The Best New True Crime Stories. Mitzi Szereto

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СКАЧАТЬ 1996, Bunting, with Elizabeth Harvey and her two teenage sons in tow, moved one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) inland to the big country town of Murray Bridge. He kept in contact with Robert Wagner. By this stage, Bunting had fallen deeper into his obsession with outing and disposing of people among his casual acquaintances who he had convinced himself were pedophiles. He stuck a diagram on his kitchen wall with a list of names, linking them to imaginary crimes. He was also motivated by the ease of accessing their social security benefits.

      In September 1997, Wagner alerted Bunting to the presence of a young homosexual he had recently befriended in Salisbury North. Nineteen-year-old Michael Gardiner was another youth with a history of neglect and abuse. He was just starting to get his life together after coming out as gay. An unfortunate but probably innocent turn of events (involving Gardiner playing a game of chase with one of the children of a woman Wagner was having an affair with) led to false accusations of abuse, and of course gave Bunting all the excuse he needed.

      Bunting and Wagner abducted Gardiner and took him to a shed in the backyard of Bunting’s rental house. There they abused, tortured, and strangled him to death. They then hacked off his hands and threw the body into an acid-filled barrel in the shed.

      Bunting next turned his attention to Barry Lane, who he had only tolerated because of his prior relationship with Wagner. Lane was in a new relationship with a younger man, eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan. They still associated with Wagner.

      Bunting heard that Lane had told a casual acquaintance about his involvement in the original murder of Clinton Tresize and decided it was his turn to be dealt with. In October 1997, Bunting, Wagner, and Trevilyan, who had been roped into Bunting’s ideology, cornered Lane at his house and subjected him to hours of torture and abuse. Bunting forced Lane to call and berate his own mother and tell her he was moving away to Queensland and to never contact him again. Growing ever more perverted, Bunting used pliers to crush Lane’s toes before he instructed Wagner to strangle him while he and Trevilyan held him down. Lane’s body was later dismembered and stuck in a barrel of acid in Bunting’s shed.

      Lane’s disappearance was reported to the police by a female friend ten days later—the same friend he had told about the murder of Clinton Tresize. However, the recording of Lane’s message to his mother put them off the trail. They assumed Lane had just moved away.

      After Lane’s murder, Trevilyan moved in with Wagner and his girlfriend. The youth was concerned for his own safety, and he confided to a cousin his involvement in Lane’s murder. Bunting and Wagner were also concerned that the mentally unstable youth would give them away, so, in November 1997, the two of them abducted Trevilyan, took him into the remote Adelaide Hills, and staged a fake suicide by hanging him from a tree.

      The next victim was Gavin Porter, a friend of James Vlassakis’s. By early 1998, still living in Bunting’s house with his mother and brother Troy, James had become addicted to heroin. Porter was a fellow addict who James invited to move into the house. A fatal move, as Bunting had suddenly decided to add drug addicts to his hate list. After befriending Porter and obtaining his bank and social security details, Bunting and Wagner tortured and strangled him in April 1998, storing his body in a barrel in the shed out back of Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge, along with the others.

      At this point, Bunting showed Vlassakis the bodies in the barrels, traumatizing the young man enough to force him to take part in his quest to rid the world of the type of people he personally despised. Next to die, and the perfect victim to introduce James to the art of murder, was his own half-brother, Troy Youde.

      Bunting convinced James that he needed to avenge himself for the sexual abuse he had suffered at Troy’s hands. In August 1998, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis armed themselves with jack handles and other makeshift weapons and assaulted Troy in his bed. They dragged him into the bathroom and used a tape recorder to record his torture and death. His body was also dumped in a barrel in the shed.

      Despite being sickened by these events, James still accessed his dead brother’s accounts to feed his heroin habit. Bunting knew he had a psychological hold over the kid.

      Bunting had maintained a casual friendship with Mark Haydon, but had taken an intense dislike to Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth. Perhaps because of this, he selected as the next victim her eighteen-year-old nephew, Fred Brooks, a mate of James’s.

      Barely a month after Troy Youde was killed, in September 1998, Fred Brooks was invited over to the Bunting house. There, he was stripped naked and tortured by Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. They burned him with lit cigarettes and a cigarette lighter. Bunting brought out a new toy he had found, a variac transformer, used to administer voltage. They attached clamps to Brooks’s genitals. After that, Bunting produced a box of sparklers, inserted one in the head of Brooks’s penis, and set it alight. He enjoyed it so much he did it again. They then used a syringe to inject water into the youth’s testicles. At this point, Brooks mercifully died.

      Brooks’s body was taken to Mark Haydon’s house in north Adelaide, where the other barrels had been transported as well. The gang then accessed Brooks’ social security payments. By this stage, the police were aware of a number of missing persons reports and a spate of suspicious activity in accessing these people’s social security payments. They were slowly closing in.

      The murder process was accelerating and becoming more random. At the same time, Bunting’s level of sick perversion was getting out of control. The next victim was Garry O’Dwyer, a twenty-nine-year-old disabled pensioner who had the misfortune of crossing Bunting’s path on a public street in October 1998. Observing his physical incapacity, a limp resulting from a car accident and seeing him as an easy mark, Bunting befriended O’Dwyer and secured an invite to his house for himself, Wagner, and Vlassakis.

      Once there, they attacked and tortured O’Dwyer, forcing him to give them his bank and social security details. They elicited statements under torture on a voice recorder to throw family members off the trail. Then Wagner strangled him to death; the body was dismembered and thrown into a barrel.

      Next, Bunting decided it was time to get rid of Mark Haydon’s wife, Elizabeth, for the simple fact that he didn’t like her. While Mark Haydon was conveniently away from home, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis murdered her on November 21, 1998, and her dismembered body also ended up in a barrel of acid.

      However, Elizabeth was reported missing by her brother within a few days. He did not believe the contradicting messages Mark Haydon gave for her absence and was highly suspicious of his seeming lack of concern. Nor did he believe she would abandon her two young sons.

      When the police were alerted, they noted Elizabeth’s association with Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis. In late 1998, Bunting moved house again, this time to Snowtown, a rural area north of Adelaide. Concerned about the police questioning Haydon over his wife’s disappearance, the barrels were placed in two vehicles and driven to Snowtown, where Bunting and Mark Haydon rented a disused bank building under a false name. The presence of two unfamiliar vehicles and the activity around the empty bank building were noted by locals and, eventually, the police.

      In the interim, Bunting persuaded Vlassakis to lure his stepbrother David Johnson to the Snowtown bank vault on the pretext of buying drugs. On May 9, 1999, he became the only victim to be murdered in Snowtown.

      By this time the police had been able to establish links between some of the missing persons and Bunting, Wagner, Vlassakis, and Haydon. The latter’s phone was tapped. After a tipoff, police broke into the bank vault and discovered the barrels, where the stench was overpowering. The mummified remains of eight victims were recovered.

      Unfortunately, Bunting wasn’t too bright, because he stored the bodies in hydrochloric acid, which preserved them rather than dissolved them. If he had used sulfuric СКАЧАТЬ