Snowtown Parole: A murderer in transition

In Canada, you see his work everywhere.

An original by Novell Morrison.

Priceless.

But...

It became clear that there were more and more fakes.

A story that impacts Indigenous artists around the world.

How has nobody ever looked into this?

Forgeries, fakes, and fortunes to be made.

An art fraud of epic proportions.

I either have to let this go or try to find out what the truth is.

Binge the full series now on the ABC Listen app or weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

ABC Listen.

Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

A quadruple murderer starts his parole in Adelaide this week.

How James Lusakis will get a second chance at life in the community.

I'm Stephen Stockwell.

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 Vasakis was involved in four murders between August 1998 and May 1999, 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.

Almost three decades ago, the country was shocked by the Snowtown murders.

In this series, we've been following the parole of James Vasakis, the youngest murderer, a teenager when this happened, and the date for his release into the community.

That date has now arrived.

But James Wasakis isn't on parole just yet.

Even though the 60-day review period has expired, the parole boards still need to meet, and they've confirmed with us today that he has not started parole yet.

It is still expected though, so in this episode we're going to find out more about his parole conditions and the reaction of the South Australian community to this decision.

To help us understand what's going on I'm joined by James Wakeland, a senior reporter for the ABC in Adelaide.

James, how big a moment is this for South Australia?

Oh it's quite significant.

I mean James Lusakis is a very well-known name in South Australia because of his connection to the Snowtown murders.

As you mentioned, he's the youngest of the four men convicted over that case.

Two men were convicted of the murders at 11 and 10.

That's John Bunting of 11 murders, Robert Wagner, 10 murders.

And then Mark Rae Hayden was convicted of being involved as well.

But James Lusakis was 18, 19 years old when he was involved in four murders, and then he turned crown witness.

And he's certainly a very significant moment for the state.

Yeah, absolutely.

And as well as James, to help us get through all of this today, I've roped in Rebecca Bryce, who is a reporter and a producer for the ABC in Adelaide, has spent time as a court reporter there, so knows this story incredibly well.

Bec, thank you for joining us.

Do you remember when you first heard about Snowtown and that story started coming out?

Absolutely.

I think everybody heard about it the day it happened because it was such big news.

But I was actually not quite a journalist yet.

I was still studying at university.

I guess for someone who lives in South Australia, who's grown up in South Australia, this would be something that you would have lived with your whole life.

I mean, can you explain how much of a mark this leaves on the psyche of Adelaide of South Australia?

I don't think you can really underestimate the impact.

It was profound on the people of South Australia.

Obviously, the victims' families and

the people who lived in the communities, some of the people who may have thought they might have become victims themselves.

huge impact on them, but also for the people of the town, of Snowtown.

You know, it's a legacy that they have carried for over 25 years and doesn't look like it's ever going to go away for them.

There's been discussion about renaming the town over the years, but that's something that hasn't happened yet.

But certainly for South Australia,

it was a huge thing.

And I think it was probably the biggest story, the biggest thing that happened to our state

around that time.

It's such a horrific part of South Australia's history and it was a long time ago as well.

I mean, you're looking at a quarter of a century since the murders and since Lesakis' parole term was set.

Is it hard to link back and understand what was happening in those moments now we're here?

Certainly, I think at the time that these sentences were handed down, there was probably a feeling that you know, this day may never come.

25 years is a very long time.

Obviously, for a 19-year-old.

It's not necessarily a life sentence.

26 years, his non-parole period, but

I think if you look at the case that you've recently worked on, the mushroom case with the non-parole period, that just seems like such an age away.

But these days do come.

These dates do arrive.

And then you have to reckon with

the result of that.

And there's certainly something that we've seen with the Blasakas case, but also with Mark Rae Hayden, who was

the one person convicted of assisting the killers, reaching the end of his sentence as well.

I think that certainly came at a time that no one was expecting and perhaps caught people off guard a little bit.

Yeah, I'm really interested in talking a bit more about the parallels between Mark Rae Hayden and James Wasakis.

I mean, because there's a lot.

there's a lot there.

With where we are at the moment with James Wasakis, I mean, he had that non-parole period set when he was sentenced to life in prison for murdering four people.

I mean, he's obviously been successful in a parole application.

What was presented at that application?

I mean, how does that unfold for him to be in this position to start with?

Well, he has been to the parole board a number of times.

Frances Nelson Casey said, she's the chair of the parole board here in South Australia and has been for 40 plus years.

She said she'd heard from him a number of times.

All

life

prisoners in South Australia do meet with the parole board every year.

So she was quite familiar with his case and had met with him every year.

And she said that he had always shown remorse for his actions.

Right.

And I mean Frances Nelson has explained her reasons for granting parole to the media as well.

She spoke at a press conference after the application was approved in August.

And this is a little bit of what she said.

I think he's got very good intentions.

He has to translate them into action.

And I think he understands it won't be all that easy.

And that actually is a very good thing.

When people have rose-tinted glasses, it's often a recipe for things going wrong.

And he's quite sensible of the fact that he's got to toe the line.

And there are very robust expectations of him.

They were also presented with his file from corrections.

And

I just had a quick listen to her again about explaining why the decision was reasonably straightforward to the parole board.

And she sat on the final decision with two other members.

And it was based around the fact that he was compliant almost from the get-go from going into prison as a 19-year-old.

He complied with directions.

He was not testing positive to drugs.

And she made that very clear.

She said, it's very easy to get drugs in prison, and he was not testing positive.

And that's quite interesting, isn't it?

Because what we know about Vlasakis is that he was a drug user at the time that these offences were happening.

And that was something that was referenced in his sentencing, that he was dependent on drugs at the time.

Yes, so he's certainly come a significant way and reasonably quickly, according to the parole board.

they were reasonably clear that he did no longer pose a risk, as best they could tell, to the

and therefore had earned his right for parole.

Yeah.

And Beck, when we've got a parole board assessing these kind of applications, I mean, is Frances Nelson KC and the offsiders that she's working with, are they looking solely at Lusakis or I guess any prisoner's behaviour in prison?

Or is it also how cooperative they have been in the investigation and the like?

Absolutely.

It's all of those things.

They have to look at the sentencing remarks of the sentencing judge.

And and I think those remarks were quite pivotal in the way they depicted Lasakis talking about his dysfunctional upbringing.

He suffered sexual abuse as a child, and his age and immaturity was also a factor that the judge considered.

But also, because of the cooperation that he gave to police, he was a pivotal crown witness.

And I think without his evidence around what occurred and what Bunting told him, because don't forget he wasn't there for all of the murders that Bunting and Wagner were convicted of.

He was able to retell Bunting's accounts of those murders.

And I think without that information, police would never have had the full story and prosecutors would never have had, you know, the solid narrative that they were able to take to both the the Bunting, Wagner and Hayden trials.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, in our last couple of episodes, we've been talking about kind of how Lasakis was recruited into this group by Bunting, the relationship that he had with Bunting, and yeah, also his cooperation with police during the investigation.

So if you're interested in hearing a little bit more about that, jump into the show notes of this episode.

I'll link to those episodes there.

As well as that, there's also some great reporting that James and Beck have done on this too.

So I'll link to the stories that they've written so you can read up on this and get an understanding of it all.

Because, yeah, I mean, I think the thing that really interested me in this situation was just how cooperative James Lesakis was in this investigation.

And, you know, it gave us a really interesting insight into kind of how parole boards work, the factors that they're considering.

And, I mean, as we mentioned at the start of this episode, James Lasakis has not started parole yet, but we are still expecting it.

No word on a review taking place.

And I mean, if there is, we'll update you in our episode on Thursday.

James, you know, kind of with a view to Lusakis being on parole, can you explain what that would be like for him?

I'm imagining kind of regular check-ins, some kind of tracking.

Have I got that right?

Yeah, that's right.

There's the standard parole conditions.

He's not allowed to go within a geographical area where some victims' families may be.

He's not allowed to contact any of the victims' families, not allowed to go to any licensed premises.

He's not allowed to take any drugs.

He's not allowed to take any alcohol.

And interestingly, he has to see a psychologist as well to help him with his reintegration.

So they're just some of the conditions that he's going to face.

Life sentence prisoners face some quite specific parole conditions as well under the legislation.

So, you know, not committing offences that would seem fairly obvious, but

not being allowed to have a gun or ammunition or offensive weapons and wearing electronic monitoring is one of the conditions as well.

Yeah, restricted and limited in some of the things you can do.

I mean, not having a gun seems like a pretty sensible one.

So, yeah, there's some of them.

He's also, I mean, we don't know what he looks like.

We spoke in our last episode, James, about how the image of Lasarcus has been suppressed in South Australia.

So no one knows what he looks like.

So we won't, you know, there's no reference for that.

But he's also not allowed to change his name, if I got that right.

Yes, that was something that Frances Nelson KC said in her press conference, that it would need to get the permission of corrections to change his name.

And she said, there's no no way that that would happen.

So

the only giveaway potentially is the fact that he'll probably have someone from Corrections with him when he goes out, particularly in the initial weeks.

Yeah, yeah, such an interesting situation that he'd find himself in.

And yeah, as I mentioned a couple of times, we've just finished this 60-day review period.

And that's basically this window where the South Australian Attorney General, the South Australian Police Commissioner,

or I should say, or the South Australian Victims' Rights Commissioner could request a review into the Parole Board's decision to offer parole to James Lasakis.

Now, that period ended, ended on the weekend, but the Parole Board does still need to meet to kind of confirm the parole decision.

Now, we don't know if there has been a review.

I feel like if there was, we probably would have heard something about it by now.

I know there's a level of secrecy about it that we'll talk about in our episode on Thursday.

But, I mean, how have people reacted to the idea that James Lusakis will soon be in the community?

Well, the families, understandably, are very upset that James Lusakis can actually get out at all, that he just isn't locked away, throw away the key.

And, of course, that's what's happened with John Bunting and Robert Wagner.

They will never be able to apply for parole.

So there is a

genuine sense of disappointment, sadness, anger from the community.

That's been mentioned by the Commissioner for Victims' Rights, Sarah Quick.

She's spoken on their behalf about how disappointed they are that this day has come.

Yeah, you know, what about the families?

Do we hear much from the families?

Do they talk much about this these days?

They don't.

We don't hear from many of the families, and Beck and I did reach out to quite a few

over the last 12 months or so.

But we have heard from Ronald Lane, who is the nephew of one of the victims, and he's very, very clear.

He's saying that effectively, you know, there's no way that James Versakis should be allowed out into the community.

Yeah, and we do have that interview that the ABC did with Ronald Lane.

This is how he reacted to Versakis' parole.

I know they did their time, but that's not the point.

It's what it is, and the victims...

They never got the chance to see the light of day and everything else.

And these guys, they're letting out free and spending their lives.

What about the victims' lives?

You know, they didn't get the chance to even live their life.

They were virtually killed.

He's worried that he could bump into him in the street or that he could be approached by him.

It's something that he also promised his grandmother that he would fight for justice for the victims for his entire life.

And he's continued to bravely speak out and say that this is something that he does not support.

And I think the lack of victims, families who do speak out also speaks to how horrific these crimes were and the deep and lasting trauma that they created.

Because there were so many victims,

many of them got lost in the telling of the story and in true crime conversations people usually put the victim at the centre of the narrative.

That didn't really happen with these cases for a very, very long time.

A lot of them felt as though their family members had been ignored, overlooked.

So I think for a lot of the victims' families, they feel as though their loved ones' identities were lost.

And also a lot of these people were very marginalised.

I think there's one victim that we don't even have a picture of.

And it's very difficult to front up year after year.

and speak out on behalf of a loved one or

and tell that story.

A lot of people have, I guess, wanted to put it behind them.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's been a challenging 12 months for a lot of those families because we're talking here about

the parole of James Lasakis, but Mark Rae Hayden, he was found guilty of helping the murderers commit these acts of moving bodies, of getting the barrels into the bank vault, right?

And he was released last year.

I mean, Did we see a similar reaction to his release or were people treating that one slightly differently?

I guess because Mark Raehayden was the first of the Snowtown perpetrators to be released, there was more interest in that case.

And he's older.

And while he wasn't found guilty of killing anyone, he was certainly seen publicly as very much involved.

So there was a lot of public interest in that case.

The other part, of course, is something we've mentioned around the suppression of James Lesakis's image.

So

you can't see the perpetrator.

So that's perhaps another thing that has led to the fact that people aren't quite as engaged, but certainly there has still been significant interest and a lot of people upset.

Yeah, and I mean, talking about Mark Rae Hayden and his release last year, I mean,

James Beck, it was your reporting that kind of helped people realize that this guy was just going to be leaving prison, not on parole.

His sentence was just going to end and he was going back into the community.

And I mean, with Lasarcus at the moment, he's just been through a sort of 60-day review where there's an opportunity to appeal that.

But in the case of Mark Ray Hayden, you know, he was just going to be out in the community and the state government actually stepped in to kind of put some conditions on him.

Is that right, Beck?

Yeah, and that's because he wasn't given a life sentence.

He was given a 25-year sentence and that was his head sentence.

So that was the full extent of time that he could possibly serve in custody.

So we saw that date and realised that it was coming up and he was about to be released into the community with no restrictions, with no supervision, no parole.

So we did some reporting on that and very quickly the government stepped in and amended the legislation.

The issue was that he had never been convicted of any of the murders.

So while he was tried over two of the murders, including that of his wife.

The jury couldn't reach a verdict and he eventually pleaded guilty to assisting an offender in both of those cases.

And that particular offence wasn't captured by the high-risk offender legislation that allows the court to supervise people who are released back into the community who are considered to be of high risk.

So they rushed through amendments to that legislation.

In the meantime, we saw Francis Nelson move to grant Hayden parole, which effectively meant the parole board could get him into the community and see how he would work under supervised conditions

ahead of

those restrictions being placed on him by the courts.

Yeah, right.

So there was basically a process to be like, oh, hang on a second, can we make this work?

Let's just give it a test run.

And yeah, released him under a kind of a parole situation ahead of that.

Yeah, an interesting approach.

Well, I mean, I think what Francis Nelson Casey was doing was

putting some ability within the parole board to see how he goes.

I mean, once he's out as a high-risk offender, it does come back to the parole board again.

They actually do oversee that legislation too, but they've got less control.

So she was happy to sort of jump in, take control of it, and at least have him follow the restrictions that she set before he then...

flipped onto the high-risk offender legislation.

I think as well that speaks to how seriously the Parole Board takes its role in providing prisoners the best opportunity to succeed in the community.

And I think that's definitely something that we see with Frances Nelson Casey, that she absolutely takes that responsibility very seriously.

Yeah.

And I mean, I guess it's kind of worth thinking a bit about the purpose of prisons in the country as well.

I mean, you know, they're often called corrective services.

And I imagine that that's for a reason.

You know, they're not just there to punish people.

The idea is that people are helped rehabilitate or they're rehabilitated and this helps people kind of correct their behavior, you know, kind of in the name.

So it's interesting kind of seeing how far they're actually going to try and facilitate all of that as well.

You know, when we look into the world that these crimes were committed in, you know, this is the late 90s in Australia.

We're now here in the mid-2020s.

James Vasakis, you know, getting ready to come back into this world, a very different world to the 90s.

You know, the iPhone didn't exist when he was put into prison.

The internet was a completely different place.

We did our banking differently, you got your jobs differently, entire new categories of work that James Lesakis will now be contending with.

How does he prepare?

Is anything done to help him, I guess, you know, come to terms with this new world, or is he just sort of pushed out into the street and told good luck?

No, and this is certainly something that Francis Nelson Casey spoke about as well, The help that he would receive to go back and try and reintegrate himself into the community.

So he'll get help with just catching a bus.

He'll get help with setting up his banking.

He'll get help with getting a mobile phone.

All of these things that he'd never dealt with before.

I mean, there is some chance he had an early, early knocker or something in 1999.

But he would certainly, you know, 26 years on, the technology would be very, very different.

And that's going to be part part of the process.

And even the

process of getting a job is something that they're going to work with him on.

It's something that James Lusakis has said he wants to do.

And he can actually travel from the pre-release centre where he's living and go out and work if someone's willing to take him on.

But again, Francis Nelson Casey said on his behalf that he understands just how difficult that might be.

given his notoriety.

Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, you know, there's still,

you know, two of the Snowtown murderers in prison with no possibility of parole

there.

Any likelihood or opportunity that they could appeal the fact?

They do not have a parole period set or anything like that?

Is there

anything for them ahead?

So they can make an application to the court to set a non-parole period.

My understanding is Wagner has actually done that and it's been rejected previously.

I was actually in court as a student journalist in, I think it it was 1999, for one of the Truro murderers requesting a non-parole period to be set for him, James Miller.

He was convicted of, I think it was six murders of women with his partner, Christopher Worrell, and was jailed for life with no prospect of parole.

applied to the Supreme Court for a parole period to be set and they did in fact

set one for him.

Unfortunately for him, he died in prison from cancer a few years before that date arrived.

But in terms of

the likelihood of Robert Wagner or John Bunting ever being granted parole, it seems pretty unlikely given the fact that what we're hearing is there's no remorse.

There's nothing in their

yearly meetings with the parole board that suggests that they're going to change any of the way in which they view these killings.

So, the chances of them ever being given a parole seem pretty remote.

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't sound like there's much opportunity for Bunting and Wagner here.

But, yeah, James Wasakis still likely to be released on parole very soon now that the review period has expired.

Make sure you're listening to our episode on Thursday.

We'll be here with any updates that we've got on that process.

You know, we're still waiting to hear if the parole board's met, if that decision's been made, if he is moving into that pre-release centre.

So, we'll update you then and also looking forward to answering some of the questions you've been sending us about the case of Snowtown Parole.

So please get in touch with us, the caseof at abc.net.au.

There's been some fantastic ones sent through already that'll start some really interesting conversations in that episode.

So we'll be back in your feed later this week on Thursday.

So please get in touch, thecaseof at abc.net.au.

Parole is such an interesting space.

And you know, this is the end of this journey, as Beck was saying, that we often don't think about when these periods are set.

You know, thinking about Aaron Patterson, right?

A parole period of three decades.

That will arrive at some point.

And so if you have any questions about this, please get in touch, the case of at abc.net.au.

We really do love hearing from you, all your questions, all your insights.

James Wakeland, thank you so much for joining us for this episode.

Thanks, Docie.

And Rebecca Bryce, thank you as well for jumping in on this one too.

Thanks very much, Stocky.

We'll be back in your feed on Thursday.

So yeah, get in touch.

Make sure you grab yourself the the ABC listen app so you don't miss any episodes of the case of.

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

This series is reported by senior reporter James Wakelin and Rebecca Bryce and presented by me, Stephen Stockwell.

Our executive producer is Claire Rawlinson and Tamar Kransvik was the supervising producer for this episode.

This episode was produced on the land of the Gaurna and we're undreary people.

Hi, Yumi Steins here, host of the HIP podcast.

Ladies, we need to talk.

October is mental health month and to get behind it we're taking a look at some of the most common mental health disorders facing women, depression and anxiety, and how we can treat them.

I love anxiety.

I think it's the mental health condition that has the best outcome.

You can binge, Ladies, We Need to Talk, on the ABC Listen App or wherever you get your podcasts.