BODIES IN THE BARREL
These horrific killings were reported around the world and Sean, who was a junior reporter at the time, remembers how the Supreme Court of South Australia was besieged with international reporters on the first day of the trial.
John Bunting, Robert Wagner and James Vlassakis were charged and found guilty of, between them, murdering 12 people over a seven-year period.
Mark Haydon was also convicted for helping to dispose of the bodies.
The case hit the headlines in May 1999 when police made the horrifying discovery of eight dismembered corpses rotting in barrels in Snowtown, a sleepy rural town 140 kilometres north of Adelaide.
The victims were friends and even family of the accused and, while the motivation for murder is not completely clear, it seemed Bunting led his gang to believe the victims were paedophiles or homosexuals.
With further bodies being discovered, gruesome details about their deaths were revealed, with most having been horrendously tortured with an electric shock machine, pliers and hammers before their eventual murder.
Parts of one victim, David Johnson, were even fried up and eaten by his killers.
‘Bunting, particularly, had a traumatised background,’ Sean says after sitting through hundreds of hours of evidence in what was one of the longest trials in Australian legal history.
The killer was found to have been sexually abused as a boy.
‘You can see why he thought the way he did, but there’s no excuse for it,’ Sean says.
The other tragedy is that the crimes ruined the reputation of Snowtown, a place which ironically didn’t play a central part in the so-called Snowtown murders, except for the fact it was where the bodies were discovered.