Bodies in Barrels: The True Story of the Snowtown Murders

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Sometimes the most dangerous person in a neighborhood is the one everyone actually likes.

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The one who looks out for people and always has clear ideas about what's right and wrong.

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Today we're in Australia covering one of the most disturbing cases I've ever talked about.

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The Snowtown murders involve 12 victims, 8 barrels of human remains in an abandoned

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bank vault, and one man who spent seven years slowly turning his entire social circle into

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a weapon.

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The town of Snowtown, South Australia has about 400 residents, a grain silo, and a wheat

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country silence so complete it feels like you can hear the earth breath.

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It sits roughly 93 miles north of Adelaide, and most people never heard of it until May

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of 1999, when police breached the vault of an abandoned bank building and found 8 barrels

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filled with remains of 12 human beings.

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The case became known as the bodies and barrels murders, and it stands today as the deadliest

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serial killing case in Australian history.

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The thing is, almost none of it actually happened there.

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11 of the 12 murders originated in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, in a neighborhood called

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Southbury North.

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News reports of the era described it as disadvantaged and socially fragmented, which is a careful

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way of saying people were largely left to figure things out on their own.

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The area had high unemployment, transient households, and residents cycling through without

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much connection to each other or to any institution that might notice when someone vanished.

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Disappearances came with ready-made explanations.

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They moved on.

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They were struggling.

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They went somewhere to start over.

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That kind of thing.

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John Bunting understood the machinery of that invisibility with extraordinary clarity,

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and he built everything on it.

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Everything was born on September 4, 1966 in Queensland, and his early childhood looked

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unremarkable, in the ways that tend to reassure the people whose job it is to look at those types

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of things.

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But at age 8, he was beaten and sexually assaulted by the older brother of a friend, and that experience

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settled into him and calcified into something permanent.

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It hardened into a furious ideology organized around the concept of weakness.

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A category he would spend the rest of his life both defining and expanding, at first in

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conversation, and eventually with a shovel.

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His eventual targets would include pedophiles, gay men, disabled people, people he considered

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to be overweight, and anyone whose way of existing fell below whatever threshold he'd privately

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assigned them.

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He was also born without a sense of smell.

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It's a condition called anosmia, and the fact sounds trivial until you trace where it eventually

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leads.

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Most people are physiologically stopped cold by decomposing human remains.

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A response that is involuntary, it's overwhelming, and tends to function as a hard limit on how close

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anyone can get to a body for any length of time.

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Bunting had no version of that warning system.

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It's what later made the barrels possible.

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By his mid-twenties, Bunting had worked at a crematorium, and then at the SA Meat Corporation,

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where co-workers recalled him stating openly that killing was his favorite part of the job,

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apparently without any concern about how that sounded.

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While living in North Adelaide during that same time period, he reportedly killed a roommate's

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terrier bulldog, which, if you know anything about behavioral markers and organized predators,

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places him exactly where you'd expect on that developmental timeline.

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In 1991, Bunting moved to Southbury, North, and began building something with deliberate

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patience.

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He positioned himself as a community protector, the man with strong opinions who looked

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out for people, who showed up when things went wrong, and who always had a clear read on

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who the bad actors were.

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In a place where people already felt abandoned by every institution around them, someone offering

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that level of certainty had enormous pull.

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His first significant recruit was a neighbor named Robert Wagner.

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Wagner had reportedly named his dog Adolf, and talked openly about wanting Nazi-themed tattoos,

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which in retrospect are not what you'd call subtle indicators of a person's inner life.

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You kinda know where he stands.

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Bunting read all of this as useful data.

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Wagner's impulsivity and loyalty made him exactly what Bunting was looking for, and Wagner

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would eventually participate in 10 of the 12 murders as the group's primary executioner.

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The most heartbreaking recruitment was a teenager named James Flosakis.

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In 1994, Bunting began a relationship with Flosakis' mother and moved into their household

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when James was 14.

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To James, Bunting was the most purposeful and commanding person he'd ever encountered.

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Over the following years, Bunting systematically dismantled the boy's moral framework, starting

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with the exposure to animal slaughter, building through rewarded cruelty, and ending with

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Flosakis being compelled to participate in torture and murder of his own half-brother

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and step-brother.

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He ensured every person around him was so deeply implicated that coming forward meant confessing

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to murder.

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He built a closed loop, then locked it from the inside.

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The first murder took place on October 31, 1992.

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A 20-year-old named Clinton Trezees came to Bunting's home in Southbury for what he believed

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was a social visit.

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Bunting accused him of being a pedophile and beat him to death with a shovel.

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Clinton's body was buried at a site called Lower Light and wasn't discovered until 1994.

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Bunting gave him a mocking nickname in later conversations, calling him "Happy Pants"

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and moved on without apparent concern.

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On Christmas Day 1995, a 26-year-old intellectually disabled man named Ray Davies was tortured

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for hours and then strangled with jumper cables.

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The supposed justification was unverified neighborhood gossip about his behavior.

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His body ended up being buried in Bunting's backyard while the group spent the following

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months draining his bank account.

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This was part of a parallel financial operation that would eventually generate approximately

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$97,000 in fraudulent welfare payments.

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Bunting's associates would torture victims for their bank's pen and then impersonate the

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deceased to keep collecting government checks.

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Some of those payments continued for months after the bodies were already in storage, which

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might be the most calculated single detail in the entire case.

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The group had their own name for what they were doing.

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They called it "playing".

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In 1997, a 19-year-old transgender woman named Michelle Gardner was abducted and taken

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to a shed in Murray Bridge, where she was strangled over a prolonged period, with the

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group forcing her back to her feet every time she lost consciousness.

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Afterward, they staged a robbery at her home to convince neighbors that she had simply

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moved on.

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Her body was later found in the Snowtown Vault.

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Her left foot was severed, so a barrel lid could close.

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Despite Bunting's home, he maintained a physical map of his targets.

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A web of handwritten paper notes connected by yarn that the group called "the wall of spiders".

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The names on it included suspected pedophiles or gay men, and also people Bunting found

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objectionable on entirely different grounds.

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People he considered to be overweight, too meticulous about their appearance, or too refined

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in their tastes.

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The suspicions were rarely based on evidence.

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More often, growing from neighborhood gossip or personal dislike alone.

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Elizabeth Hayden, wife of a group associate named Mark Hayden, was killed in 1998 because

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Bunting had decided her weight made her weak.

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Mark helped with her disposal and was later convicted of assisting in the disposal of

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seven bodies, including his own wives.

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He, by the way, was released in February of 2024 after serving 25 years.

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It was the investigation into Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance that ultimately directed police

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toward the vault.

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The final victim was David Johnson, Blasakis' step brother.

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Bunting had decided Johnson was a "yuppie" because he kept himself clean and dressed carefully,

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which tells you everything about how far the criteria had drifted away from any coherent

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logic by 1999.

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He went from targeting pedophiles to targeting people he thought dressed too nicely.

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Johnson was lured to snow town with a promise of a cheap computer.

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Inside the bank vault, surrounded by barrels containing the remains of people killed before

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him, he was tortured and murdered.

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And in one of the strangest details about the case, Bunting and Wagner ate portions of

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his flesh.

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Police arrived at the vault on May 20, 1999, finding eight barrels of hydrochloric acid and

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dismembered human remains, some with their feet removed so that the drum lids could close

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over the top of them.

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The investigation that followed was the longest in South Australian legal history, involving

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over 200 suppression orders.

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Bunting and Wagner each received multiple life sentences without any possibility of parole.

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Blasakis, who testified as a crown witness and who had been first drawn into this at 14

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years old, received 26 years.

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The town of Snowtown has carried all of this for more than two decades, and its residents

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describe it as "a quiet and decent place to live," which it maybe genuinely is.

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But they're all very tired of talking about and hearing about this story.

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Tourists still drive out to photograph the bank building, and some try to take pieces

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of it home as souvenirs, which by the way is disgusting.

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Above the vault, a plaque reads, "In memory of those taken by evil, greed, and ignorance."

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12 people, most of them already invisible to the systems meant to catch people before they

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fall all the way through.

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John Bunting understood that specific gap better than anyone, and it was the foundation

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everything else was built on.