Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 570: The Snowtown Murders Part I - The Salisbury Mistakes
Episode Date: April 20, 2024This week the boys head down under and begin the story of one of Australia's grizzliest series of murders - The Snowtown Murders, also known as the "bodies in barrels murders", which took place betwee...n 1992 and 1999 in and around Adelaide.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Can you believe?
Last podcast on the left is going back on tour.
The road leads to here.
JK Ultra is coming to these North American cities.
We got Denver, May 16th, Seattle, June 8th, Washington D.C., July 13th, Chicago, Illinois,
September 14th.
October 16th, we got Boston, Massachusetts, November 2nd, right here in Los Angeles, California.
And then on December 7th, we're going home to Brooklyn for a show at the King's Theater.
Yeah, Brooklyn, baby!
It's time for you to laugh again and open your fucking eyes. Yeah, at the King's Theatre. Yeah, look at the babies! It's time for you to laugh again
and open your fucking eyes.
Yeah, at the same time.
There's no place to escape to.
This is the last hot task.
On the left.
Why fuck your glazed?
That's when the cannibalism started.
What was that?
Ray Davy was a pedophile.
Was a pedophile!
But there was a kink in his morals.
There was a kink in his morals. There was a kink in his morals.
Is that how we warm up to begin?
Ray Davies was a pedophile.
Ray Davies, not the Ray Davies that was in the kinks.
Not that one!
A different Ray Davies.
The one in this story was a pedophile.
Dave Davies is also not a pedophile Dave Davies is also not a pedophile
No, he's not a pedophile John bunting really got him. He really got him babe. Yeah
Why don't we ever go hunting pedophiles together? Well, I know guys, why don't we just go ahead come on guys?
I'm gonna start with deer
Go ahead. Come on, guys. I'm going to start with deer.
And those are the questions we're going to answer today on last podcast on the left.
Thank you for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with Henry Zabrowski.
I'm going to put it out there.
Best pedophile bait, Funko pops.
Whoa, that is good.
If you put a couple of Funko pops out in a field or in a city block with a rope around
it, right, and you just tie it waiting for it, you're going to catch at least one or
a near sighted individual on Pokemon Go.
And that's fine.
It does tend to happen.
And then you just got to catch and release.
And of course we have Ed Larson.
How you doing?
No opinions on catching pedophiles.
No, I haven't thought about it.
I haven't thought about it.
Try to stay away from them and just hope they stay away from me and everyone I know.
Well, that's the problem is that you hope they stay away from you,
but they're right next to you and you don't even know it.
Yeah, I know. I've met a couple.
Yeah.
I actually I paid for the extra thing on citizen app.
This is not an ad for citizen.
Oh, the pedophile radar.
Wow.
Really?
Yeah.
Watchdog, right?
Watchdog.com.
Yeah, they're everywhere.
It's one of the other.
I remember I looked up when I went on the pedophile searching website and I looked up
my old address and sure as hell some kid's dad I knew that I slept over his house.
Jesus. Yeah. Jesus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Hey, you got out.
But that's why I'm thinking it's really important if we do go hunting pedophiles, just catch
and release.
Tag them.
Put them back out there.
Right?
So now we know where it is.
Oh, there's Bingo.
We can give them different names.
Sure.
You know what I mean?
I mean they are tagged. But not physically. They different names. Sure. I mean, I are tagged
But not physically they need to ear clip. I would have been like, you know like a dog
Or even while we're talking about hunting pedophiles
Are today starting our series on the snow town murders, it's been a while We've been talking about this one for a minute, and we finally got around to it.
I never even heard of this. And you guys, and I, I spent like three days researching Snowden.
I was just like, you guys were doing Snowden right there. We're doing Snowden.
I'm like, all right, they want to talk about Snowden. I don't know what's so scary about him.
I guess the government's looking at us. All right.
Well, we're talking about the assault against Julian Assange?
Oh, shit.
But we don't want to bring that up today.
Because, well, for a while, I thought it was like an Australian thing where it would be
pronounced like because we always do everything.
We pronounce everything wrong.
Snouton.
I thought it would be snouton or something.
And that's why I said that to you.
Yes.
And then I wrong.
No, it's no town like it's where all the elves live on vacation during the summer months. Um, but, uh, who, man, you'd be surprised. Yeah. You know, we should visit when we're
on tour. We should, we can. Do they have a tour around snow town? They are. They do.
And they, it is, but it's also reticent. They are not really liking the identification with
the snow town murders as they will get into. Yeah, we'll get it. They don't lean in. A
couple of people in town have decided to lean in
and the rest of the town is very upset at them
for doing that.
Okay.
The Snowtown murders were a rash of serial killings
perpetrated by a small gang of absolute morons
in and around the Southern Australian town of Adelaide
over a period of about seven years.
Although their most active period was between 1995 and 1999 the good years yeah
Mm-hmm high school are the last years you can really get away with shit. Yeah
Yeah, I think those are the official ones it was going for a while for them, but then they got theirs
You know I got a feeling I I still got away with shit up until like
2011 I think a lot of people still getting away with stuff. I got arrested for weed. Yeah
2004 yeah, so I'm saying yeah, I think that you're yeah, I think you might be I think I'm gonna say that's the last day
The Snowtown murders are so named because the small
Unlucky Australian hamlet of Snowtown was where most of the bodies were found
In fact only one murder out of the eventual 12 actually occurred in Snowtown was where most of the bodies were found. In fact, only one murder out of the eventual 12 actually occurred in
Snowtown. And that was at the very end of the gang's barbarous reign of terror.
As such, the people of Snowtown begged the media to please refer to the
killings as the bodies in the barrels murders that they don't mind,
which prioritizes how the bodies were stored over where they were found.
But I think that has the same effect as asking us to pronounce Oregon correctly
or learning how to pronounce your various county in whatever Massachusetts County you
live in. Helena. Yeah. Like I feel like it has the same effect because it just seems
that that Snowtown murder term is kind of just is in there
Yeah, it's stuck once it's in the paper and people start it's over
Yeah, it's also because the the type of crime that this was this was by far one of them besides Ivan Malat one of the most
Famous story true crime stories in Australian history. I mean many people consider this to be the number one
Yeah, they actually put it above Ivan Molat,
where the Snowtown murders,
that's number one in all Australia
as far as serial killings go.
I mean, Martin Bryant is possibly a larger true crime story,
but this one is pretty fucking intense.
And this is where it got a little American over there.
We, this is where we do our little sprinkle.
And you guys got some of this thought, you got a little bit of the serial killer disease
But John bunting that would lead this little gang is probably one of the most dangerous people to ever live
I put him in the rock terrio of the anthill gang territory
But you and I kind of we differ we differ because like we kind of had a discussion about whether or not his crew was a
Cult or a gang it was not I don't think it wasn't a call. I agree now that it's not a cult
It's a gang but yeah, but John bunting I think it's just because I imagine that their dick and balls smelled exactly the same
Don't even know if it was a gang. I mean I use the word gang that well, so you're gonna call them a team
I mean, it's more a fucking friend group. It's a squad
Hashtag not squad goals. Well the push to rename the Snowtown murders the bodies in the barrels murders was too much
entirely unsuccessful
Although southern Australia did for a time have a small cottage industry of bodies and barrels
memorabilia that might be some of the most gruesome serial killer merch ever created.
Australians got that on lockdown.
Yeah.
They got a good old fashioned brutal sense of humor and we can't wait to come back this
fucking summer.
Can't wait to come back in August.
Yes, we'll be in Adelaide.
Yeah, we will.
And Adelaide is a hell of a town.
I love Adelaide.
Yeah, it's cool.
And Marcus is bringing shovels.
See, this is the only thing I know about Adelaide.
So I was scared.
Yeah.
Now, from my point of view, the story of the Snowtown murders is Shakespeare by way of
Beavis and Butthead.
OK.
It's complex, ridiculous, messy, hubristic, obsessive, and in most cases, really fucking
stupid.
Yeah.
These are crimes that rival Titus Andronicus in their brutality, but were committed by
morons who giggled their way
through the entire process.
Led by a supreme dickhead named John Bunting, the people responsible for the murders and
the disposal of the bodies numbered at least nine, and three of those accomplices, willing
and not, ended up as victims themselves.
He really spread his crime across this group.
That's why, like, we're like, what do you call this?
It's extremely, I find it very unique
in the world of true crime.
Like, the fact that he kind of, he built up this crew,
these guys watch, I watched the movie Snowtown this weekend.
I just finished it.
Hilarious.
Hilarious.
Honestly, we couldn't stop, like,
we even keep saying lines back and forth, now they're
going, ouch!
Ooh!
Ooh!
Get his toes.
Yeah, get his toes.
My favorite line.
I love that line.
I remember that, but it's such a great line.
Love that line.
And you could just, it's just, it's brutal, because these guys all kind of acted like
they were like a little mafia.
They were like a little hit group.
They were like, they were more like a vigilante squad.
They thought that they were.
Yeah, that's what they believed they were.
But it was John Bunting and his right-hand man, Robert Wagner, who would commit the majority of the atrocities that have gone down as the worst serial killings in the history of Australia.
Murders so performative and cruel that one could almost describe them as trying too hard.
Yeah, they're being edgelords with the torture.
They are! Like it's, it's because that's the whole thing about John Bunting is John Bunting is extraordinarily performative.
And I think that's part of why he brought these people in.
For him, it was about performing and for him was about look at me, look at all these things that I'm doing, look at how evil I am,
but also look at how cool I am
for killing all these pedophiles.
Well, he kind of thought that the sleepy towns
that he kind of bounced between
were all in the Bonnie Tyler world of,
I need a hero.
And everywhere he showed up,
he'd be welcomed and celebrated
like he was a Ned Kelly.
He was like one of these styles
of like an old fashioned outback vigilante, which they
are, which also in America we love, right?
We're also obsessed with the idea of a vigilante.
There's a difference between what's right and what's legal.
It's like, you know, our pop culture celebrates that angle for both of our countries.
But John Bunting wasn't a hero.
He was a toad that was a key, you know, he also fucked it up.
He was also bad at the serial murder.
I know that it took a long time for them to get to wrapping it up, but in terms of, you
know, in terms of serial killings, it was pretty close in the middle of his rampage.
He would have kept going.
Yeah.
Do you think there's a chance he killed more than 12?
No, I think he wanted credit for each and every person that he killed.
He would have told us.
Well, Bunting, partly inspired by Nazi ideology and partly driven by alleged childhood abuse,
was ostensibly what you call a missionary killer, obsessed with murdering pedophiles,
gay people, and those that he considered weak, which often included people with mild intellectual disabilities.
But from what it seems like to me,
Bunting and others like him simply use the framework of a mission as an excuse to commit extreme acts of violence for reasons no more
complicated than they like it, and it makes them feel powerful.
Yeah, John Bunting was a, um, not short,
perfectly normal, heighted man.
So he's short?
No.
So he was five foot seven.
No, he had a perfectly great, he had a great body.
If you look at him, you can't say anything wrong
about him physically.
Not a hog body at all.
Not at all.
But he is named after the bitchiest move in baseball.
He is.
Hey, bumping his strategy.
No, it's bitchy.
Yeah, I hate baseball.
His name was Johnny Home Runs,
he fucking be a superhero. If his name was Johnny Home Runs. He'd fucking be a superhero.
If his name was Johnny Home Runs,
he would be in gay pornography.
I said a superhero, yes.
Wait, you know, he's a, he's a, oh God, he's a bad guy.
He's a bad guy.
Yeah, but he loved pain and torture
and that's all of it was an, that's all it was.
It was an excuse and a way for him to, as we've talked about endlessly all over the
years, that serial killers, especially ones with the big, big, big, big egos, they love
a righteous faction to what it is that they're doing.
Oh yeah.
You know, and he was the queen of that.
But before we get to the story of John Bunting and his many accomplices, let's acknowledge our sources for today. We've got Snowtown,
The Bodies in the Barrels Murders by Jeremy Pudney and Killing for Pleasure
by Debbie Marshall. These are some juicy ass books man. Yeah and out of the two,
Marshall's is judgy in all the wrong places and makes an already complex
story even messier by changing chronology for drama's sake. You can also
tell Killing for Pleasure, that's your supermarket true crime paperback.
How do I say that? I read, I read, I started reading Killing for Pleasure,
but then you're like, no, switch over to The Bodies and the Barrels Murders, because that's the better book.
But the thing is like, then I was, it was funny because I'm reading Killing for Pleasure, and as I'm reading it,
I was like, oh, this is too juicy to be good.
I was like, I was like, oh, this is too juicy to be good
I know it's bad. Yeah, it is salacious and all that and probably the more I don't know fun
Yeah, but for pleasure is like reading for annoyance
Like my grandpa did. When he took down the neck!
Well, it's just killing for pleasure is one of the...
That's like the name in the true crime book hat.
You just pull it out, killing for pleasure.
Secrets to hold.
Yeah, mama's not good no more.
Have you ever read that one?
Yeah, where the bodies are buried.
Yeah, where the bodies are buried.
If knives could talk.
Again, they're adapting that.
Pixar is adapting that this year.
Oh yeah, Bodies and the Bells is excellent.
It's far more the recommended of the two.
So without further ado, let's get into the Snowtown murders,
starting with the biggest douchebag we've come across
since Mark Twitchell, although he certainly has shades
of Israel Keys.
Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. This guy's name is John Bunting. come across since Mark Twitchell, although he certainly has shades of Israel Keys.
This guy's name is John Bunting.
Bunting was born in 1966 in a low-income suburb of the Australian city of Brisbane.
He was the only child of two conservative parents, neither of whom seemed all that particularly
strange.
The worst thing you could say was that his mother was a neat freak who needed to keep
their house obsessively clean while bunting himself was very messy
I don't know why when I think of like old-timey like Australian moms I my head I always see like Dame Edna
They who's Dame Edna remember the famous drag queen from UK. I always see like a look her up. Okay
I whatever I imagine an Australian mother back. They just go like
Yeah, that's definitely a Australian
But I do know that I feel like that's just obviously it's my
It's just my little thought processes
Well from what it seems like John bunting was just a strange child
He was secretive and kind of a dick straight off.
John was so concerned with privacy as a child that he and a friend once dug a 15 foot long
tunnel 14 feet underground.
We going downtown.
I'm getting in more trouble with me more friends and we digging to join.
Get out of here you lark mate.
Now you get it. And this is also John could have a secret place to hide away and pursue his hobbies.
Many a grubbies.
I'd show all myself in my little games.
On the ground like a potato.
What were his hobbies?
Playing with my feet.
I make chocolate and egg.
You're like catching bugs and dissolving them in various chemicals.
Yeah, cool.
Yeah, like break.
Actually, I mean, that's fun.
Yeah.
You know, it's not one of the major symptoms of being a serial killer.
No, I mean, it's really fun.
It's just bugs.
I mean, it's break fluid, hydrochloric acid, chlorine.
But he would also take careful note as to which chemicals were most effective at killing
which bugs.
We use very simple. This is very simple. Imagine if we would have made him an exterminator. He would also take careful note as to which chemicals were most effective, killing which bugs.
He was very simple.
This is very simple.
Imagine if we would have made him an exterminator.
He was never going to be an exterminator.
We technically had the perfect job and he got fired.
But John Bunting was, he was just immediately outside of the box, had like five different
serial killer tendencies.
It just was like, it's weird how it works like that. Yeah. He had a knack for chemistry, which he used to make rockets, stink bombs, and mortars,
but that knack never translated itself into anything practical because Bunting couldn't do math.
Now, I, this is not a slight on Marcus at all, but Eddie, I don't know if you've noticed something
about the description of John Bunting as a boing, is that number one, he loved to dig.
Description of John bunting as a boy is that number one. He loved to dig. Yeah number two. He loved to kill
Insects and we're in a fun creative ways. Yeah, which yeah
He did sort of as well also he was sounds like he would have been a part of the rocket club like Marcus once Well, I would there was no club. I just built the rocket on his own
That's like the burner von Braun
Style yeah of being inside of his own and I just wonder if there was any other particular
like similarities between John Bunting and Marcus that's one thing that like as
The worst part about doing this show is seeing your own characteristics in serial killer
is seeing your own characteristics in serial killer. You're saying this about John Wayne Casey.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, that's a, I do know that me and John Bunting probably would have been like
friends when we were kids.
Oh yeah.
But that's the problem with like being in this sort of environment is like you're friends
with your kids and then you start growing up and that he turns into a psychopath and
you just kind of turn out to be a normal person.
But then you are always friends with me when you were kids and they always say hi to you every time you see them
And then you have to like pretend like oh, yeah, we're friends, but you know what's fucking wrong with you
No, there's something really fucking wrong with that smart to be kind of friends with them. Yeah
Well, that's why when I was a kid I grew up in the mean streets of Queens, and I was mostly friends with
several members of the New York Knicks
Hanging out with Patrick Ewing quite a bit. I was hanging out with Patrick Ewing quite a bit.
I was hanging out with me and Ed Koch.
Those were my big guys.
Those were my main friends when I was a child.
So I wouldn't know.
Now, by the time John was a teenager,
he had a large collection of guns,
which was possible back then in Australia
in the days before the Port Arthur Massacre,
in which 35 people were killed
and 24 were injured in a mass shooting.
Now for John Bunting, an interest in World War II history soon turned into an obsession with Nazis.
And while some of us are obsessed with understanding Nazism and the stories that spring from such evil,
Bunting bought into the ideology of the Nazis.
Four things in common. Now, I also was obsessed with World War II as a little kid.
And I wonder if it literally becomes it comes from maybe our grandparents.
I know that like, you know, having a grandparent in World War II
on the right side was really, really nice.
And I was obsessed as a kid.
And I think that the Nazis were at first like
Your eyes are drawn to them. I think partially it's because of their the way they are presented and as a kid I always was into the Empire
I like Darth Vader and you can kind of see why you're like
Oh with the look of these crazy costumes and then all of a sudden you're looking into it. You're like what in the living fuck?
That's that was my response
Where I think something like somebody like John bunting because we talked talked about this, about like, what is it about neo-Nazism that is like specific?
It's a specific type of hate. And I think it's because these guys, all of these guys that are attached to either neo-Nazi groups, and it's also quite like what John Bunting is like, is that they are not only dickheads and morons, but they also must be correct.
So their ideology must feel like it has some kind of like thing behind them,
some kind of institution behind them.
Yeah.
It's a way for total losers to think they're better than people and powerful
because they think they're connected to this series of other people.
They don't realize that most people that are neo-nazis look like either curly or smegle
But they can watch footage of Nuremberg and say I'm a part of that
I'm a part of that thing and that makes that I get to stand up for something else like this is a bigger thing
I think that's what it does and it makes a shithead feel less alone. Yeah
I think that's what it does and it makes a shithead feel less alone. Yeah
Now bunting red mine comp he joined a neo-nazi group and he painted a swastika on of all places the inside door of his Cars trunk, that's how proud he was
Man I would tell you about the kid I grew up with.
Who was like, he hated Nazis. And he was like, he used to like go to like punk shows to fight
Nazis. And then he went to go get an anti Swastika tattoo. It was like a Swastika with
a line through it. And then when he got the tattoo, you know, it had to do it in two sessions.
So the first time it was just a Swastika, but then he was so poor that he couldn't afford to get the rest of the tattoo.
And so for a full year he had to have just a swastika on his chest even though he hated
Nazis and always be like, Hey, you know, when are you going to finish that tattoo there
Bill?
And this is like, ah, you know, we're saving up.
It's like get the line first. Would you guys ever read Mein Kampf? Have you read Mein Kampf? I've never read Mein Kampf
no. I've read excerpts. Yeah I mostly follow it on Pinterest. Well John was of course a virulent
racist but he was especially homophobic and he was
quite vocal about his homophobia to anyone who had the misfortune to be in his presence.
The root of his homophobia, John claimed, was a systematic campaign of abuse suffered
at the hands of a friend's older brother that began when John was eight years old and
continued for years after.
John said that he was so embarrassed as a kid that he never said
anything to anyone about this abuse and this was even after he said his abuser's father walked into
the room while John was supposedly being burnt with cigarettes while naked and hogtied. But when
John got older his favorite topic of discussion was the abuse he'd suffered as a child and the
story always ended with his abuser dying in a motorcycle accident.
This Bunting always made sure to say was a shame because it robbed him of taking any
sort of revenge on his abuser.
His version of his abuse was intense and it was very involved.
And it involved his friend's older brother that would systematically torture him and
his friends and they would he would do this again and again. Yeah the older brother and his friends
would torture John. Yes and now I'm starting to understand what we talked about is that again you
have to buy the words of John Bunting and say that do you believe him? I don't know because partially
is I think his own personal obsession with it sounds like a bit of a fantasy. It sounds like a
thing that he created in his brain
in order to justify what he'd do later on
because it's this crazy story
that he gets to call back to at all times.
Or it could very much be real.
I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, if the stories to come are any indication,
Molestation seemed to be a fairly common occurrence
in the world John Bunting inhabited.
It was a, I think he was, yeah.
Molestation happened a lot.
It was in the air.
Like old Hollywood.
You know what I mean?
When fame and glitz was everywhere.
Oh, and southern Australia.
Ah, you can smell the freshly blossoming child molestation.
People need something to do.
You know, it's just too...
Yeah, you gotta give people jobs.
No man, but hey, last night check there's not a lot of money in child molestation. Not anymore. That's just too. You gotta give people jobs. Yeah. No man. But hey, last night check. There's not a lot of money in child molestation. Not anymore. Not in this academy. What's a guy
supposed to do? I'm just a mediocre guy with no abilities. How am I supposed to ruin a
child? Yeah. We got the Prince out of the game. We got Clinton out of the game. You
know, no one's buying anything
now as a way to take out his anger about being abused on someone
john said that when he was 13 he befriended a 40 year old man named
benny hey john yeah hey you're my best friend in the whole world little boy
benny also had experienced childhood trauma claiming that his father had cut off his toes
with bolt cutters just for the fun of it.
And I get it.
Believe me, I do.
Because look how funny my stumps are.
Benny, we don't know if Benny is real.
We don't know at all.
Yeah.
But the idea of Benny, because like, you know, I'm soon to be 40, you know, and just the
idea of like, like, honestly, this, this might sound controversial, but if soon to be 40, you know, and just the idea of like, like honestly, this
might sound controversial, but if you're a 40 year old and you spend a lot of time hanging
out with a 13 year old, it's like, it's kind of like, you know, it's like, how do you put
this? I got a lot of friends. I'm not here to fuck. Why are we hanging out?
Yeah. I don't want to talk to anyone who's under 24.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See, if you're not here, I don't want, I can't, I can't understand you.
I got nothing in common, except I guess if you decide to go torture pedophiles together.
But I think that there's other ways to do this.
Well, the two bonded and allegedly formed a sort of back alley to catch a predator.
From how John tells it, he lordered on street corners as pedo bait. I ain't got no parents, I've got nowhere to go, wonder what me's gonna do, I've got these
suckin' lips and these sensuous hips.
Oh, me shorts fell off again, uh oh, I'm stuck in a manhole, oh what to do?
Then he would lead men into alleys where Benny was waiting.
I thought I heard a curious boy walking down the alley.
There Benny and John would supposedly laugh and pummel these would-be pedophiles.
Haha take that!
Another kick of my heel!
Another kick of my pointed boot!
Haha!
Yeah now you're getting it Benny!
Now you're getting it!
Now let's go see lethal weapon
because I'll legally get
Are you better
I tell you what Johnny, I'm not getting too old for this shit
Later on in life John would claim that it was Benny who taught him the ropes on how to quote
Deal with gay men.
You take them to the store, you pick out dishes, and then you go on vacation.
And he would later claim that he and Benny murdered at least a couple of dudes in their
pedo fishing expeditions.
Right up top, it's important to note that John Bunting conflates gay men with pedophiles,
perpetuating the myth that all gay men are pedophiles by nature and should therefore be exterminated.
In his mind, trans women are also pedophiles, because he considered them to be gay men who
just happen to dress like women.
But in reality, gay men are not only less likely to be child molesters than straight
men, multiple studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of men who molest boys
are, in fact
Straight men. I will say most of the gay men I know can't stand children. Yeah
Literally actively avoid them like the only people I really know that know who they are
Straight men are sort of like we're in that way. You know, we deal with that a lot. We don't know
Say our feelings.
Sometimes we either, you know, like, uh, we should go to therapy,
but instead sometimes we build a giant machine that we use to sort of
occupy a bunch of police officers time and take over a small town.
Or sometimes we write a super long thing that some people call a
manifesto that we would rewrite to get our thoughts out because it's so difficult to say it in a vulnerable setting, but then of course you got to set up a bunch of mail bombs as well just to sort of cut the vulnerability of the manifesto.
Yeah baby.
Yeah, but you get it.
Therapy is a warm gun, yeah.
Well to break this down for just a second because it is absolutely fascinating.
Not all child molesters are pedophiles, but neither are all pedophiles child molesters.
I just want you guys to know I walked into Marcus' office yesterday and we're you know
as we know as we talked about the week how we're gonna do the show and I come in and
Marcus is like you know like Willy Wonka at the end of the movie of the movie Right his head and I and I come in I was like, hey Marcus, how you doing?
He's like, you know that there's a distinct difference between child molesters and pedophiles
Because one's got an action-oriented mindset
Well, I was able to you know know, smooth that out a little bit.
That was a bit of a, that was a knee-jerk reaction.
That was a, I was able to smooth out that distinction just a little bit.
Because I don't want to get, I'm like, listen, I don't want to get the letters from our non-practicing
pedophile listeners who are like, you just don't understand what I do.
You know how often I have to have sex with a man who's on his knees?
They're all semantics, man.
It is semantics, but they need semantics.
Well, pedophilia is a psychological disorder in which a person is exclusively attracted to children.
And often there's no preference for gender.
In other words, there's no such thing as heterosexual pedophilia or homosexual pedophilia.
There's just pedophilia. Wow, no labels? Total freedom. That's incredible. I can't wait to tell my wife to not listen to this.
Come on, I'll give her the abridged version when they come over.
Additionally, pedophiles often go their entire lives without ever molesting a child.
But child molestation is not always
about sexual gratification and it's not always perpetrated by pedophiles.
Are we going to get into the whole like non-practicing pedophiles thing?
No!
It just begins to feel like if you call yourself a non-practicing pedophile, just skip the
pedophile part. Just don't continue to not do that.
Just don't mention it.
You take that little thought you have in your head, you bury that down good and deep until
it becomes pancreatic cancer, which is what a pedophile is supposed to do.
No, you take that thought and you talk to your therapist about it.
You get help.
I know, but what is the help?
What is the help?
No, I'm not a psychiatrist.
Don't you just be put in the net?
Side-stores LP o TL a gmail.com. How do we fix these pedophile? Yeah, put them on top of a mountain
I think that they would all of a sudden we've got pedophile mountain. We already have
You hear the sound coming from a mountain we do technically do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do Now, interesting. I interviewed a non-practicing pedophile for Brighter Side one time. Oh, I thought about you saving it for the poor house
when you were working.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like, it's 21 and over in here,
so you might not want to work with him.
Yeah, no, I remember I interviewed him for a while
and I was just like, I was trying to get to like,
you know, like, you obviously,
we're not allowed to shoot him in the head, you know?
And so you're trying to figure out like,
what the fuck do you do with all these people?
And then by the end of it, I was just like,
I gotta stop fucking talking to this guy
And I was like we can't release this
I'm not even talking about non-practicing pedophiles. That wasn't even the point of this whole thing.
Many times, child molestation is about a power dynamic or a perpetuation of an abuse cycle.
As in, someone hurt me and I don't know how to deal with it, so I'm going to try hurting someone else to see if that makes me feel better.
This very well could have been the case with John Bunting, although as far as we know,
he never hurt or molested a child.
That's what I found really honestly very interesting is that he didn't actually then go ahead and
do a bunch of the things that he says that he was against, but then he did a bunch of
stuff that was his bad words.
Really awful.
Yeah, it's also bad.
He like played with children, right?
He was technically that was the that was his main, that was kind of how he got people's also bad. He like played with children, right? He was a technically, that was his main,
that was kind of how he got people's trust,
was that he was good with his kids.
Like he would like go to the arcade and shit.
Yes, that was part of his like,
I view it as a psychological game
to see how fucking cool I am, see what a hero I am.
Yeah, no, he definitely, he had a messiah,
or I wouldn't say a messiah, a savior complex,
that's what it is, you have definitely had a savior complex. Now the people who knew John back in Brisbane said that even then he talked non-stop about
wanting to bash gay men and he constantly bragged that he was on the run from the law
because of the gay men he'd already bashed.
Nobody however really listened to what he said because as we'll see, John Bunting is
nothing if not an incessant talker.
It's a constant monologuer. because as we'll see, John Bunting is nothing if not an incessant talker.
It's a constant monologuer.
And also, they do say, I was doing that voice for a reason, that he had a high squeaky voice.
I went looking for any evidence of him talking,
and he's one of those guys that has never said a single fucking word publicly about anything.
So you don't think we can get him for the update show?
I've been, honestly,
his assistant and I have'm going back and forth.
Yeah, yeah.
We reach out through Sirius, maybe he'll get back.
Yeah, maybe, maybe.
Let's use those connections.
Now in 1986, Bunting and eight friends
were on a road trip across Australia
to Perth, but when their caravan
broke down around Adelaide, they
figured, fuck it, this is where we live now.
True freedom. That's how I became a comedian. I was trying to go to New Jersey and my car broke down
at Yee Haw junction I'm like I guess I'm moving to Tallahassee and then I joined
murder. That's how it works. Similarities.
Well John eventually settled into an Adelaide suburb called Salisbury North, which was not
the best neighborhood in the Adelaide metro area.
High in poverty and crime, Salisbury North was a cheaply built suburb designed to house
employees of a nearby weapons manufacturing facility.
It didn't even have sewers until 1955, and residents up until that time were told to
bury all their sewage in their backyards
Oh no! M's to carrot lumps!
By the time bunting moved in during the mid-80s, conditions weren't much better.
From what I can tell, and this may be unfair, let me know if it is,
but it seems like Salisbury North was sort of a neighborhood for misfits.
I can hear the clicking and the clacking, I can hear the typing.
It seemed like a place where people were shoved instead of being in a place where people lived or it could also be that the
Sorts of outsiders that populate this story were just the sorts of people that were willing to hang out with a guy like John Bunting
For me, it's like a town that's made for wet steak
See part of what makes the story different from other serial killer tales is that Bunting
and his cronies weren't murdering strangers.
Every person they killed was either personally known to them or was at the very least an
acquaintance or a friend of a friend.
And while some of them were apparently very nice and some were just mentally ill, a few
of the people they killed were real pieces of shit.
Yeah, because they're killing the people they hung the people they killed were real pieces of shit.
Yeah, because they're killing the people they hung out with, which was other pieces of shit.
And John Bunting, I actually feel like it's the, this is a suburb thing.
Because when I looked at pictures of Adelaide and looked at pictures of Snowtown, it's like-
We've been to Adelaide, you didn't have to look at pictures of Adelaide.
I barely remember, we were there for like 30 hours.
We weren't there a long time.
But I was looking, I did a Google Street view
I went looking through Snowtown. It's good. Well Snowtown nothing happened in Snowtown except where they you know actually
You know put the bodies. Yeah, right. It's good over there. It's hilarious. It's like technically
I just think it's a suburb thing where it's like you just get a big mixture suburbs have like a lot of weird ass
That's what we call it. All right, you change it from the snow town murders to the Salisbury
mistakes.
They're all like, they get sued by Salisbury. Like the company that has the sauce. I like
Salisbury Steak. The Salisbury Mistakes is going to be the LPN softball team.
But I mean, coming as I do from a low income town, you know, all of these types of people
just sort of mix together.
And sometimes you just don't really have any choice but to be in the same room as the biggest
dickhead in town.
It just fucking happens. But now once Bunting moved to Salisbury North,
he got a job at a meat processing plant, butchering cows,
first working in the intestine, liver and spleen department
before being promoted to meatbagging and general rendering.
Next week they say I get to get out the brain.
I don't want to cut off a cow's face.
Oh, but I like killing the intestines.
It's pretty gross man.
Yeah, of course.
Now John loved working at the slaughterhouse.
And he loved telling people how much he loved working there.
He loved it.
And he would describe in detail how he'd use a stun gun to immobilize a cow before cutting its throat.
It's the one time I really feel like if he had just stayed at the abattoir, he would have been fine. gun to immobilize a cow before cutting its throat.
What gave John the edge in the slaughterhouse and what would make
him a particularly disgusting serial killer later on was the fact that John Bunting had been born
with no sense of smell. So spending all day knee deep in blood cow shit and intestines was no problem
whatsoever for John Bunting just as being in the presence of rotting corpses
wouldn't be a problem later on.
Hey, come here, come here, I'm gonna tell you a little secret, then.
I kinda like it.
My favorite cousin has no sense of smell.
Yeah?
And she's my favorite because I can fart around her.
That's great.
Yeah, she just laughs at the noise.
Yeah, that's really fun.
You can have a new thing called Ozzie Candle.
Mm-hmm. Ozzie Candle? laughs at the noise. Yeah. That's really fun. You can have a new thing called Ozzy candle.
Ozzy candle? Instead of Yankee candle. It's Ozzy candle, but it smells like a fucking pig intestine.
Cow fuck. Cow cum. Cow juice. Someone did send me like a candle that was like, the smell was the Essex, like the chip. Yeah. Did you ever burn it? Yeah, it was a.
It was wild.
Interesting.
I want to I want to smell it.
Is it up in the office?
Yeah.
Where do we I mean, we don't want to light
it, the building.
Yeah, sure.
Let's light it in here.
Let's light it in the parking lot.
Or in the bathroom.
You guys never want to have fun.
I want you in the studio.
Now, in his leisure time, Bunting collected guns, knives, and ropes.
He made poison, blow torches, and malt off cocktails, and he boasted to his roommates about how much he just loved killing.
He also went on and on about how much he hated gay people and pedophiles,
how much he'd like to kill them, and how he'd in fact killed a couple already years ago somewhere else.
Yeah.
Now by 1989, John Bunting met an 18-year-old girl named Veronica Tripp, the first of many
vulnerable people that John would take advantage of over the next decade.
Tripp had a mild intellectual disability she could barely see and she couldn't read.
But my god, could she dance?
Yeah, just to see her up there, you wouldn't even believe she was all jacked up.
You barely tell her last name's trip.
And somehow she found John Bunting captivating, but she also said that John was quote,
Thick as a brick, thicker than me, that's for sure.
Could you say that a little more enunciated? Thick is a break. Thicker than my. That's for sure.
You just said it worse than the first time.
It's Australian.
Yeah, well, subtitle it.
Thicker than my.
Thicker than my.
Thicker than my.
Thicker than my.
Thicker than my.
That's for sure.
Thicker than my.
She said you said thicker than me.
That's for sure.
And that's what gets me about the people involved in this story.
Most of them are just smart enough to know they aren't very bright,
but they also think that everyone else is dumber than they are.
Oh, of course. But then she found John Bunting.
You I also thought you put this in a really good way.
The last time we were talking about it during our production meeting about how,
like it's just that John Bunting is one tiny click smarter than every other
piece of shit in the circle around him.
Yes. Yeah. It's just like he's just he's Damien
Hasenkopf. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's just just the tiniest bit smarter.
He's the smartest. Yeah.
The yeah, he's the he's the smartest person in the room somehow in a room full of idiots.
Yeah. But at any rate,
Veronica would say, hmm, well, yeah, we would say so. You know, nothing. Yeah. But at any rate, What were you about to say? Hmm? What were you about to say?
You were about to make a comment about?
I was just saying that, you know, I feel like I'm smarter than both of you.
Fuck you!
I get longer taint!
That's not true.
My taint is longer.
I have longer taint than him.
Really?
Yeah, his balls are too long.
Oh.
Yeah.
But it's not about the balls.
It's about the base.
I actually never measured my taint because I'm smarter than Henry.
I know.
I've seen the documents.
I can look from his pants.
But at any rate, Veronica married John Bunting in September of 1989, looking past his habit
of incessantly talking about murdering pigs with skewers because he liked watching them
bleed out.
Okay. You know, Carolina deals with your talk about records.
She talks with me about records.
She also loves records.
They got a whole show.
Yeah, we have an entire show about music.
I was saying, everybody's got topics that they stick to.
None of my family wanted to hear me talk
about the extended versions of the different serials I miss.
That I was explaining while my mom was in town.
I was like, double dip crunch.
Where's that at?
We're in double dip crunch.
Then I was like, mom, what's that cereal like?
And she was like, oh, it was one of the raisin brands.
It was raisin.
I was like, mom, you know which one?
She was like, oh, you had the,
oh, Henry Thomas, you always loved your cereals.
And I was like, I know I did.
What was the cereals?
And then it was like Natalie and Jackie both were like sliding, cereal son. I was like I know I did what was the cereal and then it was like Natalie and
Jackie both like were like sliding and then Natalie finally was like stop
talking about
cereal
Does she not know the rule of visiting mother the rule of chewing time the rule of
Built-in nap time also works.
Now after John got married, he was no longer so abstract about who he wanted to kill.
Instead of just saying he wanted to kill gay people in general, he was now talking about specific neighbors.
Fantasizing out loud about filling his home with the corpses of dead gay men and pedophiles,
giggling as he talked about treating them like puppets.
I also find his character to be very interesting because right before this, he was like a nomad.
He was bouncing back and forth between kind of like weird little jobs and didn't know where to live.
And then the way they talked about with Veronica Tripp and her kids, it was like, it's like he showed up.
And then all of a sudden, it was like the it's like he showed up. And then all of a sudden it was like the next day he was a permanent part
of their lives. It was like he was always there.
And it was like he immediately took over for this family.
Like he just kind of came in and in a it's interesting.
I kind of feel like he was waiting for a place
where his personality could take root.
He was kind of searching around for like, who's gonna put me up?
Who's gonna plant me in a spot
so that I can finally be me,
the me I've always wanted to be.
Also weirdly reminds me of,
I've been watching the O.J. Simpson documentary series.
It kind of reminds me about that.
Outmade in America?
Yeah, where it's like that man talks about,
O.J. Simpson kind of talks about,
he was like, I'm a man that time was waiting for.
Yeah.
Well, a couple of years later, John and Veronica moved into government-subsidized housing at
203 Waterloo Corner Road.
This is where John would live until the Snowtown murders were finally discovered, and this
neighborhood is where he would meet his eventual accomplices.
Now, out of the three main accomplices that would follow John down the path of murder,
none were more involved than Robert Joe Wagner.
Hulking, illiterate, and slow of mind, Wagner had also been abused as a child, again by
the older teenage son of his mother's friend.
And he definitely was.
He definitely was abused.
And he's the Tex Watson.
Yes, he's very much the Tex Watson. He's the enforcer
So key we got so now we kind of just remember this is a super complex
This is a very complicated story and it's only gonna get more complicated as we go
So just always remember John buntings Charles Manson this Robert Wagner is Tex Watson
Yeah, John bunting is the ringleader Robert Wagner is his right-hand man Robert Wagner and Joe bunting are the two guys who would commit the most heinous acts of murder throughout.
By 14 Robert was in a relationship with a 31 year old trans woman named Vanessa
Lane who also happened to have served time in prison for sexually assaulting
two 12 year old boys. Eventually Vanessa would herself become a victim but she
was also a terrible fucking person,
the first of many in this story. Hey, how dare you? Okay, yeah, they might have groomed and seduced a
14 year old boy and then kidnapped him and drove off into for several years where I guess they wanted some long fuck robbery spree
and while he, you know, over and over again. How dare you?
She's a beautiful flower.
She's a piece of shit. Whoa, real bad.
Now Robert's mother called the police when her son entered into a relationship with Vanessa Lane,
but the cops didn't really care, saying that Robert was close enough to the age of
consent where it didn't really matter.
He was 14, the age of consent 16.
What do you want?
What do you want from us?
I mean, the people that perpetrated these atrocities, like they were, the one thing
they were correct in saying was that the cops did not give a fuck about any of these people.
The authorities did not give a fuck about the poor people of Adelaide at all. You know, if they just went and wrote a book called
like Bro-Lita, this would all be completely fine. Bro-Lita? Yeah, the dude version of Low-Lito.
Ah yes. I get it now. Be Low-Lito. Low-Lito, yeah. Maybe. I like Bro-Lita. Lilo Lido. Lolo Lido. Maybe. I like Brolita. Lilo and Stitch.
Weird.
That's just a movie.
Yeah, that's just the name of the title.
It's got nothing to do with-
When's the last time you've seen it?
Never.
Is there pedophilia in Lilo and Stitch?
Is Lilo a child?
Lilo's an alien.
Ohana means family.
Let's move on.
So, Robert spent the ages of 14 till 18 going no contact with his family because that's
what Vanessa wanted.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose.
He was mature enough to choose. He was mature enough to choose. He was mature enough to choose. He was mature enough to choose. He was mature enough to choose. So Robert spent the ages of 14 till 18 going no contact with his family because that's
what Vanessa wanted.
He was mature enough to choose.
Weirdly even though Robert was in a relationship with a trans woman, he worshipped Adolf Hitler.
Whoa weird.
He even named one of his dogs Adolf.
He even had one of those old like you, those custom screensavers that has like floating text in your computer
Except instead of saying like Robert's computer or like fart. Yeah, like he said Adolf Hitler is still alive
I don't know why. Waiting for it to hit the coroner.
Yeah, and you're like, oh yeah.
Yeah, he's alive.
Robert even tried getting someone to tattoo a swastika on his forehead,
but no tattoo artist in Adelaide would do it.
You didn't even got down to Pearl for that.
Yeah, or call the cops.
Yeah.
Robert even joined a neo-Nazi group, but was kicked out for being, quote,
too radical, too radical for Nazis.
Now we are, are we for certain that that didn't mean he just didn't boogie board there?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Man, you are too radical.
You're fucking too tubular to be not for the white race.
Yeah, your sneakers got wheels on them, man.
We're more of a bodacious crew.
Can you imagine, this is this the Andrews Breivik story
Yeah
Now Robert and Vanessa lived in a house filled with dogs and cats all of whom shat and pissed everywhere fleas
Bounced around every room and the entire house was absolutely filthy
Robert for some fucking reason played church music at high volume all the time and allegedly
both he and Vanessa were seen performing acts of bestiality in their yard with
their dogs. You're gonna want to do that behind the fence.
Maybe calm the dogs.
Maybe the music guy made the dogs just kind of chill out.
And this is the guy that John Bunting would use as his right-hand man in his
moral crusade against the gay men of
Southern Australia. Why didn't they just run for office?
And those dogs were you know girl dogs. Yeah to be fair. Yeah. Thank you Robert Wagner
However was but one of eight accomplices in the Snowtown murders
Although to be fair some participated in a more diminished capacity than others and not all were willing or even aware.
Robert Skews, for example, was a man in his 50s with brain damage who lived next door to
John Bunting and he was hoping to continue the quiet life living off disability that he'd been
living the last few decades. Skews, however, was the connection between John Bunting and Robert
Wagner. See, John Bunting and his wife became friends with Robert Skews, and Robert Skews was friends
with Robert Wagner and Vanessa Lane.
So before long, all five of them had formed a tight knit friend group.
I think the term you'd be used would be, nowadays the kids would say what you would call a nightmare
blunt rotation
It did however take some mental gymnastics for bunting to accept Robert Wagner and Vanessa Lane's relationship
I find it. This is this is fascinating. It is in buntings mine Robert Wagner had been coerced into
Homosexuality by Vanessa Lane just because he he decided. Yeah. Because he said he looked straight.
Yeah.
And he justified hanging out with Vanessa
because he believed, based on Vanessa's previous conviction
for sexually assaulting two 12-year-old boys,
that she knew every pedophile in the neighborhood.
Lucky.
Were they in your Google invites?
You get your Facebook messages?
No, they got a Slack.
They got a Slack.
They got a Slack.
More like a slick.
But these guys, Vanessa Lane is also interesting because there's some, I read two conflicting things about whether or not there was one story that Vanessa Lane did revert back.
I think it's like, what's the term? It term it's not D trans I know what the term is there was some saying that they had maybe consider themselves not
trans anymore during a period of time that may have allowed him John Bunting to
get in like this is one of those things that we are honestly a little could I
would say I'm a little confused on very confused. I trade and trust me. I tried I like looked shit up
I tried figuring it out, but it's it's very confusing. Yeah, cuz Vanessa Lane. It's all very personal
So, you know, yeah things because they're dead name. Their dead name is Barry Lane
Yeah, and a lot of the so if you're confused at all because a lot of the material just call them Barry Lane
Yeah versus Vanessa Lane. We're trying to honor this dead pedophile
We did if one person gets the standard then everyone gets the stand that's what we believe did they die as Barry or Vanessa?
I don't Vanessa Vanessa
But I don't know I don't know whether or not that's what a lot that was a part of the thing
What's the gravestone say I think I have no idea. don't know it's yeah again. I have to look at my
You know it's it's just more like why did John bunting allow this person in his life
yeah, I think it's like yes, it was because he viewed them as a
He viewed them as a tool
but also I think that Vanessa Lane was lying to John Bunting because much like
it's a little MAGA-y, right? Where it's like Vanessa Lane is a villain and decides, okay,
I like these other villains. That's fine. We're all going to hang out. But I have to sort of
ingratiate myself with this other group of villains. So what I kind of have to do maybe is downplay the
thing that makes this guy the most angry. The thing that makes this guy the most angry. I like how bad, I love his hate. I love how
much he hates. I love his fat body. I love his toad-like face. I love this guy. I want
more of him. I need him. And so what she decided was I think I'll downplay it, get you in closer
to me, maybe because you are talking dangerous. Maybe you're already starting to talk dangerous
about you want to kill a bunch of gay people and you want to quote-unquote kill a bunch
Of pedophiles that you equate the two together
Maybe you're like very similar to why women date serial killers why anybody dates a serial killer I give you the feed
I'm now safe you become an accomplice to avoid becoming a villain
You join in because you are trying to you are doing this to be like I'm one of the good ones
I'm here with you. I'm on this side with you, buddy. Let's go kill some people.
There's some of these, you know, we believe me cause a lot of these pedophiles,
honestly, they're not super fun. Like,
listen, I'll get it. John, it's bad out there.
We don't like the pedophiles cause honestly they cheated monopoly.
And they also knew that he would kill the people they didn't want around anymore.
Or that maybe knew about other crimes that they've committed
They could clean up some from some fucking loose ends for themselves at this point though. He hasn't killed anyone
No, at this point and I think that my building I think that might even be giving Vanessa a little bit too much credit
So I think it's a lot simpler than that like Vanessa's a cunning predator as well
Yes, Vanessa is also predator
But I think it's a lot simpler where it's just these sorts of friend groups in these
small towns and these poor communities.
Like it just happens.
It just happens. And you talk shit behind each other's back and then you get together
and you drink together and then everything's fine for a little while.
And then you talk shit and then you get into a fight.
But then you're fine again.
And then everything's awful.
It's so it's just these
relationships between these types of people are it's simple and complicated all at the same time
and nothing makes sense because they're all fucking morons it's like i don't like trans women but
you're my trans woman yes but the murder gang led by john bunting wasn't complete just yet
soon enough they began hanging out with mark Hayden who was described as a quote
taciturn dullard
It's not the way to describe a man. I went taciturn
What's it mean?
What's the taciturn such a type of bird?
Backward slow, do you know what taciturn means no I never heard the word before
it's a good word yeah no what I am
you man I would love to be a bear at least you're at least a weekend
with the kiddies in the penises because we're gonna come get That's pretty taciturn yeah, okay. Yeah in the movie. He was the guy with the long beard
Yes, okay good. Yeah backward slow Hayden spoke in monosyllables and was described as a meek follower
Now naturally John Bunting saw another person he could control when he met Mark Hayden at a welding course
The two became fast friends and they'd often take
Mark's Land Cruiser out to the salt flats
to do wheelies and junkyards.
Enter into the scene, Verna Sinclair.
Now Verna first tried going for John Bunting,
but when he rejected her because she had seven children
from five men, she shifted her focus to Mark Hayden.
Look at that irrational thought.
Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha She shifted her focus to Mark Hayden. Look at that irrational thought. Hahahaha
Ha!
And she shifted her focus to Mark Hayden
I don't like it. I don't like it because I don't think you can commit.
Yeah.
She shifted her focus to Mark Hayden because he was willing to watch her children while she went out.
Oh.
And soon she and Mark were married in the LDS church because Verna was a Mormon.
Yay!
But when she went to change her last name,
she went ahead and changed her first name as well.
I just am so sick of this shit.
It just like, it really is difficult to keep this shit
straight because they all have their legal names, what
they call themselves, and then like what the town calls them.
Everybody's got like three names and everything.
They're all the same.
It's not even like, it's like, cool. It's not like she became like sizzle lady or like
Mrs. Thunderbutt. It's like she just changed it to Elizabeth. Yeah. Yeah. Cause she wanted
to avoid, like she's, she's like, she wanted to avoid any exes track tracking her down.
Oh, these men coming around looking to make a poke.
And she was a handsome woman.
Sure.
But I don't know why you'd why she necessarily thought that there was going to be all these
dudes showing up from the past looking to make slick.
But I also think that that's because I think it was dudes in the past looking for money
she owed.
I smell a sequel to Book of Mormon though.
Well, Verna Sinclair became Elizabeth Hayden and she too would fall victim to John Bunting's
murder gang. Now, after about a year at 203 Waterloo corner road, John Bunting began digging
the same sort of tunnel that he dug when he was a child. Although I think burrow might
be a better way to describe it. Yeah, I'll be burrowing. Yeah, I'm Michael L. Cockerby, a little hole in the ground for me and my friends, yeah.
You know what they say, you can take the tunnel out of the boy, but you can't take the boy
out the tunnel, especially if you smash his fucking bones and you let it eat like it was
so much soil.
You wouldn't tell the difference between the boy and the tunnel.
It's like if Albert Fish was Dig Dug.
I like the guys!
Well, John told his wife that the hole was going to be a bunker or quote, maybe a TV
room.
I always love a TV room where the roots of the earth itself are tickling my body. It sounds incredible
Have you ever been down in a hole and how good it feels?
I hate it because it reminds me of being of mixed kind of feel like what it'd be like being slowly lowered and the ground
Inside of a casket, but I know I'm glad
You like it. You know where I feel most comfortable
Sitting in a chair in a home. Yeah. Like in
front of a television. I feel truly comfortable in my car. Like I drive around. I'm not saying
being in a hole is where I'm most comfortable. I'm just saying that the coolness of the dirt
that you feel in a hole is incredibly comfortable. I'm going to compromise. Basement. I like a basement.
No, but it's got to be outside. Have you ever gonna have the coolness of the dirt contrast with the heat of the day
This is a good time for this actually Eddie. How do you feel about?
subterranean lifestyle I
Once had to dig a hole for work and my hands bled so I hate holes. Yep. Wow
All right, there you go, but you lived in a basement for a while
I did live up beneath the Plumbers Union and then the oh that dog had to get killed You know, there you go. But you lived in a basement for a while. I did live up beneath the plumber's union and then that dog had to get killed. So that
was a whole long story.
God, he was so fucking sad. That was a sad part of Eddie's life.
Well Veronica just didn't ask questions when it came to her husband's doings. Partly this
had to do with the fact that John almost exclusively was talking about how much he hated gay people
or how much he loved working at the slaughterhouse.
I just wish that there was a way to combine the two. You know? Wouldn't it be crazy? Maybe
I'm crazy to stick with him. I might make him stick here and throw some spaghetti at
the wall, right? Try to ask yourself the question, what if we brought gay men into the slaughterhouse?
Okay
Yeah, it's it
That's the idea
Well, additionally he constantly reeked of death
But the reek wasn't a problem for John because as I said he had no sense of smell
But I think he liked smelling like that. Yes to make up for this
He'd asked people to describe the smells of herbs, soaps, and spices and
would sometimes stand next to a stranger point to something and say hey tell me
what this smells like. What's it smell like? Tell me what this smells like. It's my
finger. Smell my belly. I on, smell my belly. What more smell? I'm gonna stay over here. No.
Come on, smell my belly.
I don't want to.
I don't want to.
I've all been so careless.
No.
I'm a curious boy.
No.
No.
No.
Are you gonna say no to me?
No.
You say no?
No.
Get the hammers.
You say no?
No.
No.
I ain't gonna.
Now to help dig the tunnel, John Bunting enlisted his new friend Mark Hayden.
Which was perfect because Mark had also dug a tunnel under his own bedroom when he was
a kid, and he loved digging.
Simple, where the worms live.
Nice.
Brown.
Dark.
Locked to be in there.
But of course, bunting took all the fun of the actual digging while Hayden had the shit
job of ferrying out the buckets of dirt.
Which carrying the buckets of dirt is the worst fucking part of the job.
We're getting this done by next week or sick ass is off to some kind of fucking vacation.
This is digging.
I think the dirt carrying sounds lovely.
Really?
More than digging.
Really?
No, digging's easily the best.
No!
That is Eddie's Eastern European show.
My back!
That's his full Ukrainian.
That's like the full like, because I can see, imagine Eddie.
Tie a bunch of dirt to me.
I'll bring it wherever you need.
Literally transport Eddie.
Look at him.
Transport him into
1818 Ukraine right imagine him in his tunic like he's got like a weird sort of like
Tubular gourd like hat on and he's just pulling a horse like he's pulling the horse. Yeah, the horse is relax
Pretty soon though Robert Wagner the one who would become John Bunting's main murder partner, he decided that he wanted to get in on the tunnel action as well, because
it seemed like a hell of a lot of fun.
Hey, it's FOMO!
So the three of them started bonding on a shared project.
It was also around this time that John started trying on the role of the Savior.
John brought stray drug addicts off the street into the home he shared with
his wife in an attempt to turn it into a DIY drug rehab center.
Okay.
But usually the addicts just sat, drank coffee, and listened to John rant and rave until they
got bored.
Then they'd wander off while John went out to find someone else to start the whole process
all over again.
It's like Louis Vatican.
Yeah, just fucking bring him in take him out
It seems like you like thought he was a priest. Yes
I he thought that he was this moral this true a bastion of morality. Yeah, and that people would be impressed
by his
Thoughts like I think that if he um had any form of remote education or or real kind academic pursuit, he would try to write a book.
I think he would be very similar to, very similar to Anders Breivik, something like that, who would write something, probably a tome that would be very
boring and it would
destroy my search history and be another thing that probably keeps me permanently on some form of government list.
Yeah. Especially after I just bought that whole Jesuit conspiracy book, and I wonder what that just did to me. I think it's fine as long as you know that
it's a conspiracy. No, I'm just saying the problem is that, but who, but just Jeff Bezos
know this. Does the computer know this? That it's my iron. Bezos loves selling that shit.
He does. Bunting sounds like he's like less street smart, more dirt smart. Yeah. Very
much so. Don't fucking talk about dirt smart. Dirt smart more dirt smart. Yeah, very much so. Hey, don't fucking talk about dirt smart.
Dirt smart is pretty smart.
Yeah, it can be.
Now working at the slaughterhouse.
Now working at the slaughterhouse seemed to take care of two of John Bunting's needs,
feeding both his bloodlust and serving as an outlet for the extreme amount of anger
he carried with him everywhere he went.
But after suffering an injury during a motorcycle accident, John had to quit the slaughterhouse.
Besides just the loss of the job he loved, the accident also seemed to have injured his
brain because the violence that John had always talked about perpetrating began soon after.
For example, when he had to cut his long hair for a new job at the local foundry, John's
mother did a terrible job using kitchen scissors.
When John looked in the mirror, he snarled, kicked over some furniture, ran outside, grabbed
a pickaxe, and furiously started digging in the mirror, he snarled, kicked over some furniture, ran outside, grabbed a pickaxe,
and furiously started digging in the tunnel.
Oh, Mummy! Do I look terrible? I hate me bangs! Oh my God, my tunnel! I'm doing my job dick,
dick, dick all day long! Nobody cares about your banks, John. Remember that, John.
Nobody cares where they're at in case people stare.
Never!
How dare you?
How?
How will I go back to the slaughterhouse with this haircut?
Well, outbursts of that sort became common.
And not too long after, John Bunting committed his first murder.
But as opposed to other killers, whose first kill is usually a rageful accident,
John's first murder was entirely premeditated.
Now, in 1991, Robert Wagner and Vanessa Lane befriended a gay teenager named Clinton
Trezise for reasons that aren't completely completely clear seeing as how Clinton was just a regular friendly
dude, Bunting became convinced that Clinton was a pedophile.
Was because gay people were pedophiles in his mind.
Yes.
So he was 13.
You said he was 13.
Teenager.
The teenager.
Yeah, he was 17.
He was 17.
I mean, if you're underage, you know.
You could still be a pedophile at 17. Yeah, he was he was a 17. He was 17. Yeah, I mean if you're underage
17 yeah, very much so was the age cut off I think if prepubescent post-pubescent
I think if you're hmm, how do I put this in a way that works? How do we not talk about this?
Hmm, how about this? I didn't ask the question
So after John invited Clinton over to his house for a social visit, John bashed him in the head with a shovel, killing him. Then using his powers of
persuasion, Bunting convinced Mark Hayden and Vanessa Lane to hide the body. They
loaded it into Vanessa's station wagon, drove it 20 minutes outside of town, and
buried it in a shallow grave.
Shortly after though, Vanessa was sitting in Bunting's kitchen talking to John's wife when she blurted out that John had murdered Clinton Trezise.
That's... God... Vanessa wanted to. Vanessa wanted to tell him.
Oh yeah, well she said under... she said it under the auspices saying like, you gotta get away from John.
Yeah.
John's dangerous, you gotta get away from from the she just wanted to fucking tell someone
Vanessa was a known liar about many things
So John's wife didn't believe her and John denied it when she first brought it up
But when Vanessa came back with more details John's wife confronted him again
This time he admitted to the murder completely and warned his wife to keep quiet.
She was a very meek woman. She really was. She was a... she had a... some form of a mental disability.
She was quiet and so like she was already new like because you have... she's got two accomplices.
He's already just murdered somebody in Coldplay.
I mean it's not like he's gonna marry an activist.
What do you mean curveball if he'd married... what was it? Huma Abaji? What was the name for him? like he's gonna marry an activist. And keep quiet she did while John continued
killing and recruiting more people for what would become a sort of passive
murder squad consisting of people who would lure victims help dispose of
bodies and stand guard while bunting and Wagner perpetrated the most heinous of
the crimes.
The next to join the crew was yet another abused youth, a guy named Jamie Vlasakis,
who had been brutally raped by his father Spiros until Spiros died of a heart attack
when Jamie was seven.
But it wasn't while he was molesting him, right?
Did not I?
You know what?
I actually don't know.
Yeah, the details don't really come out on that one. Yeah, They didn't put that on the death certificate heart attack while molesting.
It was while he was molesting the son.
After zipping through another marriage in just a year, Jamie's mother became addicted
to prescription drugs and her two sons, Jamie included, were befriended by a neighbor named
Jeffrey pain who also happened to be a pedophile. I guess they're like, I mean people talk about
the pedophile elites and the pedophile government. They seem to be
fucking everywhere. You know what I do think? I think that there are obviously
pedophile elites. There's also what I would call pedophile groundlings.
And they are the hoi polloi of the pedophile community.
They're the voters of the pedophile community.
You can't have pedophile elites without pedophile groundlings.
You can't.
You really can't.
And you don't think that pedophile elites don't consider themselves above the regular
pedophile?
Oh, they're not hanging out.
No, no, no.
We get my children freshly flown in from France and then they are freshly ground into food for my horses.
Yeah.
Well, meanwhile, Vanessa Lane, who lived nearby, she'd been watching Jeff the pedophile groom Jamie Vlasakis, and Vanessa told John Bunting.
So, John stepped in and began grooming Jamie for a different purpose altogether.
Reverse grooming. Murder. So John stepped in and began grooming Jamie for a different purpose altogether.
Reverse grooming.
Murder.
Acting as a father figure, John took Jamie out to the movies and they raced around on motorbikes.
But, never willing to be normal for too long, John would also murder cats and dogs and skin them in front of Jamie while trying to get him to join in.
Which is, I guess, like the murder grooming equivalent of showing a kid a porno movie
I actually think it's exactly what it is. It is slowly getting you him used to violence
He saw a son he saw somebody that he could make into a little version of himself when he arrived
Like again, it was another one of those it was just like one day
There was no John bunting the next day John bunting was thing that Jamie knew. He came in and took over his entire brain and he was killing animals in front of him,
being like, look how this is no big deal.
Then he would slowly put the gun in his hands and say, like, kill this dog in front of me.
Like, do these things.
Kill this animal in front of me.
Get me going.
Like, get me.
See how, how easy this is, how we can let this go.
And then unfortunately, I do believe of this group, Jamie Velzakes is the baby spice.
He's the baby spice and Robert Wagner is
sporty spice.
Sporty.
Yeah. And then I would put John Bunting. I mean, I guess because a leader of the Spice Girls was
ginger.
Posh.
I thought it was posh.
Not peas, not posh. I think Mark's scary spice.
Yeah, Mark could probably be scary spice. Mark Hayden? Yeah, look. Yeah, I'll kiss Daddy Murphy. Yeah, I do just stomp and move.
I should probably text my wife before I say anything else about the spice girls.
You probably should because we don't want to get anybody upset.
Yeah, man.
You know, I can't even allow that.
I just want to zig a zig a.
We all do.
Does that mean you want to be my lover?
Mm hmm.
You got to get with your friends, which he did.
That's me.
And what we all know is that friendship never ends.
Vanessa is is Beckham.
Yeah!
But what brought Jamie fully into John's fold was John's compulsive spying on the neighbors
and his habit of searching their houses when they weren't home.
This, John said, was in service of rooting out the pedophiles and homosexuals in the
neighborhood, which appealed to Jamie because he'd been abused by not just one man, but two, one of whom
was a neighbor.
But what really caught Jamie's attention was John's so-called wall of spiders.
In a spare bedroom in his house, John Bunting had a huge conspiracy board featuring everyone
he suspected of being a neighborhood pedophile, with notes that included addresses, phone numbers, and supposed crimes and proclivities.
Hey John, I just want to say, it's been honestly a lot being your neighbor, it's fun to be
your neighbor. Can I take a look at the wall of spiders? I just want to see it again, because
it's so interesting and stuff. And then you've got to just make sure my name's not on there. Just pull that little pin there.
Cut a bit of a string there.
Oh, look at all these spiders.
We better do something about him, alright?
I know, anyone he rolled up on with a fucking disposable camera must have been terrified.
How about we just remember this the way we remember it? One neighbour, for example, was tagged as preferring young boys, while another had
played Santa Claus in the past, but had very suspiciously been banned from playing Santa
Claus ever again anywhere in Adelaide.
We know that's alcoholism.
That's definitely alcoholism.
Or he lost weight.
Cancer.
But you don't get banned for that.
You just get put on a wait list.
Yeah, you got to get fat.
Yeah. All these alleged pedophiles were connected with wool string.
Although I think John just did that because it made the board look more legit.
It's nice because then you always follow the strings, the pedophiles.
That's what I like about it.
I'm my favorite color and I hate spiders and gays.
You really like d arts and crafts.
He did.
He loved them.
He did.
At first though, all John would do with this information and speculation was make prank
phone calls, spray graffiti on their houses, or pour brake fluid on their cars.
Harassment, yes, but definitely all things preferable to being murdered.
It is crazy that he would do these weeks long prank call things.
He'd just pick up like stuff man. I I
Heard that always clean ice cream tricks. Oh you better go out there fuck those kids
I smelly and stupid
This is the time of like the height of popularity for the jerky
This is the time of like the height of popularity for the jerky boys. But speaking of murder, the dossier that was most extensive was the one that John kept
on Vanessa Lane, which was ironic considering how most of the information on the wall was
from Vanessa Lane, who was also a known liar.
Yeah I think that she was delivering things to him to make him distracted from killing her.
Yes.
By the mid-90s, the relationship between Robert Wagner and Vanessa Lane had deteriorated.
Likewise, John Bunting's marriage had also ended,
and he was now in a relationship with Jamie Vlasakis' mother, Elizabeth Harvey.
Okay, so remember that?
Okay, so John Bunting is no longer with everybody's
favorite dancer Veronica Tripp. She's gone, she's out! Yeah well no she's actually kind of not. She's
still around. She's still around. But they're not in love anymore. Now she's in love with Jamie
Vazlakis' mother Elizabeth Harvey. All right. Who would go on to play the woman that would play that woman would win the AFI award for the movie Snowtown.
Nice! And so Robert Wagner left Vanessa and moved in with John Bunting, Elizabeth Harvey, and Jamie Vlasakis.
Wagner and Bunting also joined a new neo-Nazi group together, which worked out this time because Bunting was there to keep Wagner from being too enthusiastic.
Would it be a neo-neo-Nazi group?
I guess so! A new neo! A new neo! A new neo-Nazi! Bunting was there to keep Wagner from being too enthusiastic.
Wagner also started dating women to prove he wasn't gay, and he and Bunting began an
echo chamber concerning both of their fantasies about murdering pedophiles and by extension
gay men because again to them
these two groups were one in the same. And again that shows he's not gay. Yeah. You're not gay
John and I feel like that's a part of it is that it's him trying to beat it back within himself.
He also was fucking let's let's be frank here raped for a bunch of years by Vanessa Lane so it's like
It's B. Frank here raped for a bunch of years by Vanessa Lane. So it's like he's not doing good No, no, none of them are doing good. All these people are doing very poorly. I think that they need
Mentos
Now bunting and Waggers movements during this period before the murder spree truly
began are a little confusing because these people are, to put it bluntly, racist, moronic,
homophobic trash.
Anyone who's been around these sorts of people knows that they're constantly moving from
one house or town to another.
They're fucking this person, they're moving in with that one, they're getting back with
another, then they're ending up back where they started with a couple of extra kids in
tow before they do the whole fucking thing all over again.
I don't use soap opera.
Also, this used to happen. This is for the kids out there.
Trash used to operate in silence and in privacy or,
and that, or out loud to the neighborhood.
And a thing that we used to call Facebook, when you call Facebook, we used to call directly
outside of our homes.
We would look at the trash operating and how the trash move in and out.
Now the trash like this, they just talk about it on the internet.
Well, they also perform on the internet.
Oh, very much on the internet.
You've seen go on to Dick Doc.
Oh, there's a lot of a lot of these guys on there.
You see my algorithm is filled with them.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think every day about the guy who says she makes me pee and I make her poop.
I think about that guy constantly.
Oh, yeah.
And he used to just be in. in so used to be somebody's neighbor
You know my now I get to enjoy him
I love and I just send it to over and over to Jackie is
Various versions of the same old man no shirt sitting in a bed and I can only do it cuz it's silent
It's a silent video and it's him just going
Make it cuddling his tongue. It's going
Like just in the mind just the I think you need to do it louder
Yeah, I think you can do it with that
Like that
I call those? Clit flutters.
Oh God, it's your wife's birthday.
What do you think is going to go on later?
While John Bunting's first wife, Veronica, was still living at 203 Waterloo Corner in
Salisbury North, John Bunting was renting a house Veronica, was still living at 203 Waterloo corner in Salisbury North.
John Bunting was renting a house in a community called Murray Bridge, 50 miles southeast of
Adelaide with his new squeeze.
Elizabeth Harvey, mother of Jamie Vlasakis.
Isn't that freeing to just burp?
To just burp and just let it go?
Well, it only works if it's a part of the word.
Like squeeze is the perfect word to burp in the middle of.
It is.
But every book about the, what do you call it, the bodies in the...
Barrels?
Bodies in the barrels murders.
Every book says that the timeline is extremely confusing.
Yes.
We're in it now.
So now these are the kind of like the final positions that these guys would take socially
So now that we're all in one now, we'll see we'll try to piece together
Who how who he they killed and when multiple books about people who can't read?
There hasn't been this many since like books about the Stone Age
Homeward bound
The same amount of incredible letters were written by the cast of Homeward Bound and
the cast of this story.
When John rented this house, he made sure that it had a shed.
This shed was off limits to everyone except Bunting, Wagner, and Blasock.
And it would be here that the fledgling murder gang would torture their first victim to death.
Now Bunting was by no means a faithful person to either his wife or his girlfriend.
And he'd been in an on-again off-again relationship with a woman named Suzanne Allen.
Suzanne was an obese, intellectually disabled individual with bowel disease, 47 years old to Bunting's 29.
As such, Bunting was able to manipulate Suzanne when the time came. When it came to the first
victim John Bunting chose to begin his so-called cleansing of the pedophiles from southern
Australia, he really couldn't have picked a better person than Ray Davies. No relation to the kinks vocalist of the same name.
We talked about this.
Now I am so excited because I finally get to use this joke that I've been waiting to
do in true crime, when in our true crime episodes.
Finally a victim that didn't brighten a room.
This guy darkened the room. This was not, he did not love to laugh. He loved to
publicly masturbate. He loved to fuck a dog. A real Salisbury mistake. Yeah, actually I
feel like this is one of the things that they did that almost wasn't a mistake.
The Davies was your classic sexual
deviant. Classic formula.
He was caught having sex with a family
dog in the backyard when he was 13,
which was a fact his mother freely
offered up to the media after
his body was discovered.
That's a secret.
The secret was dead.
You could just see his ghost like a little bit long. Mommy, what would
you say? Something like that. Gordon say he love lacrosse. Robert Wagner is just like
a real man. Does it in the front yard? Show the neighborhood, show the Dalmatian who's the man.
And Davies would also sometimes hide in the bushes and masturbate as school children walked
by when, yeah, that was when he reached adult age.
That was when he was an adult.
Davies was also in a weird, strange sexual relationship with Suzanne Allen.
They looked like a couple.
Yeah.
Now, John Bunting learned of Ray Davies not through Suzanne Allen, but through Vanessa
Lane, who actually wasn't lying this time when she said that Ray, classic pedo name
by the way, had been molesting children.
And so just after Christmas Day 1995, John Bunting and Robert Wagner picked up Ray Davies
and drove him out to the torture shed John prepared
out in Murray Bridge.
So we can go out to the pet store?
Go I wish we could rent them.
Because once you, if you bought them, because when you buy them and you have your times
with them, right?
They're all said.
Yeah, you're not fun anymore.
I ain't chasing the ball.
Right, there's pets in the shed.
Go.
Pets in the shed. Let, there's pets in the shed. Go.
How's that?
Pets in the shed.
Alright, let me get a condom, I don't want to get pregnant.
Well after waterboarding Ray in a bathtub, Bunting repeatedly smashed Ray's genitals
with a metal pole, causing them to swell to twice their normal size.
Giggling and screaming slurs, Bunting and Wagner tortured Ray for hours before they marched him into the trunk of their car and drove him back to Salisbury North, where John's girlfriend, Elizabeth
Harvey, was hanging out. Once John arrived, he was elated, jumping up and down telling Elizabeth that he had someone in the trunk.
He then went out and grabbed Ray, dragged him inside to the bathroom. There they stripped him naked and continued torturing him before taking him to the bedroom, where they verbally berated him and forced him to call them both Lord and Sir.
Absolutely.
Meanwhile, Jamie Vlasakis stood at the door to make sure no one else in the house
Interfers sucking on a big lollipop
Watch him with this weird little girl like fucking teddy on
They then took Ray into the spare room where John bunting had his wall of spiders if only to scare him that much more
I know you scared right now you wee little pedophile,
but imagine how scared you'd be if those were actual spiders.
How scary would that be, imagine it!
There Wagner and Bunting began the final attack, stabbing Ray with the knife.
Finally John called Elizabeth Harvey into the room to participate in the further
stabbing of Ray Davies, and he invited her to participate in the final deadly action
of strangling him with jumper cables. This participation, John said, was a present for
Elizabeth, I suppose because Elizabeth was under the assumption that some other guy was
molesting her kids and one molester was as good as another. Probably though, it was more
about just implicating her in the crime.
He was ramping her up though.
He was doing this, like you also remember, like the Snowtown movie really shows,
like I think that's a really accurate view of a bunch of guys,
because he would get them all in the kitchen.
They would just be talking about killing people, talking about doing this and
talking about how the police aren't doing anything.
We got to do something. You look what happened.
Your kids, no one's doing anything about it. He's still over there. He's still hanging out
We're fucking do it. So he big he slowly was like
indoctrinating everybody into like getting into this mindset and then he just finally got over the
Whatever the block was from him physically beginning
But after Ray finally died his corpse was dragged to the backyard where it was thrown into the tunnel,
which was finally getting some practical use.
Down in the dirt, John talked about how pleased he was for finally killing a deviant,
and he bragged to Jamie about how he'd manipulated Jamie's mother into participating.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, was too frightened of John Bunting to tell anyone,
so she numbed
herself with drugs to handle the guilt and knowledge of what had been done and what she
herself had done.
While some of you out there might be cheering the death of a pedophile, saying that justice
was served, it's important to remember that the whole pedophile angle was just a smokescreen
for John Bunting.
Oh, it was an excuse? Yeah, remember, his first victim was killed for no other reason than he was gay, and his important to remember that the whole pedophile angle was just a smoke screen for John Bunting.
His first victim was killed for no other reason than he was gay, and his next murder after
Ray Davies was nothing more than a murder of convenience.
John Bunting and Suzanne Allen, the intellectually disabled obese woman, were having an affair
at the time of Ray Davies murder, but the relationship had ended sometime in 1996. According to letters that were later found, her love
for Bunting had become an irritation and their relationship had become hostile.
It was also very possible that Suzanne Allen knew too much and was maybe
threatening to go to the police with what she knew about Ray Davies
unless John Bunting came back to her fold.
Many folds.
She's not a nice person.
She's not a nice person.
I'm allowed to do this.
She knew that Ray Davies was molesting her children and she still stays with him.
She's not a nice person.
She let him do it.
Yes. I guess. And that's a term that I've never heard before which is called the tooth fairy
Yeah, I do not know that someone's allowing somebody else to molest their children. You can give it a different name
Don't need to fucking bring the tooth fairy into this. Why what do you want to do?
How would name would you give it?
Molester letter.
A molester letter?
A molester letter. Yeah.
I would kind of do it as like a manager.
You're like an agent.
So Susanna Allen
disappeared around November
1996. The justification
of course being that
Susanna Allen was a so called tooth fairy
who had allowed Ray David Davies to molest her grandchildren.
And since she didn't go to the police to have Ray arrested, she was a pedophile by proxy and had to go.
In reality, she was just an inconvenient person.
She was. And we all know the police don't do anything anyway.
Absolutely. And she was kind of grabbing him.
She was like, and it's not a comment on her weight, but she was doing the Miss Piggy style. Like, I love you, John. I love you. Oh John, I love you so much.
Oh, give us kisses. Give us little kisses. You know, and you know,
and eventually it's like a lot.
By fucking John Bunting, she did something to get Ray Davies dead and have him
punished for fucking her kids. hmm interesting yeah so he is like her weird secret police so she did
do something but the cops don't do anything we know the cops don't do
anything but I feel like it could have done something I feel like they had
found out they wouldn't have given a shit. We've learned this. You're right. Well, as such...
That's a very interesting take.
Well, as such, Suzanne Allen was killed, then mutilated in her own bathtub
in a way that befit John Bunting's career in a slaughterhouse.
First, her arms and legs were cut off at the shoulder blade and the joints.
Then those appendages were skinned and defleshed from their bones.
All of her organs were cut out, as were her breasts and genitals, and for no other reason than curiosity, Bunting scalped the corpse, cut the head from the torso, and tossed it
around with Wagner like a bloodied soccer ball, all while they giggled to each other.
I'll tell you what, there's nothing gay about this!
He then faked kissing the head, holding the mouth open and mocking her, saying,
Kiss the puppet, kiss the puppet!
But once they had... yeah, that's fucked up. That's real weird.
Yeah, it's real weird.
Yeah, it's fucking weird.
It's really, it's wee wee weird.
It's weird.
But once they had their fun, her remains were bagged up in several garbage bags and driven to Bunting's house,
where the dismembered corpse was thrown in with the rotted remains of Ray Davies.
The story that Bunting and Wagner told Elizabeth Harvey was that they were planning to rob Suzanne Allen,
but on the night of the robbery, they found her dead in the bathtub from a heart attack.
They then got the bright idea to commit welfare fraud by collecting Suzanne's
checks and keeping the money for themselves. But in order to do that, they needed everyone to think
that Suzanne Allen was still alive somewhere. So they dismembered her body and hid her in the tunnel.
All right, someone go yell at somebody at the drive through a Burger King.
Cause that's how they know, that's a calling card. All right, now somebody go. All right,
we need somebody to go out there. Someone's got to go fart in the lobby of the bank.
All right, somebody's got to go in there, fart a couple of times in the bank.
And you'll be like, oh, Suze.
Come and crack a lock in the gate.
And that will establish an olive boy.
And that's the thing is that that is what they did.
They did that again and again with almost all their murder victims.
They farted in the bank.
That's a Sue's fart.
They committed welfare fraud.
Oh.
Is that they would take over their disability checks, their welfare checks,
their social security checks, and no one would really notice.
Finally, a crime worth committing.
Well, if it is, it works for a while.
Not too long after that that though, now that the
tunnel had become little more than a tomb, Bunting and Wagner filled it up with concrete
and bricks with the help of their next door neighbor, Robert Skews. It's unknown however,
if Skews knew exactly what he was helping to conceal.
I guess you told me to say goodbye to my tunnel. Good night tunnel. You did your job. You're not tunnel no more.
You grave. Not as funny as a tunnel. At the same time, the killing was fun. So thanks
tunnel for everything you've done for me. Alright, bye now. See you soon. It was romantic. Just looking at his sad tunnel and be like, well what went in that tunnel?
Said, but look what I'm saying to it.
Glad it was useful.
Elizabeth had a larger friend circle than Ray Davies or Bunting's first victim, Clinton
Trezise, so she was reported missing when she disappeared
along with all of her stuff.
But since she had in the past expressed
some suicidal ideation, the authorities wrote her off
as a lost cause and the case petered out.
Now after the murders of Ray Davies and Suzanne Allen,
Robert Wagner had found that he liked killing
other people very much.
He also renounced his former homosexuality
and refused to acknowledge
that he'd ever been in a years-long relationship with Vanessa Lane.
Thank gay, hate dancing, hate the club, love to kill.
But to that point, this could be why Wagner and Bunting chose a trans woman as their next
victim. Michelle Gardner came from a tough background, but had made friends and moved
in with the woman in 1997 who just happened to be dating Robert Wagner.
Wagner, of course, hated Michelle and bore a further grudge when Michelle
was playing with one of the children and jokingly put her hand over the child's mouth.
This was a trigger for Wagner because his childhood abuser had done the same thing and the first thoughts of murder began to stir. And again, Michel Gardner,
just a regular fucking person, never did nothing wrong to nobody.
No, it was just around.
Yeah. It also didn't help that Jamie Vlasakis, who if you'll remember, stood guard while
bunting in Wagner tortured Ray Davies. He also hated Michelle. He'd even once tried
to burn down the
house where Michelle was staying while
Michelle and her friend's kids were
still inside.
But in September of 1997,
Michelle's friend took off on
a vacation. In 10 days into her trip,
she received a call that her house had
been burgled and Michelle, along
with all her friend's furniture,
was gone.
Incredibly, though, the friend asked the two men responsible for the disappearance,
Bunting and Wagner, to head up the search for Michelle.
All Bunting and Wagner would say, however, was that the last they saw of Michelle,
she was at the gas station trying to pick up guys.
Because remember, Bunting and Wagner had positioned themselves within this small
community as we protect you.
We're protecting all of you. We're starting this.
And he, they were starting with the ignorant faction of the,
of the town essentially being like, look, we're doing this.
And so other dumb members of the town will begin to look to them
as if they were some kind of local sheriff
that would handle situations for them.
It's just like essentially the same as asking the fat boys to even be nurses.
The fact that they were allowed to even work at the hospital.
Things got even more suspicious when Nicole found Michelle's wallet under her bed a week
later with a note thanking Nicole for letting Michelle stay at her home.
Finally Michelle showed up on her friend's answering machine but she didn't sound right.
Michelle's message, in which she sounded quite distressed, said that she was sorry
about her friend's stuff but she needed the, and if her friend went to the police,
Michelle would go to the tax department to report fraud.
But what really happened to Michelle
was that Bunting and Wagner had lured her away
and drove her to the torture shed in Murray Bridge
and had forced her to record this message
in order to create somewhat of an alibi.
There in the torture shed, they burned her legs and genitals with cigarettes
and used jumper cables to administer electric shocks.
They're starting to escalate.
They then tied a rope around her neck that would strangle her if she didn't remain standing.
But when they got bored, Bunting and Wagner pulled on the rope until Michelle died,
all while they giggled and gleefully pranced around the shed, mocking Michelle's mannerisms.
Didn't they dismember and skin the last person?
Yes.
That's not really escalating.
Well, the torture leading up.
The torture.
Oh, okay.
That was just them getting rid of the body.
That was them destroying the evidence.
Yeah, that's just getting rid of the body.
She wasn't alive.
The last victim was not alive when all that was happening.
Yeah, the jumper cables to administer electric shocks and the cigarette burns and all that.
That's the escalation.
Okay, okay, okay.
Sorry.
Hey, you still learning.
You're learning.
You're learning.
You're learning.
But after Michelle, it seemed like Wagner just couldn't get the long-term relationship
that he tried to denounce out of his head.
And perhaps it was the murder of Michelle Gardner that whet Wagner's appetite for the
murder of Vanessa Lane.
I also think you're looking at bunting getting in the head of Wagner.
I think that he is telling him essentially you're going to kill Vanessa Lane because
now our her what we need out of her is now completed.
We got her.
Think about all the years she spent raping you.
Like essentially, like she came from you, like he's just in his head.
The reason why I think he killed Michelle Gardner with them and why they did it so flagrantly and so intensely
was to prove to Bunting that Wagner was not gay anymore.
And that he was, and he had no thought about this anymore. And he had no feelings towards trans women anymore.
And he did not care. And so this was the next level. This was about,
that's why the crimes are also interesting because they are like, you know,
it's horrible to say, but the murders themselves,
they do have practical edges and then there's also like weird psycho,
psycho edges, like some psychological edges to the killings.
But I also think a lot of it was more so wasn't even about the victims
It was about these relationships that he was building with these other guys and how those murders factored into their relationship
It was a it's like
This is essentially that remember the Sisterhood of traveling pants. I remember I think that this is like close to that
of traveling pants. I remember. I think that this is like close to that.
All right. Like how you wrap that one up. Yeah. Yeah.
No, but does that help? No, no. You don't think it helps? I didn't. It didn't write anything in my mind. What does kids
have in community? It's about the friends you make along the way. Okay. Oh, okay. There we go.
Having community. It's about the friends you make along the way. Okay, yeah.
Okay, there we go.
Now by October of 1997, Vanessa, 42 at the time, had continued her predatory behavior with another young boyfriend,
a mentally ill 18-year-old named Thomas Trevillion.
Trevillion was a paranoid schizophrenic who always wore army fatigues because he believed he was a soldier,
and he was soon befriended by John Bunting and Robert Wagner. They convinced him that Vanessa Lane deserved to die. So
on October 17th the three of them decided to do something about it. Bunting, Wagner
and Turvillian picked up Vanessa Lane and tortured her, then forced her to call her
mother to tell her that she had a new boyfriend and wouldn't be seeing her family anymore.
After that bandages were shoved in Vanessa's mouth and tape was wrapped around her head.
The murder gang started by crushing her toes with pliers while laughing at her pain.
Then they handcuffed her and shoved her face to the floor, mocking her and calling her
slurs before ultimately strangling her to death.
Her body was then wrapped in a carpet and left in Bunting's house for days,
which was no problem for John because remember, he had no sense of smell
and he terrified everyone in his immediate orbit.
Also, remember, I kind of like it.
Yeah. But finally, Bunting and Wagner stuffed Vanessa Lane's corpse
into a 44 gallon barrel, making
her the first of many to meet that fate.
Trevillion didn't participate in the torture, even though Bunting and Wagner tried to goad
him into taking part, but he did sit there and watch as it happened.
As such, he would be the next to fall victim to Bunting and Wagner.
Wagner, by the way, at this point had earned the nickname Papa Smurf.
Bunting had called him that because Wagner enjoyed watching people go blue in
the face as he strangled them.
Quipping in the most Shakespearean manner, quote,
first they go blue, then they go poo.
Shakespearean.
God, it just reminds me of Robin Hood men in tights
It's the character. We don't get no
First they go blue then they go
Why and that's where we'll pick back up next week for part two of the Snowtown Murders.
Yay!
And it's going to get so much worse!
Isn't that amazing? It just gets worse from here. But there's a lot of stuff to cover.
The next half of it, it is just as fascinating and horrifying.
Yeah.
How do we know that all this torture happened?
Because we'll find out, because there was a, let's just say, some of these guys couldn't hold up to police interrogation.
Yeah. Some of these guys rolled over and they did find the bodies.
Quickly.
Okay. But weren't the bodies dissolved anyway?
We'll hear all about it.
Not completely. Let's just say that they didn't use the right kind of acid. Yeah
So kind of dissolved. I mean it was a slurry, but not as much of a slurry as it could have been next year next week
The juice is loose
You're gonna love it
Check it out. Uh, great work. Uh, thank you team. We did I love this. I love this. I love this
Thank you to the team. We did. I love this. I love this. I love this. Thank you to the team
Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left to watch us talk
You can also go and see side stories is now on our youtube channel
You can go to lp on the left
You can see that but we have a lot of crazy fun stuff on the patreon now. We got behind the scenes footage
Full length last podcast on the left no commercials for any of the shows fun as hell. You know, we we do our thing
Yeah, we're working on we're working on it
We're working on yeah, and if you like torture like this, you should listen to the brighter side
Podcast twice a week Amber Nelson and I go check it out and go on tik tok for some reason at LP on the left
Apparently our numbers are up cool and on Instagram to add LP on the left. What does it do?
I don't know but go to LPNTV at twitch.tv slash LPNTV and watch all of our strange.
Say our shit and go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to see how we are coming to your home town
sooner than later or maybe later than sooner but we will go to see us.
JK Ultra is the name of the tour.
Go to lastpodcastontheleft.com and buy those tickets. We got is the name of the tour. Go to last podcast on the left dot com and buy those tickets.
We got Chicago's basically sold out.
Denver's basically sold out.
We have a bunch of ones coming and come and see us.
Australia, we're looking at you.
Yeah. And when we go to Adelaide, we're going to turn snow town into show town.
Yeah. And all you out there in England and Iceland we're finally gonna fucking do Iceland
We're doing we're doing Reykjavik. We're gonna do the big hall
Bring sir strawman on stage sure that rotted the rotted shark. Yeah, we can bring some
Let's pop it and see if we throw up. Yeah, that's a good great idea
Yeah, we're gonna play Reykjavik and we're gonna be doing two nights in London
And all three of those shows are gonna be in October.
Go to last podcast on the left.com to get tickets to those.
Yeah.
And when we come out to Iceland, I want one of those volcanoes erupting.
All right.
So throw some rocks in these dormant fuckers.
I want to see some shit go down.
There's been a volcano going for quite a while now.
It's been a problem.
Yes.
Very scary.
I'm actually scared of them
It's fine. So if you stuff it actually if you can do the opposite put a cork in it
stuff a puffin into Hell Satan, I gene and there's no unredeemable
Choose one who's your favorite one of their family? Who's your favorite? I like Jamie the most
I like Jamie the most
This show is made possible by listeners like you
Thanks to our ad sponsors You can support our shows by supporting them for more shows like the one you just listened to, go to LastPodcastNetwork.com.