Australian Serial Killers: The Rage for Revenge by Gordon Kerr

Author:Gordon Kerr [Kerr, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TCBooks
Amazon: B005UXI5OA
Publisher: Canary Press
Published: 2011-10-10T23:00:00+00:00

The Snowtown Murderers

As they killed, they played a CD of the song Selling the Drama from Live’s album Throwing Copper, turning the murder into a ritual of sorts, although they didn’t call it murder. It was ‘playing’. Playing for high stakes, too. They murdered nine people in Australia’s worst case of serial killing, in the seven years during which the slaughter took place, making $95,000 from welfare and credit card fraud. Now and then they even turned on each other, in order to keep their secrets within the circle.

Their first murder was relatively straightforward – a twenty-two-year-old homosexual, Clinton Trezise, was hit on the head with a heavy instrument, possibly a hammer, and then buried in a shallow grave in a remote spot in the agricultural hinterland of Lower Light, about fifty kilometres north of Adelaide.

Gradually, however, they became more elaborate, not to mention more horrific, in their methods. Dismemberment, removal of limbs, de-fleshing and torture all became part of the game of death they enjoyed playing. It was so gruesome that when the case eventually came to trial, three jurors had to drop out, unable to bear the gorier parts of the testimony, while others required counselling after the conclusion of the trial.

At the centre of it all was thirty-two-year-old John Justin Bunting, a man filled with hate. When he was young, he whiled away his time by burning insects in acid, and as a teenager was linked to neo-Nazi groups. As an adult, his hatred was directed at homosexuals and paedophiles. At his home in Waterloo Corner Road, in the northern Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, Bunting devised a large chart on a wall in one of the rooms. On it, using paper and lengths of wool, he had created a network of the names of people he suspected of being paedophiles or homosexuals. Now and then, he would vent some of his anger and disgust by selecting one of the names at random and making an offensive telephone call to them.

The police had become concerned about the number of missing persons cases in the Adelaide area and a task force, named Chart, was assembled to try to get to the bottom of them. The trail led to a disused bank in the town of Snowtown, one hundred and fifty kilometres north of Adelaide.

Once, it had been a bustling small town branch of the State Bank of South Australia, home to the savings and mortgages of the farmers who owned local farms and the businessmen who serviced the needs of the families who lived in the area. Now, it was long closed and dust had settled on its fixtures and fittings. It had recently been used for other purposes, however. On 20 May 1999, as police entered the red-brick building in the town’s main street at the culmination of their long and complex missing persons investigation, anticipation hung heavy in the air. They would not be disappointed.

The main area of the bank contained electrical and computing equipment, but

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