Episode 570: The Snowtown Murders Part I - The Salisbury Mistakes
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Can you believe? Last podcast on the left is going back on tour.

The road leads to here. JK Ultra. It's 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, California.

for a show at the King's Theater. Yeah, look good, baby. 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 Lost Hot Pass. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Yeah!

Ray Davies was a pedophile. But not. 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. No, he's not a pedophile. John Bunting really got him. He really got him, babe. Yes. Yes.

He really did. Guys, why don't we ever go hunting pedophiles together? Come on, guys. Why don't we just 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 Zebrowski. I'm going to put it out there. Best pedophile bait? Funko Pops. Whoa!

That is good. It is. It is. 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 nearsighted individual on Pokemon Go. Yeah. And that's fine. It does tend to happen. And then you just got to catch a release. Yeah. And of course we have

Ed Larson. How you doing? No opinions on catching pedophiles. 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.

You know, I actually, I paid for the extra thing on Citizen App. This is not an ad for Citizen App. Oh, the pedophile? The pedophile radar. Wow. Oh, really? Yeah. You look at Watchdog, right? Watchdog.com? Yeah, they're everywhere. Or is it Guard Dog? It's one or the other. I remember I looked up, 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, 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. Now we know where it is. Oh, there's bingo. We can give them different names. I mean, they are tagged.

But not physically. They need to ear clip. I wouldn't even be like, you know. Chip them like a dog. Exactly. The reason why we're talking about hunting pedophiles is that we are today starting our series on the Snowtown 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? They were doing Snowden. 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 it. It's all right. Well, we are talking about the assault against Julian Assange. We don't want to bring that up today. Yeah.

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. I thought it'd be Snoughton or something. And that's why I said that to you. Yes. And then I'm wrong. No, it's no town like it's where all the elves live on vacation during the summer months. But, oh, man, you'd be surprised. Yeah. Yeah, you know. We should visit when we're on tour. We should. We can. Do they have a tour around Snoughton?

Unfortunately, they do. But it's also reticent. They are not really liking the identification with the Snowtown murders as we'll get into. Yeah, we'll get into 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 outcasts

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. High school. Those are the last years you can really get away with shit. Yeah. Yeah, sure. 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 still got away with shit up until like 2008.

2011. I think a lot of people are still getting away with stuff. I got arrested for weed. Yeah. In 2004. Yeah, so I'm saying, yeah, I think that you're, yeah, I think that you might be. I think, I'm going to say that's the last day for you, for Ed Larson. 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, 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 if 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's no town murder term is kind of just, it's in there. It's stuck. Once it's in the paper and people start referring, it's over. Yeah. It's also because the, the type of crime that this was, this was biopsy.

By far, besides Ivan Milat, one of the most famous true crime stories in Australian history. I mean, many people consider this to be the number one. They actually put it above Ivan Milat, where the Snowtown murders. That's number one in Australia as far as serial killings go. I mean, Martin Bryant is a...

possibly a larger true crime story, but this one is a pretty fucking intense. And this is where it got a little American over there. We, 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 bandwagon.

of the Ant Hill gang territory, but you and I kind of... We differ. We differ because 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 was. Yeah, it wasn't a cult. I agree now that it's not a cult. It's a gang. But John Bunting, I think it's just because I imagine that their dick and balls smelled exactly the same. I also don't even know if it was a gang. I mean, I use the word gang. What else are you going to call them? A team? I mean, it's more a fucking friend group. It's a squad.

Squad goals. Hashtag not squad goals. Well, the push to rename the Snowtown murders, the bodies in the barrels murders, was entirely unsuccessful. Although Southern Australia did, for a time, have a small cottage industry of bodies in barrels memorabilia that might be some of the most gruesome serial killer merch ever created. Australians got that on lockdown. They got a good old-fashioned...

and 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's 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. Okay. 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've watched the movie Snowtown this weekend. I just finished it. Um,

Hilarious. Hilarious. Honestly, we couldn't stop. We've been saying lines back and forth. Ouch. Get his toes. Get his toes. My favorite line. That's such a great line. Love that line. And you could just see, 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 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 brutal.

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 for him. It 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 um 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, 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'd 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 not short, perfectly normal, hided man. Right.

So he's short. No. So he was 5'7". No, he had a perfectly 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, don't take his strategy. No, it's bitchy. I hate baseball. Yeah, 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. Yes.

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, 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. The,

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 in 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 salacious. You know, it's bad. I know it's bad literature. Yeah, it is salacious and all that and probably the more, I don't know, fun. That's what I'm saying. It's the funner one. Yeah, but killing for pleasure is like reading for annoyance. Whoa, hey, some people

love to kill for pleasure like my grandpa did when he took down the next. 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. 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. Well, yeah, Bodies in 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. This guy's name is John Bunting. 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, in my head I always see like Dame Edna.

Who's Dame Edna? Remember the famous drag queen from the UK? I always see like a, look her up. Okay. Whenever I imagine an Australian mother, in fact, they just go like, I bet I'll reach it. Yeah, that's definitely an Australian. But I do know that, I feel like that's just, obviously it's my, it's just my little thought processes. So I don't know if it's correct or not. This is where my little head goes. I'm just thinking.

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're going downtown. I'm getting more shovel with me more friend. And we're digging a joint. Get none of you like me. None of you get it.

This is all so John could have a secret place to hide away and pursue his hobbies. What were his hobbies? Uh...

You're like catching bugs and dissolving them in various chemicals. Yeah. Cool. Actually, I mean, it was fun. It was 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 brake fluid, hydrochloric acid, chlorine. But he would also take careful note as to which chemicals were most effective at killing which bugs. This is very simple. Imagine if we would have made him.

an exterminator. He was never going to be an exterminator. He 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, 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 boy. Is that number one, he loved to dig. Yeah. Number two, he loved to kill.

insects in fun, creative ways. Yeah, which he did. Not something that I did. He did sort of as well. Also, he sounds like he would have been a part of the Rocket Club, like Marcus was. Well, there was no club. I just built the Rockets. On its own. I tried, but I couldn't figure it out. That's like the Werner Von Braun style of being inside of his own. And I just wonder if there was any other particular...

similarities between John Bunting and Marcus Harkness. That's one thing that the worst part about doing this show is seeing your own characteristics in serial killers. I do know that me and John Bunting probably would have been friends when we were kids. But that's the problem with being in this sort of environment. It's like you're friends when you're kids and then you start growing up and he turns into a psychopath and

And you just kind of turn out to be a normal person. But then you were always friends with me when you were kids. And they always say hi to you every time you see him. And then you have to like pretend like, oh, yeah, we're friends. But you know what's fucking wrong with you. You know, there's something really fucking wrong with that. It's 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. Yeah.

I was hanging out with Patrick Ewing quite a bit. I was hanging out with me and Ed Koch. Yeah. Those were my big guys. Those are 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. No, 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 and 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 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. 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 Smeagol. You have one or the other. But they can watch footage of Nuremberg and say, I'm a part of that. I'm a part of that thing. I get to stand up for something else. This is a bigger thing.

I think that's what it does, and it makes a shithead feel less alone. Yeah. Right from your grave.

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Now, Bunting read Mein Kampf, he joined a neo-Nazi group, and he painted a swastika on, of all places, the inside door of his car's trunk. That's how proud he was. Now everybody can tell, I put my old sneakers in there, and my old sneakers feel the hate.

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. Yeah. 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, I 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 whole 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 I was just like, ah, you know, we're saving up.

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,

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. Now, 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. How convenient. This, Bunting always made sure to say, was a shame because it robbed him of taking any sort of revenge on his abuser. Well, his version...

of his abuse was, it 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 which 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. Cause partially is I think his own personal obsession with it sounds like a bit of a fantasy.

Sounds like a thing that he created in his brain in order to justify what he'd do later on because that it's this like 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, 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, in southern Australia, ah, you can smell the freshly blossoming child molestation. People need something to do. You know, it's just too interesting. Yeah, you gotta give people jobs. No, man. Hey, last I checked, 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! Yeah!

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. Yeah. You know, and just the idea of like, like, honestly, this, 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? Like,

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. You 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 loitered on street corners as pedo bait. Oh, I ain't got no pedo.

parents I've got nowhere to go wonder what me's gonna do I've got these sucking lips and these sensuous hips oh me shorts fell off again I'm stuck in a manhole laughing

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. Ha ha! Take that! I don't know the kick of my heel! I don't know the kick of my pointed boot! Ha ha! Yeah, now you're getting it, Benny! Now you're getting it! Now let's go see lethal weapons.

Because I legally can't. Are you burnt, Tom? 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.

Now, 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 gay.

Straight men. I will say most of the gay men I know can't stand children. Yeah. Literally actively avoid them. Well, they're like the only people I really know that know who they are. You know? Well, straight men are sort of like, we're in that way. You know, we deal with that a lot. We don't know how to...

Say our feelings. Sometimes we either, you know, like 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 will 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've got to send a bunch of mail bombs as well just to sort of cut the vulnerability of the manifesto. Yeah, baby. Yeah, but you get it. The P is a boy! Yeah! Yeah!

Well, to break this down for just a second, because it is absolutely fascinating. 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's office yesterday, and we're, you know, as we talk throughout the week, how we're going to do the show, and I come in, and Marcus is like, you know, tick, tick, tick.

like Willy Wonka at the end of the movie, right? His head, 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? And I was like...

I'm going to go get a coffee. You know what? You're right, buddy. You're fucking right, dude. Because one's got an action-oriented mindset. Well, I was able to smooth that out a little bit. That was a knee-jerk reaction. 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,

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? Yeah. Total freedom. That's incredible. I can't wait to tell my wife to not listen to this.

Come on, give her the... I'll give her the abridged version when they come over. And 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 pedophile 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. 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, that's 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? I don't know. I'm not a psychiatrist. Do they just have to put, don't you just be put in the net? Side stories, LPOTL at gmail.com. How do we fix these pedophiles? Yeah, you put them on top of a mountain. I think,

that they would love that. But all of a sudden we've got pedophile mountain. We already have many. At least you know where they are, where they are.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You hear the sound coming from Pedophile Mountain. We do technically do put them in little communities and then they do then form networks amongst themselves and then do end up continuing their recidivism for pedophiles. Yeah, it's not a good idea to put them all in one place. Okay, because then they talk. Yeah, they plan. Oh, interesting. I interviewed a non-practicing pedophile for Brighter Side one time. Oh, I thought you were going to say for the poor house when you were working there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's 21 and over in here, so you might not want to. 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, 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 got to stop fucking talking to

I think that's the issue. And I was like, we can't release this. No one wants to hear this. We're just going to delete this. He was like, literally, he had a hook for a hand and everything. It was a mess. And he says, like, we're stationed with a hook for a hand. And oftentimes the children scream and run before I have a chance to fuck. Oh, good. Well, 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 worst. Really awful. Yeah, it's also bad. He like played with children, right? He was technically, that was his main, that was kind of how he got people's trust. Yeah. He was good with the kids. He would like go to the arcade and shit. Yes. That was part of it.

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 come 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. He'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...

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. Yeah.

I was trying to go to New Jersey and my car broke down at Yeehaw Junction. I'm like, I guess I'm moving to Tallahassee and then I joined Murderfest. 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. Probably good for growing crops.

Hey, don't go fucking around there. It's our poo-poo lumps. Hey, Jerry, get off the poo-poo lumps and yard. Where are my carrots, Brown? Oh, no. M's the 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. Hmm.

For me, it's like a town that's made for wet steak. Oh, yeah, it's a wet steak. There's a wet steak in a bad chicken. Bad chicken town. See, part of what makes this 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 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. 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 cute. Well, Snowtown, nothing happened in Snowtown. No. Except where they, you know, actually...

you know, put the bodies. Yeah. Right. It's good over there. And he's hilarious. It's just, it's like that.

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 people. That's what we call it. All right. You change it from the Snowtown murders to the Salisbury mistakes. Salisbury mistakes. They get sued by Salisbury, like the company that has the sauce. Yeah.

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.

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 meat bagging and general rendering. Next week, they say I've got to get out the brain. I've got to wait to cut off a cow's face. Oh, but I like killing the intestines. It's pretty...

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 like it's like how often can you say that being like if he just could have found and kept his stable home at the slaughterhouse yeah maybe he'd have a chance maybe if he would have saw a bull fucking a calf he would have stayed but 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 yeah

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, man. I'll tell you a little secret, then. I kind of 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 Ozzy Candle. Ozzy Candle? Instead of Yankee Candle. It's Ozzy Candle, but it smells like fucking pig intestines. 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. It was wild. Interesting. I want to smell it. I got it up in the office. Yeah. Where do we? I mean, we don't want to light it in the building. Yeah, sure. Let's light it in here. Let's light it in the parking lot. Yeah. 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 Molotov cocktails, and he boasted to his roommates about how much he just loved killing. He

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 can barely tell her last name's Tripp. 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 as a break. Thicker than my. That's for sure. You just said it worse than the first time. It's a shrillian. Thicker than my. Thicker than my. Thicker than my. Thicker than my. Thicker than me. That's for sure.

And that's what gets me about the people involved in this story. Like 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. 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 time.

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 Hassenkopf. Yeah. Yeah. He's just, just the tiniest bit smarter. He's the smartest. Uh, yeah, the, um, 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. What were you about to say? What were you about to say, Sub? You just wanted to make a comment? Nothing. I was just saying that, you know, I feel like I'm smarter than both of you. Fuck you! I've got a longer taint. That's not true. My taint is longer. I have a 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. 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 cereals I miss that I was explaining while my mom was in town. I was like, double dip crunch. Where's that at? 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 cereal. And 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. Welcome to my life. Does she not know the rule of visiting mother? The rule of chewing time? The rule of experience?

Extend the conversation. Extend the conversation. Built-in nap time also works. Oh, yeah. 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

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 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 going to put me up? Who's going to plant me in a spot so that I can finally be me? The me I've always wanted to be. Also, weirdly reminds me, I've been watching the O.J. Simpson documentary series. It kind of reminds me about that. 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

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 now you kind of just remember this is a super complicated story and it's only going to get more complicated as we go. So just always remember, John Bunting, 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 fucking...

14 year old boy and then kidnapped him and drove off into for several years where I guess they went on some long fuck robbery spree while he 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. 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 lowly ah yes i get it now

Be Lolito. Lolito. 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 it. 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. 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 know, those custom screensavers that has like floating text in your computer. Oh, yeah. Instead of saying like Robert's computer or like fart. Yeah. Like his said, Adolf Hitler is still alive. Well, he's just pinging around. Just pinging. Adolf Hitler is still alive. I don't know why. Waiting for it to hit the corner. Yeah. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah, he's still alive.

Robert even tried getting someone to tattoo a swastika on his forehead, but no tattoo artist in Adelaide would do it. You don't need a goddamn pearl for that. Or call the cops. Robert even joined a neo-Nazi group, but was kicked out for being, quote, too radical. Too radical for Nazis. Now, 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. Your sneakers got wheels on them, man. We're more of a bodacious crew. Can you imagine? This is the Anders 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 going to want to do that behind the fence. Maybe calm the dogs. Maybe the music I 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. 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

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 use would be, nowadays the kids would say what you would call a nightmare blunt rotation. LAUGHTER

It did, however, take some mental gymnastics for Bunting to accept Robert Wagner and Vanessa Lane's relationship. I find it. This is fascinating. It is. In Bunting's mind, Robert Wagner had been coerced into homosexuality by Vanessa Lane. Just because 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. More like a slick. But these guys, it's...

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. What was it? I think it's like, what's the term? It's not D trans. I know what the term is. There was some saying that they had maybe considered 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, I would say I'm a little confused on. I'm very confused. And trust me, I tried. I like looked shit up. Oh, me too. Yeah, I tried figuring it out, but it's very confusing. Yeah, because Vanessa Lane. It's all very personal. So, you know, everything's.

Because 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 versus Vanessa Lane. We're trying to honor this dead pedophile by making sure we keep their identity secure. If we did...

If one person gets the standard, then everyone gets the standard. That is what we believe. Did they die as Barry or Vanessa? Vanessa. Vanessa, technically. But I don't know. I don't know whether or not that was a part of the thing. What's the gravestone say? I have no idea. I don't know. Yeah, again, I have to look at my pictures. The longer we talk, the more dangerous this is. Yeah, yeah. You know what it is? It's just more like, why did John Bunting allow this person in his life? And 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 I

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 what you believe me? Because a lot of these pedophiles, honestly.

They're not super fun. Like, they're not like, listen, I'll get it, John. It's bad out there. We don't like the pedophiles because honestly, they cheated on Napoli. Yeah. 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 fucking loose ends for themselves. Well, at this point, though, he hasn't killed anyone. No, not yet. At this point. And I think that might... I think that might even be giving Vanessa a little bit too much credit. It's a little...

I think it's a lot simpler than that. Like Vanessa is a cunning predator as well. Yes. Vanessa is also a 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. Hey, there's no way to describe a man. I ain't taciturn.

What's it mean? What's a 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. Do you know what I am? Meester. You look like a bear. Are you a bear or are you a man? I would love to be a bear. At least for at least a weekend. Don't tell me you like to play with the kitties and the penises because we're going to come get

That's pretty taciturn. Yeah, okay. 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. Ha! Ha!

And she shifted her focus to Mark Hayden. 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. 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's 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 scissor lady or like mrs thunderbutts it's like she just changed it to elizabeth yeah yeah because she wanted to avoid like she's she's like she wanted to avoid any exes track tracking her down all these men coming around looking to make a poke and she was a handsome woman

Sure. But I don't know 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 Aiden, 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 this. Yeah, I'll be burrowing. Yeah.

Yeah, Michael, you're comfortable in the ground with 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 of 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 hate 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, it makes it kind of feel like what it would be like being slowly lowered into 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 like, oh. 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. Oh.

I like a basement. I like a rumpus room. No, but it's got to be outside. Have you ever laid down? It's got to 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 plumber's union and then that dog had to get killed. So there 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 for him. I might maybe have some stick here where I'll throw some spaghetti at the wall, right? Can't ask yourself the question, what if we brought gay men into the sloth house? Okay.

Yeah, that'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 death. Yes. To make up for this, he'd ask 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. Hey, come here. Come here. Smell my belly. Come on, smell my belly. What more smell? I'm going to stay over here. Come here, smell my belly. Come on. I don't want to. I've all been so curious. I'm a curious boy. No. No. No. You're going to say no to me? No. You're saying no? No. Get the hammers. You're saying no? No. No. I ain't going to.

Now, to help dig the tunnel, John Bunting enlisted his new friend, Mark Hayden. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

Locked, be you know. 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 these dumbo nugs weak. I'm sick of acting like this is some kind of fucking vacation. This is digging.

I think the dirt carrying sounds lovely. Really? More than digging. Really? No, that is Eddie's Eastern European show. My back. That's his full Ukrainian. That's like the full like because I could see. Imagine it. Tie a bunch of dirt to me. I'll bring it wherever you

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 relaxing. Yes.

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 Fatacom. Yeah, just fucking bring him in, take him out. It seems like he thought he was a priest or something. He thought that he was this moral, this true bastion of morality. Yeah. And that people would be impressed by his...

Like, I think that if he had any form of remote education or real kind of academic pursuit, he would try to write a book. I think he would be very similar to Anders Breivik or something like that who would write something, probably a tome that would be very...

and it would destroy my search history and be another thing that probably keeps me permanently on some form of government list. 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, does 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's pretty smart. It can be. Now, working at the slaughterhouse... ...from your place.

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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. Remember when BTK became a dog catcher, it worked for him too. 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 tunnel. Oh, mommy! God, look at that!

I hate me bangs. I'm going to go in my tunnel. I'm doing my tunnel. Tick, tick, tick. All day long. Nobody cares about your bangs, John. Remember that, John. Nobody cares where they're at in case people stare. Never. Never.

How dare you! How would 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 clear, seeing as how Clinton was just a regular, friendly dude, Bunting became convinced that Clinton was a pedophile. It was because gay people were pedophiles in his mind. Yes. He was 13.

You said he was 13. Teenager. He was 17. If you're underage. You could still be a pedophile at 17. Was the age cut off? It's pre-pubescent, post-pubescent. How do I put this in a way that works? How do we not talk about this? How about this? I didn't ask the question. Wow.

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. Vanessa wanted to. Vanessa wanted to tell him. Oh, yeah. Well, she said it under the auspice of saying, like, you got to get away from John. Yeah. John's dangerous. He's dangerous. 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 had some form of a mental disability. She was quiet. She was already new. He's got two accomplices. He's already just murdered somebody in cold blood. It's not like he's going to marry an activist. Because

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. You know what? I actually don't know. Yeah, the details don't really come out on that one. Yeah, but they didn't put that on the death certificate. Heart attack while molesting the son. 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 Payne, who also happened to be a pedophile. Like I said, they're like

I mean, people talk about the pedophile elites and the pedophile government. I seem to find, yeah. They seem to be fucking everywhere. You know what I do think? I think that there are obviously pedophile elites. Yes. There's also what I would call pedophile groundlings. Yeah. And they are the, holy pull.

of the pedophile community. There's 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 pedophiles? Oh, they're not hanging out. No, no, we get my children freshly flown in from France and then they are freshly ground into food for my horses. Yeah.

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. Murdered.

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 that it's exactly what it is. He was slowly getting

him used to violence. He saw a son. He saw somebody that he could make into a little version of himself. When he arrived, again, it was another one of those. It was just like one day there was no John Bunting. The next day, John Bunting was the only 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 easy this is? How we can let this go? And then, unfortunately, I do believe of this group, Jamie Vilsakis is the baby spice. Yeah.

And 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 the leader of the Spice Girls Was Ginger I thought it was Posh He's not Posh I think Mark's Scary Spice Yeah Mark could probably be Mark Hayden Yeah Yeah I'll kiss Teddy Murphy Yeah I'll do the stomping 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. I won't allow that. I just want to zig a zig a. We all do. Does that mean you want to be my lover? You got to get with your friends, which she did. That's me. What we all know is that friendship never ends.

Vanessa is Beckham. 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, John.

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, all right? I don't know, is anyone he rolled up on with like a fucking disposable camera must have been terrified. Yeah. No, no, no.

How about we just remember this the way we remember it? Well, one neighbor, 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.

But you don't get banned for that. You just get put on a wait list. Yeah, you got to get fatless. 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 blurs my favorite color and I hate spiders and geese. He really liked 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, like, weeks long, like, prank call things. He'd just pick people, he'd just pick up, like,

Flicks up. I mean, I... Hi there, hey. Hi, you hear that ice cream? Ice cream tricks. Go in your bed. Go out there and fuck those kids. Hi there, you smelly and you stupid, you fat, you fat bitch. Oh, smelly for me, you dumb...

This is the time of like the height of popularity for the jerky boys. Yeah, it really is. 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. Yeah.

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 he's in love with Jamie Vislakis' mother, Elizabeth Hart.

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.

Post-Neo is the old one.

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 gay.

Let's be 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 of these people are doing very poorly. I think that they need Mentos.

I feel like a good injection of Mentos would fix a lot of this. Now, Bunting and Wagner's 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 and dough 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 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 so. You've seen Go On to Tick Tock.

Oh, there's 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 somebody's neighbor. Now I get to enjoy him. What I love, and I just send it 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 because it's silent. It's a silent video and it's him just going...

make a cunnilingus tongue. It's going like just in the mind. I think you need to do it louder. I think you can do it without. Like that. That was the one. That was bad. It's disgusting. It's a little. Oh, you know what I call this? Clit flutters.

Oh, God, it's your wife's birthday. What do you think is going to go on later? Well, while John Bunting's first wife, 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 Harpy, 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. But every book about the bodies in the

Bodies in the barrels murders. Every book says that the timeline is extremely confusing. So 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 he, they killed and when. Multiple books about people who can't read. Yeah.

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.

Now, when John rented this house, he made sure that it had a shed. This shed was off-limits to everyone except Bunting, Wagner, and Blasakis. It's for boys! 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.

Now, 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, I'm so excited.

because I finally get to use this joke that I've been waiting to do in true crime when on our true crime episodes. Finally, a victim that didn't brighten a room. This guy darkened the room. I

This was not. He did not love to laugh. He loved to publicly masturbate. He loved to fuck a dog. A real Salisbury mistake. Yes. Actually, I feel like this is one of the things that they did that almost wasn't a mistake.

And 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 the secret. The secret was

It was dead. It was gone. You could just see his ghost like a little bit long. Mommy, what would you say? Could you say he loved 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. Yeah. 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 in 1995, John Bunting and Robert Wagner picked up Ray Davies and drove him out to the torture shed John had prepared out in Murray Bridge. So we can go out to the pet store? Laughter

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. Let me get a condom. I won't 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. We got one!

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. That would be something they would do with every single person they killed. Call me Lord. Call me Sir.

Which sounds very sexual. Yeah. There is a contingent to this that I wonder if he had a sexual reaction to some of this. Absolutely. Meanwhile, Jamie Vlasakis stood at the door to make sure no one else in the house interfered. Just sucking on a bitch.

big lollipop with his like pigtails watching with his 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. Now I know you're scared right now, you wee little pedophile. But imagine how scared you'd be if that was what

Actual spiders. How scary would that play 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, and 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 at what happened to your kids. No one's doing anything about it. He's still over there. He's still hanging out. We're fucking doing... So, he...

slowly was like indoctrinating everybody to 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. Now, 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 that his first victim was killed for no other reason than he was gay, and his

very next murder after Ray Davies was nothing more than a murder of convenience. See, John Bunting and Suzanne Allen, the intellectually disabled obese woman, they 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'd still stay with him. She's not a nice person. She let him do it. Yes. I guess, and this is a term that I've never heard before, which is called the tooth fairy. Yeah. I do not know that somebody 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? What name would you give it? A molester letter. A molester letter. A molester letter. Yeah. I would kind of do it as like a manager. Yeah.

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 Bitt Davies to molest her

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, Johnny.

I love you. Oh, John, I love you so much. Kiss. Oh, give us kisses. Give us little kisses. You know? And, you know, and eventually it's like a lot. Yeah. By fucking John Bunting, she did something to get Ray Davies dead and have him punished for fucking her kids. Hmm. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. So he is like her weird secret police. So she did do something. But then... Because the cops don't do anything. We know the cops don't do anything. But...

I feel like they 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! Ha ha ha!

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-wee-wee. 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.

Now, 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-thru at Burger King. Because that's how they know there'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, so we're going to go in there, fart a couple times at the bank. And people are like, oh, Suze. I'm cracking like an egg. That will establish an all-a-boy. And that's the thing. That is what they did. They did that again and again with almost all their murder victims. They farted in the bank? What?

That's a sues part. They committed welfare fraud. Oh. 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. It works for a while.

Not too long after 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 just told me to say goodbye to me tunnel. Good night, tunnel. You did your job. You're not a tunnel no more. You're grave. It's not as funny as a tunnel. At the same time, the killing was funny.

So thanks, Tunnel, for everything you've done for me. All right?

Bye now. See you soon. It was romantic. Just looking at his sad tunnel. My walk went in that tunnel. Sad. But what can I say to it? I'm 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

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 you.

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 a 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 Michelle Gardner

just a regular fucking person, never did nothing wrong to nobody. No, was just around. Yeah. It also didn't help that Jamie Vlasakis, who, if you'll remember, stood guard while Bunting and 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, and 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 they were starting with the ignorant guy.

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. Where it's just like essentially the same as asking the fat boys to

to even be nurses. Like the fact that they were allowed to even work at the hospital. Well, 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. And 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, was,

said that she was sorry about her friend's stuff, but she needed the money, 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. Because that was just him getting rid of the body.

Yeah. 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. This, the jumper cables to administer electric shocks and the cigarette burns. No, that's, that's the escalation. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. You still learn it. 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

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 her, what we need,

out of her is now completed. We got her. Think about all the years she spent raping you. Yeah. 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 then 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, you know, it's horrible to say, but the murders themselves, they do have practical edges and then there's also weird psycho edges, like psychological edges to the killings. But I also think a lot of it was more so, it 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's like

This is essentially the... Remember the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants? I remember. I'd say that this is like close to that. All right. I like how you wrapped that one up. Yeah. Yeah. Does that help? No. You don't think it helps? It didn't write anything in my mind. Well, it's just kids having community. It's about the friends you make along the way. Okay. Oh, okay. There we go.

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 Trevelyan. Trevelyan 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 Tervillian 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 everybody.

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 now trevillian 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 a 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 from Robin Hood Men in Tights. If we don't get no tolls, then we don't get no rolls. First they go blue, then they go poo. Why? And that's where we'll pick back up next week for part two of the Snowtown Murders. Yay! Yay!

And it's going to get so much worse. Isn't that amazing that 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 were

couldn't hold up to police interrogation. Yeah. Some of these guys rolled over and they did find the bodies. 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 going to love it. Check it out. Great work. Thank you, team. We did it. I love this. I love this. I love this. Thank you to the team. Go to patreon.com slash 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 page right now. We got behind-the-scenes footage, full-length, the last podcast on the left, no commercials for any of the shows. It's fun as hell. You know, we do our thing. Yeah. We're working on it. We're working on it. We're working on it. Yeah, and if you like torture like this, you should listen to The Brighter Side. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really smart. Really good. Podcast twice a week. Everyone else in the night. Go check it out. Yeah. Go on TikTok for some reason. NLP on the left. Apparently our numbers are up.

Cool. And on Instagram, too. At LPOnTheLeft. 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 hometown sooner than later. Or maybe later than sooner. But we will. Go to see us. JKUltra is the name of the tour. Go to LastPodcastOnTheLeft.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 Snowtown into Showtown. Yeah, and all you out there in England and Iceland, we're finally going to fucking do Iceland. We're doing Reykjavik. We're going to do the big hall out there. Dude, we should 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 going to play Reiki Vic and we're going to be doing two nights in London. And all three of those shows are going to be in October. Go to last podcast on the left dot 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 crazy.

It's been a problem. Yes. Very scary. I'm actually scared about it.

That's fine. So stuff it, actually. If you can do the opposite, put a cork in it. Stuff a puffin into it. Hell Satan. I game. There's no one redeemable. Choose one. Who's your favorite one of their family? Who's your favorite one? I like Jamie the most. Well, wrong. Wrong. Wrong one. Who died? We'll find out next week who he likes. Check it out. See you, fuckers.

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