Bodies in Barrels: The True Story of the Snowtown Murders

0:00 Sometimes the most dangerous person in a neighborhood is the one everyone actually likes. The one who looks out for people and always has clear ideas about what's right and wrong. Today we're in Australia covering one of the most disturbing cases I've ever talked about. The Snowtown murders involve 12 victims, 8 barrels of human remains in an abandoned bank vault, and one man who spent seven years slowly turning his entire social circle into a weapon.

0:51 The town of Snowtown, South Australia has about 400 residents, a grain silo, and a wheat country silence so complete it feels like you can hear the earth breath. It sits roughly 93 miles north of Adelaide, and most people never heard of it until May of 1999, when police breached the vault of an abandoned bank building and found 8 barrels filled with remains of 12 human beings. The case became known as the bodies and barrels murders, and it stands today as the deadliest serial killing case in Australian history. The thing is, almost none of it actually happened there. 11 of the 12 murders originated in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, in a neighborhood called Southbury North.

1:35 News reports of the era described it as disadvantaged and socially fragmented, which is a careful way of saying people were largely left to figure things out on their own. The area had high unemployment, transient households, and residents cycling through without much connection to each other or to any institution that might notice when someone vanished. Disappearances came with ready-made explanations. They moved on. They were struggling. They went somewhere to start over. That kind of thing. John Bunting understood the machinery of that invisibility with extraordinary clarity, and he built everything on it. Everything was born on September 4, 1966 in Queensland, and his early childhood looked unremarkable, in the ways that tend to reassure the people whose job it is to look at those types of things.

2:26 But at age 8, he was beaten and sexually assaulted by the older brother of a friend, and that experience settled into him and calcified into something permanent. It hardened into a furious ideology organized around the concept of weakness. A category he would spend the rest of his life both defining and expanding, at first in conversation, and eventually with a shovel. His eventual targets would include pedophiles, gay men, disabled people, people he considered to be overweight, and anyone whose way of existing fell below whatever threshold he'd privately assigned them. He was also born without a sense of smell.

3:07 It's a condition called anosmia, and the fact sounds trivial until you trace where it eventually leads. Most people are physiologically stopped cold by decomposing human remains. A response that is involuntary, it's overwhelming, and tends to function as a hard limit on how close anyone can get to a body for any length of time. Bunting had no version of that warning system. It's what later made the barrels possible. By his mid-twenties, Bunting had worked at a crematorium, and then at the SA Meat Corporation, where co-workers recalled him stating openly that killing was his favorite part of the job, apparently without any concern about how that sounded.

3:47 While living in North Adelaide during that same time period, he reportedly killed a roommate's terrier bulldog, which, if you know anything about behavioral markers and organized predators, places him exactly where you'd expect on that developmental timeline. In 1991, Bunting moved to Southbury, North, and began building something with deliberate patience. He positioned himself as a community protector, the man with strong opinions who looked out for people, who showed up when things went wrong, and who always had a clear read on who the bad actors were. In a place where people already felt abandoned by every institution around them, someone offering that level of certainty had enormous pull.

4:28 His first significant recruit was a neighbor named Robert Wagner. Wagner had reportedly named his dog Adolf, and talked openly about wanting Nazi-themed tattoos, which in retrospect are not what you'd call subtle indicators of a person's inner life. You kinda know where he stands. Bunting read all of this as useful data. Wagner's impulsivity and loyalty made him exactly what Bunting was looking for, and Wagner would eventually participate in 10 of the 12 murders as the group's primary executioner. The most heartbreaking recruitment was a teenager named James Flosakis. In 1994, Bunting began a relationship with Flosakis' mother and moved into their household when James was 14.

5:15 To James, Bunting was the most purposeful and commanding person he'd ever encountered. Over the following years, Bunting systematically dismantled the boy's moral framework, starting with the exposure to animal slaughter, building through rewarded cruelty, and ending with Flosakis being compelled to participate in torture and murder of his own half-brother and step-brother. He ensured every person around him was so deeply implicated that coming forward meant confessing to murder. He built a closed loop, then locked it from the inside. The first murder took place on October 31, 1992. A 20-year-old named Clinton Trezees came to Bunting's home in Southbury for what he believed was a social visit.

5:59 Bunting accused him of being a pedophile and beat him to death with a shovel. Clinton's body was buried at a site called Lower Light and wasn't discovered until 1994. Bunting gave him a mocking nickname in later conversations, calling him "Happy Pants" and moved on without apparent concern. On Christmas Day 1995, a 26-year-old intellectually disabled man named Ray Davies was tortured for hours and then strangled with jumper cables. The supposed justification was unverified neighborhood gossip about his behavior. His body ended up being buried in Bunting's backyard while the group spent the following months draining his bank account.

6:41 This was part of a parallel financial operation that would eventually generate approximately $97,000 in fraudulent welfare payments. Bunting's associates would torture victims for their bank's pen and then impersonate the deceased to keep collecting government checks. Some of those payments continued for months after the bodies were already in storage, which might be the most calculated single detail in the entire case. The group had their own name for what they were doing. They called it "playing". In 1997, a 19-year-old transgender woman named Michelle Gardner was abducted and taken to a shed in Murray Bridge, where she was strangled over a prolonged period, with the group forcing her back to her feet every time she lost consciousness.

7:25 Afterward, they staged a robbery at her home to convince neighbors that she had simply moved on. Her body was later found in the Snowtown Vault. Her left foot was severed, so a barrel lid could close. Despite Bunting's home, he maintained a physical map of his targets. A web of handwritten paper notes connected by yarn that the group called "the wall of spiders". The names on it included suspected pedophiles or gay men, and also people Bunting found objectionable on entirely different grounds. People he considered to be overweight, too meticulous about their appearance, or too refined in their tastes. The suspicions were rarely based on evidence.

8:05 More often, growing from neighborhood gossip or personal dislike alone. Elizabeth Hayden, wife of a group associate named Mark Hayden, was killed in 1998 because Bunting had decided her weight made her weak. Mark helped with her disposal and was later convicted of assisting in the disposal of seven bodies, including his own wives. He, by the way, was released in February of 2024 after serving 25 years. It was the investigation into Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance that ultimately directed police toward the vault. The final victim was David Johnson, Blasakis' step brother. Bunting had decided Johnson was a "yuppie" because he kept himself clean and dressed carefully, which tells you everything about how far the criteria had drifted away from any coherent logic by 1999.

8:56 He went from targeting pedophiles to targeting people he thought dressed too nicely. Johnson was lured to snow town with a promise of a cheap computer. Inside the bank vault, surrounded by barrels containing the remains of people killed before him, he was tortured and murdered. And in one of the strangest details about the case, Bunting and Wagner ate portions of his flesh. Police arrived at the vault on May 20, 1999, finding eight barrels of hydrochloric acid and dismembered human remains, some with their feet removed so that the drum lids could close over the top of them. The investigation that followed was the longest in South Australian legal history, involving over 200 suppression orders.

9:41 Bunting and Wagner each received multiple life sentences without any possibility of parole. Blasakis, who testified as a crown witness and who had been first drawn into this at 14 years old, received 26 years. The town of Snowtown has carried all of this for more than two decades, and its residents describe it as "a quiet and decent place to live," which it maybe genuinely is. But they're all very tired of talking about and hearing about this story. Tourists still drive out to photograph the bank building, and some try to take pieces of it home as souvenirs, which by the way is disgusting. Above the vault, a plaque reads, "In memory of those taken by evil, greed, and ignorance."

10:24 12 people, most of them already invisible to the systems meant to catch people before they fall all the way through. John Bunting understood that specific gap better than anyone, and it was the foundation everything else was built on.