mark treats Elizabeth's children like they're nuisances.
He'll do shit like lock them in their room at night,
won't allow them to come out even to use the bathroom.
They'll be forced to go to school
without being able to take a shower or bath.
He also on occasion will do stuff like pick up one
of the boys by their ear or hit them with a belt.
How fun.
Mama Elizabeth Sinclair does
nothing about any of this. Neither of these people ever clean their home and
the children live in quote almost indescribable squalor according to a
lawyer later. Mark Dad ends up signing the house over to him probably probably
fucking made him like sign the house over they wouldn't feed him or something
and then he'll sell it to a developer for the grand total of $22,000 which says a lot about what kind of house this was then in September of 1998
Mark is somehow able to purchase another house in nearby Smithfield Plains
Okay, so now let's check in with another. I know there's a lot of characters, but it's all so fascinating horrible
But now let's check in with another character and see what kind of how they have their shit together or not
And they won't you know they won't but let's just see how bad it is.
Around this time, Jamie Velasquez, so desperate to belong, asked John to be his dad.
He's already kind of been a father figure for a while, but now it's like,
will you be my dad? John says yes. And under John's guiding fatherly influence,
Jamie starts using meth. Oh God! He's also dropping acid, snorting coke,
popping pills like Benzos and Valium.
He's essentially high all the time and he can't hold a job.
And he's relying on a youth allowance from the government and he's getting by by running
scams to buy drugs.
While living with John, Jamie's subjected to his constant rants about pedophiles and
gay people.
John does not differentiate between these two wildly different groups.
Calls them all to waste.
Also makes Jamie believe that there are pedophiles everywhere. And to be fair,
based on the characters we've met in the story, it does kind of seem like there were pedophiles everywhere in the suburbs of Adelaide.
Slowly but surely John brainwashes Jamie into his belief system, just like he did with Jamie's mother Elizabeth Harvey.
Meanwhile, speaking of pedophiles, ol' fuckin' Barry Lane, ol' fuckin' Peto Bear,
still sending John information about other local pedophiles, which he then adds to his wall of rock
spiders. And then John shares everything he knows with Jamie. John starts bringing Jamie out on
nighttime outings where they will attack alleged pedophiles and vandalize their property now,
just like John supposedly used to do with his corrupt and almost certainly fictitious mentor Benny as a teen. Meanwhile, Jamie continues to experience major trauma.
At the age of 16, Jamie shoots up heroin for the first time, and even though he's a member of a
pedophile vigilante group, he gets raped again by an acquaintance of his stepfather Marcus Johnson.
After a party at Marcus' home, this man invites Jamie to a local park to do some drugs.
Once Jamie is high, he rapes him and Jamie tells no one. Fucking Jamie cannot win. He is surrounded
by monsters. Now let's check in with some other misfits in this ragtag crew. Robert Joe Wagner
and Barry's terrible relationship is starting to deteriorate further and further. Barry is
furious about how much time Bobby Joe is spending with John and John tells Elizabeth Harvey that Barry Lane has touched her son
inappropriately now. She ends up slapping Barry in the mouth. Robert punches him.
John doesn't do anything yet. Then Robert continues punching Barry here and there
for a few weeks afterwards though. Like you know and good. Fuck that chicken
hawk. The police now advise Barry to move out for his safety,
marking the end of his eight year relationship.
Robert Joe now moves in with John and Elizabeth for a while,
later moves into his own place in a suburb,
in the suburb of Elizabeth.
He also starts dating women in an attempt
to prove he's not gay.
And this very confused young gay man starts going out
with John and Jamie to beat the shit out of other gay people.
This is a fucking fever dream of an episode. Now we're almost ready to talk about some murders again.
At the end of 1995, John calls his estranged wife, Veronica, whom he'd...
whom he had previously kicked out of the house and tells her that he's gonna move to a house...
he's moving out of the house in Salisbury North and he wants her to move in so he doesn't have to rent it to anyone else. I guess she's just like, uh, yep. Okay, fine.
John, Elizabeth, and Jamie now they move to an isolated farmhouse out in the country about two hours from Adelaide.
Veronica moves back in Salisbury North by January of 1996 and at Elizabeth Harvey's encouragement, her estranged husband Marcus Johnson and her son Troy,
you now move in with her.
So it's like a weird fucking family swap.
Elizabeth Harvey is now with Veronica's husband John and Veronica is with Elizabeth's estranged husband Marcus.
John and Elizabeth will not last long out in the country. They'll return to Waterloo Corner Road in early 1996,
where they won't stay long again, because John will then decide to move to
Murray Bridge a cute little city of about 18,000 people about an hour outside
of Adelaide but just before all that the group killed their second victim at the
end of 1995 over three years after Clinton Tresize was murdered and now
going forward the killings will increase greatly in frequency.
26 year old Ray Allen Peter Davies is murdered on Christmas Day, December 25th 1995.
Right? Don't feel bad for him. He's a piece of shit. This episode is so weird where a lot of the
victims are scumbags and many of the murderers are also victims. Ray Davies was in a relationship
with a local woman named Suzanne
Allen who had previously pursued John Bunting romantically. No idea why all these women were
going after John. Look him up. He's not a looker. He is not a handsome man by any stretch of the
imagination. Suzanne, born in June of 1949, grows up in Mildura, Victoria. She left home at age 14
hoping to make a better life for herself.
She didn't, of course she didn't.
She's a character in this story.
By the age of 24, she'd already been married and divorced twice and had four kids.
She settled in Salisbury North, just 600 feet from John's home at Waterloo Corner Road,
which is how she met him.
Suzanne fell in love with John, often wrote him letters expressing her feelings for him.
Oh boy.
Also tries to see him every day.
But John does not feel the same way about her.
He is irritated by Suzanne, but also interested in keeping her around in some fashion because he thinks she can be easily controlled and manipulated.
So even though he doesn't like her, John, Robert, and Barry also start visiting her frequently.
Do you think that John was fucking her? I do actually. Sources don't say that,
but I feel like John was fucking a lot of the characters in the story. Perhaps some of the men as well.
But I feel like John was fucking a lot of the characters in the story. Perhaps some of the men as well.
The story is like a soap opera, but one with no beautiful people.
Just nothing but troubled dysfunctional very damaged outcasts.
It's a soap opera set in hell.
Okay, now circling back to Suzanne's boyfriend Ray Davies.
Ray born in June of 1969.
He ended up being raised by his aunt.
Neither mom nor dad were in the picture and he has a troubled childhood.
And when he's 13 years old,
his aunt catches him fucking the family dog. Yes. Yes. He's not even the first dog fucker to show up in this story.
I'm not gonna lie. I want to go to Adelaide now and not because I'm a dog fucker. Because I'm not.
I just need to visit the suburbs and I gotta look at where these clowns lived. It just doesn't feel like a real place.
Roy, excuse me, Ray will later get in trouble again with the police for more dog fucking.
Ever theft and assault, Jesus Christ. I should add he is described as intellectually disabled
in some sources. This dog fucker is not playing with the full deck. I mean, I doubt many dog
fuckers are. As an adult, Ray lived in a caravan park, so again a trailer park. In 1989, this dog,
dick, and son of a bitch moved to the northern suburbs of Adelaide, soon meets Barry and
Robert Joe, who offers to help move his trailer. Suzanne Allen allows him to park
it in her backyard. That's how he becomes connected with his crew. She and Ray will
then soon get engaged for a short time, but will live separately. Inside his
trailer, Ray apparently continues to fuck dogs. Is this
episode starting to feel like another dick bird story? It's not. I promise it's
not. I've actually, I have backed off. I'm not doing my normal little fucking
tangents on this episode because there's so much shit going on and the whole
thing feels like a lie. It's just so over the top. How the fuck did I not know how
completely crazy this story was? It is insane.
Have we ever covered another story with this many characters who are so fucked up?
Reminds me a bit of the episode on England's Fred and Rose West.
But with even more fucked up characters, just not quite as much incest. Anyway, in addition to supposedly fucking God knows how many neighborhood dogs,
Ray also starts trying to lure young neighborhood children into his trailer. Oh, and not done. He frequently openly beats off in front of everybody in the neighborhood. Oh, yeah, what a neighborhood. Oh,
So much fun.
Yeah, it's a party. It's a party. Okay.
Dude would just stand in the window or he would just walk out in the yard, cock out, stroke in it, while shamelessly making eye contact.
Did he grow up in Florence, Italy? Doesn't say so, but I wonder.
Ray soon became physically abusive towards Suzanne, and she obtains a restraining order
against her fiance. But he still lived in a trailer in her yard. But not for long,
because Ray will disappear forever. After Suzanne's grown daughter, Annette Cannon, tells John
that Davies had just sexually molested some of Annette's young children. So, Suzanne's grown daughter, Annette Cannon tells John that Davies had just sexually molested
some of Annette's young children.
So Suzanne's grandchildren.
And I've got to wonder, did literally any kid growing up near these people in the 90s
did not get molested growing up?
Okay, now let's return to Christmas Day.
December 25th, 1995, John and Robert Joe invite Ray, who they normally don't have shit to
do with, out for a little drive a
Dead giveaway that something bad is gonna happen
Every day okay John
Haven't hit that button and it's been too long since I've been John drove while Robert sat with Ray in the back
It doesn't sound like it was a comfortable trip for Ray
Because Ray was constantly getting punched by Robert as they drove out to John's farmhouse in the country.
A rural area called Bacara to be exact.
Elizabeth and her kids are in the city for Christmas so John is home alone.
Once they make it to the farmhouse, Ray is taken into the bathroom, forced into the tub, stabbed in the groin repeatedly with some kind of big metal pole.
John and Robert are screaming at him while they stab him and repeatedly with some kind of big metal pull. John and Robert are
screaming at him while they stab him and calling him all sorts of degrading names, then they force
him back into the car and take him to the house on Waterloo Corner Road. The following information
regarding what happens there comes from Elizabeth Harvey. She recalls that John disappeared without
any explanation. John returned later, told her he had a surprise for her. John and Robert then force
Ray Davies into the bathroom there. She then listens while they torture him for a while,
doing shit like hooking his balls up to a car battery with jumper cables. Then they move
Davies to a mattress in a spare room, invite Elizabeth to join them. In that room she stabs
Davies, helps strangle him with some jumper cables. Now he's dead at the age of 26.
And I'm not mad that this woman-beaten, dog-fucking, public-beaten-off rock spider met a violent end. Once Ray is dead, John throws his body into that massive hole behind his house.
Oh, finally! Finally we get to use it. Elizabeth, now she knows she has to keep quiet for her own
safety. Next day, Suzanne's daughter, Annette, asks where Davies has gone. She is told he has been dropped off in the scrub, right? Dropped
off out in the boonies, forced to walk home, but he's never seen again. And then Suzanne
now helps John clean out Ray's caravan. By May of 1996, John and Suzanne's friendship
has deteriorated though. He's sick of her obsessiveness. John eventually tells Annette
Cannon that he can't take it anymore, Asked her to tell her mom Suzanne to back
off. Suzanne is heartbroken when she hears but she won't back off. She continues
writing to John. Then her daughter Annette gets pregnant and one of Suzanne's
ex-boyfriends is the father. The fucking soap opera continues. All these people
should have been sterilized. Suzanne now is telling people she was going to
overdose and kill herself. After making these statements, Suzanne disappears in November of 1996. It's assumed that she has
killed herself, but she didn't leave a suicide note or tell anybody where she had gone. Some
neighbors notice that Suzanne's car is gone. A group of men had moved furniture out of her house
in the middle of the night, which is just a wee bit suspicious. Suzanne's brother reports her
missing in November of 1996. Her daughter Annette reaches out to Center
Link, Australia's social security program for information. She is told that they
can't share anything with her for privacy reasons. Annette also goes to the cops
and the police are able to access Suzanne's records and see their bank
account is still active. She is receiving a pension check every two weeks which is
withdrawn from the account. Also had changed her mailing address
before she disappeared to a house in Murray Bridge,
leased by one John Bunting.
Dun dun dun.
When the police spoke to John,
he said he knew Suzanne had stayed,
she'd stayed with him for a while,
but she moved out to live with some dude
no one had heard of named Andy.
John also is now telling anyone who will listen
that Suzanne is a pedophile.
Because she didn't do anything about Ray Davies molesting her grandkids. Then John confesses to Elizabeth Harvey that he and Robert Joe Wagner broke into
Suzanne's home to rob her, found her slumped over in the bathtub, believed she died of an overdose
or a heart attack or suicide, knows he will get in trouble for breaking in the house and for moving
Suzanne's body so they decide to get rid of her.
He said they cut off her arms and legs in her own bathtub and then, quote, defleshed
her.
And that's a creepier term than skinned.
Do you need any help skinning that deer?
No, I'd like to deflesh it alone.
John said they put her remains in garbage bags and took her to John's home
on Waterloo corner road where they then threw her into that big hole on top of
the body of Ray Davies. God, John's digging, really paying off now.
Elizabeth believed him when he said he didn't kill Suzanne because she's an
idiot but she didn't understand why he felt the need to dismember and deflesh
her. John now moved out most of Suzanne's property
into their house at Murray Bridge and sold her TV and other belongings. He also
asked Elizabeth to go to the bank and pretend to be Suzanne to get a new card.
Elizabeth did that and will now collect Suzanne's pension for the next year.
Eventually the guilt will get to her and she will tell John they have to cancel
it. He agrees. He says, yeah, it's wrong. We have to stop. And then he gives Suzanne's
bank card to Elizabeth Hayden's sister Gail Sinclair,
who now pretends to be Suzanne and keeps cashing the checks.
Veronica Bundy, remember her? John's estranged wife. What's she up to?
Well, she moved out of the Waterloo Corner house by Christmas of 1996. So moves out again.
Soon after John shows up, begins filling in the massive backyard hole of his with concrete, bricks and soil and enlisting the help of Veronica.
I guess she helps him before she leaves. Barry, Robert, and his neighbor,
Barry, Robert Joe, and his neighbor Robert Skues to do so.
Glad we have some closure, finally, and literally, on that big old murder hole.
Are you wondering right now what rock spider Barry Lane is up to? Is that peto bear still alive?
He is. Not for long, but he is. By April of 1997, now 41 year old Barry Lane is up to. Is that pedo bear still alive? He is. Not for long, but he is.
By April of 1997, now 41 year old Barry Lane is in a new relationship with just turned 18,
18 year old Thomas Travillion. And Thomas has just moved in with Barry. Thomas was born in 1979,
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Of course he did. Of course. We can't meet a single person
in the story who is not suffering from severe
mental illness or cognitive impairment,
or isn't being preyed upon by pedophiles or isn't fucking dogs or murdering
people or digging weird holes in the yards or fucking defleshing somebody.
Thomas did not take his medication regularly,
which caused him to experience frequent and intense hallucinations.
He met Barry after Christmas of 1996 when he was 17,
and after a doctor assessed him at a hospital and wrote that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
And we will now reconnect with this odd couple very soon.
But first, time to introduce even more people to this timeline.
Some new friends of Snowtown murderer Jamie Lasakis.
Nicole Zarita and Maxine Cole are cousins who were extremely close with one another.
Like way too many people in today's story.
Nicole was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
Her first child was born in 1991 when she was 23.
She had her second kid the following year.
Nicole moved to the suburbs of Adelaide in 1992, hoping for a fresh start.
But instead, she settled into the center of the Rock Spider Web, aka Salisbury North.
Peto Central. The world's fucking pedo capital. Maxine also moved to the area.
Briefly lived with Nicole before she got her own place. Maxine started dating a
man named Peter Gardner, who had a brother named Michael, who was now going
by the name of Michelle. I feel like a lot of you, I picture a lot of you
listening right now having your own war room Michelle. I feel like a lot of you, I picture a lot of you listening right now having your own war room boards.
You just like a lot of pictures, you know, or names at least, a lot of names with thumbtacks put on them
and then this piece of yarn connected like, wait, who? Who's connected to who now?
Michelle wanted the sex change but couldn't afford one, so she's dressing women's clothing, but it's not physically transitioned.
Nicole liked Michelle and she moves into, and Michelle moves into Nicole's home in July of 1997.
Meanwhile, Nicole's cousin Maxine Cole and her man Peter Gardner break up.
Now she moves onto the same street as Jamie Lasakis, one of the people on the fucking Peto team.
Maxine's sister Iris, also living in this shithole of all shitholes of a neighborhood, introduces her to Jamie.
Turns out the two have some history.
Jamie once tried to burn down Maxine's house when her kids were still inside, which she
didn't care for, and she doesn't like him.
Makes sense.
Yeah, sure, why not?
However, because no one in this story is in the ballpark of healthy or normal, Maxine still
introduces this guy, Jamie, to Nicole Nicole and Michelle and immediately Jamie dislikes and ridicules Michelle for being transgender
Which he equates to homosexuality which he then equates to pedophilia
Thanks to John's bullshit and this classification as you can imagine will not bode well for Michelle's safety and well-being
near this crew in early 1997 Robert Joe Wagner asked Max
near this crew. In early 1997, Robert Joe Wagner asks Maxine Cole out on a date,
and soon they start splitting time between each other's homes. And Maxine is introduced to all of Robert's friends, including murderers Mark Hayden and John Bunting. Maxine soon becomes pregnant
with Robert's child, and they move into a house in Elizabeth, the town, not the person, not one of
the Elizabeths. And John, Mark, and Jamie are always stopping by and discussing something.
Robert tells her it's men's business. The less she knows, the better.
Maxine also never asks Robert about his previous relationship with Barry Lane
because he becomes extremely angry if it's brought up.
19-year-old Michelle Gardner, Maxine's ex-boyfriend's cousin and Maxine's cousin
Nicole's read-its roommate, disappears in September of 1997.
Before she disappears, Michelle was spotted playing with Robert Joe Wagner's children
and putting her hand over one of the kid's mouths. Wagner saw that, became enraged.
When he told his crew, they were ready to act. All of them already hated Michelle because she
was transgender. Nicole Zarita, now she had left home for a couple of weeks in September of 1997. To do what?
I'm not sure. Probably go fuck some dogs or molest some kids somewhere. God knows with these people.
Ten days after she left, her friend called her, told her to come home immediately because the house had been burglarized and now Michelle was missing.
Initially, Nicole was mad at Michelle.
She suspected Michelle was behind the burglary because there was no signs of forced entry. And the only other person who had a key to her home
was Maxine.
Nicole asked Robert and John where Michelle went.
Robert told her he saw Michelle taking some gay men,
talking to some gay men at a service station.
He also said she drove off with him
when he called her a thief.
Jamie would later admit that he was the one
who stole Nicole's property,
which he said he then sold to buy drugs.
After Michelle had been missing for a week, Nicole found her wallet under the bed with her ID in it,
as well as a thank you note for letting her stay in the house. This made her think Michelle did not
run away, of course. Maxine Cole then received a message supposedly from Michelle on her answering
machine, but she didn't sound right. She said, I'm sorry about your stuff, but I need the money. If
you go to the cops, I'll go to the tax department department When Nicole got to Maxine's home, not sure the tax department
They're probably running some fucking scam praise scam in the government some kind of disability scam
Who God knows when Nicole got to Maxine's home to retrieve the tape the message had been erased
Nicole now started receiving phone calls from a friend of Michelle's who said she needed her ID and asked her to meet up at a park
She also heard Michelle's voice on one of the calls saying into the phone, this is Michael I just want to tell you
your kids taste nice. The fuck? Why would Michelle slash Michael say that? Well
because she had been forced to. John had now started to record his murder victims
saying things while they were being tortured so he could play the
recordings over the phone later to make people think they were still alive.
Nicole knows something is not right. Over time the messages become threatening. She while they were being tortured so he could play the recordings over the phone later to make people think they were still alive.
Nicole knows something is not right.
Over time the messages become threatening.
She receives one message from Michelle where Michelle says,
I don't appreciate you mucking me around that I'm probably going to have to come and gut
you myself.
Nicole and Jamie now create a poorly devised plan where Jamie will break into a business
and leave Michelle's wallet behind so the cops can get involved.
She has no idea. Jamie already knows that Michelle is dead.
After she'd been forced to make a bunch of voice recordings, right, she'd been murdered.
Michelle had been lured out of Nicole's home, driven to John's home in Murray Bridge
where she was taken into his shed and tortured.
Over the course of several days, Michelle's skin and genitals will be burned black in places
with cigarettes and with a machine that delivers a powerful electric current.
It's hooked up to her genitals,
biologically his genitals. So Michelle has her cock and balls cooked up for a few days. Holy shit.
Finally Robert Wagner has strangled Michelle before she was forced to stand.
And then a rope was then tied around her neck attached to an overhead beam.
Jamie later said about John's reaction to her death.
He was laughing his head off about how he murdered Michael when John Bunting said to Michael to stand up.
Michael stood up until basically he couldn't and then he you know gets hanged.
That was a big joke to John. The fact that he, Michael, tried to stand up but fell down and died.
Some joke. Michelle's body now stored in a barrel in John's shed for months.
They had to cut off one of her feet to fit her in.
The next murder will occur just a month later.
Barry Lane, aka Vanessa Lane, is finally murdered by John Bunty, Robert Wagner, and Barry's
new boyfriend, Thomas Trevillion, October 17, 1997.
Before he died, Barry told his mom Sylvia Lane that he had helped dispose of Clinton
Trezise's body in 1992.
She had told him to go to the police if that was true, but he didn't.
December of 1996, Berry had met a woman named Michelle Behette at a Salvation Army meeting.
Great, another Michelle.
Not confusing at all.
Within a month, Pito Bear and Michelle were talking about getting married.
Also, he had started to become physically abusive towards her. The local welfare department was concerned about their relationship
because Michelle had three minor sons and Barry was a convicted pedophile. He was legally required
to have supervision during visits but that didn't always happen. For fuck's sake Michelle, why are
you letting a convicted pedophile near your boys? Let alone thinking of marrying this guy. Also he
is gay. Barry
was still living with Thomas Trevillion while seeing Michelle and still
fucking him. The dark twisted soap opera continues when Barry didn't show up
for a scheduled visit with Michelle and her kids one day. Thomas calls Michelle,
tells her that he and Barry have went to Clara, South Australia, a little town of
just over 3,000 people, about a 90-minute drive north of Adelaide, and that they
didn't know when they'd be back.
Barry also called, told her he loved her, asked Michelle to collect his mail and feed his
dogs.
But when she went over to the house and saw that his car was gone, she noticed that the
back door had been forced open and that the air conditioner had been stolen.
She wondered if Barry had gone to Claire voluntarily.
Barry last spoke to his mom Sylvia Lane October 17, 1997, called her in the middle of the
night, spoke calmly at first, then began shouting verbal abuse, saying she was not his mom,
he didn't want shit to do with her, told her he was moving to Queensland to go fuck herself
and then the phone goes dead.
During the call Sylvia heard someone in the background that sounded a lot like Thomas
Trevillion, his boyfriend.
After the call Barry Lane is tortured more than he had already been tortured and then murdered. According to author Debbie Marshall, a
big bandage was put across his mouth as a gag, tape was wound around
his head and mouth as well, then his toes were crushed one by one with a pair of
pliers. While torturing him, John demanded that Peto Bear give over his bank cards
and PIN numbers, forced him to call his mom, tell demanded that Peto Bear give over his bank cards and PIN numbers,
forced him to call his mom, tell her that he was moving.
Thomas Trevillion was ordered to join in, but he hesitated, and Robert Wagner now strangles
his ex-boyfriend to death.
They then wrapped Barry's dead body up in tape, put him in a garbage bag, and rolled
him into some carpet.
Michelle reported Barry missing October 27, 1997.
John now told others that Barry had gone on a long holiday.
Barry's boyfriend and one of the people present at his murder Thomas Trevelyan
will now be the next to die. Another person involved in some of the murders
becomes the next murder victim. After Barry disappeared Trevelyan stayed with Maxine Cole
and Robert Wagner for several weeks. Then on November 4th, 1997, Maxine Cole's son was playing with a dog when Thomas tried to kill the dog with a knife in front of the kid.
Dogs having a rough episode. That afternoon, John Bunting told others that Thomas was starting to
go mental and was becoming a liability. Later that same day, Thomas got into the car with John and
Robert to go, in theory, for a country drive, but then they returned without him. John told Maxine that Thomas had gone to Goller, a small city just north of Adelaide. Maxine didn't ask
any more questions. What really happened was that John and Robert drove Thomas out to Kersbrook,
town about 22 miles from Adelaide and just 13 miles from Goller. There they prodded Thomas with
a sharp stick, forced him to walk to an embankment. They stood him on a crate, tied a rope to his neck, which was then tied to the embankment.
While they were doing that, I guess an elderly couple driving by saw John's vehicle,
looked down the embankment to ask if they needed help. They could only see John and Robert.
John said they were fine. The couple moves on. Once the couple leave, John and Robert kick the
crate out from underneath Thomas and John leaves a few dollars in his pocket to trick the police into thinking it was a
suicide. A truck driver will later find his body. Robert appeared to be shocked
when the police called and told him what had happened. Maxine not sure what to
think. A week before he died Thomas had told his cousin Lenore Penner that he
had helped two other people kill Barry Lane, dispose of his body and access his
account with a social security pin.
He said they were sharing the money and trying to make it seem like Barry was still alive.
Also said he believed these men that he'd helped kill Barry with were out to get him.
Lenore assumed that Thomas was having a psychotic episode due to his paranoid schizophrenia.
But when he turned up dead, she called the police in October of 1997 and they took her
statement.
But a detective reassured her that they believe Barry was alive and well in Queensland. Not sure why the officer
believed that. When Thomas's body was found, a pathologist determined that his death was not
suspicious and declared it a suicide. His diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia made that determination
easier. And speaking of paranoid schizophrenia, 29-year-old Gavin Allen Porter, a friend of Jamie Vlasakis,
had also been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had spent several years in mental institutions.
After his mom had died in 1997, he moved from Victoria to Adelaide.
There he met Vlasakis, moved in, and the two took up shooting heroin together.
A little while later, in late 1997, Porter moved with John Bunting, Elizabeth Harvey and her kids and Jamie Lasoccas out to Murray Bridge and one
day in late 1997 Bunting was pricked by a used heroin needle that Porter had
left lying on the living room couch. So he decided that Porter needed to die.
Some sources say he stepped on the needle in the bathroom. Either way John
Bunting says that Porter is a waste, A dead giveaway that his days are numbered.
Yeah, a giveaway.
Yeah, a giveaway.
My neighbor got big testicles because we see this door every day.
Every day!
Uh, shortly after this incident, Porter was sleeping in his parked car on the property
when this decision was made and he was now attacked by Bunting and Wagner.
He manages to stab Bunting in the hand with a screwdriver
before he's overpowered, dragged out of the car with a rope.
Elizabeth is sitting in her kitchen during this attack,
later claims she didn't see or hear anything.
That is bullshit.
John strangles Gavin to death in his shed,
then he shows Jamie his friend's body when he comes home,
also shows him the barrel that contained the bodies of Barry Lane and Michelle Gardner.
Gavin's body will now not be found for almost two more years, not until May 20, 1999.
Jamie will later testify, John pointed to me and said, that's Barry's arse.
And it is ugly, all shriveled, and the stench is disgusting.
The shed reeked of the smell, it was horrible. I went outside and spewed my guts up.
Jamie and Robert now drove Gavin's car to Robert's home. Two days later, John
asked Jamie to go to his car, bring a new barrel to the shed, put Gavin's body in
it, and the barrel was transferred to Wagner's house. John gave Jamie access to
his friends social security benefits now. Jesus. Jamie is tasked with watching over
Gavin's barrel. When explaining why Gavin needed to be killed, John told Jamie he
needed to go to the clinic just like the others. They are the disease. We are the cure.
Okay, John would not allow anyone into his shed except for Jamie and Robert at this point.
Elizabeth Harvey will later become defensive when asked why she didn't question him about the shed saying,
Why would I question him if he wants to keep the shed locked? It's his business.
I was on medication and everything was too big and if I started asking questions Well, then John made sure chaos was always around
People crashing into my social security file letters in the mail Jamie getting broken into things missing out of the house wheels coming off my car
Looking back. It was all John. He staged manage all of it
But also Elizabeth you made it easy for him not to get caught in
July of 1998, Australia's Most
Wanted features a story about the skeleton found at lower light back in 1994.
John was watching TV with Elizabeth and Jamie when it came on
and he told them that's my handiwork. But she doesn't know what's going on.
Home life was tense for John at this point as Elizabeth's son Troy is not fond
of John. They disagreed on many topics but especially when it came to the LGBTQIA
plus community. Troy thought they had the right to live, you know, the lives they
wanted. John thought they should all die. This disagreement will not work out well
for Troy. Another dead giveaway? But before we get into that, let's meet Gail
Sinclair, another sad sack who will fall in
with this sorry lot and have their life upended.
May of 1998, Elizabeth Hayden's sister, Gail Sinclair, and her 17-year-old son, Fred Brooks,
are living with Mark and Elizabeth at their home in Smithfield Plains.
Days after moving in, Gail meets John Bunting and is smitten.
Gail is easily manipulated.
John of course likes that. However, he is smitten. Gale's easily manipulated. John of course likes that.
However, he is disgusted by Gale's obesity. Gale's son Fred doesn't like John because John is a dick
to his mom about her weight. Gale's son Fred Brooks, born March of 1991. He spent years in foster care
because his parents separated when he was a toddler and for years his mom had nothing to do with him,
but then he becomes Gale's primary caregiver due to her fragile mental health for fuck's sake. Fred as I said didn't care for John.
John also hated Fred because he was Elizabeth Hayden's nephew and John hated that Elizabeth.
Fred also recently had touched Jamie's leg in John's presence to steady himself when he's about to
fall. A very normal thing and in John's bats crazy mind, that made him a pedophile who needed to die.
He's trying to grab his dick or something.
Fred now tries to get away from this fucking crew by joining the Air Force cadets, but they won't take him.
Who knows why they rejected him? Maybe his bones were made out of balsa wood.
Maybe he only had half a spine or one leg was two feet shorter than the other one or his brain was actually just a
brain stem or he admitted to fucking dogs while high on meth who the fuck knows what these motley characters
Troy you'd Elizabeth's 21 year old son who disagreed with John Bunting about homosexuals deserving to die is
Killed by John and his murder crew between August 25th and September 8th 1998.. No one knows the exact date, according to author Debbie Marshall.
Jamie was just 18 years old when he now directly participated
in his first murder,
the torture and strangulation of his half-brother.
At the time of the murder,
Robert and Mark were visiting John and Murray Bridge.
Elizabeth Harvey and her younger kids
were away from the house.
John woke Jamie up in the middle of the night,
took him into Troy's room,
where Robert and Mark were waiting outside,
armed with jack handles. They gave Jamie the middle of the night, took him into Troy's room where Robert and Mark were waiting outside armed with jack handles.
They gave Jamie the leg of a piece of furniture.
Gave him like a couch, you know, chair leg, whatever.
And a pair of handcuffs.
Jamie thought Troy deserved to beat him because of the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his brother,
but later said he didn't think they were gonna kill him.
The four of them sneak into Troy's bedroom.
Troy is first hit on the head with one of those jack handles. He cries out to Jamie as he is beaten.
You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?
Jamie hits Troy. John handcuffs him. Troy is forced into the bathroom, forced to
speak phrases into a voice recorder. Troy was forced to say 20 different phrases
including, leave me the fuck alone. I've had enough. I've had enough. Mom, I can't
handle it in this house no more.
It's all around me.
I'm going to see the earth before there's none left.
Wish me luck."
That's a weird phrase.
John punched Troy in the testicles repeatedly
in the bathtub, forcing him to call the members
of the group Lord Sir, God, Chief Inspector, and Master.
His toes were crushed one by one with a pair of pliers,
strangled for a while with some rope by Robert Wagner.
During the struggle, Jamie accidentally broke Robert's hand by hitting him with a club.
After all this, Troy's still not dead. Jamie wanted it to end, so he tightened the rope, started to finish him off,
but then he's interrupted mid-murder when some of Troy's friends stop by and ask about him.
While Jamie is talking to Troy's friends, Troy dies in the tub from his injuries.
The men now have to dispose of his body before Elizabeth gets home.
Mark and Jamie drive to a store to buy gloves and trash bags.
Troy's body put in a John's shed, kept there for two days until Robert and Mark
purchase another barrel, according to Jamie's later testimony.
Bunting and Wagner started cutting up Troy. They chopped off his legs and that.
Robert cut off all the muscles and all that. So it was down to the bone and threw
that into the other barrel. My god. John asked Jamie what he thought about his
first murder. Jamie said he enjoyed it. But in reality he said later I kept the
lie going for him because you know I thought well if he could do that to my
brother he could do it to me. Afterwards they used Troy's cards to
withdraw his Social security benefits.
When Elizabeth comes home, John tells her that Troy had been picked up by the cops
after getting into a fight.
In order to de-stress, Elizabeth now takes a bath in the same tub
where her son has just been murdered and dismembered.
She didn't understand why Troy hadn't contacted her after a few days,
but John and Jamie reassure her that they just ran into him.
They said Troy had a job, a new relationship, he's doing great. And Elizabeth, because she's Elizabeth, just
accepts that. John and Elizabeth now move a few houses down the street after this murder.
John felt it was too risky to leave the barrels in the shed so Mark Hayden now takes custody of
these barrels. Now let's reconnect with Fred Brooks, right? Gail Sinclair's son, who is another victim.
Gail said she last saw Fred September 17th, 1998.
He said he was going out to a party, but he never made it there.
Fred was in front of the house talking to John, Robert and Mark before he left.
Suspicious. About 50 minutes later, the three men told Gail they would be away
for a few days doing a job and they tricked Fred into joining them under the
pretense of breaking into a computer warehouse.
Instead, he's taken to John's home out Murray Bridge and John has Jamie come out to meet them. John asked Jamie to help him move some
goodies. Jamie assumed he meant stolen goods but he was horrified to find it was Fred Brooks instead.
Jamie put a set of hand and thumb cuffs on his wrists encouraged Fred to do the same.
Made it seem like they were just playing a weird game and before Fred knew it he had handcuffed
himself and was fucked and Jamie was free.
And now he was forced into John's bathtub.
There his clothes are removed.
He is forced to listen to the recordings of Troy
you'd been previously tortured and killed.
How fucking scary is that?
To be tied up in a bathroom surrounded
by several crazy maniacs.
These dudes, one of whom was playing a recording
of somebody they've already tortured and killed.
That's horror movie shit.
Brooks is punched in the groin repeatedly by John. John loved to push his fists into people's balls.
John gay? I wonder. Is that where some of his weird anger comes from about homosexuals?
Brooks is also forced to repeat phrases into the recorder. Brooks is forced to say he didn't want to see his mom again, he's moving to Perth, that kind of thing.
Also, Byrne was a cigarette lighter and a machine used to induce electric shocks is attached to his balls and an alligator clip
After he refuses to admit he molested some young girl
Even worse and this is fucking bad of all the bad things said in this episode. This is the one that made me cringe the most
The guys light a sparkler up and they jam the sparkler into his dick. Oh my god.
Which means that somebody else was holding his dick still.
Probably John.
John's at least bisexual, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
After that first sparkler is done burning, they pull it out of Fred's dick.
Can't imagine that pain.
Light another one and jam that one in the penis as well.
They also put some cigarettes out on his arm,
shove other cigarettes up his nose, puts them out on his forehead, shove them in his ears.
His toes are crushed one by one with pliers again. Right? Fucking ball shocks some more.
Beaten with the jack handle. He falls in and out of consciousness until he dies.
All of that because he touched Jamie's leg in John's presence to steady himself when he was falling.
All because John just didn't like him.
His body is put in garbage bags, stored in the trunk of a car until Mark tows it away.
Gail will report her son missing the next night.
A few days later, John and Mark tell Gail that they saw Fred, who was, quote,
off his face and aggro, right? He's drunk and out of control, and they gave him $5 to call home, but I guess he didn't.
But then he does call, but then Gail does call her son's mobile phone and
you know quote-unquote he answers, she hears some recordings, his voice sounds
off to her he says I don't know why you're fucking ringing me fuck off and
leave me the fuck alone. Days later Elizabeth Hayden also receives an
abusive call from Fred, they're playing again those messages, she's at least
relieved he's alive in her mind, She calls the police. Now they put
a note no longer active on his missing persons case file. Shit. Fred had been
receiving a youth training allowance from the government but John wanted more
money than that. He knew they could get a homeless rate allowance that was higher.
So Jamie now begins to impersonate Fred, shown up to appointments at the local
Centerleek office.
They also were able to arrange for his benefits to be redirected from the joint account he shared with Gail Sinclair into Gavin Porter's bank account.
These killings, all organized by John Bunting, continue to escalate through late 1998.
The next victim is John's poor neighbor, 29-year-old Gary Dwyer or Gary O'Dwyer.
O'Dwyer was mentally disabled.
John repeatedly called him gay slurs.
I don't even think he was gay.
May have been, who cares?
Gary O'Dwyer, born in 1969.
He was underweight, suffered from severe epilepsy.
He was adopted by a couple who could not have kids of their own.
Starting at the age of 15, though, he's homeless.
He's wandering around Adelaide, drinking,
using drugs, committing petty crimes, and then eventually lands some state housing.
Christmas Day 1994, Gary sustained serious brain damage after he was left to die in a
hit and run.
My God, the amount of sadness in this episode.
1998, he was living a few doors down from John Bonte to Murray Bridge.
John wanted to murder Gary by the end of October 1998.
Yeah, tasked Jamie with finding out whether Gary was on a pension or not, whether he had
any pending court cases.
Jamie was instructed to tell Gary they wanted to stop by his place for a drink.
And then when they do, John, Robert, and Jamie, they show up and attack him.
Robert hooks Gary around the neck, throws him onto a mattress in the kitchen floor.
Gary is stunned, asking what he did wrong.
He goes into convulsions before he's even tortured.
Then he is tortured with that electric shock machine attached to his fucking balls in his
stomach.
Toes again crushed with that damn pair of pliers.
These sick fucks clearly really enjoying repeating these torture methods.
Or at least John the ringleader is enjoying it.
Jamie punches Gary
repeatedly, later testifies. All these murders and stuff. I just could not handle it anymore.
I did it to reassure John that I was still playing, still doing what he was doing. I was
still with him that way. That I wasn't a threat to him. To reassure that he wouldn't murder me.
While Gary was still alive, Jamie left the house to go to a party.
Fucking what? Yeah sure, why not? go have some beers, yuck it up.
Directly after watching a guy get his toes crushed with pliers, his nuts
shocked electricity, punched into a bloody mess.
John and Robert stay behind.
They force Gary's they like to do to repeat phrases into that tape recorder.
Gary said stuff like I'm Gary O'Dwyer.
I'm a pedophile.
Now I'm finally really happy I've had treatment.
Bunting spoke into the recorder and asked him, do you like the treatment you got? No, O'Dwyer said. Bunting asked, Does it hurt?
O'Dwyer responded, Yes, it hurts a lot. Bunting asked, Are you ever going to
fuck another little boy or girl? You know you'll get hurt, don't you?
O'Dwyer answered, No, I'm not. I know I will get hurt if I hurt someone else.
But again, this poor bastard, I don't think he was a pedophile. I don't think he had hurt any kids. They just wanted his money. After Gary died from his torture
session, his body is taken to Mark Hayden's home and put into a barrel. Now let's backtrack.
Discuss the investigation into these murders a bit. By this point, the police are starting to
suspect that something's going on amongst Robert Joe Wagner and his associates. In November of 1997,
detectives began investigating the disappearance of Barry Lane. It had been four months since they
did a routine review of missing persons cases in the area, including the
disappearance of Clinton Tresize. Robert Wagner was under suspicion in Clinton's
case because Clinton previously lived with Barry Lane. Now Robert is coming up
again in connection to Barry's disappearance. Missing persons submitted a
request to access Barry's banking records and learned that money
was being taken out of his account.
They set up video surveillance at an ATM in July of 1998 and see Robert making withdrawals
from that account.
Robert is now followed by a surveillance team for the next six months.
Then four months after the surveillance begins, Mark's wife Elizabeth Hayden, she turns up
missing.
A dead giveaway? That she's dead? Maybe. 37-year-old Elizabeth Hayden
murdered November 21, 1998. Shortly before she was killed, Mark confessed to John
that he told Elizabeth about the body at Lower Light. John then told Jamie
that this Elizabeth had become a problem. And that was her dead giveaway moment. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway.
My name about big testicles cause we see this door every day.
Every day. We eat ribs. Robert Wagner agreed. She's a problem.
He said he considered Elizabeth to be a whore and a lowlife.
On November 21st, 1998, John and Robert sneak into Elizabeth's home
when Mark and the kids are gone for the night
now these fucking pedo hunters are killing one of their
task force members wife
They drag Elizabeth into their bathroom where they torture and killer
Elizabeth pled for her life as John and Robert restrained her forced her into the tub bunting forced her again to speak into the tape recorder
She is strangled to death after being tortured
Elizabeth's body was put into some trash bags dragged into a pit under the garage of her home, and her remains would have
to be moved again later. John wrote a journal entry, so he wouldn't forget any of the details
about this, and part of it read, the routine of confession that has to be got through,
that has to be got through. The groveling on the floor and the screaming for mercy,
the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair. My god.
Mark of course found out what happened and helped cover up the disappearance.
Neighbor later reported that there had been a terrible row between Mark and
Elizabeth in November of 1998 because Elizabeth disliked how Mark was
showing romantic attention to her sister Gail. Elizabeth's friend
Sharon Ball called her four days after she went missing. She said that Elizabeth
or a recording of Elizabeth told her leave me alone I'm alright. The line then
went dead. Sharon tried again this time what was likely recording called her a
dirty fucking slut. Sharon called a third time now heard a man's voice say um
and then the call abruptly ended. When Sharon called Gail, she learned that Elizabeth had been drinking, was dressed to
go out the night she was last seen, and Gail didn't know where her sister went.
Mark continued to collect Elizabeth's welfare checks, did not report her as missing.
Elizabeth's brother, Gary and Sinclair, last saw her when she dropped off her two sons
for babysitting.
She said that she and Mark were going to a restaurant.
Well, after a few days of her not being heard from,
Garian knows something's wrong when Elizabeth has not contacted her kids,
which was not like her. At first Mark told Garian that Elizabeth
was sleeping. Hours later he had a different story. He said Elizabeth came home drunk,
packed up, and left with some other guy. And while Mark refused to report her
missing, Garian does. And on November 25th, 1998, Detective Greg Stone
sees the missing person report filed by Garian. He thinks it's strange that her
husband wasn't the one to file the report. So Detective Stone calls Mark, asks if
he and Gale can come to the station. In his statement at the station, Mark writes
that Elizabeth made a pass at his friend John Bunting that wasn't well received,
which his friend Robert Wagner witnessed.
Gale's story is the same.
This statement links Robert Wagner to three missing persons cases now.
Three days later, when John shows up for his meeting with the detective, he tells the same
story.
As the heat on them is now turning up, the four murderous conspirators know they needed
to move the barrels somewhere else.
They put them in a Toyota Land Cruiser parked at Mark's house. The vehicle unregistered. They didn't want to attract attention so they
decided to tow it on a trailer attached to Robert's car. They began moving the barrels
at midnight, asked Gale to be their lookout. Gale will later recall, I thought they might
have stolen property or something. They had stuff they had to move, right? And they took
some stuff out of the manhole in this house and they wrapped stuff in a whole heap of old blankets and put that into the Land
Cruiser. Well the Cruiser could only fit four barrels so the fifth was stored in a car at the
Murray Bridge home until it could be moved later. John asked his friend Darren Freeman to store the
Land Cruiser in barrels at his property in Hoylton, two hours north of Adelaide now,
and the barrels will stay there from November of 1998 to January of 1999,
in the heat of the Australian summer.
Freeman's partner Angela complained about the terrible stench. She demanded to know what the fuck was in the barrels.
Was told they contained kangaroo carcasses.
She wanted the barrels gone, but John said it was too risky because kangaroos, they were shot with an illegal weapon that belonged to Mark.
Five days after Elizabeth's missing person report was filed, the police obtained a warrant
and searched Mark Hayden's house in Smithfield Plains.
They didn't see anything unusual but noticed a foul odor.
Police would later believe that if they had acted sooner, they would have found six plastic
barrels containing bodies of six men and a freshly dismembered body of Elizabeth which
were stored on Mark's property before they were moved. Okay, December of 1998, and January 1999, investigators still searching for Elizabeth Hayden.
They now believe foul play was involved because her documents, purse, bank card, rings were found.
Mark said he didn't know why she would leave all that behind. In early January 1999, detectives
back at Mark's home in Smithfield Plains, they went
into Mark's back shed, found a big open pit which he said was used to work under cars.
It definitely wasn't a big murder hole that he and John had dug.
They didn't do that.
They don't dig murder holes.
Detectives noticed immediately that the smell was horrific and the detectives felt sure
a body had recently been there.
There was maggot casings in the pit which indicated they'd been feeding on something.
Investigators were back on January 13th after a Navy reporter that she saw a man loading bags into a Land Cruiser, which had since disappeared.
Investigators now sprayed luminol in the laundry room of Mark's house found blood.
Mark and Gail Sinclair said it was used as a dog-whelping room and that the couple and that could explain the blood. For a bunch of idiots I'm surprised they're able to
make up these plausible lies and still haven't got. Also kind of surprised they
didn't say which is like a dog raping room. That's where we are. That's where we
rape the dogs there. That's the sometimes gets a little bloody. Also in
January of 1999 John's friends Darren Freeman and Angela moved to Snowtown,
you know, about 45 kilometers, a little over 20 miles from Hoylton.
Finally, we have made it to Snowtown in the Snowtown murder suck.
Angela is angry when the Land Cruiser is towed to their property.
Snowtown, again, located in the mid-north region of South Australia, about 90 miles north of Adelaide.
The town is settled by non-indigenous Australians, was settled in the mid 19th century and developed around a railway station. It is
part of South Australia's so-called wheat belt economy mostly based on agriculture, livestock,
and salt mining and again there's now that windfall farm I mentioned. Fun fact, it has literally never
snowed once in Snowtown. The governor of South Australia named the town after his secretary Thomas Snow back in 1878.
Okay, Mark and John approached Rosemary Michael
to ask about renting the former state bank building
she and her husband owned in Snowtown.
John said he wanted to use it to store equipment
for repairing cars and motorcycles.
Asked if it would be okay to store drums of acid
inside the vault,
because you need a lot of acid
to work on these motorcycles. A rental agreement was signed by John Bontine and
Mark Lawrence which is Hayden's real surname. The Snowtown branch, the state
bank closed in 1995. The bank was used as a craft shop for a little while
afterwards but that business failed and it was sitting unoccupied. Meanwhile John
and Jamie are still trying to get victim Fred Brooks benefits as well as all of their other security schemes had now dried up.
Social Security schemes.
Jamie appeared for a medical appointment, convinced the doctor he was Fred Brooks, said
he could not fill out his forms due to schizophrenia, was permitted to file his forms every three
months.
Okay, Jamie then opened a bank account in Fred's name. Again for a bunch of idiots. They're not complete idiots when it comes to crime.
Jamie leaves John to live on his own in late December of 1998. But then in March of 1999,
he's arrested for riding an unregistered motorcycle and non-payment of fines.
After his arrest, he's living back with John again. February of 1999, investigators were given
permission to monitor phone calls between Bunting, Wagner, and Hayden.
They would record more than 5800 hours of conversations.
God, these guys talk a lot.
I'm sure they heard a lot of riveting, high-brow intellectual stuff.
You have a, you have a fuck a dog, like a, like a very small dog?
How would you recommend holding a small dog to go about fucking that compared to like a labored dog?
Just hours of like fucking stupid horrible conversations. Additional surveillance operations were conducted 25 times from February to May of 1999.
Crew's final victim will be killed that last month, May 9th, 1999.
24 year old David Johnson, Jamie's stepbrother.
My god. David Johnson, Jamie's stepbrother. My God, I just lost a half brother and a stepbrother.
Now, John Bunting disliked David because he felt like he cared too much about his appearance.
And that obviously made him gay, which made him a pedophile.
Seriously, that was his reasoning.
That was his death sentence dead giveaway.
The bar keeps getting lower when it comes to who qualifies for getting murdered
Every day Every day there's something crazy going on in the story
John Bunting talked about getting David and suggested that Jamie find a way to bring him to the bank in Snowtown on
Mother's Day 1999 Jamie drives David to Snowtown under the guise of helping him purchase a secondhand computer
Before David's killed the police listened disturbing phone that indicated the group was planning to kill him.
But they didn't know where or when so they were not able to save him. On the night of the murder, the police intercepted a call at 6 40 p.m.
Where are you? asked Robert Wagner. Jamie answered, I'm just at my mom's house now taking the car home. Then we're leaving.
Right, so you've got Pusshead with you? Yeah, he's just behind me.
16 minutes later, Jamie received another call from John who said, this is the voice of happiness.
Jamie said they were on their way up to the bank and John said, just walk
straight in. Later that night at 10 40 p.m. John asked Jamie over the phone,
how is it? Jamie answered, um, not authorized, canceled. John said, oh, in other words,
there's no money. They were discussing
how Jamie attempted to access David's account after he was dead but found it
empty. Let's now discuss how David died. Poor bastard. According to Jamie David
thanked him for bringing him to Snowtown. Bunting and Wagner ushered him into the
manager's office of the old bank to look at this computer
supposedly. But then David is grabbed from behind and handcuffed. John tells
David he can go home once he hands over his wallet and pin number.
David is then forced to speak into a microphone attached to a computer and
say some names, numbers, and words, which John will then manipulate with
some kind of Sound Forge computer program. Once David's jeans and
shirt are removed, tape is put over his mouth and he's kicked in the genitals
repeatedly. He is then forced to listen to what
John is now calling his voices of death. This is this compilation of the previous recordings
of victims being tortured and murdered. Jamie leaves during the attack to go to the bank to see
if David had given the correct PIN number. David is dead when he returned with his belt wrapped
around his neck. All because John felt he dressed in kind of a gay way, but really because John just
wanted his money.
Which he didn't even have.
David's body then dismembered and shoved into a barrel in the vault.
During the dismemberment, Darren Freeman arrived at his home in Snowtown,
found a note on his door asking him to call Wagner.
John answered the phone. Freeman was feeling curious and used his key to enter the bank.
Jamie and Robert walked out wearing gloves and overalls,
and Darren felt like he had just walked in on something.
After it was over the men went to Freeman's home to shower and at some point that night Bunting and Wagner fried and ate a piece of David's flesh.
Yeah, why not? Want to throw some cannibalism into the shit show of an episode.
Jamie and Robert then spread a story that David ran away with a 13 year old girl
he was molesting even though they also said he was gay and he was now hiding from the police. John and Jamie then filed a form
to claim David's Social Security benefits and they sold his car to Gail
Sinclair. Gail told David's father Marcus Johnson that David had asked us to
collect his belongings when she was caught going through his
things. At the time of his death David was engaged to a woman named Linda
Corvuscus. Linda was upset to a woman named Linda Kourvaskis.
Linda was upset to hear
that he had gotten another girl pregnant.
He didn't, just another lie, the crew said about David.
But she warned Robert and Jamie
that if she didn't hear from him soon,
she was gonna call the police.
Linda then receives a call from dead David
using John's voice manipulation software,
and they had Gail pretend to be David's new girlfriend.
God, how are they so fucking dumb and smart at the same time? May 20th 1999 the remains of eight
victims are finally found in six plastic barrels inside the Snowtown bank vault.
Earlier that day John had called Adelaide Auto Records about a spare part for a
car, a turbo XA, some type of car David Johnson drove. The police were still looking for
the Land Cruiser that had disappeared from Mark's property and Darren Freeman agreed
to speak to the police about the vehicle on his property believed to be connected
to the disappearance of Elizabeth Hayden. He explained that John and Robert brought
it because it smelled bad. Also mentioned some black barrels which were moved into
a bank. That led the police to heading in the Snowtown Bank making a horrifying
discovery. The smell inside the vault was so led the police to heading in the Snowtown Bank, making a horrifying discovery.
The smell inside the vault was so bad the police needed breathing gear to continue with their
investigation. Inside the barrels investigators found the bodies of Michelle aka Michael Gardner,
Barry aka Vanessa Lane, Gavin Porter, Troy Ude, Fred Brooks, Gary O'Dwyer, and Elizabeth Hayden
and David Johnson. Before the bodies were identified, the police counted 15 feet, concluded,
because they're pretty good at math, but that must mean there's eight people.
One foot's missing. Also inside the vault, the police discovered knives, handcuffs,
clothing, rubber gloves, and a machine that administered those electric shocks.
John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and Mark Hayden are arrested the next day, May 21, 1999.
They made a brief appearance in court and were initially charged with the murder of
a person unknown between August 1, 1993 and May 20, 1999.
That same day, Jamie visited his friend Wally Fitzgerald, told him everything, including
where additional bodies were buried in John's backyard.
Fitzgerald then called Crimestoppers the next day, March 22.
Good man.
Before he called, the police spoke to Jamie on May 21st.
He was not a suspect at the time.
Within 24 hours, Jamie spoke to a lawyer who then called the police and informed them his
client had info about bodies at Snowtown.
Elizabeth Harvey was interviewed immediately after John was arrested, admitted she had
not seen her son Troy for eight months.
She denied knowing anything about the murders and could
not explain why she had a letter addressed to Suzanne Allen in her handbag. Elizabeth
changed her mind while driving home, went back to the station, told the police now that
John found Suzanne dead in her tub when he and Wagner went to rob her, and that John
and some other shitheads buried her so that they would not be arrested for robbery and
that she had been impersonating Suzanne to get benefits for the next 12 months.
Elizabeth is now charged with fraud but allowed to return home. The remains of
47-year-old Suzanne Allen are now found at John Bunting's home on Waterloo
Corner Road May 23rd 1999. Using ground penetrating radar, investigators
discovered human remains buried in that giant backyard hole of John's. Suzanne's
dismembered remains wrapped up in 11 different trash bags. Investigators discovered human remains buried in that giant backyard hole of John's, Suzanne's dismembered remains wrapped up in 11 different trash bags.
Investigators related determined that Bunting and Elizabeth Harvey stole $17,000 of pensions
meant for Suzanne.
Elizabeth and Jamie now decide they have to talk to Marcus Johnson.
Elizabeth tells him we believe that David is up there, pointing towards the sky.
Jamie agreed with her and added, I'm sorry, Marcus,
because David was Marcus' son. Elizabeth told Marcus that Troy's body was also in the barrels.
Jamie even showed Marcus the bank cards that belonged to David and other victims.
Elizabeth was still having a hard time accepting everything and asked Jamie if it was all true,
and he tells her, sorry, Mom, it's true. Elizabeth and Marcus now go to a pub,
where she decides she's going to call the police
to tell them about her son Troy Ude. And then Jamie is arrested and taken in for questioning.
His lawyer lands a deal for him. He's going to share info from Elizabeth about the location of
two more bodies in return for assurance that Jamie's statements could not be used against his mom.
Jamie's six-day long interview, holy shit, will start May 24th, 1999 He was told that immunity could be on the table if he cooperated
But then his request for immunity will be denied ten months later
While at the station Jamie attempted to kill himself by overdose on heroin, but is revived
In a call to his mom Jamie said if I go to jail, I will do myself in I don't care
It's hard enough sleeping at night now without sleeping in a 4x4 cell. After tomorrow, I might be in jail. I might have to put John in for everything.
Then I might have to say he did a couple of others, you know, unfound bodies that were found and stuff.
On May 26 1999, the police used ground penetrating radar and discovered skeletal remains in the hole in John's backyard.
It was the body of the missing dog fucking pitot shitstain Ray Davies,
killed Christmas Day 1995. Second body buried directly underneath Suzanne Allen's body.
June 2, 1999, Jamie Vlasakis is arrested and charged with the murder of David Johnson the next day. At the hearing, the judge agrees to lift the suppression of Jamie's name, location of the
offense, and the date. Jamie starts the second round of interviews that will end in the Australian Spring. His final statement will be almost 2,000 pages long.
The names of most of the victims are released to the public June 11, 1999. Almost five years later,
the public learned that the body of Clinton had been found in lower light. On July 2, John Bunting,
Robert Joe Wagner, and Mark Hayden jointly
charged with 10 murders. They were accused of killing Clinton Trisice,
Trisice, sorry his name is just a little tricky for me, Suzanne Allen, Barry Lane,
Michael Gardner, Troy Eude, Gavin Porter, Gary O'Dwyer, Elizabeth Hayden, Frederick
Brooks, and David Johnson, who was not yet officially identified. This was the
beginning of a lengthy and expensive legal process.
At the end of April 2000, Jamie is charged with four more murders.
The committal stage will start December 11, 2000 in Australia before a serious criminal
matter is transferred to a higher court.
It goes to what's called a committal process in the local court.
And during that stage, police will send attorneys and the accused the evidence that they've
gathered in their investigation called a brief.
A pathologist who conducted four autopsies was one of the first witnesses.
Pathologist Dr. John Gilbert told the court that the putrefied state of the four bodies
made identifying the cause and date of death difficult.
The cause of death could only be identified in five cases.
Gilbert described the dismemberment as crude and said it occurred after death.
Chief forensic pathologist Ross James conducted five autopsies, and he testified that Elizabeth
Hayden was eight weeks pregnant when she was killed.
Damn.
The skin of several victims was blackened in places from electrical and fire burns,
he testified as well.
Court heard that John Bunting forced some of the victims to make statements from a prepared
script so he could record them, replay the tapes later to trick relatives into thinking they were still
alive. Police also found a notebook that contained a script that some of the victims were forced to
say into the recorder. The script was in Bunting's handwriting, but all four of the accused fingerprints
were on it. Phrases said by David Johnson were recorded on a computer and those same phrases
were found in the notebook. A recording of Elizabeth Hayden was found in the ceiling of Bunting's home after he was arrested.
The prosecution did not describe a specific motive but said there was evidence of financial fraud.
8 out of the 10 victims' bank accounts had been accessed after they died.
After victims died, they accused access their social security benefits by falsely assuming
their identities. Gail Sinclair now going by the name of Jodie Elliott,
why do so many characters have to keep fucking changing their names in the story?
Also a witness in the committal hearings.
She was offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony.
Gail admitted to trying to obtain payments on behalf of Suzanne Allen.
She said John asked her to call social security and pretend to be Suzanne so she could tell them
she was no longer missing.
Gail tried calling, but was told she had to come to the office and she refused to do that.
Gail and John also tried to rent a house in Suzanne's name, but that deal fell through.
Robert's girlfriend Maxine Cole testified that Gavin Porter's car was registered in her name after he disappeared.
She testified that John and his friends liked to brag about how they destroyed others' property
and John disliked multiple people,
including Michael Gardner, David Johnson, and Troy Ude.
Maxine also spoke about a so-called hit list,
which Jamie told her about
after Robert, Mark, and John were arrested.
Jamie's stepfather, Marcus Johnson, was on that hit list,
as well as Mark Hayden.
John would have killed his whole fucking group of friends
if he had enough time to do so.
Elizabeth Harvey died from cancer February 6, 2001, which was a huge blow to the prosecution
because she did not testify at the committal hearing. Before she died though, she spoke to a journalist said she never figured out why John killed so many people,
but perhaps he did it just because he could do it. At one point, Jamie and John were put in the same prison.
That must have been fun.
When Jamie asked John, his adoptive father figure basically, if he was going to kill him John replied,
I can't believe you'd fucking ask me that question because you know I do anything to get out of here.
So I guess that meant he would have killed him if he thought that would help him walk free. John finally being truthful here.
February 19th 2001 the court hears from Raylene Brown, whose former fiance was friends
with John Bunting. She said that John talked about skinning people, putting salt in their wounds,
that kind of shit. Also discussed the way you could blow up houses and torture people and hurt
people. Which I guess is just more of the skinning stuff. Some of the stuff he said was about razor
blading people, skinning people. John's the one who said about putting stuff through the air
conditioning and getting rid of people that way. She didn't take him
seriously until the bodies were found. Man, so glad I don't have any friends who
come over to the house and brag about torturing and killing people. June 21st,
2001, court is back in session for Jamie's surprise arraignment. He pleads
guilty to the murders of Troy Ud, Fred Brooks, Gary O'Dwyer, and David Johnson
and ascends to life in prison for each count. The fifth murder charge against him for Gavin Porter was dropped.
July 4, 2001, Bunting, Hayden, and Wagner officially committed for trial. August 13, 2001,
the three defendants pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of murder before the South Australia
Supreme Court. Submissions for Jamie's sentencing delayed until October of 2001.
Two psychiatrists had determined that Bunting
was able to control Jamie
because of Jamie's wildly unstable,
highly abusive childhood.
He was diagnosed with both depression and PTSD.
One of the psychiatrists said about Jamie,
in my opinion, one of the many tragedies in this case
is that a vulnerable, immature, and dependent adolescent,
desperately seeking adult love, care, and concern,
fell under the influence of John Bunty.
Yeah, well said, actually.
Experts were of the opinion that Jamie could one day be reintegrated into society,
and in court Jamie said,
I hate myself for the fact I have done these degraded crimes.
I have to live with the pain and suffering I have caused to the victims,
families, and friends, and it sickens me to think
that I could even be involved in taking away precious lives from their loved
ones.
When I lie in bed at night, I think I don't know myself anymore.
In the mornings I wake up and think why.
And when I look in the mirror and look at my face I think, this is not me.
How did I end up in this position?
I could kill myself tomorrow, but then I think this would be the easy way out.
And then I realize the choices I have made are the ones that will affect my life forever.
Now is the time to face up to my mistakes and own up to my responsibilities.
I am so sorry for what I have done and I could never forgive myself.
I would like to say to the loved ones of the victims, I know that nothing I have said today
nor anything else would ever make up for the pain I have caused you.
I know the damage I have done to your lives and the suffering you will have to experience and I know you can never forgive me, but I
am sorry." And you know what? I mean, for an apology statement for crimes of serious
disease, that might be the best one I've ever heard. No passing the buck. No attempting
at garnering sympathy. I do feel bad for Jamie. Man, talk about being dealt a shit hand in
life. May 21st, 2002, John Bunting charged with two more murders, for the deaths of Clinton Trezise and
Thomas Trevillion. Mark Hayden also charged with the murder of Clinton Trezise, but his
murder charges overall reduced to three, including the murders of Elizabeth Hayden and Troy Udde.
The judge determined that Mark's trial would be separate from John and Robert's trials.
Jamie Vlasakis formally sentenced to life in prison with a non-parole period of 26 years, July 10, 2002.
The judge said that the most horrific murder Jamie participated in was the murder of 18-year-old Frederick Brooks.
He was subjected to electric shocks and his flesh was scorched with a cigarette lighter.
His right toe was crushed with a pair of pliers.
You said that you did not play a part in this torture, but you were present.
September 27, 2002.
Robert Wagner now pleads guilty to three counts of murder for the deaths of Barry Lane, Fred Brooks, and David Johnson.
John Bunting and Robert Joe Wagner's trial officially starts October 16, 2002.
Bunting will plead not guilty to a dozen counts of murder.
Wagner will plead not guilty to eight counts.
The defendants were also charged for stealing a total of $95,000 from the victims.
According to the guardians covered to the trial, investigators could not determine a
motive at first and thought the deaths were connected to a pedophile ring.
They then decided that the victims had been tortured to extract social security details.
Only later did they consider that the killings might be all but motiveless. The jury heard that the murders
were ritualistic and humiliating. Several were forced to confess to being pedophiles before they
were killed, even if they weren't. Prosecution portrayed John as the ringleader, because he was.
He killed people on a whim. He hated pedophiles, wanted to kill them as a form of vigilante
justice, but he also hated people who were gay, transgender, obese, had learning disabilities, or just annoyed him.
Jamie Vlasakis took the stand in February of 2003, would testify for a full 32 days. That's a lot.
Jamie would say about the motive,
They were a disease and we were the cure. They had to be gone to the clinic to be cured to make them good his accomplices referred
to murders as plain when they were talking about the murders it's like you
know when you go to a shop with a young kid and you know you buy them a toy and
the kid gets really excited it was like that he testified about
buntings tools of torture and mutilation that were found in the Snowtown Bank one
of those items was a variac machine
normally used for nickel plating.
And that's the machine that was emitting that strong electrical current.
After they went to that machine after they were starting off with a car battery, it seems.
According to Vlasakis, Bunting attached this machine to victim Fred Brooks,
asked him to rate his pain on a scale of 1 to 10 after he was shocked.
After a few seconds, Brooks said the pain was a 10.
After being shocked again for longer, he said it was a 100.
I got.
Evidence was completed July 10th, 2003.
The defense's argument lasted less than two hours
because they had no defense.
September 8th, 2003, John Bunting found guilty
of 11 of the 12 counts of murder.
Robert Wagner convicted a seven counts of murder.
The four women informed the judge
they could not reach a verdict
on the murder of Suzanne Allen.
The judge sentenced them to 11 and 10 life sentences respectively.
He couldn't under Australian law sentence them to life without any possibility of parole,
but he didn't list in their sentencing when they could become eligible for parole.
So a little bit of a loophole there.
In total, the trial lasted for 11 months, 227 witnesses testified,
and the proceedings cost $15 million.
December 19, 2004, Mark is convicted of five counts of assisting offenders. The jury deadlocked on his participation in the murders of Troy Ud,
Elizabeth Hayden, and David Johnson. Senior prosecutor Wendy Abram indicated
she would seek a retrial on those charges. September 16, 2005, the prosecution agreed
to drop the murder charges if Mark would plead guilty to assisting with the disposal of two more bodies, and he does.
And he is then sentenced to 25 years in prison, eligible for parole after 18 years.
May 6, 2007, prosecutors formally dropped the final outstanding murder charge against
John Bunting and Robert Wagner regarding the death of Suzanne Allen.
Prosecutors said it would be not in the public's interest to go through with a retrial. In March of 2019, Robert Joe Wagner seeks a parole date that could enable him to be
released from prison.
Under South Australia law, a prisoner without any eligibility for parole can apply to set
a parole date.
The court can decline to give it though if the court believes it would be inappropriate
for reasons including the gravity of the offense.
And a judge told Wagner,
I cannot make an order that you are never to be released.
If I had the power to make an order that you are never to be released, I would unhesitatingly
make that order.
He's never getting out.
Wagner's application for a non-parole period formally denied May 9, 2019.
Part of the judgment said,
I firmly consider that the bodies in the Bery Barrels murders are the worst crimes ever to be detected
in South Australia.
The judge also noted that Wagner showed pleasure in inflicting pain and boasted and joked about
his involvement in some of the killings.
The applicant also personally dismembered several of the victims after death and treated
the bodies with an appalling lack of respect and dignity.
After the murders, the little burgh of Snowtown experienced an economic boost from some true
crime tourism, but it came at a cost.
Residents, as you can imagine, don't love that their town is mostly known for being
associated with the worst string of murders in South Australia history, especially because
only one of the murders actually occurred there.
At one point, the community considered changing their name to Rosedown, but never went through
with it.
Rob Van Der Veen and his partner Chris Black
purchased the bank building
where the final murder occurred in 2012.
The bank came with a four bed attached house
and the combination of the house and the bank
sold for $200,000.
Van Der Veen put a plaque above the bank vault
that reads,
in memory of those taken by evil, greed, and ignorance.
And he told The Guardian in 2024, the town is not a scary place.
It's nice and quiet.
We don't have peak hours like rush hour and we've got everything here.
He also said that tourists still visit every day, mostly because of the murders.
As of 2024, Snowtown is still a tiny little community with a population of just over 400.
There's a pub, a few shops in town,
and that's it. The bank is open on weekends and public holidays to sell random bric-a-brac.
And that is the quiet ending to this noisy fucking crazy story.
Good job soldier, you've made it back. Barely.
You made it back. Barely.
Man, what a wild mess of a tale. Before I share some final thoughts, how about one more sponsor?
A sponsor just really perfect for this particular episode.
Oi!
Today's Time Suck is brought to you by the Salisbury North Mayor's Office.
I'm Reggie Jones, Mayor of the District of Salisbury.
You can call me Elizabeth and you should move, right now, to Salisbury North.
Everyone's welcome here, and I truly mean everyone.
Sick of judgy neighbours calling the coppers for your root and your beagle?
Come to Salisbury North!
You'll be one of many beagle buggerers here.
Want to dig a massive hole in your yard but can't get the necessary permit?
Come to Salisbury North, we don't do permits, we just let you live.
Dig your hole, throw some ankle biters in there, doesn't matter.
You like drugs?
We have more.
Myth, heroin, all kinds of pills, fun stuff, Ripper.
You don't like to work? Forget about it.
Almost no one works here in Salisbury North.
Recording this commercial is the first time I've worked in two years.
Are you a rock spider? Well, me too.
Almost everyone here in Salisbury North fucks kids.
No judgement, mate.
And there's lots of kids here, which is kind of crazy.
But I'm not complaining.
So come to Salisbury North, do whatever you want.
Beat off at the playground.
Beat off in my face, get drunk, fuck a retriever,
kill a drifter, throw him in a backyard grave pit.
There's no rules, mate, no laws.
Salisbury North, South Australia,
where the only thing we take seriously is freedom.
That's a crazy commercial, but it felt accurate.
So, so much abuse and dysfunction today.
My God, so many tragic, just highly damaged characters.
So much partner swapping, molesting, raping, incest, grifting, dogfucking,
hole digging, just overall insanity.
Absolutely no one in the story even remotely had their shit together.
Not even in the ballpark of having their shit together. I truly cannot imagine what it was like to live, you know, at or near
203 Waterloo corner road in Salisbury North in the 90s. Where all of your neighbors, or at least most of them it seems, are just so
colossally fucked up.
Where everyone's house is filthy, where sexual abuse is commonplace, where dudes just fuck dogs in trailers or stand in their window and beat off.
Where no one ever seems to, you know, hold a steady job. Where people just disappear on a
regular basis. Where people just rotate from home to home, partner to partner on the same street.
All fucking the same people. No one with any direction or purpose in life.
We just talked about purpose a few weeks ago. The Existentials Suck.
So many of these characters, so purposeless.
Just drifting in the worst ways through their lives.
Not John though.
John Bunting had a purpose.
He was a pedo hunter in his mind at least.
He was the cure to the disease of pedophilia.
And he led his ragtag crew of misfits to believe they were doing something noble as well.
I guess he gave them purpose that way.
But they weren't doing something noble. At least not normally. Some of the people they took
out certainly fucking scumbags. I'm glad that they got taken out, truly. But others weren't.
Those guys weren't cleaning up the neighborhood. They were running a welfare benefit scam. And it
sure seems like John truly enjoyed just torturing the fuck out of people, whether they were bad
people or not. Man Man I did not expect this
topic to have this much crazy in it. My head is still spinning. Let's move along
to the takeaways. Get the hell out of here.
Time Shuck Top 5 Takeaways
Number one, John Bunting was the leader of the group of killers who committed
the Snowtown murders. Men who considered themselves to be pedophile vigilantes.
Several of them were sexually abused as children, which motivated them to seek revenge against child predators.
But then they started killing people who weren't pedophiles.
People whose money they wanted.
In the end they became even worse than the rock spiders, than the deities that they were killing.
Number two.
John Bunting turned young Jamie Vlasakis into a killer.
Jamie was the son of John's romantic partner, Elizabeth Harvey, one of so many fucking Elizabeths,
and he suffered significant trauma as a child and young adult and was desperate for belonging, acceptance, and a father figure.
John gave him all of that but at a terrible price as he indoctrinated Jamie into his terrible murderous belief system.
Number three, in the murder of David Johnson, the last of the Snowtown murders,
two of the killers engaged in an act of cannibalism by frying and consuming a piece of his flesh.
How the hell did that have anything to do with pedophile vigilantism?
Number four, John Bunting and Robert Wagner's murder trial lasted 11 months,
making it one of the longest in Australian history.
In the end, they received multiple life sentences and a non-parole period that has still not been set, meaning there's a good chance that they'll never qualify for
parole and they will die in prison as they should. Number five, new info, prisoner release updates.
Mark Hayden first became eligible for parole in 2017, but his first application was denied.
He applied again in 2021, also denied. January of 2024, the South Australian government said it was
seeking legal advice on whether new laws could be used to keep Hayden in jail. For example, in 2022,
Australia created a standalone offense that criminalizes concealing or interfering with
human remains, but they would not be able to use that new law to keep Mark incarcerated.
His 25-year non-parole period ended this past April and he was released to an undisclosed
location.
He's 65 years old and if you live near Adelaide, he might be your neighbor.
Jamie Lasaukas scheduled for release next year in 2025 when he'll be only 46 and I'm
glad actually that he will be set free.
None of the murders were his idea, right?
He had one of the worst men in fucking Australian history take him under his dark wing
after being repeatedly sexually abused and neglected by so many people growing up.
No one ever really looked out for him. He was another victim in my mind of John Bunty.
Whoo, Snowtown murder, seven yearsanity in South Australia has been sucked.
Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team for all the help in making time suck.
Starting with Queen of Bad Magic, Lindsay Cummins, for having to listen to me talk about this subject so so much the past few days.
Thanks also to Logan Keith helping to publish this episode, designing merch for the store at badmagicproductions.com.
Thanks to Olivia Lee again for doing the research on this one.
Also thanks to the all-seen eyes moderating the Cult of the Curious private Facebook page,
the Mod Squad making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everyone over on the Time Suck
subreddit and Bad Magic subreddits.
And now, updates. First up today, a meat sack marine.
Clinton Bowers writes in with the subject line of, I'm a triple M myself Dan, regarding
episode 420.
Hello Dan, Lordeth of the sucketh.
Well played.
Listing to episode 420 and I got to the part about Jean Paul Sartre being a military
meteorologist.
I too was a motherfuckin' military meteorologist.
Triple M in the Marine Corps.
Almost like a quadruple M there.
To answer your question, military meteorology in World War II was very accurate actually.
The Normandy invasion, or D-Day as we call it, the date of June 4th for the invasion was specifically chosen due to certain weather
conditions that were going to exist at the time that would allow for the concealed movement of
ships and equipment. The weather was supposed to break at a certain time on June 4th. The American
military meteorologist at the time who was not near France had gotten the weather all wrong and
if it wasn't for a British forecast for the invasion probably would have been a complete failure.
Being able to accurately predict meteorological conditions on the battlefield has been a vital
part of fighting wars for a long time.
Even Sun Tzu spoke to its importance in battlefield planning.
Yeah, the art of war, right?
I think that's what he wrote.
Yes, technology has gotten better and I can say without breaking any kind of intelligence
protocols that Marine Corps meteorologists have to maintain a 98% accuracy rating just
to be certified to deliver forecasts.
Couple that with a lot of scientific knowledge on how the weather affects weapon systems,
manpower and like, it's quite a lot of responsibility for say an E-4 who's low in the totem pole
in the chain of command.
There were a couple times in my career that a corporal or a sergeant I had to tell some very
when I was a as a, excuse me, a couple times in my career as a corporal or a sergeant.
I had to tell very high-ranking individuals certain weather information
that made a huge impact on base and wartime operations. Whenever I tell
people that I was a meteorologist in the military the number one answer that I
get is I didn't know they had that.
Especially being a Marine, it's crazy how many people don't even know that job exists.
I wasn't very fond of my job because it wasn't very glamorous and I wanted to fight, but it was pretty rewarding.
It had some very cool aspects to it.
I took my job very seriously because it was iterated constantly that our job could have a massive impact to marine safety and efficiency on and off the battlefield. I
did it the majority of the time that I was in. I supported airfield operations
but part of my time was also the support of battlefield operations. I can say that
in the entire time I was in which was seven years and some change that I only
got about two forecasts wrong. And by wrong I mean I didn't exactly calculate
the correct information.
They were close, but not 100%.
With that being said,
I did maintain a 99% accuracy rating on my forecast.
Good for you.
I'm actually really happy that I got to learn meteorology
because now I have a better understanding
of how it works in my daily life.
And it's actually a huge impact on my outdoor activities
like hunting, fishing, riding dirt bikes.
Our friends find it really weird
that I can just look up at the sky,
tell them what the weather is going to do
based off the color of the sunrise and the sunset.
That's awesome.
One thing a lot of people don't know
is when you go through meteorology training in the military,
you actually get close to an associate's meteorology degree
with only 17 months of training.
It's one of the longer MOS schools in the military
for every branch of the military except the army.
The Air Force is the branch that supports the army
with weather information. Every meteorologist in the
military attends training by the Air Force after you after your initial
training of 17 months. There's also auxiliary schools to get to go to that
include space weather, tropical weather, a bunch of other specialized weather
info. We can learn more about the stuff that you know takes additional time
recruit towards your degree. If you're actually to participate in all of the
meteorology training that all the military has to offer you'd be close to
having a bachelor's degree in less than two years. My peers went on to get their
degrees in environmental sciences or meteorology or earth sciences. Due to
this they gave themselves the opportunity to become officers. Like I
said, it's not a very glamorous job but it's very specialized and highly important. I thought it was very cool to
hear somebody that was important in history actually being a military
meteorologist. It's a very unheard of job. Not very often that I get to relate to
this subject of a Time Suck episode, except I nerded out on this one and had
to write to tell you a little bit about military meteorologists. I could literally
talk for hours on the subject just to give a brief overview of the cool stuff that meteorologists and military do.
But that would be a time suck worthy, like a whole time suck itself.
Thank you for everything you guys do over at Bad Magic.
You guys have been a huge part of my life and one of five podcasts I listen to regularly and the first podcast I ever started listening to.
You and Lindsey have inspired me to do much and be a better person.
Thank you even though we've never met.
I feel like I'm part of your family as well.
You guys stay classy. Keep sucking.
Make death earn it. Respectfully Clint Bowers.
Oh shit Clint. Thanks for a great message man.
And for the kind words.
Make death earn it. I love that.
And 98% that is wild.
I honestly didn't know you could be that accurate with weather predictions. I've been joking about weather forecasters too
much I guess. Thanks for the D-Day info that's super cool. Does make a lot of
sense once you laid out like you did. I hope you keep listening. Keep staying part of
the fam and yeah thanks for being awesome. Next up Z and Z you did not ask
me to take out your name but I'm gonna be careful and do so anyway. Zee sends in a message with the subject line of hero pothead saves suicidal teacher.
What up comments? And they write in it, I'm a first year public school teacher and even though
I should definitely be climbing my mountain of paperwork right now, I got to pause to write in.
I want to thank you. Your suck on existentialism was the wake up call I didn't know I needed.
So I've just started my first real grown up music teaching job and dude it is hard as fuck.
I could have taught anywhere, but I made the let's say interesting choice to take a job in one of Chicago's roughest schools.
I thought I was prepared to teach these kids. I am NOT.
I have been insulted on a daily basis, injured frequently, and spent more time breaking up fights than I have teaching music.
Every day has broken my heart a little. Many of my students come from poor, neglectful, even violent households. Oh man, this episode
must have been great for you. And they don't give a single shit about the little white lady
begging them not to break her pianos. And yeah, race is a big part of it. I've been told over and
over by my bosses that many of the kids are racist against white people. I was too naive to believe
that at first, but by Nimrod, they sure are.
I feel like I need to read a whole library's worth of books
on race and the needs of black students,
but who has the fucking time?
Four weeks into my dream job,
I found myself sinking fast into depression.
Now and then I'll imagine killing myself,
then immediately follow it by saying,
why the hell did I think that?
Shouldn't I be happy?
These kids need music.
My whole purpose in life is to teach music and play music.
No one told me this would be easy. So why aren't I happy?
Your high existential ass just answered that question for me.
Of course I'm unhappy. I've convinced myself that this is my purpose. My sole purpose. And why?
Because I'm a good teacher. Because I love music. Because I just dumped three years, half my sanity and all of my savings into a low rent graduate program so I could make it here
Bullshit. I have no set purpose rather. I have a series of choices each day. How do I want to feel?
What do I want to do? What do I want to put out into the world? That's it
No one is making me live for this and living for a job. This heart is only gonna hurt me
I'm damn thankful that I listened to the suck before teaching today when I realized the amount of pressure That's it. No one is making me live for this. And living for a job this hard is only gonna hurt me.
I'm damn thankful that I listened to this suck
before teaching today.
When I realized the amount of pressure
I was putting on myself, I let it go.
And you know what?
Today went a lot better.
Because I didn't try to be perfect.
I cared only about the social contract.
I'm here to help these kids
and to help them learn to be good to each other.
All the rest is noise.
We had a relatively calm and productive day, hopefully the first of many. So thank you
Dan for reminding me this this new teacher to drink some Whipple Chill. It's
hard not to get caught up in the great lie of purpose. A lie shoved down our
throats every day. Like you said we're on this earth to mess around. I have an
important job and I'll do the best I can. But I'm also gonna keep reminding
myself that I'm not Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. Like he said, that doesn't make me
less worthy. If I choose any purpose it'll be to live a good life and maybe
to get hit with fewer and maybe to get hit with fewer pencils. Oh sorry not
sorry for the long hard message because you can take it like a man. Keep giving
us life Dan and Lindsay and the rest of the Time Sub Crew. You make teaching so
much easier and keep smoking that sweet ganja my man Z
Well, what a great message Z. I really love when you wrote today went a lot better because I didn't try to be perfect
I cared only about the social contract
I'm here to help these kids and to help them learn to be good to each other all the rest is noise
Right. Oh man, I do the same shit to myself
For a while honestly, I started to hate podcasting
because I was only focusing on my fuckups. In spite of podcasting being so good to me.
Or on the odd negative review. Or just like, I don't know, the time some weeks it took.
You know, because I wanted each episode to be perfect. Just like you talked about pressure. Put
all this pressure on myself. God, why can't I say that word? Why is my tongue fuck up here?
Why did I get this thing wrong? Why didn't people like this episode as much as I liked it?
Blah blah blah blah blah. Stupid shit.
And I had to remind myself, I chose all this.
And that I'm not perfect and neither is anyone else.
And I owe no one perfection. And that I don't need to make everyone happy.
And when I took on this mindset of, just do your best, enjoy it, have fun with it,
hope others enjoy it, have fun with it, hope
others enjoy it, and then let it the fuck go. Ironically when I started to care a
little less, the end product got a little better. And much more importantly, I'm
happier. And life is too short to suck the fun out of it, right? Suck the fun out
of a job by having the wrong shitty perspective. What if the next five years
you make, Z, just one big positive
impact on a student's life?
Just one out of thousands of students, just one student, you really make that impact.
Won't it be worth it?
Or what if you just make some small impacts on a few students that won't even ever
realize how much you helped them or appreciate music, won't ever tell you,
won't ever give you that gratitude.
That's also worth it.
Or what if you just fucking try your best and you do the best you can and if they don't receive it, well, that's on them.
That's also okay.
You know, maybe you'll be helping just by showing them they're not all white people
or who they think they are and they'll become a little bit less racist and that'll be thanks to you just being you.
That's also amazing. There's so many ways to make it amazing. So just keep being amazing Z
And one more today from an anonymous professional bookworm
another amazing
Mesaq this sweet bibliophile
writes in with a subject line of censorship sucks and we should be mad about it
Dear time suck crew. This is gonna be a long one. Sorry not sorry
I've been pondering for a while now about suggesting book banning and censorship as a topic.
As a long time shit almost 30 years library professional and library director,
this is a topic that is near to me but I don't know if anyone else would care that much.
Then I found this article this morning and decided I couldn't wait. Thank you for the link.
And sorry for the article. Post Falls Idaho Library, which is, I don't know, about 10 minutes for me,
is proposing measures to restrict access to adult material and require ID to use adult In summary of the article, Post Falls Idaho Library, which is about 10 minutes from me,
is proposing measures to restrict access to adult material and require ID to use adult
collections which will literally be locked behind closed doors.
The use of this area will be recorded by cameras and a log kept of who goes in and out.
This is so egregiously against everything that libraries stand for, it makes me sad
and angry.
All of this is in the name of keeping harmful materials quote-unquote away from children. But what defines harmful
materials is very debatable. I have literally been asked to remove all
puberty, body, and sex education books from my children's section. And I've had
several people tell me that we shouldn't have any LGBTQ plus books or
representations at all. I could tell more horror stories, but it would be a novel.
While this particular restriction is worse than I have seen,
it is by no means an isolated incident.
Here in Indiana, a school librarian can face felony charges
if they give a kid a book that someone considers harmful.
Public librarians narrowly avoided being included in that legislation.
This is all being led by shady groups like Purple for Parents and Moms for Liberty
that have extreme political and social agendas.
I often wish that more people outside the library bubble knew that these things were happening.
I truly believe that there are more good people out there who support libraries
but the agenda is being controlled by the few who show up and complain.
Good people need to get involved and actively fight for the right to access information. I could go on and on, but I've got to work to continue my nefarious plot
to corrupt the children. Thanks for everything you do to spread knowledge to the world.
Sincerely, a loyal space leader." Fuck, spaces are yes, great suggestion. Maybe it could be a
short suck. At the very least, I'm addressing it now with some thoughts and letting people hear
your thoughts. You know, before I push pause on stand-up comedy touring, to focus on podcasting, just
be home more with family and friends and rest more, I was joking about this very subject.
It was my favorite bit I was working on.
It is scary.
It's scary mainly because, as you wrote, what defines harmful materials is very debatable,
wildly subjective.
I watched a clip online by the Good Liars.
God, they're so funny.
Where at a protest over harmful books in schools,
a man asked this woman, one of the hosts asked this lady
who's protesting, she's wanting to ban books.
He asked her if kids should be able to access a book
in their library that condones slavery, genocide, and rape.
This woman gets all fired up.
Oh, absolutely not.
Oh God, no, that book needs to be banned now.
Then she's told by this guy that the book he's referencing is the Bible.
Exodus 21, Exodus chapter 21, verses 20 and 21 explicitly state that a slave owner
may beat their slave within an inch of their life.
Deuteronomy chapter 20, verses 16 to 17, has God ordering the Hebrews to commit
six complete and total genocides.
Deuteronomy chapter 22 verses 28 and 29 lay out the means by which an incel may rape a virgin,
pay off her father, and marry her. Nothing says she has a right to say no. I doubt a single person
in favor of banning books and schools will be okay with banning the Bible and I don't do this to pick
on Christians. I don't point this out, truly. I do it to illustrate how when you open a door like this, odds are it's gonna slam back and hit you in the fucking face in a way you did not expect.
There is not, and there has never been, actual fucking porn.
Like Hustler, Penthouse, porn in school libraries.
That's not what people are trying to ban. That is bullshit propaganda. They're just trying to ban books that don't align with their highly
subjective worldview. And when you do that, you open the door to then have
books you hold near and dear in your worldview also be banned. Which is why I
am very against censorship. You want to monitor what your kids read? You should.
You should build a relationship with your kids where they feel comfortable sharing what they read
with you. You should be checking in with them a lot and you can tell them why you
don't want them to read such-and-such a book. But to punish a librarian with a
felony because they let a 10 year old read a book about say someone's
transgender experience? Get the fuck out of here. Keep your subjective moral decisions to your family and your
kids and not mine. Right? Fuck censorship is where I strongly stand on this issue. Let parents
monitor their own kids, not ask the government to monitor other people's kids when it comes to
library books. You don't want your kids reading those books, you fucking keep your kids out of
the library. And hail Nimrod.
You don't want your kids reading those books. You fucking keep your kids out of the library.
And hail Nimrod.
Thanks Time Suckers. I needed that. We all did.
Whoo! Last message had me fired up! Blood's boiling a little bit right now.
Thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast,
Scared to Death and Time Suck each week. Short Sucks and Nightmare Fuel on the Time Sucks, Scared to Death podcast feed some weeks. Please don't move into a neighborhood full of nothing but rock spiders, deadbeat parents, chronically
unemployed, openly masturbating dog fuckers, and a gang of idiots who will
torture and murder you for your government welfare checks this week.
There's got to be some other place you can live that's also very affordable,
right, but just not full of so many outrageous dirtbags. Find some place you can be, you can live safely
and where you can safely keep on sucking.
I checked to see if things had improved in recent years in the gang's old neighborhood
on Waterloo Road, Salisbury North.
It's looking quite a bit safer.
Let's check in with our news.
Can you help police find a man responsible for a terrifying attack which has left another
man scarred for life?
The victim received a cut to the head and across his back after being slashed on Waterloo
Corner Road at Salisbury North in November.
It's disturbing and frightening for members of the public to be involved in incidents
like this, especially when there are random attacks.
The man has been left with a 45-centimetre scar across his back.
This security vision shows the suspect, a Caucasian man in his 20s or 30s with blonde hair and a woman he was with.
It was filmed nearby shortly after the confrontation.
Any assault, especially in this case involving a weapon, is very suspicious.
If you recognise these people, call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Crime Stoppers SA, Police credit union and nine wheels.
Supporting the-
Yeah sure, someone got randomly stabbed and slashed,
but doesn't sound like their dog got fucked.
And the suspect didn't rape them, or molest her kids.
So good on you, Salisbury North.
Good on you.