Snowtown Parole: The murders and investigation

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In 1999, one of the most horrific serial murders in Australia's history was uncovered.

Now, 26 years later, one of the murderers is about to leave prison on parole.

This could be the first time a serial killer is released back into the community in Australia.

I'm Stephen Stockwell, and a heads up.

This is a particularly violent case, so while we're avoiding details, we do still reference violent acts in this episode.

Welcome to the case of Snowtown Parole.

The bodies in the barrels are now the bodies in the backyard.

11 people killed by the so-called Snowtown murderers.

James Flasakis was involved in four murders between August 1998 and May 1999.

They were Troy Yude, Flasakis' half-brother, David Johnson, his step-brother, Gary O'Dwyer and Fred Brooks.

James Lasakis is serving life with a minimum of 26 years.

The youngest of the four men jailed over the murders has applied for parole.

Victims' families say he should never be released.

I'm astonished that we've even considered parole.

Snowtown was the biggest story in the country for years after 12 bodies were found spread between a bank vault and an Adelaide backyard.

There wasn't just one person responsible for those murders.

There were three, John Bunting, Robert Wagner and James Versakis.

For these crimes, Bunting and Wagner were sentenced to life without parole, but Versakis, the youngest by far, only a teenager when he was involved in the killings, got life with a 26-year non-parole period, a period which has now expired.

Versakis, now 45, will leave prison in a week.

and as best as we can tell, he'll be the first serial killer to get parole in Australia, with a whole life ahead of him.

In this series, we're going to find out why he was treated differently by the courts, why parole was even an option, and then how that decision was made.

The date of parole for murderers can feel intangible when they're set.

Think of Aaron Patterson, decades away from that point.

But this is potentially the first time we're seeing that moment arrive.

To help explore the story of Snowtown and learn more about this, I've enlisted the help of James Wakelin, a senior reporter in the ABC's Adelaide newsroom.

And James, you actually covered some of the Snowtown trials, right?

Well, Stocky, it's a long time ago, but I do remember going in for a few days during the trials, particularly for Bunting and Wagner.

And

I've got to be honest,

it's grim even just thinking about it at the moment.

Yeah, it is a really horrific story.

We're not going to dive too deep into the details in this series of the case of.

We're looking more at the parole situation and the reason that James Basakis ended up with kind of a different treatment to the other murderers.

But, you know, James, the reason I'm keen to have you here as part of this is because your proximity to all of this, you know, the thing that people probably remember about Snowtown is the bodies and the barrels in this disused bank fault, you know, north of Adelaide.

And you were actually there the day they were uncovered.

That's right.

I mean,

it was a huge story, as you can imagine.

And it just started, the rumor started getting around.

I think a photographer had got a tip from a police friend that there were some bodies in a barrel that had been discovered in a place called Snowtown in the state's mid-north.

And it sounded too ridiculous to be true, but then at the same time, who's going to make that up?

So

we all started heading down there.

different journalists started going just on spec

and pretty immediately the cops were up front said yeah this is this is a thing by the end of it we thought there were six bodies in six barrels by the end of the day.

Turned out that wasn't 100% true.

There ended up being 12 bodies involved.

I mean you were kind of up there on your own back as well.

You just sort of jumped in your own car and drove up from the newsroom.

Was it the Adelaide Advertiser you were working for at the time?

That's right.

I was at the Adelaide Advertiser.

I was a very young reporter at the time.

And I just went to the chief of staff.

I said, I've got to be on this story.

And he goes, well, the cars are out.

And I said, that's okay.

I've got a car.

I'm heading up.

And I went up and

started talking to people in the town, basically, and adding my bits to the coverage.

Yeah.

And I guess it's important to point out that most of these murders didn't occur in Snowtown.

Almost all of them happened in the kind of north of Adelaide.

And then the bodies were moved.

And they occurred over.

like a quite a long period of time, right, James?

So we're talking four or five years.

No, longer, longer.

This is 1992 to 1999 that these murders happened.

It's quite remarkable that they could have occurred over such a long period.

These people were just disappearing,

you know, every few months.

Or I guess they really started ramping up their killing spree in the last couple of years.

And that's how they came to police attention at that point.

Yeah, right.

And I mean, you spent time going to various people's houses, talking to people about, you know, missing family members and the like after these bodies were uncovered because there were a huge number of people who started getting in touch with not just the police but also you know the media talking about look maybe one of my family members one of my friends is is in these barrels

exactly I mean police didn't know who they were who some of the victims were

so we as the media and police at the same time were trying to work out who they could be so we were going around and talking to to families and working out when their loved ones had disappeared and seeing if if there was any link or potential that they could be one of these victims, which was obviously horrific for every person who had a missing loved one out there that perhaps they'd been murdered and turned up in one of these barrels.

So, yeah, it was a pretty frightening time and

something that really did grab the state and the nation's attention, I guess.

Yeah, and I mean, I'm really interested in learning a bit more about the people who are involved in these murders because, yeah, we have four players.

There is Bunting and Wagner, the kind of ringleaders of this.

There's Mark Hayden and there's James Lasakis.

Can you talk us through who Bunting and Wagner were, the kind of ringleaders in this situation?

Well, Bunting was the older figure.

He actually originally came into Adelaide from Queensland and then unfortunately for the people of Adelaide

and those involved, he decided to stay here.

He had a particular

hatred of pedophiles or anyone who was a bit different.

He also had a particular dislike for homosexuals and he always talked about this non-stop.

And effectively, the evidence was that he conflated being a pedophile with being homosexual.

He couldn't see the difference between the two.

So basically, that meant that he could target anyone who was homosexual.

He was known for killing animals, torturing animals.

He had a big gun collection.

collection.

But he was also charismatic.

He would pull people into his circle and they would feel his power and almost feel

obliged to do what he wanted them to do.

He got Robert Wagner.

He came in pulled in by Bunting and that's when their killing spree started in 1992.

From there,

I guess they were friends as well with Mark Hayden, who was very much a sheep in all of this, is the way he's been described.

He just followed along.

He supplied cars.

He helped them dispose of bodies or store bodies.

And then years later, James Lusakis came along as well and became involved.

So John Bunting, you know, almost this sort of classic psychopath role, right?

You know, he can be incredibly charming in some situations and then, you know, brutal in these other ones.

I mean,

is that what he was like?

It appears that way.

I mean, it appears like he was, you know, your classic psychopath, but he had an ability also

to bring people in because it's extremely, extremely rare that you will get a group of serial killers.

It hardly ever happens because, you know, you can never put together, you know, somebody will crack something or something will happen.

But he had them so much under his control that that...

It never leaked to the police.

It never got out into the community.

People were either too scared of him or they were so involved in what was going on, nothing leaked out, even though there were so many people when you look at it that actually knew about at least one or more of these murders.

These people lived so close to one another.

I mean, there were next-door neighbors that were murdered.

There were ex-girlfriends that were murdered.

This was a tight-knit little community, but it just didn't leak out because of the power of bunting.

And, you know, it sounds as well that, yeah, he had this kind of control over people and this

access to this community.

Was that something that he was using to kind of to

hide this?

He was putting together a dossier on people within his community that he wanted to target.

And then he befriended people like Robert Wagner, who was a very large guy, a very intimidating guy.

But at the same time, he was involved in the community.

He was on the kindergarten community.

He was seen as a father figure to

his girlfriend's children.

These were not people that you would necessarily associate with crimes like this.

There's been some great ABC reporting.

James, an article that you and Rebecca Bryce wrote that kind of tells the story of the Snowtown murders and has the details and the stories of the victims who were murdered by, you know, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlasakis.

And I'll pop that in the show notes of this episode so you can go back and read a bit more about who these people were and what had happened.

But James, you know, interested in talking more about James Versakis.

He was the youngest of this troop by quite an order of magnitude.

I mean, you know, we're talking the years and the times that he was involved in this.

He was between sort of 17 and 19 years old.

How did he get involved in this?

Well, unfortunately, his mother began a relationship

with John Bunting.

Elizabeth Harvey was his mother.

His father had died when he was younger, and so he moved in and became part of Bunting's family more or less from the age of 14.

Yeah, wow.

And so I imagine probably seeing this guy as a kind of father figure, right?

You know, I can't imagine he would have had a huge number of male role models kind of existing at that point.

So is that what drew him in?

Absolutely.

He's described, he saw Bunting as a hero figure.

to him.

He worshipped him was another term that's been used.

Certainly initially, he'd never got that kind of attention.

He'd never had someone look after him the way John Bunting did initially.

So

from that early period,

he loved the guy and they formed a strong bond.

And it was...

It wasn't until four years later, so from the age of 14 then to 18, that he actually started getting involved in the murders.

He'd heard about them.

He thought perhaps it was just a lot of bragging until Bunting showed him one of the bodies.

Oh, wow.

And when did he actually start kind of getting involved in those acts, in the murders?

It was in 1998, I believe.

It was the first murder that he was involved in.

And, I mean, part of it was he would be part of...

the entrapment of people.

That was kind of the way he was used.

And then afterwards, he'd be the person that would go around and collect

their

Social Security money.

That was part of what he did because he was the youngest.

He could impersonate some of the younger people that they had killed.

And then they would collect their social security.

Because that is a part of what was going on here as well, right?

Because these murders were happening, these people were disappearing.

But throughout all of that, you know, they weren't.

considered kind of missing in that that sense because their social social security checks, their Centrelink money kept getting collected.

That's right.

And that's one of the big misses, I guess,

from the police, but also semi-understandable in the sense that, well, hang on, they're not missing.

They're just turning up in different places and collecting their money.

But unfortunately, no, they had tortured all their victims to give their pins

and had effectively been collecting their dolls ever since.

Were they also getting people to record, you know, kind of messages to loved ones explaining their disappearances?

Yes, exactly right, Stocky.

That's right.

They did, they recorded their voices and then they would actually ring loved ones and they would replay these voices to them saying, don't contact me, I hate you, I never want to see you again, these kind of messages to try and put off family members so they wouldn't start looking for them.

And to a certain degree, it did work.

How did this all start coming unstuck?

When did police start to get wise and start to look into what was going on here?

I remember being sent out to cover what seemed like a reasonably straightforward missing person case out at the Elizabeth Police Station.

And when I got there, it was an appeal by

a man and a police officer for a missing woman.

And her name was Elizabeth Hayden.

Now, we come to know later, of course, that Elizabeth Hayden was one of the Snowtown victims.

She was also the wife of Mark Ray Hayden who was also convicted of being involved in those killings.

But at the time we knew absolutely none of that.

So we went to the press conference and they went through the details of her disappearance.

It sounded reasonably

straightforward in terms of missing person.

They hadn't seen her for some days.

They were looking for this appeal, giving some details.

I put a question to the man who was sitting next to the police officer.

He was the brother of Elizabeth Hayden, why he was there and not her husband.

And he didn't answer.

The brother didn't answer.

And he looked at the police officer who was there and he looked back at Elizabeth Hayden's brother.

And

it was just a long delay.

And I said, okay, I think I get the picture of what's happening here.

And then as I was leaving, I spoke to the police officer.

I said, oh, that was telling.

And he goes, it was.

And you're right.

And we're looking at this missing person, but it's not just this missing person.

We think this is linked to more.

And that's the first little hint that I had that there was something much bigger going on.

And I mean, that moment at the press conference about Elizabeth Hayden's disappearance would have been kind of chilling.

Your trip to the bank vault, to Snowtown, when these bodies were uncovered, was in May 1999.

How long until arrests started to be made?

Yes, so it was fairly immediate.

It was pretty much within 24 hours they had Bunting and Wagner in custody.

I'm not sure how quickly they got Hayden and Versakis actually came forward

before he was arrested because he was wanting to do some kind of deal with the police to see if he could get some kind of immunity for his help.

Yeah, and I mean this is kind of central to what we're talking about here, right?

Because you've got these two guys, Bunting and Wagner, who

are in prison at the moment without an opportunity of parole.

But we have James Lusakis, who also committed some of these murders, who is now in 2025, a week away from parole, getting out of prison in South Australia.

So

his situation is different.

And does a lot of that come down to, you know,

his cooperation with police, him putting himself forward,

him trying to, I guess, do the right thing?

Yes, do the right thing or self-interest, whatever it was.

He came forward.

He did speak about potentially getting immunity.

All the police said was, we'll look at it, we'll consider it.

And then he effectively just started telling them everything, everything he knew.

And he had a lot of information.

While he was only involved in four of the murders, he had been told so much about the others, knew where the bodies were, knew where evidence was stored,

had so much information that he gave the police.

And then at the end of it, they said,

well, in terms of immunity,

We can discuss that further, but for now we are charging you with one murder, and that was for the murder of David Johnson who was the last victim and really probably the saddest case of all.

And that was a murder that took place, was that in the bank vault in Snowtown?

Yes, unfortunately that one happened.

He was a ruse.

He was driven up there.

He went up there with James Lusakis

and was going to buy himself a $200 computer

and yeah, was murdered.

How soon before

this was uncovered did that happen?

The police were already monitoring them by this stage.

They were already on to the main offenders.

So it more or less happened

very close to the arrest time.

So yeah, it's haunting, really.

Yeah.

And I mean, do you, you know, you talk about how James was hoping to get this kind of deal.

What kind of insight do you have into the conversation he was having with police around that?

You know, was he kind of going in there being like, yep, I'm going to tell them everything.

I'm going to give them everything they need to know.

And, you know, maybe they'll just let me off with a slap of the wrist.

Is that what he was looking for?

I think so.

I think so.

I mean, he was, I mean, clearly they charged him after the first interview.

So the chances of getting immunity at that point really

would have been severely diminished.

But the actual decision wasn't made straight away.

It was made sometime later that they actually told him officially, no, you are not getting immunity.

We will be charging you

with four of the murders and you can decide what you want to do from there.

In the end, he pleaded guilty, but on the proviso that the prosecution did not oppose the idea of a parole.

Right.

Yeah.

And he was kind of a critical piece.

in these murders because he because he knows so much about them, right?

Well, he was really, James Lasakis, a key part of the prosecution case.

Without him, it would have been so much more difficult to prove the 11 murders for John Bunting and 10 for Robert Wagner.

He had all the details.

If he wasn't involved, he knew where the bodies were buried, literally.

Yeah.

And, I mean, talking about where they were buried, well, we've spoken a lot about the bank vault in Snowtown.

These were also, you know, buried in the backyard of a suburban house, too, right?

That's right.

knew that.

He told the police and that's when they started the dig at the house and found two bodies in the backyard.

Yeah.

Yeah, really kind of bringing it home to Adelaide at that point, I suppose, as well.

You know, this is something that initially starts to unfold, you know, hours north of Adelaide and then finds itself coming closer and closer.

And then, yeah, it's a story that took over the country.

for a period of time.

The trial for Bunting and Wagner was something that ran for 11 months.

So it was a huge, huge undertaking at that point.

And James, we're looking into this story because James Lesakis is, you know, he's in line for parole next week.

How big a deal is that in Adelaide with, you know, with the history that we're just talking through?

Well, it's a pretty big deal.

I mean, he is obviously a significant

name in terms of the criminal cases that have occurred in South Australia.

The Snowtown murders is probably the biggest case the state has ever dealt with.

Versakis getting out as a person who killed four people out into the community is something a lot of people are following very closely.

Yeah, yeah, a week until he's out on parole in a pre-release centre.

And as that gets closer, we're going to bring you more of this story, talking through how the trials for these murderers unfolded and what Versakis did that meant he is now in this position.

James will have you back for those episodes, of course.

But thank you for taking us through this this in this one.

Thanks, Docie.

If you have any questions that you'd like James to answer, please get in touch.

Email thecaseof at abc.net.au.

We really enjoy hearing from you.

And this is something that happened a long time ago.

And, you know, we have a lot of detail about, and you probably have a lot of questions about.

So, yeah, please get in touch.

The caseov at abc.net.au.

We will be spending some time with James answering your questions.

So get in touch.

And don't forget to jump on the ABC Listen app.

Our next episode will appear there slightly before it rocks up anywhere else on Thursday.

Thursday, and we'll be looking into what happened through these trials and through the sentencing of everyone.

Find out how his cooperation served him in court.

We're back in your feed on Thursday.

The case of Snowtown Parole is produced by ABC Audio Studios and ABC News.

This series is reported by senior reporter James Wakeland and presented by me, Stephen Stockwell.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson.

This episode was produced on the land of the Ghana and Wurundjeri people.

Hey, I'm Sana Kadar, and I host All in the Mind on ABC Radio National.

It's a show where we investigate why people behave the way they do.

But there's some perspectives we don't often hear about, like what makes people cross the line into criminal behavior.

Are they evil or are they damaged?

Are they both?

After the stealing, they often will describe a sense of pleasure or gratification.

Join us on Criminal Psychology, a special series exploring some of these questions.

Hear it now on the ABC Listen app.