The Mammoth Book of New Csi (3 page)

First they broke up a concrete slab in what had been the back garden and removed it. Then they used sophisticated ground-penetrating radar equipment, first developed to detect plastic landmines laid during the Falklands War. As the radar scanner moved over the exposed earth, ominous black shadows appeared on the TV monitor, showing that something lay beneath the soil. After digging down some six feet, the detectives found a corpse, wrapped in black plastic bags, which had been in the ground for more than three years. This was identified as forty-seven-yearold Suzanne Allen, a former lover of Bunting. He and Wagner claimed that she had died of a heart attack, but they had cut her up and buried her so they could continue to claim her benefits.

Below that they found a skeleton that was even older. This was twenty-six-year-old Ray Davies. In 1995, Suzanne Allen had rented a caravan to him. After Davies was accused of being a paedophile, Bunting and another of his lovers, Elizabeth Harvey, tortured and killed him, burying him in the garden. His disappearance was never reported. The death toll was now in double figures.

At the beginning of June 1999, a fourth suspect was arrested. This was nineteen-year-old James Vlassakis. He was the son of Elizabeth Harvey, who died of cancer soon after his arrest. Initially, Vlassakis was charged with just one murder that had taken place on 4 May 1999, though the name of the victim was suppressed. After his arrest Vlassakis repeatedly attempted suicide and was moved from prison to the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital. In a taped phone call played at the trial, he told his teenage girlfriend Amanda Warwick about the bodies in the barrels and said that he would soon be charged. She asked if he had anything to do with the murders. He replied: “It’s too big, I can’t tell you.”

Another house in Murray Bridge was raided and an eleventh body was unearthed. The police then went through their unsolved crimes file and discovered that bones found in the field at Lower Light in 1994 belonged to Clinton Trezise. His head had been beaten in with a shovel by Bunting, after he had been invited into his home in Salisbury North.

The body of eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan had been found hanging from a tree near Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills in 1997. Initially, his death was thought to have been a suicide, but he was later implicated in the murder of Barry Lane. Gavin Porter, a missing man from the neighbouring state of Victoria, also appeared to be a victim. A heroin addict and friend of Vlassakis, he had been killed after Bunting had pricked himself on a discarded syringe and decided he must die.

More properties were raided in the wheat belt around Snowtown and along the Murray River. This led to press speculation that the gang extended much further than the four already in custody. Indeed, the gang had once been bigger. It became clear that some of the victims had earlier been perpetrators. The gang had turned in on itself and began killing its own. It was thought that the transvestite Barry Lane had a hand in the murder of his boyfriend Clinton Trezise, before he himself was killed. Lane had lived with Robert Wagner – despite his vociferous hatred of homosexuals – just a block away from Bunting’s demolished house where two corpses were unearthed.

The four accused went on trial in November 2000. Bunting, Wagner and Haydon were charged with ten counts of murder, but remained silent and refused to plead. Vlassakis, who was then charged with five counts of murder, reserved his plea. The evidence given in court was deemed so gruesome that suppression orders were used to keep the horrific details from the public. The Snowtown murder case was subjected to over 150 suppression orders in all. However, in Britain, the
Daily Telegraph
ignored the ruling and revealed that the victims had been sadistically tortured. According to the medical testimony, some victims had burn marks on their bodies. Others were found with ropes around their necks. They were gagged. One victim died with his arms handcuffed behind his back and his legs tied together. Another had received electric shocks to the genitals. A burning sparkler had been pushed into his urethra. His nose and ears were burnt with cigarettes and his toes were crushed before he was left to choke to death on his gag. Another had been put in a bath and assaulted with clubs. He had been beaten around the genitals and had his toes crushed with pincers, before being garrotted with a length of rope and a tyre lever.

Victims’ bodies had been mutilated and dismembered. The head and arms of Elizabeth Haydon had been cut off. Her torso had been stripped of its flesh and her breasts and genitals removed. The final victim, David Johnson, had been cooked and partially eaten.

Before they died, victims had been forced to call their tormentors “Lord Sir”, “Chief Inspector”, “Master” and “God”. They had also been forced to record carefully scripted phrases, which were then left on the answerphones of friends and relatives to allay suspicion. Gang members then impersonated their victims at benefit offices to collect the money due.

In July 2002, Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and was given a life sentence with the stipulation that he must serve twenty-six years before he was eligible for parole. He had struck a deal with the prosecution, otherwise he would have had to serve forty-two years before he was eligible. By then the charges against Bunting, Wagner and Haydon had increased to twelve counts of murder.

On 8 September 2003, after an eleven-month trial in front of the South Australian Supreme Court, Wagner was found guilty of the murder of seven people, on top of the three murders he had admitted earlier. Bunting was convicted of eleven murders. The jury was hung on a twelfth charge – the murder of fortyseven-year-old Suzanne Allen, whose body had been found wreathed in plastic under Bunting’s demolished house. The defence claimed that she had died of natural causes.

Many of the charges against Haydon had been dropped due to lack of evidence. He was not convicted of any of the murders, but pleaded guilty to having helped dispose of the bodies. Both Wagner and Bunting refused to stand when the judgment was read, while Bunting protested loudly that details of the deal that Vlassakis had made to get a shorter sentence in return for giving evidence against them had not been revealed to the jury, some of whom had undergone counselling after hearing his testimony. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Vlassakis’s testimony alone had lasted thirty-two days. He claimed that he had been involved in the killing of his half-brother Troy Youde, stepbrother of the last Snowtown victim, David Johnson. He vomited when he recalled how he had found Wagner cooking Johnson’s flesh in a frying pan and been offered some.

The victims, Vlassakis said, were relentlessly tortured. The eighth victim, Fred Brooks, had been beaten in a bath and had lit cigarettes stuck in his ear and nose. Wagner and Bunting, the prosecution said, boasted that “the good ones” never screamed. Their targets, they maintained, were primarily homosexuals, who they claimed to loathe.

The murders have given Snowtown a terrible notoriety. With street hawkers selling Snowtown Snow Shakers featuring body parts and barrel-shaped fridge magnets bearing the logo “Snowtown – you’ll have a barrel of fun”, the inhabitants are worried that the town may never shake its sick image. There has even been a proposal to change the name to Rosetown. Few think it will help.

O
N THE MORNING
of 15 July 1992, twenty-three-year-old part-time model Rachel Nickell was walking on Wimbledon Common, close to her home in south-west London, with her two-year-old son Alex and their pet labrador Molly. She was brutally attacked. A passer-by found Alex clinging to Rachel’s blood-drenched body under a silver birch tree, crying: “Get up, Mummy.” She had been stabbed repeatedly and raped. Her throat had been slit – all while her son looked on. A bungled investigation led to the wrong man being charged, while the killer went on to kill again. But crime scene evidence eventually led to the conviction of the murderer sixteen years later.

Apart from Alex, there were no witnesses to the attack, but one person saw a man carrying a dark holdall towards the spot where Rachel’s body was found and another saw the killer washing his hands in a stream. The killing was thought to be a murderous escalation of the “Green Chain rapes”, a series of 106 sexual assaults that had taken place near green spaces across south London in the early 1990s. The police had already been tipped off to a possible suspect when the mother of Ministry of Defence warehouseman Robert Napper called them, telling them that her son had admitted to a rape. However, she got the details wrong, saying that the assault had taken place on Plumstead Common when, in fact, it had happened in a house nearby. As the report did not match the record of any crime, the police did not act on the tip-off, though Napper had a previous conviction for carrying a loaded air gun in a public place.

By the time Rachel Nickell was killed, Robert Napper was suspected of four sexual assaults, three of which he has since been convicted for. They demonstrated an increasing use of violence. Napper admitted attempting to rape a seventeen-year-old girl who was walking to a friend’s home on the Caldwell Estate in Hither Green, south-east London, not far from his home in Plumstead in 1992. Eight days later he sexually assaulted another teenage girl at knifepoint in a field in Mottingham. In May, he grabbed a twenty-two-year-old mother pushing her two-year-old daughter in a buggy along the Green Chain Walk, Eltham, in broad daylight. He put a ligature around her throat, battered her and raped her on the footway. Neither the daylight nor the presence of the child seemed to discourage him.

Rachel Nickell was attacked at between 10.20 and 10.35 a.m. on a bright, sunny day. Her son Alex was found with blood completely covering his face, chest and arms. He had put a piece of paper on his mother’s head as a makeshift bandage. When examined, he was found to have linear abrasions and bruising on the forehead, cheeks and mouth. The consultant paediatrician who examined him said these injuries were consistent with the child being dragged across the ground face down. There were flakes of paint in his hair.

The sexual nature of the attack on his mother was palpable. Her jeans and underwear had been pulled down to just above her ankles to expose her buttocks. The pathologist later said that it appeared something, such as a finger or round object, had been inserted into her anus. There were knife cuts to the T-shirt and bra, and the left cup had been pulled down to expose the nipple.

A total of forty-nine stab wounds were found, mostly to the front and rear of the upper body. The most severe stab wounds were to the front and side of her neck. Her heart and left lung had been stabbed while she was alive, while the right lung and liver were penetrated after death. A defence wound was found on her left hand, showing that she had tried to fend off her attacker. The killer also left a sample of his DNA, which was collected by swab from her intimate areas.

In August 1992, an e-fit of the Green Chain rapist was issued. A neighbour called the police saying that Napper matched the description. The police arranged for him to give a sample of saliva and blood on 2 September, but he did not turn up. A second caller identified the e-fit as Bob Napper. Napper failed to turn up to provide DNA samples again on 8 September, but the police ruled him out of the investigation because he was 6 ft 2 in. (1.90 m). They were convinced they were looking for someone who was no taller than 5 ft 9 in. (1.75 m), even though one of the victims said the suspect was 6 ft 3 in (1.94 m).

On 27 October, Napper was arrested for the possession of an unlicensed firearm and ammunition. Searching his home, the police discovered an A-Z map with marks showing the locations of the attacks. Napper said they were “just doodles” or points on his jogging route. One even appeared to show the site of the Rachel Nickell murder, though it turned out to be a printer’s error. Napper was prosecuted for the firearm offences and spent two months in jail.

Early the following year, Napper was stopped by the police after being seen climbing the wall of a young mother’s home, but he persuaded them that his actions were entirely innocent and they let him go. Later, a tin containing a gun with Napper’s fingerprints on them were found on Winn’s Common in Plumstead, but the police did nothing. In a search of the area, other boxes were found. One contained a “Big Swede” folding lock knife that Napper had bought a year earlier.

The police were not interested in Napper. They were after Colin Stagg, an unemployed man from nearby Roehampton known to walk his dog on Wimbledon Common. Although no forensic evidence linked him to the murder, they were convinced that he was their man thanks to the profiling of the killer by criminal psychologist Dr Paul Britton, who was called in just thirteen days after the killing. Dr Britton had made his name in the investigation of the murder of pet beautician Caroline Osbourne in 1984. She had been tied up and stabbed repeatedly. After 15,000 people had been interviewed and 80 men arrested and released, detectives turned to Dr Britton to give them an insight into what motivated the killer and how to identify the suspect.

From a study of the case files, Dr Britton deduced that the motive was sexual and carried out as an expression of “corrupt lust”. He said that the killer would be a man in his early to mid-twenties, lonely, sexually immature, with poor social skills and probably living at home. He was probably a manual worker and lived near the murder scene. The following year Paul Bostock was arrested. He matched Dr Britton’s profile exactly and was convicted of the murder of Caroline Osbourne in 1986.

From then on, Dr Britton’s profiles were used on more than a hundred cases. Following the murder of Rachel Nickell, he came up with a seventeen-point profile that was remarkably similar to the one used in the Osbourne case. It fitted Colin Stagg perfectly. Britton then joined the undercover Operation Ezdell where a policewomen from the Metropolitan Police’s Special Operations Group contacted Stagg under the pseudonym “Lizzie James”, posing as the friend of a woman he had once contacted through a lonely hearts column. Over five months, through meetings, phone calls and letters, she dangled the prospect of a sexual relationship in front of him and tried to get him to divulge violent sexual fantasies. At one point, she even told him: “If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right.”