Snowtown by Jeremy Pudney

Author:Jeremy Pudney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780730450030
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

It is a trait of most serial killers to keep ‘trophies’ from each of their crimes. For John Bunting, these trophies were the victims’ bodies. While his earliest victims had been buried—and Trevilyan hanged to look like a suicide—the others were kept in large plastic drums. Occasionally Bunting would peer into each barrel, remarking about how well the contents were rotting, sometimes reliving the murder of that particular victim.

Bunting’s barrel collection began while he was living at Murray Bridge. Eventually the bodies of Michael Gardiner, Barry Lane, Gavin Porter and Troy Youde came to be stored there.

Bunting had no sense of smell, so he did not notice the pungent odour created by the decomposing remains. He would regularly ask Vlassakis how bad the smell was, and use air fresheners in a bid to disguise it. Some visitors to the house noticed the stench regardless:

In the back garden they had a shed big enough to fit a car in. It really smelt around the back of the shed. It smelt like dead cats. It smelt like rotting flesh, like what you smell when you see a dead cat on the side of the road.

When Bunting, Elizabeth Harvey and her sons moved out of the house, the landlord too noticed something on the nose:

I do remember, on returning to the premises…detecting a horrible smell, which smelt like a rotting and decaying sheep. It was a smell similar to rotting meat. I only say sheep because for years [we] lived on a farm where we had smelt rotting sheep in the paddocks.

The landlord also spotted strange dark stains on the garage’s cement floor. They appeared to be circular in shape.

Bunting and Wagner used a truck to shift the barrels from Murray Bridge. They were destined for the garage at Mark Haydon’s house, in the northern Adelaide suburb of Smithfield Plains. James Vlassakis recalls coming home late at night, stumbling across the move:

As I walked up the driveway, John and Robert were actually in the truck…they were tying the barrels into the truck at that stage. I sat there, had a bit of a conversation with John, and in that conversation he told me that they were going to Mark’s place.

When John Bunting realised Elizabeth Haydon had been reported missing, he was enraged—and he panicked. It was only a matter of time, he assumed, before the police would want to search Mark Haydon’s house, and that meant the barrels in his garage would have to be shifted—and fast.

By this time, late November 1998, there were five barrels containing seven victims: Michael Gardiner, Barry Lane, Gavin Porter, Troy Youde, Fred Brooks, Gary O’Dwyer and Elizabeth Haydon.

Bunting decided that the best way to transport the barrels would be in the old Toyota Land Cruiser sitting in Mark Haydon’s yard. Gail Sinclair was told to stay inside and keep watch for the police while the barrels were being moved:

John turned up that night and they seemed pretty edgy for some reason and I couldn’t figure it out. I thought…they might have had stolen property or something on the premises.

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