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| Case file: James S. Vlassakis et al. On May 20, 1999, police officers from a missing persons task force operating out of Adelaide, South Australia, entered a disuse former bank in the farming community of Snowtown, north of the city. For a year, they had been investigating a number of disappearences going back to 1993. When they opend the vault, they discovered six black plastic barrels of acid, which held human body parts from eight individuals. They also found handcuffs, knives, ropes, rubber gloves and a machine that could be used to produce electric shocks. The next day, police raided addresses in northern Adelaide and arrested three men: John Bunting, Mark Haydon, and Robert Wagner. All were charged with murder. Subsequently, two more bodies were found buried at Bunting's home. On June 2, a fourth suspect was arrested, 19-year-old James Vlassakis. Postmortem examinations of the remains indicated that many of the victims had been tortured before they had been killed. Some had gags in their mouths and ropes around their necks; others had been mutilated by having their limbs and feet hacked off; several of the bodies showed evidence of burns. Because of their condition, identification required the combined forensic skills of pathologists, anthropologist, fingerprint experts, DNA analysts, and odontologists. Even though most of the body parts had been submerged in the acid, it was still possible to extract sufficient DNA for checking against that of relatives of the missing persons. One breaktrough was that police were able to identify skeletal remains that had been unearthed by a farmer some five years before. In this case, anthropologists were able to coampare the bones with an X-ray of the missing individual. It transpoired that all the victims were either related to or know by the accused, and had been killed so that the murderers could fraudulently claim their welfare or disability payments. In some cases, the killers had even impersonated some of the victims when dealing with banks. Before being killed, some of them had also been forced to leave messages on their telephone answering machines to allay the fears of relatives and friends at their sudden disappearence. Vlassakis admitted to killing four of the victims, including his halfbrother and stepbrother, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001. However, he cooperated with the investigators and testified against Bunting and Wagner at their trial in 2003. Bunting was charged with 11 counts of murder, Wagner with seven; both received life sentences. Haydon was charged with 10 counts of murder, and is still awaiting trial. |