Band of killers' macabre secrets

By Greg Ansley

CANBERRA - Australia watched with macabre fascination this week as police, followed by an army of television cameras, moved a backhoe into the rear yard of 203 Waterloo Corner Rd, a state house otherwise undistinguished from others surrounding it in the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North.

The previous Sunday the house had sprung to national notoriety when the ochre-red soil yielded the remains, in two plastic rubbish bags, of a still formally unidentified person.

That corpse was the ninth discovered by police at the end of a long investigation into missing persons that, with the uncovering of eight others, some dismembered, in the vault of a former country town bank developed into Australia's worst serial killing.

The backhoe lumbered into Waterloo Corner to resume the excavation of the already-opened tomb, found after police used ground-penetrating radar to detect the telltale disturbances of a criminal grave.

Three metres below the surface, it scraped away the compacted soil covering the skeletal remains of victim number 10, leaving only one more body to be found in what has become a byzantine world of murder, fraud, blackmail, paedophilia and tangled sexual relationships.

With three alleged killers facing trial, and the possibility of further arrests, a clear picture has yet to emerge of the chain of events that led to the gruesome cellaring of corpses in plastic barrels, at least one filled with acid, in the vault of the former State Bank at Snowtown, a quiet farming hamlet 150km northwest of Adelaide.

But the killings have already revived popular mythology of Adelaide as a city of Gothic horror, recalling a series of brutal and bizarre slayings that have given the conservative state capital an undeserved but persevering image of dark secrets.

And yet there has been a series of especially gruesome murders and mysteries in the state: the tragic disappearance of three Beaumont children in 1966; the mallet killings by Clifford Bartholemew of his own and another family; the deaths of seven young women in the Truro murders; and the killing and sexual mutilation of five males, aged from 14 to 25, by a homosexual gang known as The Family.

Snowtown fits the image.

The trail extends back to 1993, when 22-year-old Clinton Trezise disappeared.

Trezise is believed to have had a homosexual relationship with a convicted paedophile, Barry Lane, a flamboyant transvestite who dressed in blonde wigs, pink pants and called himself Vanessa.

Lane later lived in another homosexual relationship with Robert Joe Wagner, 28, a sickness beneficiary who is one of the accused.

According to a man identifying himself to the Sydney Morning Herald only as Martin, and who claimed to have lived first with Lane and Wagner and then with John Justin Bunting, 32, another of the accused, the three men had compiled a list of paedophiles for use in blackmail.

Lane's mother Sylvia told the Adelaide Advertiser that Lane later feared for his life because he had helped dispose of a body and "knew too much."

Lane has been named as one of the victims.

Another victim named by police is 37-year-old mother-of-eight Elizabeth Haydon, described as a slow but genial woman who several years ago married the third accused man, Mark Ray Haydon, 40.

The relationship became even more interwoven when Haydon's sister Gail Sinclair met and moved in with Bunting.

Sinclair survived.

As the police net closed evidence of a further crime began emerging: some of the victims were social welfare beneficiaries whose payments had continued, and had been regularly collected, after their deaths.

Although some unconfirmed reports suggest as much as $A100,000 ($121,000) may have been gleaned from the scam, it is not clear whether fraud was a motive for at least some of the killings, or whether it was merely a profitable spinoff from them.

Either way, the trail led last week to the main street of Snowtown, population 500 or so, where one of the accused had rented the former bank.

Police have said from the beginning that the killings were not random, but carried out by a closed group which preyed upon itself - a belief given force by investigators' certainty that they were looking for 11 bodies, the fact they knew where to find two outside the bank, and the speed of the arrests.

But it appears now that some of the victims may never have been reported as missing.

And a chance court hearing in Adelaide that led reporters to a grieving fiancee has cast a further shadow: a 24-year-old man who went to Snowtown to buy a used computer from "someone he knew" two weeks before police opened the vault has been confirmed as one of the bodies in the barrels.

As of last night police had identified five of the ten bodies and they remained adamant that there was an eleventh still to be found.