Episode 572: The Snowtown Murders Part III - The Three Amigos
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Hello! Ed Larson and Amber Nelson from the Brighter Side here to check in with you, see how you're doing. Is your day more disappointing than a gas station sandwich? Are you trying to put one foot in front of the other in a glue factory? Did you try to throw your air fryer in the bathtub but nothing happened because you were too lazy to plug it in first? Then the Brighter Side podcast is for you! Oh yeah! Eat

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There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that?

That's the song. That's what he should have used. And you know what? I'm fine with that song. Touch me and touch me. Touch, peel, stand. It's like, it makes sense. Well,

Because he did peel quite a lot of these guys. He let them stand too long in a fucking...

The barrel. Is this legitimately the most peeling that we will have heard of in an episode? Because they go straight to the paring knives. There's a lot of peeling in this episode. Man, I'm trying to go back into the banks to see if there's like more peeling and something. Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. I was watching a thing about the secrets of the Neanderthals. Oh, you've been getting into that one, huh? Have you watched that? I've not seen it yet, but I've been into it. They had secrets? They didn't keep them well.

They were incredible gossips. It's the tea behind Neanderthals. Did you know that Susie had sex with a rock? I knew that Susie was bad when she slept with that pine cone when she was with that dog.

But they would use, they would break off pieces of rock to make a little thing and they talked about how they would cut the meat off of a bone. Yeah. And there was like arrowheads, kind of. Neanderthals do something very similar to what John Bunting will end up doing with the slow peeling of bones. They do that and they don't know

why they don't know why Neanderthals literally took a there was they find whole patches of Neanderthal bones that they would just like scrape the meat off the bones that they think that they did some extravagant cannibalistic ritual but they don't know why so it's just secrets no answers

Man, that's why we need Netflix, man. Take up the time. Passing the time. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks here with Henry Zebrowski. I'm the real old grunge Henry Zebrowski. My wife won't come back. I will say, I want to say thank you so much to the positive people

we've gotten from the last week episode. But I will say I have met now, thanks to our commentary last week, several live superfans. And live superfans are specific.

Yeah. Me or a specific group. I definitely got one being like, how dare you make fun of live? My polycube drowned in a river. Like, you survived. Like, it sounds like they watched their polycube drown from the banks. Live is very specific.

Once we get headed into throwing copper slander, nevermind Alice and change slander. Yeah. You did. I didn't slander. It's fine. It's okay for me to think that a band is fine. Yeah. What's the big fucking deal. It's Alice in chain. I told him he hasn't gotten to a big enough fight with his wife yet to understand Alice. Yeah.

It's a great name for a band. It's a great name for a band. It's totally cool for me to think that a band is fine and live. It's like, I mean, I see what you mean. It's a very melodramatic band. Very melodramatic. Very melodramatic. And I can say that objectively, that it is a melodramatic band. I agree. And we have the objective Ed Larson with us. How you doing? Happy Mother's Day, everybody. Happy Mother's Day. Oh, fuck. It's the Mother's Day special. Oh, man.

Oh, great. Do we want to talk about last week? I feel like it got a little... It was two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, but you know, last episode, we're timeless here. We stand out. We're here. We're forever on the internet. It doesn't matter. But last week, I think we got into sort of the intensity and lack of schedule of John Bunting and Robert Wagner and their series of murders. Last week, what we're saying, what we realized was like,

It was like the contents inside of these barrels. Sure. The episode was really about the melange of a slurry. What's that word? A melange. Is that a real word? It is. I vouch. I vouch. Okay, good. It's sauce.

It's a food-based term for humans semi-melted in a giant barrel. So when you look inside this barrel, which John Bunting loved to do, you would see feet and fingers all flopping around in a big kind of, I would probably say, unpleasant juice. And that's what last episode is. And so this episode is really about spilling that barrel out. Getting the ladle in there. Playing with the toes. Looking to see who belongs to what.

And that's where Marcus takes it. Yeah. And I definitely did my best in the last episode to try to make the timeline as cohesive as possible. But it's extremely difficult. It's extremely difficult just because of the inconsistencies of the witnesses that were left alive. Unreliable narrators. Unreliable narrators. They're usually on heroin.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And not necessarily. I mean, like unreliable narrators, not on purpose, just because they're fucked up individuals with drug problems. And we'll also later get into the forensics of everything, which also made dates, times, causes of death. Very, very, very difficult. But this one is definitely a little more linear.

So when we last left John Bunting and the rest of the Snowtown Murders crew, he had just murdered Elizabeth Hayden, the wife of a lesser accomplice named Mark Hayden. The exact motivations are unknown, but it's most likely that the reasons were twofold.

First, John Bunting just didn't fucking like Elizabeth. Yeah. And his near decade long murder spree had devolved from a mission to kill pedophiles to an easy solution to rid himself of a person because they were a problem to him personally. Believe me. And if you hear it one time, you hear it 10 times.

Every single time I go out to kill a bunch of pedophiles en masse, and I mean this. I end up just like, I'm at the thrift store, I'm buying a pastry and stuff. I'm like, why don't I- You buy pastries at the thrift store? No, I'm like next to the thrift store in the pastry area. I go, I look at the hats and I'm like, what was I trying to do today?

oh yeah, I wanted to kill all those pedophiles. And so yeah, it's easy to get distracted. It's easy to get off course. Yeah, you're just sitting there putting spikes in a bat and you're like, you know, 10th spike in, you're like, why am I even doing this? Why am I even doing this? I'm ruining a perfectly good bat. I could kill a pedophile just with the bat.

Yeah, you don't need the spikes. But no, it's one of those things, you know, where the normal person might say like, ah, I could kill him. You know, that fucking asshole. But now he's killed a bunch of people. Now he understands. Oh, I actually can kill them. Yeah, I can do it. I like doing it and I will do it.

Well, the second reason that Elizabeth Hayden died, possibly, is that six of the Snowtown crew's murder victims were being stored in barrels in Elizabeth Hayden's garage, decomposing in a slurry of hydrochloric acid that wasn't quite doing the job of dissolving flesh and bones they'd expected because they had used the wrong kind of acid. It's the brown kind, dude. Ha ha ha ha!

Now, wouldn't that like put her in their cool book? Well, that's the thing. From what I can tell, Elizabeth was under the impression that the barrels were full of kangaroo corpses that Bunting and crew said they were planning to grind up and turn into pet food as a little side hustle. And you know how much more sharp I, he looks, ground up kangaroo. Can you imagine feeding your dog a slurry of mangled,

rotted kangaroo? Well, the problem is it wasn't supposed to be slurry. It just got to slurry because they hadn't figured out. I think they hadn't figured out like the kangaroo processing process yet, because remember, John Bunting worked at a slaughterhouse for years. So he's got this sort of like it's like I think like what do they call it? No, they would say the Dunning Kruger curve.

Like, what is the Dunning-Kruger effect? Is that like there's if you get like a certain amount of information, just a little bit of information, you believe that you're an expert on the subject. But then the more you learn about a subject, the more you realize you don't know. I think John Bunting, by working in a slaughterhouse, thought, you know, but of course, actually, I'm looking up right now. Kangaroo is actually an absolute it is a meat used many times in dog food.

It's like deer meat over here. I'm looking at Chewy.com. Specifically, VeryChewy.com. Grain-free is very popular these days. I don't believe in it. It's bad for older dogs. It's bad for their joints. And hello to all of our listeners out at Chewy.com. We actually have quite a few. Oh, good. Thank you. Reno.

That's the packing house. I have family members who've worked there. You're not supposed to can the dogs. John Bunting, yes. So I feel like, all right, that's an educated. He knew that he could pose as this. Educated guess that I have. I don't know that for sure. That's just an educated guess. The key to today's episode is the bodies in place.

the barrels. So now he has his collection of barrels. We were kind of talking before the episode about how we've realized that John Bunting is one of the most product-based killers of all the product-based killers we have covered. Can you explain that? He's a process and product guy. He's both, yeah. Can you explain that to me? Well, we're going to get to that here in a second. Jumping ahead a little bit. Okay.

But as far as the story goes with the kangaroo corpses in the barrels, or at least that's what they're telling Elizabeth Hayden, Bunting was telling her that the barrels couldn't be dumped because, as the story was told, they were killed with unregistered guns that could be traced back to John Bunting. That's what he's telling her. And this was absolutely

after the Martin Bryant killings, the Martin Bryant massacre, where he murdered 35 people, and that's when Australia got their shit together, got rid of all their guns. I believe he was the one having sex with his mother. Yeah. Yeah, I think...

I think he was. He was either having sex with his mother or he was having sex with an old lady that was posing as his mother. There's a lot going into Martin Bryant. There's a lot to unpack there, and we're going to be doing that sometime in the future. Happy Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day. Sometimes a mother gives the gift that keeps on giving. Come.

But the point is that having an unregistered firearm in Australia, it's a serious fucking offense. Yeah, they hate it. And this is when the law is kind of new and when they're going real fucking hard on it. Plus, it brought down boomerang sales. Yeah.

And honestly, do you know what Australia's like when they're in a boomerang depression? Just guess what doesn't bounce back? The economy. Well, that's all to say that all Elizabeth had to do was look into one of these barrels and she would see a head floating in a putrefying slurry and everyone involved would immediately go to jail. I can't help but notice this row looks like Toby. Ha ha ha!

Can you imagine this? This this loosen around these barrels are now going to start it move from place to place and they are juicy. Like that's one of those that I can't. This just shows I got an email about the boredom of the small towns and fucking and shenanigans everywhere.

In small towns and how people just learn to accept so much in a small town because it just you're everybody's right on top of each other. I've been telling you this for years. This is exactly how I that's why I was talking in like episode one is like, I know these people. I know these situations. I know like I grew up in a town of less than 400 people. All this shit is normal. I wouldn't trust.

Like, in my mind, I have to vet somebody to watch my dogs. I can't imagine leaving an unmarked series of absolutely leaking barrels in a car in my driveway for a very long time. I just feel like it's very obvious. And they weigh everyone kind of. And we're like, it's fine. It's fine. It's very strange. I just remember 98 was the year it kind of stunk a little bit. Yeah.

Remember? 98. Real stinky year. Real stinky year. Real stinky year. Wow. Yeah, I remember that year. Now, on the night of Elizabeth Hayden's murder, John Bunting instructed Mark Hayden to take Elizabeth's sister, Gail, out for a drive. Remember, all these people are all living in the same house. Yeah. And while they were out, Elizabeth was captured, tortured, murdered, and placed in a barrel like all the others, marking body number seven.

Now, I'm not entirely sure of the order of things here. What? Do you ever see the movie Fatal Instinct? Yeah, when she cooks the rabbit? All I can think about is when they go out while they're disposing of the body, they're chopping up the body, they're going to put it in the barrel and they're all like, you know, listening to the live over and over again. And then when they go out and it's just like, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-d

and he's like buying her shoes and stuff and they're like getting ice cream and they're going out to watch a bunch of kangaroos get decapitated like having a fun little day out together you know and then coming back and they're just being like one less lady in here then now I'm not entirely sure of the order of things here as

it goes with much of this story, but it seems like this murder was committed with the full knowledge of Elizabeth's husband, Mark, because when he was shown the body of his dead wife stuffed in a barrel, he laughed. But it is unknown if this laugh was out of mirth or nervousness. Well, it depends on the laugh. Wow, that is my wife in there. You see, that's nervous. If he went like... Also suspicious, but if also he looked at it and went,

Yeah, a light chuckle maybe. That's also weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's demonic. You know, real loud laughing, that's compensating. I always wanted her to be in smoothie form. She was always ahead of her time. No!

But either way, Mark definitely knew she was dead and he did not report her missing. And it was only after her brother reported her disappearance did the police get involved. But by the time investigators finally got a warrant to search Elizabeth Hayden's home, which was where the bodies had been stored up till that point, John Bunting had already arranged for the barrels to be moved, although they were not moved to Snowtown just yet.

See, Bunting had been absolutely enraged that Mark Hayden hadn't kept the situation with his missing wife under control. Bunting had done the same song and dance as before by recording Elizabeth's voice during torture and playing those recordings when people called her house. And that had worked perfectly.

every time. They all bought it. That's why the investigations took so long. Mark was also supposed to push the angle that Elizabeth had taken off with a new boyfriend, as she was known to do from time to time. But he was never able to convince Elizabeth's brother that this was the truth.

Therefore, the report was filed and the investigation progressed. I'd love to get an email from somebody who actually knew somebody that was like this. I always feel like, oh, she went away with a new boyfriend or like, how popular are these people? What do you want to know? I know people like that. Elizabeth Hayden. God love her. Yeah. You know, she's a special lady. The fact that there were so many guys balling this woman out.

And I don't know how it happened. They just were... The guys are so busy. See, that's the thing. Why are these guys so busy? Also, the idea of someone just fucking off for a couple of days, that's so like...

I'd call the police after like 12 hours. No, because you are married to a reasonable woman and you live a reasonable life. Like that is, you live a responsible life in which people don't disappear for days at a time. These people don't live that life. Yeah, it's full of chaos there. Yeah, and everyone, I think a lot of people operate under the assumption that only attractive people fuck. Hmm.

No, no, I know that's not true. Yeah, that's not true at all. I fuck. Yeah, but that's the thing. You're cute and you've got a personality. Yeah, you know, you've got a little Juno Sequoia. Yeah, I like it. I like a kiss. I like a hug.

But that's the thing is that people that are extraordinarily unattractive. It's not about the attraction. It's more just the so busy. Well, that's the thing. They're not busy. That's the point. That's why they could do anything. Yeah. If you're busy, you have a structure. If you're not busy, you can go missing for four days and no one asks any questions. Wow. That sounds cool. It is kind of cool, but it shouldn't be.

It's no way to live. It's definitely a way to fucking be in the grave by 47, 46. But hey, man, leave a crumb custard fucking sweet ass corpse. Horrible, desiccated corpse. Smile on his face. Captain's hat on.

Martini glass broken, shoved up his ass. Loving life. Now, Bunting did have an eventual method planned for disposing of these bodies permanently, but he actually had quite a hard time letting go of the corpses. See, while other serial killers may take a piece of clothing or a driver's license as a trophy, like Dennis Rader did, he had a whole collection of driver's licenses, he had a little box of mementos that he kept in his daughter's treehouse.

The bodies themselves were John Bunting's trophies. Now, there are certainly serial killers who kept bodies in their homes. Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen, they're the most famous examples. They tried to get rid of them, but it took a long time. Dennis Nilsen slowly but surely tried to get rid of his bodies, but he loved them very, very closely. Dahmer tried to get rid of his, too. Slowly but surely. Also barrels. Yeah, brunch. Ha ha ha!

That's unfair. That's unfair. All right. We don't know what happened to a lot of those bodies, honestly. And I feel like Jeffrey Dahmer has gotten a bad rap. I saw the show. He was sexy. But the difference is the motivations. Dennis Nelson and Jeffrey Dahmer's motivations for keeping the bodies around. That's a deeper, more pathological motivation for them. It was done out of a desire for companionship. And once those bodies reached a point where they were no longer recognizably human, all

then they got rid of them. It's hard to fuck them. Yeah. No, it's not. Or it's hard to sit on the, it's hard to sit on the couch and pretend that that person is alive. Well, even serial killers at some point hit a taste wall. Yeah. At some point you're like, every one of them got there, go like, no matter what, they get an ick about something. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. At some point they're just like, ugh. It's probably like, they probably have different, there's no, there's probably several corpses that Jeffrey Dahmer, like there was a,

that he favored. You know what I mean? There was a couple, there was some that he sucked and sucked and sucked and sucked until there was like, there was just barely like as gross. But you know, there was a couple that even he had this sort of like beer goggles on and after they were dead and they were all prostrated out and then they're ready to be like, you know, be serviced. And he's just like,

Who were you last night? Do you think he ever got into a situation? Sometimes when I go to the farmer's market, my eyes are a little too big. I buy a little too much stuff and a week later, I'm like, fuck it, I didn't get to it. They all putrefy into a slurry at the bottom of the fucking vegetable.

Oh, that's exactly what happens. But John Bunting was looking for that effect. Yeah. And there are people who didn't really have a taste wall. I don't believe Ted Bundy had a taste wall because he would actually go out to the sites of his murder victims, like where he dumped the bodies and he would have sex with the dead and he would paint makeup on the heads until the corpses liquefied.

And that's the thing. They're liquid now, so he cannot have sex. He physically can't have sex with them anymore. I mean, you can stick your dick in the puddle, but it's not the same. And he got no gift. But that's the thing. Even then, the puddle will eventually sink into the...

Yeah. And then you're just fucking a hole in the dirt and that's not, that's not what he wants. Then you're Barry Keegan. Who's Barry Keegan? From that movie. From the salt burn movie. Where they eat the cum, all the cum stuff. He fucks the grave and shit. I didn't watch the cum movie. It's good. It's not good. I felt like it kept trying to offend me, but it never did. It's weird. As it kept going, I was like, show more dick. Suck his dick. Look,

That's kind of how I felt. Why are we acting like it's so like getting like naughty or whatever? Just suck his fucking dick. Yeah. Guys suck dick all day. They love it. They love it. Dicks love getting sucked. They really do. And some guys love sucking dick. Why not put it on film? Do it. It's for everybody. Yeah. But for bunting, the bodies were so...

But for John Bunting, the bodies were something that triggered a fond memory of what he considered an accomplishment. I mean, a very literal trophy. Because he thought, he was given the excuse that this is about the illegal guns, is that I don't want people to know, like, that was like, I think in his head, what he even talked about maybe with Robert Wagner, what he talked about those other guys, because he was the one that was truly obsessed with the corpses and the barrels. I don't know, Wagner would also open them up and giggle at them, because that's the funny thing. Think about how sick Wagner was, because he didn't have

a fucking sense. He had a sense of smell. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Because I mean, that is the thing about this series too, is that like Robert Wagner sort of fades into the background and

until the murders happen. Because, like, John Bunting is the guy that, you know, we're definitely following the most. He's the philosophical center of their little gang. Yeah, and John Bunting is just sort of the guy. Like, I mean, it's, think back to, like, the analogy I made, or the comparison that I made. He's Debbie Harry, and Robert Wagner's the guitarist from Debbie Harry, who's just as important to Blondie, but Debbie Harry is more recognized for Blondie. Chris Stein, are you saying that Robert Wagner is the Chris Stein? Who? No.

No, it's Beavis and Butthead. It really is. It's Beavis and Butthead where, you know, John Bunting is Butthead. He's the one who has the ideas. He's the one that, you know, gets Beavis to go along. Beavis is just there. And, you know, and Robert Wagner is the guy that's just kind of following, loves doing all the same shit. Yeah. He's down for it every time. He's a Cornholio. Yeah. He's a Cornholio. Robert Wagner.

There's cornholio. Yeah, every once in a while. Yeah, he does go ham. He does cornholio. It's happy for the butthole. That's exactly what he's doing. That's what this all is. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Finding work-life balance can be tough, but Squarespace gives you the tools to reach your goals and have time to celebrate.

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Now, I'd imagine that a lot of serial killers would have loved to have this sort of relationship with the corpses, the people they killed. Tell me. Well, the closest known serial killer to do this was probably Jerry Brudos, who made ceramic casts of the breasts of women he killed. He actually kept them on his mantle. He was killing women in his garage. He had a wife. Wow.

And she wasn't allowed to go into the garage and he would make ceramic casts of the breasts and put them on his mantle and be like, that's funny, right? I got it at a novelty store. And she'd be like, yes, dear, that's fine. Yes, that's wonderful. Love the severed tits. Most serial killers, however, are prevented from keeping bodies around because human corpses start to smell real bad, real fast. Mm-hmm.

This attracts attention. And most people, even serial killers, have an evolutionary revulsion to the smell of rotting corpses of any kind, no matter if it's human or animal, because our bodies are saying, don't eat that.

Yeah. How long till we start to stink? Like two days, three days? You start to stink pretty fast. I imagine in the sun in Australia, you stink a little faster than you would in other places. Much, much faster. I love the, this is going to be great. This is going to be great for my fucking algorithm. How long does it take a dead body to smell? But it also has to do with, it's actually more humidity than it is heat. Oh.

Four to ten days. Four to ten days? Yes. Oh, so you get some time. Yeah, you get plenty of time. You don't watch a long weekend. That's why mummies are so well preserved because it's heat, but it's dry heat. Happy Mummy's Day. Yeah.

But if you'll remember, as we said, John Bunting was born with no sense of smell. So he would repeatedly open the barrels and marvel at the dead bodies of the people he and Robert Wagner had killed. It's like you or I would look at a fun tchotchke we picked up on vacation. Nice. Oh, yeah. Nice. Yeah. Like it. Yeah. Toast still there. Good. Oh, yeah. Let me give you. All right.

need some salt imagine i feel like guys would that kill you immediately uh to eat like to there was a bunch of acid in there yeah that's bad yeah to ladle a putrefied corpse liquid slurry into your mouth yeah you're gonna get real sick and you might die but what about the thing where you stomp on the corpse's belly and the fucking gunk comes up to the top and you fuck it do what

What does that have to do with any of this? I think mung is kind of a wives tale. This is not... Because it sounds like this is a mung distillery. It's like a brewery for mung. They weren't selling any fucking soup or anything. They were just keeping it and looking at it. Yeah. Hey, people brew home brewed.

brew beer and they don't drink it at all because it'll probably poison them yeah well i mean but this is more putrefied flesh it's a different thing yeah putrefied organized brew these yeah if you throw some hops in there i'm just saying it's different from mung that would be interesting if he did if he had some burned oak barrels and he put them in there you get some grains in there some hops cask aged yes do you remember when we had that guy the guy that came back

stage in Oregon when we did the show in Portland and he brought us the whiskey that was all made that was put in the casks made from the caskets of murderers. I still have it in my office right now. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fun. That's gross. I took a shot of it. It was fine. Maybe if the barrels were clear, he wouldn't open them up so much. That's why, you know, like when you go to the nature company, you get a shark in a jar. That's great. You don't open it. You know, you just sit there, you look at it, you enjoy it. You didn't think it was going to be on display. Yeah, that's the thing. Anyone who goes into the garage is going to see the body in the barrel. He needed a decorator. Yeah.

But once it became obvious that the cops were going to knock on Mark Hayden's door at any moment because of the disappearance of his wife, Bunting had to devise a way to move all the bodies to temporary locations before he could find a sort of safe house where he could have both a private kill room and a place to enact his final plan for disposal.

Now, as it turned out, Mark Hayden had a broken down Land Cruiser in his front yard. So four of these leaky barrels were loaded inside the cruiser, which was then towed to a town two hours north of Adelaide to property owned by friends of Bunting's, a couple named Ann and Dennis Cordwell. The moment Bunting arrived with the Land Cruiser, though, the Cordwells immediately asked, what the fuck is that smell? Can you imagine immediately the...

Same day you need a bit of a clean up, then you're on your car back. I can't even imagine that. Now that I got two dogs, picking up four piles of dog shit this morning, I gagged just at that. Oh, man. I got my little bite. I got a dog shit trash can now, and if you don't change that out fast enough. It's wild in there. There's this little mold on them. It's not good. You're just like, wow, your poop's making poo.

Well, Bunting gave them the same kangaroo pet food story. And since the Cordwells were probably well acquainted with these sorts of idiotic get rich quick schemes, they shrugged their shoulders and said, fine. All right. Yeah. All right. Now, can I ask a question about the barrels? Yeah. You said they're leaking. Now, are they leaking through the bottom or is it just some of the tops on? The top. The tops are just not that they're not. They didn't buy like.

top-of-the-line barrels. The way I... It seems to me would make sense is that

Like the wonderful coffee shop we do down the street. They have iced coffee cubes. Yeah. And go inside of the coffee and causes the coffee to kind of like reestablish itself. Right. So I think what happens is you got a barrel full of these bodies. Right. And then you fill it as much as you can with acid. And I think that as it slowly dissolves, the liquid inside of it grows and pushes up out of the top of it in a sort of a, uh,

kind of a frothy yeah gets foamy and frothy and then it comes up out of the top and also like if you leave a slow cooker too long or you fill it up too much very much so and i also think that because they're moving in a hurry they're not it's this is a white glove service this is a room and board and also they are lifting these up they're slapping back and they're opening them a bunch you gotta keep if you keep them shut you know that's another thing yeah they're wearing out the lids yeah

Well, soon enough, though. Yeah, it's gross. Logistics. Well, soon enough, though, the Cordwells moved from their more spacious property up north to a home near Snowtown in January of 1999. The only place to put the Land Cruiser now was in the Cordwells front driveway. So they had to live with the stench of death anytime the wind blew in the wrong direction.

You know what would have stopped this in a fucking second? Nextdoor. Nextdoor app. Yeah.

What's that smell? It is literally like I follow it. My favorite has been like, there has been a man casing a home for a robbery slash group rape. I know he has. You see a shot of a man across the street in a UPS uniform. This man comes several times a day to see whether or not I lay prostrate in the living room waiting for his sexual based attack.

And you're like, that's a fucking delivery man. These people are watching you, dog. Yeah. Be careful out there, man. Yeah. Man, I didn't even realize it, but I bet I'd probably show up on those because the coffee shop that I go to a few times a week, I go in, I get my coffee, I come back and I sit in my car and I read a novel while I enjoy my cinnamon roll and my flat white. Why do you do that? Because it's nice. You don't sit in the coffee shop? No, it's too loud in there. Some people like, you know, eating in the car. That's when you go to In-N-Out, they're like,

in the car or are you going to take it to go? Well, I do it as a shame eat thing where I eat an entire rotisserie chicken alone by myself in the car in the parking lot of Gelson's because I'm so hungry that I can't continue forward. That's why your hands are always slipping off the wheel. For me, my car is like a sacred space. Like I love my car. Like the inside, it comes, it's, I think it's a Texas thing. You're in your car so much, but yeah, my car is, is my safe space. It's my sacred space. You were in New York for 12 years.

Yeah, but man, I mean, that shit gets in your DNA and doesn't come out. I lived in Texas for 22 years. I think that you've become

super sexual super sexual subaru sex i'm not sitting in my car hard i'm reading a fantasy novel and eating a cinnamon roll sounds hard yeah what kind of fantasy i wish there was a quiet coffee shop that's what all it is it's about a quiet coffee shop where he could eat his beans anywhere from medieval to victorian to urban it's fine okay okay

Meanwhile, Bunting searched for a new location where he could store all of the barrels together in a private place. Okay, hang out. Let's party. Yeah, and he soon discovered that the state bank in Snowtown was up for rent.

This building was owned by a farming couple who tried turning it into a plant shop but had failed, so the bank was sitting empty. The farming couple, however, had not removed the large metal front doors, nor had they removed the bank vault, which gave John Bunting and the rest of the Snowtown crew the perfect place to not only store bodies...

but to kill victims. It feels like when the Ghostbusters found the firehouse. This place is great. We should stay here tonight, you know, to try it out. So John Bunting contacted the owners of the Snowtown State Bank building and told them that he wanted to use it to store cars, motorbikes, and various automotive parts for repair work. After agreeing on $60 a week in rent,

John Bunting and Mark Hayden signed the lease, and soon after, Bunting had a locksmith change the locks on the vault.

Now, once the barrels were in the bank vault, the entire place smelled terrible. Even after they filled the place with air fresheners. It's going to be worse. It has to be worse. It's so much worse. Because, you know, I mean, we all lived in New York. We know what happens when a mouse dies in the walls. Dude, I just had one happen. Yeah. And no matter how many air fresheners you put out, it still just smells like air freshener mixed with decomposing flesh. Oh, yeah. One of the liquid shits I took after New Orleans. Have you ever sprayed?

that spray like oh it's a poopery on top of that man that's ancient orange that is like it's sickness that smell that poopoo smell mix with the air spray smell is good when it's your own though it's nice i don't know i sit in it i love it

Sometimes I have this, my poop will smell. I'm like, if this was being read by a psychic, they'd think 9-11 was going to happen again. If someone decided to feel like they needed to scry, my post, New Orleans shits, they'd be like,

I think the economy's going to tank. See, I'm in there, I'm shitting, and, you know, I'm just post-mating. Door's open, come on in. The great replacement theory. But eventually, after Bunting and Wagner spent a fair amount of time opening barrels and giggling at the bodies, Bunting... Which is probably more like... Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow. Bunting conceded that the barrels couldn't stay in the bank vault indefinitely because the stench was so bad that you could smell it from outside the building, like through bank vault walls, through the outside walls of the building. And like you're standing on the, you're standing on the sidewalk. It's like something smells like shit. Don't you ever think maybe it's kind of like we've opened up a stank store. Buy stank. I'm a businessman.

I ain't even a man, really. I'm a bastard. The plan they devised was to remove the bodies from the barrels and individually butcher them so the bodies wouldn't be so much of a tight fit, lest the lids pop off. Then they would cover the bottoms of the barrels in cement and drop them in the ocean. Get more barrels. At any point, did they not get more barrels? They might have had...

We don't even know how they got the barrels. They got them at the store, right? They purchased them, right? Yeah, they just bought them. Yeah, they didn't hand make... They're not barrel makers like it's fucking 1896. Like, they're buying plastic black barrels. Getting to work almost straight away, Wagner opened the barrel containing the corpse of Troy Ude and began the grisly work of cutting all the flesh away from the bones and dismembering the body.

Bunting, meanwhile, made sure he was the one to cut off Eudes' testicles, which he then stabbed repeatedly. Yeah, doing the, I'm stabbing his balls. I'm zigging. Look what I'm doing. Yeah. Where did this information come from? From Jamie Vlasakis. Oh, okay. Yeah. This was all done in the presence of Jamie Vlasakis. There we go. Who, if you'll remember, was another lesser accomplice who was never completely comfortable with the whole murder torture thing. Remember, Jamie, baby spice.

We've got John Bunting, Scary Spice, Robert Wagner, Sporty Spice. Interesting.

Well, basically, Jamie was under John Bunting's complete control and didn't know how to escape. Yeah, because he found that every single time he didn't like somebody or they did something that they felt that they went across purposes or they felt that you were going to snitch or they felt that you were had any real knowledge about the crimes, but were not necessarily involved in the crimes. You end up murdered. So he knew that he was so close to being next. Yeah.

But even though, if you'll remember, Troy Youde had molested Jamie as a boy, Jamie wasn't all that jazzed about watching Robert Wagner hack away at the body of his half-brother. So Jamie went to the Cordwell house to take a shower. Now Jamie, of course, smelled like a low-quality slaughterhouse.

But the Cordwells just assumed that Jamie had been cursed with this funk because he'd also got caught up in Bunting's kangaroo pet food scheme. How nice is this Cordwell family? You become just lazy. There is something else going on. All right. Fine. Fine. Whatever. Does it kind of stink a little bit? So do you. Oh, you shut up. You shut up.

Jamie, however, he did still participate in the welfare scam in which the Snowtown crew cashed their murder victims welfare checks. He was benefiting from all this. And Jamie was, in fact, the one who seemed to be in charge of keeping the payments flowing. Oh, he was the Treasury Secretary. Jamie was the one who forged signatures for victims Gavin Porter, Troy Ude, and Gary O'Dwyer, although he did once accidentally sign his own name to a check. Oh, man. You know, fuck! Fuck!

Oh, no. Oh, fuck. All right. I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to send it in anyway. Here we go. But to keep the payments going for Fred Brooks, Jamie had to physically check in because he'd missed a filing deadline. Now, hear this. This is such a funny, stupid side quest. Yeah. This is definitely not in the movie. No, this is not in the movie.

Once he was in the welfare office, Jamie, as Fred Brooks, told them that he had schizophrenia, which was why he was late with his papers. And you can tell because of the giraffe I rode to get here. And the fact that I'm just a collection of shards of spirits, I'm an ice lord, and I know the government is going to make me a gay puppet for the prime minister. All right, so...

Can I have my money, please? Imagine how awful a sketch comedy show called Schizophrenia would be. Oh, God. Schizophrenia. And just people wallowing around their own piss and shit. It's comedy. It's comedy.

It's written by Jean Genet? The problem was that the government then demanded proof of his mental illness. So Jamie had to go to a doctor and fake schizophrenia. Apparently, though, Jamie was a good enough actor to pull this off. There's no way. There's literally no way that he's not doing the annual day. He got the doctors though, dude. I think the dude was just like...

All right. Fine. The payments flowed once more. And since Jamie was now listed as a schizophrenic, he only had to check in every three months instead of every two weeks. Why do you? I just don't understand why. That doesn't make sense. If you have something as debilitating as schizophrenia.

I feel like that's calling for a more checkups than less checkups. I agreed with that. Right? Because you're like, why would you, what means it? Why is it laxer? Because you have a mental disease. Well, I guess they assume that like, you can't get your shit together every two weeks, but you can get your shit together every three months. I think if you got a diagnosis of schizophrenic, they might want you to get your shit together every week. They might want you to maybe have some organization. You need a planner. You need a checkbook.

It's not like he has a wall calendar. Yeah. Or he's getting fucking alerts on his phone. Like, yeah, every three months he's going to forget again. Of course he is. He's got schizophrenia. Well, he actually doesn't. Yeah, but I'm taking it in real life.

Meanwhile, police had not given up on the investigation into Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance. They'd found her purse, a bank card, wedding rings, plural, and dirty clothes in a garbage bag. This was enough to kick the disappearance up the ladder to a possible murder, and more officers were assigned to the case as a result.

I'd like to note that they say in South Australia, it's slow going. It's easy as we're seeing. I think a lot of these things are, it's interesting how they manifest in a fairly, I would say, chill part of the world. And so these guys are like kind of an anomaly. A lot of people kind of just going along to get along. These guys are a bunch of fucking monsters that sprung up in this very kind of slow moving town. The Adelaide police and all these people around the area are

They move real slow. Yeah. And it takes a long time for them to build a case. So it is interesting that they committed the majority of their crimes as they were already being investigated for their crimes. And it took some time for them to slowly put this together because they wanted to have, I guess I have a rock solid case. Well, not necessarily.

I mean, they watched them. They know that they're taking money from dead people from ATMs. They've been watching them for months. Well, no, they did that once, like after Vanessa Lane, like after Vanessa Lane, like many years before. And they had spotty surveillance for like a month.

Yeah. And then maybe two months. And then they stopped watching them. Yeah. And then it wasn't until a little bit later that they did start. It wasn't until actually right now, right before the last murder that they started watching them. And additionally, with Bunting and Wagner back on the scene, speaking of Vanessa Lane, her disappearance was given another look. Yeah.

look because they had completely forgotten about that one. It was found that Bunting and Wagner, who were close associates of Mark Hayden, whose wife had gone missing, they had been withdrawing welfare checks from the bank accounts of people who had all supposedly left town suddenly and mysteriously. And it works for one, two, three, but once it gets to four, five, six, seven, eight,

Then it gets suspicious. Yeah. And not the strength of that, investigators got permission to monitor Bunting, Wagner, and Mark Hayden's phone calls. Police dubbed them the Three Amigos after the extremely lighthearted comedy. Oh, yeah. Which one's Martin Short? Bunting. No, no. Chevy Chase. Bunting's definitely Chevy Chase. But it's short, though. Do you have anything besides Mexican food? No.

My favorite is, would you like to take me out and kiss me on the veranda? Lips will be fine. But them naming them the three amigos, this was long before they discovered how gruesome this case was going to be. I don't think they were amigos at all. My thanks. They were bad.

Yay! We got there. Yay!

Now, by May of 1999, John Bunting and Robert Wagner believed that police had given up on their investigations. But on the day that Bunting and Wagner decided to return to murder, it didn't really matter because it just so happened that that was one of the days in which they weren't being watched. That's the slow going thing that you're talking about. Yes, they idioted their way into being good at this. Somebody was speeding and the cop was busy. Well, it looks like I've lost the next eight hours.

Now, perhaps appropriately, considering how off the rails the mission had gone, Bunting and Wagner's last victim was not a part of Bunting's wall of spiders, nor, to the best of our knowledge, had this victim abused or molested anyone. Instead, murder victim David Johnson was merely a person in Bunting's circle of dirt bags Bunting just didn't like.

He was also Jamie Vlasakis' stepbrother somehow. But the ins and outs of that rat's nest of relationships is far too complicated to explore. You know that song, I'm my own grandpa? I'm my own grandpa. Everything about these people's connections is like that song. Yeah. But this is where John Bunting, he wanted to be a serial killer now. Now all of the auspices of a missionary style motivation are gone.

He just wants to kill. He's very, very excited about it. And now it's like, we've got a fucking murder studio. I want to break it in. Yeah. Now, the setup for David Johnson's murder was that Jamie Vlasakis would tell David that he had a friend who was selling a computer for just $200. Great deal. But they had to drive out to Snowtown to get it. Never go to a second location.

Now, there were a lot of phone calls arranging the capture of David Johnson that were recorded on police wiretaps. But for some reason, could be Australian law, could be a manpower problem. Authorities couldn't listen to the phone calls in real time. Instead, they heard all of this after the fact. What's the point?

Is it the point of monitoring the phone calls to catch them? No, it's gathering evidence. Yes. But also it's maybe catch them. Yeah, it's also to try to catch them. I mean, that's what we try to do here in America. But we also have a military-sized police department in almost each city. So we have a lot of manpower. And we're also a surveillance state as well. And we go and we have a RICO. The whole RICO thing allows them to kind of mobilize hundreds of cops at once. And they just do live 24-7 wiretaps on people.

Also, you don't want to arrest somebody and let them get away from lack of evidence. You got to make sure you got their fucking ass. Oh, yeah, of course. This is they will eventually amass quite a bit of evidence. Yeah. But even so, none of the so-called three amigos ever outright said what they were doing. Of course, because they were doing stupid gangster talk on the phone. Yeah. All police heard later was Bunting asking Jamie if the machine was all set up. And Wagner asked if...

was on the way. What an awful... That's so fucking stupid. And they're all going like, all right, no worries. No worries. Back and forth because that's how they say things are cool. Mm-hmm. Now, once David entered the Snowtown Bank...

Bunting and Wagner were waiting with handcuffs. After he was restrained, they took his wallet and got his pen number and bank information. Then they recorded David's voice like all the others. But this time, Bunting was trying a new method. Instead of a tape recorder, Bunting was attempting to use recording software on a 1999 desktop computer. He wanted to go digital. Yes. He's becoming the Moby of serial killers.

He thought that he could get a lot of sound bites together and string them together on a computer. Guess what? He's not good at it. No. He was bad at it. He did not know how to put together a bunch of sound bites correctly onto a computer. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, man. I feel like he was so... This is his escalations. This is his version of like, we're going to make this into a sustainable murder fact.

Yeah, the future is now. The future is now. But from what it sounds like, Bunting used the computer to record countless names, numbers, phrases, and words that he would later try to edit to create sentences like, fuck off, piss off, shithead, why are you phoning me? Your mother's a whore, and so on and so forth. At least it was something to keep him busy. Yeah.

But once the recordings were complete, Bunting and Wagner popped their well-worn copy of Live's Throwing Copper on the CD player and began the torture using most of the same techniques they'd used before.

But this time, while Jamie and Wagner were out at the bank testing David's PIN number, David almost escaped. After getting himself free, David and Bunting got into a scuffle, which cracked a couple of Bunting's ribs. But when David went for a knife, Bunting overpowered him and strangled him to death with David's own belt. But now that they had their own kill-slash-disposal room, Robert Wagner got straight to work butchering David Johnson's body inside the Snowtown Bank vault.

But just as Jamie was holding the corpse's leg while Wagner cut at the knee, who should walk in the front door but their friend Dennis Cordwell, the same guy who stored the Land Cruiser. He's just dropping by just to say hello. Yeah, he just wanted to come say hi, see their new venture. He's very nice. He's extremely nice. And then you probably heard the throwing copper from outside. He was like, oh, it's my favorite album. I want to go with it.

hey, you guys like Seven Mary Three? I can't believe they never bought another CD. They did not go over anything else. What a perfect time for those fucking specs in Adelaide. I can't believe it. And by 1999, like,

I think Secret Samadhi's out by that point. I think Secret Samadhi came out when I was like 13 because I remember that was the day that I bought that CD was the same day that I set that dumpster on fire. 1997, it was definitely out. Lakhani's juice was right fucking there.

Get Marcy Playground. Something. Smells like sex and candy in here. Bad, bad, bad. Well, now that I think about it, 1999, they're listening to Fastball. Primitive radio gods. They're listening to The Way? Every morning,

Ouch! That was the remix. Now, luckily for the three amigos, Bunting just so happened to be outside of the vault at the time. So he distracted Dennis Cordwell by showing him his new computer. Later, Cordwell recalled... He got a thing right here. See how the snake goes around the corner? Chasing after the apples.

I want to make sure I'm running out of the obstacles there because I can't tell how you snipe. Isn't that nice? I've got this computer here. How about here? It's a thing called pornography. Have you heard of it? There's teddies there. It's everywhere. Look at this here. You ever thought you could play pinball on a machine? You didn't know. Oh, look, you can play pinball on this computer. It's amazing. It's easy. Ball never gets stuck. I'm spending the next three or four hours downloading Smarty right now. And then in the back, it's just...

But once Cordwell was shuffled away, Wagner and Bunting decided to take their debauchery to the highest level when Wagner came out of the vault with a chunk of Johnson's flesh that had been sliced off the corpse's leg. As Jamie later remembered it, they all went to Cordwell's house with the meat and

and told Cordwell that they had some fresh kangaroo to share. It's kangaroo, everyone! Again?! And this is, you know, they're wanting to bolster their story. They're wanting to say, like, yeah, we're absolutely doing this kangaroo pet food thing, and now, look, we've got some kangaroo flesh. We got some meat. Well, great. I definitely am so happy you're taking this weirdly just-found semi-warm room-temp kangaroo meat from that extremely smelly bank vault. Thank you. Oh!

Amazing. I didn't know what we were going to do. The HelloFresh guy didn't arrive because the postmaster got shot mad. He's just scared of them, and he's like...

Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, he said, cook it up. So Wagner went to the kitchen and fried up the human flesh in a pan. They look distinctly different, by the way. Human meat is very close to pork, and kangaroo meat's very dark. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe he had it wrapped up, but it was then cut into squares. And Dennis Cordwell, unaware of the providence of the meat, joined Bunting, Wagner, and Vlasakis in a bout of cannibalism. We got there. And I think...

that the reason why he didn't know the difference in the meat was because, well,

Wagner overcooked the fuck out of it. He tried to hide that this is not kangaroo meat. We need a meat thermometer. That's how I avoided overcooking chicken for the last several years. Yeah, me too. Oh, I use a meat thermometer every time. Yeah, pork, chicken, steak, lamb. Get that Chef Paul's magic seasoning. It'd make anything taste like fish. Nothing I like to do than a big fucking brown lump of meat. I'm going to pull out my fucking long ass meat thermometer and I just barely...

bury that fucking thing deep in the center of the brownest biggest wettest fucking loaf fucking beef i can get my hands on a model that's the only thing i fucking give a shit about you are becoming a better cook well to explain away david johnson's disappearance bunting told jamie to spread the rumor that david johnson had gotten a 13 year old girl pregnant and was now on the run from the police

Bunting also tried editing the recordings he'd made on his computer of David's voice, but soon found that editing is actually quite a difficult skill to teach yourself that takes years to get right. As both Rob and I know, you know, you can't just torture strangle a bunch of sound bites out of just a person you need to leave room. And it's also important for that. Do we have a condenser on there? No, it's extraordinarily hard to edit voice.

And especially on the 1999 computer, 1999 software. Like it's like, have you ever seen that fucking, the clip of that guy going, doot and doot and doot doot do. Oh, whoa.

And he's showing the guy. And it's really hard. No, I've never seen it either. But I don't watch editing videos for fun. It's way back in the day. And it's going to be difficult. In other words, it's very complicated software that an idiot like John Bunting is not going to be able to figure out. That's why you always get a backup on tape. Absolutely. But also, it's a funny escalation because the tape recorders were...

technically working fine. Yeah, they were working just fine. So because that didn't work, Bunting had his mistress, Gail Sinclair, pose as David's new girlfriend to distract David's family.

Now, David Johnson's real girlfriend was both devastated and somewhat incredulous that he had supposedly knocked up a 13 year old girl. And she told Jamie Vlasakis that if David didn't show up or call her or do something within a few days, she was going to call the police. Now, this girl very well could have become a murder victim.

But instead, Bunting had Jamie buy a prepaid mobile phone under David's former legal name, David Cheeseman. The phone number was then given to his ex-girlfriend, and when she called, Gail Sinclair, John Bunting's mistress, answered the phone. Yeah, John Bunting also could fuck like crazy, man. Yeah. She very matter-of-factly said that David was taking a shit and couldn't come to the phone and then hung up. And then was like, that's it. Like,

He wasn't. I'll tell him you called. No, he was dead. Yeah. Yeah. But he's like, nope, taking a shit. He'll call you back. And then just hung up. But at the same time, police were slowly but surely, and I do mean slowly, catching up to the sloppiness of the three amigos. We are the three.

amigos. Amigos together we'll pee. Good night, Dad. Yeah, I could just imagine these three guys. My little buttercup has the sweetest smile. Are you the singing bush?

While driving around, you shot the invisible swordsman! It's one of my favorite movies. It's like my top three favorite comedies. One of my favorite. All jokes. I have a plethora of piñatas. Fly from your grave.

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While driving around Snowtown, two detectives spotted Mark Hayden's Land Cruiser, which they'd been searching for ever since a neighbor had seen a group of men loaded up with something mysterious and putrid before towing it away.

that Land Cruiser was still on Dennis Cordwell's property. And after being questioned about the disappearance of Elizabeth Hayden, Cordwell told detectives that the Land Cruiser had been brought to his property by John Bunting and Robert Wagner. Naturally, the Land Cruiser was covered in stains by the leaky barrels and smelled like decomposition.

They're definitely. So they're like, OK, we're on the right track here. Just fucking keep following this land crew. Just keep following Bunting and Wagner. And it's going to lead us to something awful. It's a fucking evidence machine. That's what they've created, that it just leaks proof. This vehicle, Cordwell said, had been filled with several rancid smelling barrels, which had since been moved to the old bank in Snowtown.

Now, once the cops pulled up, they were immediately overwhelmed, even from the outside, by the overpowering and unmistakable stench of death.

With more than probable cause, they walked in and discovered six black barrels lined up against a wall on which knives, gloves, and handcuffs were hung above. And so on May 20th, 1999, officers called their superior and said that they had bodies. It was seven years after Bunting's first murder that

and 11 days after the death of their last victim. There's actually a very interesting video online of them popping open the vault where you could see, because they did this thing where they had just taped garbage bags up to do it, and you see the cops just slicing it open to go look inside, because it just looked like a...

it looked like a guy's hangout area. There was like a man cave. It was like a man cave where they pictures of ladies on the wall. Literally there was stuff like that. There was like, they're all their hangout. I think drinks like, like literally like glasses filled half with like, they were just hanging out on top of the barrels and shit. Yeah. Fuck it. Dartboard. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, the cops, on the instructions of their superiors, retreated from the building to plan the next step of their investigation, because it was obvious that there was a small ring of criminals involved in these murders and they did not want to fuck this up.

They began searching Dennis Cordwell's property to see if he had anything to do with it, and while the only forensic evidence was in the Land Cruiser, they also found the dumbest, most edgelord note I've ever read, most likely written by John Bunting. It said, Not...

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off. Almost like meant nothing, and then at the very end, it's like, I'm guilty. It's just very cool.

It's a Spencer's shirt. Yeah, it really is. It is a... That is... That's what you see in Hot Topic in 1999. I remember I had a shirt that said nine of the ten voices in my head say don't shoot. I had one of those. I had one with like puffer, like white spots all over it. And it just said...

Same shit, different day. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, after that, all available officers were rallied to Snowtown State Bank, where they told residents of this quiet village they're just there to make routine inquiries into a drug bust. There's definitely not a bunch of bodies over there in that building. No. But really, they were there to survey exactly what was hidden in the vault at Snowtown.

After unscrewing the lids of the barrels, investigators found, as one writer put it, a toxic soup of bones, arms, legs, and heads floating in a stew of liquid decomposition. Not surprisingly, a lot of the officers who were there that day were deeply shocked.

deeply traumatized by both the sights and smells they experienced. It's fun because it's like they put the ghoul in goulash. That's a good one. I don't write these things down. None of this is prepared. But while they had to spend all day and all night cataloging every bit of evidence in the bank, and there was quite a bit,

The barrels could not be moved out by hand. They couldn't just sort of like circle their way out. You know how you move a barrel. Yeah, you gotta get a hand cart. Yep. And that's lest the human soup slosh out onto the floor like a cup filled with too much coffee. Oh yeah, because you gotta tilt it. Yeah, you gotta tilt it back. That's why you gotta get the ladle. Yeah. Honestly, they could have used a chef. Yeah. Where's the bear in this? Ha ha ha!

That's what they need, man. The ladle patrol. Like a guy going, hey, I hear you need a human soup. I'm over to a pot. They're like a big fucking chips hat on because then some guy shows up late. It's like, no soup for you. Finally, though, someone brought a handcart after forensics had enough time with the barrels in the spot where they were found and the bodies were loaded into a truck and driven to Adelaide police headquarters.

Meanwhile, in the small hours of May 21st, detectives and officers arrived at the homes of John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and Mark Hayden with arrest warrants. All three were arrested without incident, although Bunting was characteristically combative and chatty.

Jamie Vlasakis, however, wasn't even on police radar when it came to the murders, even though he'd been cashing checks from the same people just like the rest of them were. It was only after Jamie unloaded everything he knew about the murders to a friend that police arrest him after the friend reported everything they heard because the friend was freaked the fuck out.

Man, he was so close. Yeah. I mean, they would have got away with it. They would have got him eventually, I think. Yeah, they were very bad at it. Yeah. Yeah, they definitely would have got him eventually. They began to... Serial killers sometimes move into a state. Sometimes it is a...

almost magical thinking. Like Richard Ramirez was certain that the cops would never find him because he was working in league with Satan. But it happens a lot with these guys. They begin to believe they are invincible. They begin to believe that because it's either one or the other. Sometimes we're, if you know, obviously it's more complicated than that, but one,

Oftentimes you see a serial killer who wants to be caught. Like we say oftentimes they go into berserker mode where they do a bunch of careless shit and then get caught like towards the end of a crime spree where somebody like John Bunting was just extremely bad at it. And he began to feel that I, because he was being surrounded by protection, I'm great at this. Yeah. I'm a very good killer. And as a matter of fact, maybe there is some form of mystical edge to me being

being a hero and doing the things for the quote unquote right reasons. And that's why no one will catch me. Yeah. The universe wants me to do this. Wants me to be doing this. Within 24 hours, Jamie had spoken to a lawyer and the lawyer negotiated immunity if Jamie told them everything he knew or so they thought. Jamie talked for six days telling everything he knew, but would learn for another 10 months that his immunity request had

had been denied. Got, got, dude. How does that happen? Because cops lie to you. Yeah, cops are fully allowed to lie to you and say anything. Oh, yeah, you got your immunity. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, tell us everything you know. A cop can't promise anything to you. Anytime a cop promises you something inside of interrogation room, it's a lie. Yeah, they can't. Yeah, do not do anything until you have a paper in front of you that you have signed. Yes. Do not say anything at all, ever.

Now, the media immediately lost their shit when they heard about the bodies in the Barrels murders, initially comparing the depravity to something akin to what was found in the home of British serial killers Fred and Rose West. Be thankful you missed that one, Eddie. All right. The story was also... Because I'm not talking about it ever again. I'll send it to you. Yeah, send it to me. I'll fucking not read it.

The story was also immediately dubbed The Snowtown Murders. And when the story reached America, Adelaide was labeled as Australia's gruesome true crime capital, which, in fact, it very much is. And we can't wait to see in August when we come to Australia for the JK Ultra Tour. Oh, my God. We should roll Henry out in a barrel. Oh, man. And spill me out with a bunch of soup. Yeah. Get this good barrel.

Yeah. I personally love Adelaide. I think it's a great job. Yeah, we'll see you when we're there. Wait. But just like we had after the captures of Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, Snowtown's street joke started immediately, which I will now ask Ed to deliver in his inimitable style. All right. So why is it so difficult to get a bank loan in Snowtown? Why? Because it costs an arm and a leg. Eddie!

Eddie, too soon. Why is service so slow at the Snowtown Bank? Why? Because they only got a skeleton staff. Come on, you fucking idiot. Inappropriate. There was a mentally handicapped man that was turned into chicken noodle. All right, here's one. What was John Bunting's savings accounts filled with? What? Slush funds. Oh, hell no.

That last one you wrote. That one's mine. That one's mine. That one's mine. It was the best one. You just missed submitting for the Tom Brady row since why you had to write for Tom Brady.

The Snowtown also became a true crime destination, complete with merch. Pictures were sold depicting skeletons hanging out of barrels, captioned, I've been to Snowtown and survived! And novelty ceramic skeleton-filled barrels were produced with the label, Snowtown SA, you'll have a barrel of fun!

It's not clever, though. They went hard on that. I mean, I feel like it's not clever. We can mix it up. It got me. I was actually like, how about a barrel full of monkeys? How about more fun than a barrel full of honkies? Does that work? Can I get that shirt? Yes. Yeah. We'll pick it up when we're in town. Yeah.

Well, even the police got in on the fun just a bit, almost naming the Snowtown investigation Task Force Barrel. But after that was deemed to be too salacious, they renamed it to something totally nondescript, Task Force Chart.

Interestingly, there was also wild speculation that the bodies found at the Snowtown Bank were a part of a wider conspiracy of nationwide bank vault murders. What, to create a national chain of pedophile fucking chowder? And police departments all over Australia raided bank vaults for bodies. Snowtown State Bank, of course, was the only one used for this particular purpose. Yeah, it got the lucky number.

They're lucky. Yeah, the bank has to be out of business to be filled with bodies and barrels. It does. Unfortunately. Now, once Jamie Vlasakis was examined by a mental health professional, it became obvious that he was a damaged, highly unstable, emotionally stunted individual who'd found a sort of father figure who would just tell him what to do in John Bunting. But even so, Jamie was charged with five murders in April of the year 2000.

Meanwhile, police started working backwards through John Bunting's past to see if they could find the body of Clinton Trezise, Bunting's first victim, because it was kind of an open secret at this point amongst certain people that because John Bunting talked about the murder of Clinton Trezise all the time. It was his first murder. You know, he was like, yeah, that's why, you know, this is why I do this, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth.

But when they spoke to Bunting's old next-door neighbor at 203 Waterloo Corner Road, Skews mentioned that Suzanne Allen and Ray Davies had also mysteriously disappeared from the neighborhood. These were victims two and three, and the police at this point hadn't even heard these names.

Skews then told investigators about the tunnel that Bunting, Wagner and Hayden had dug just for fun years earlier. This was the same tunnel Skews had helped fill. It's just like, I gotta say, man, you're saying some suspicious fucking shit. Like this idea of you're like, yeah, it's crazy because they're like, bunch of guys, you know, obviously disappeared around them. We kind of wouldn't say anything and then,

It was like big old fucking hell. They put a bunch of shot in there and I can help him cover it up. No, no problems. No worries there. But I'm, you know, otherwise I don't know what else I saw. I don't know what else you'd want and what you'd be curious about. You're going to get cops like, what? What? Fucking shit. What? Huh.

The bodies of Davis and Allen were found after minimal digging. And from what Skews said, he had no idea he was helping to bury bodies at the time and was haunted by this knowledge for the rest of his life. This is why curiosity is a good thing. Always pursue your thoughts. Sometimes you're getting paid for a job, you know, and say, you know, $30, dig this hole. Sure. Most of the times I would say truly for your own protection, never ask questions. Ask a couple, just a couple.

Now, once it came time for trial, the prosecutors partly had to rely on the testimony of Jamie Vlasakis for the specific causes of death. See, in some cases, forensic pathologists were able to determine the victims had died of strangulation due to broken hyoid bones in the neck. Usually when you find when someone strangled, it breaks a bone in the neck. That's how that's how they determine the cause. That's what they said was suspicious about Epstein. Yeah. But for the rest, the

the bodies had mostly been found in a state of suspended putrefaction, meaning that the lack of oxygen in the barrels had stopped the process of decomposition at the putrefaction point to create a sort of human slop. Remember how in the 60s and 50s they just put a lot of like whatever would float in pudding and in Jell-O? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what this is. Oh, okay. That's fun. The, um, no...

When you have these barrels, they're just like years they're sitting in there. No months. Oh, a couple of more sitting in there for years. Like Michelle Gardner, I think was her name. The fourth victim. They found them all in 1999 and everything kind of started in a couple of years before that. I believe Michelle Gardner was killed in 97.

So a couple of them had been in there for a couple of years, but that's the thing without oxygen, you know, like they'd open them up every once in a while, not for enough time, not for enough time. So, yeah. I mean, if you remove all oxygen from the atmosphere, then yeah, they're not going to decompose past a certain point because what happens with decomposition is that the, you know,

bacteria and certain things within your body start to eat away at your flesh in order to survive. And that's what causes the body to putrefy, turn into liquid. But at a certain point, that can only decompose a body so much. So without oxygen,

it stays at that liquefied point. Marcus, I'm having a lovely time tonight, but could we maybe choose an appetizer? Is there any way for like, where's the waiter at? No, those are the sorts of conversations I have when like, Caroline is on the couch like watching TV and I'm just like standing there. Oh yeah, that's me. Oh,

Natalie has experienced the same one-man show. Yeah, the standing and talking while, you know, they're on. Info dump, it's called. Yeah, the info dump while they're just trying to, like, do a crossword. Yeah, it's all upsetting shit. Every once in a while, Julie will be like, so what are you learning about? And I'll start, like, half a sentence in, and I'll be like, you know what? You don't want me to finish this. You don't want to know. No, there's no reason. Why would you know this? Well, this liquefying of the bodies made forensically determining cause of death

all but impossible on a lot of the victims. For those specifics, the state had to depend mostly on the testimony of Jamie Vlasakis. But even after pleading guilty and giving all the information he could about the 12 murders Bunting and Wagner committed, where I think they committed 10 or 11 together, but Bunting definitely was involved in all 12, Jamie Vlasakis was still sentenced to life in prison.

although he is eligible for parole starting next year, 25 years after his sentence began. That singer. I can already hear it. I don't know what he sounds like. Now, as far as the other trials went, Bunting and Wagner stood trial together and pled not guilty to every charge. As a result, their trial lasted for nearly a year and featured 220 witnesses,

The witnesses alone took 140 days. That's too much. It's very long. Well, now in the United States, they have a thing that's called like juror fatigue. They talk about stuff like this now where they say like, you have to figure out how to do these because like,

It melts people's minds watching stuff for that long. Yeah. But out of the entire year in which every piece of evidence was examined one by one, Bunting and Wagner's defense only took up 80 minutes of court time, less than an hour and a half to lamely claim that there wasn't enough evidence to convict Bunting and Wagner. I have a statement from my client. It says here,

Series of criminally laid banana pails were left near the barrels. Am I getting this right? And they slipped and fell in there. The defense rests. Really good work, everybody. Really good work. If the barrel don't fit, you might acquit.

There was, of course, very much enough evidence. Very much so. Yeah. Almost there was like barrels full of it. Yeah, you don't get to say that very often. There were literally barrels full of evidence. Barrels of evidence. And Bunting and Wagner were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But while Bunting said nothing after his sentence, Wagner stood up and made a pitiful speech about how they were just doing what the police had refused to do, completely ignoring that the majority of the people they'd killed had nothing to do with molestation or pedophilia in any way whatsoever. They were either homophobic murders, transphobic murders, or just people they didn't fucking like.

Man, I got a lot of emails about how they do create areas where pedophiles live together in communities, where you could sort of release them. And sort of like a safe release, like you do with Buffalo. Oh, no. There was that one building on 26th and 1st in Manhattan where everyone was like, oh, that's the building where they put all the pedophiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I got to tell you, as long as it's not anywhere near an M&M store, it's technically illegal. Yeah.

Maybe it was further north than Stuy Town. But it was like right on the border of a school. But basically, a lot of the conversation was that recidivism is...

pretty close to like 80%. Yeah. Yeah, they come back to suck. Especially when you put them all together and they can compare notes. Yeah, they hang out and they just fantasize all day. Mark Hayden, meanwhile, was able to get a separate trial because he technically only assisted with moving and storing bodies and he was present when some of the crimes were taking place.

But even so, he was found guilty as well, although he was sentenced to only 25 years in prison. That means that Mark Hayden is set to be released, let's see, Tuesday after next. Is that interesting? On May 21st. Wild. I'm looking at this article right now. So apparently he is 65. He's going to be allowed to be out on a conditional release. There are exclusion zones that he can't go to. I don't know how you're going to fucking keep him from doing that. I don't know how that works. He has a...

constantly monitored. He is banned from attempting contact with any of his victims' families. He has to obey a 9 to 6 a.m. curfew. He'd be electrically monitored. And, yeah, I guess he's not allowed to talk to the media. But, yeah, he's only supposed to go certain areas. Yeah. But I don't know how you stop him. I guess you watch him. But as we see sometimes the South Australian government doesn't necessarily keep a thorough view. Yeah.

So we'll see. So if he can't talk to his family, but he killed his wife, can he not talk to anyone like his victim's families? Can he not talk to anyone in his family? No, I don't think so. Well, he can't talk to his wife's family. Yeah. But once you marry somebody, they're your family. They're your family. I think the marriage is annulled when you kill them and you dismember them and you put them in a barrel and they turn into soup. Technically, he did not kill them and dismember them. He drove jail away. Yeah. He was the Postmates guy. Yeah.

But he was involved in that murder, right? Yeah, he was. So it's like he knew that it happened, but he only got charged as an accomplice. Well, you got 25 years. Crazy. Yeah, you got 25 years because he did help them move the bodies in the barrels from the garage to the car to the bank. And he was present during a couple of the murders, but didn't participate. And that was, you know, Jamie Vlasakis came in and testified and said, like, no, Mark Hayden didn't participate in anything. He's a good guy! He's a good guy!

He's a nice guy. Well, as far as Bunting's life in prison goes, he's still a fucking dick and has been known to dip pencils in his own feces before stabbing people with the tips to make sure they get infections. So he's killing people? No, they just get infections. He's just fighting guys. Oh, okay. He's not going anywhere. See, a pencil, we all know the pen is mightier than the sword. Yeah.

He's just pricking people. He's just an asshole. Yeah, he's an asshole. Presently, he's turned his attention from pedophiles to prison officers and police as far as who he wants to murder. He's an absolute menace to everyone in prison and speaks nonstop about escape, revenge, and the details of his crimes, cornering anyone unlucky enough to get stuck in his company.

Wow. An unpleasant man gets his unpleasant end. That's good. Yep. That's good. He'll die in jail. Hopefully as well. No, he'll die in jail as will Robert Wagner. They're both life without parole. So those guys aren't getting out anytime soon. I doubt that Jamie Vlasakis is ever. I think Jamie Vlasakis is going to be like Leslie Van Houten, you know, where, you know, it's just going to take forever. And then maybe one day he'll get.

uh released maybe one day but i think he's gonna be more like a tex watson yeah where it's just like he's fucking in there forever he's just yeah this is a great series this is fun i'm very excited we're getting into some really cool territory next week we have this is a topic we've been wanting to do for a long time i'm excited we finally got into it pittsburgh zone i can't wait it's gonna be really really fun um go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left

And you can watch our bodies flop around on video. You also get ad-free bullshit. See us live. Our live last stream on the left every Tuesday. It's fun as fuck. I think it's good. I don't care what you think. It's real good. I don't care what. I'm doing plugs from now on. You fucking piece of shit. I don't care who you define me. TikTok and LP on the left. I don't know what it does. We did get some passive income last week. Yeah, we did get some.

and passive income. You can also follow us at Instagram, uh, at LP on the left and check out all of our live streams at twitch.tv slash LPN TV. And if you can't watch any of that stuff live, you can watch it after the fact on our YouTube channel. Uh,

And you can come see us on tour. We are coming to Australia. Yeah. In August. We're coming to Adelaide. Can't wait. Yeah. And we're coming. We're Melbourne, Sydney. June 8th, Seattle. I'm sorry. I know you're talking about Australia, but, you know, I just want to plug that one real quick. Yeah. Get it out there, man. No, I can't wait to be back in Australia. We're going to have a lot of fun and we're not going to kill any pedophiles.

as far as I know. No! And don't forget about our other shows that are a little later in the year. We're coming to Washington, D.C. We're coming to Brooklyn. We're going to be doing a show at the Wiltern here in Los Angeles near the end of the year. And we're also going to be doing two dates in London in October, I believe. Can't wait. And we're going to be doing, finally going to be doing the long-awaited show in Reykjavik, Iceland, which I am very, very fucking excited for. So I know all you fuck

Icelanders like to wait till the last minute yeah but buy them tickets now

And come on out to our show. Give us a warm lap. I can't wait to have some of them hot dogs. Some of them lamb hot dogs. Flip me some puffin'. They got some time, man. Fish don't pickle itself. No, they're not, dog. And if you want to hear our new show on the SiriusXM app exclusively, go check out last update on the left if you already have the SiriusXM app. You also can get a three-month for free membership if you apply. And that's on y'all. That's right. And that's on y'all.

And, you know, happy Mother's Day to everybody. And available today on Amazon is my movie, How America Killed My Mother. So make sure it's a great movie to watch on Mother's Day weekend if your mom's already dead. Yes. It's a great one. But also just go to HowAmericaKilledMyMother.com to find out other details on how to watch it on Vimeo.

But yeah, it's available on Amazon now. Hey, congratulations. That's great. And I just want to say thank you to all the MILFs that have supported me emotionally. They don't know that they have. But in every hotel room I go and in every time Natalie's out of town, the MILFs that come around in this little box here are some of the most important members of this little community that we call Henry Zabrowski's sexual touch. Yeah, the MILF man when he comes. So I just want to say thank you to all the MILFs that...

Your wares and what you do for people is just... When you shoplift and then you naughtily get searched for the items, you don't know who you help. So thank you for that. So if you're a MILF out there and you're getting railed by a police officer, thanks. Security guard, please. Thank you. Hail Satan. Again. Hail the MILFs.

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