The most notorious crimes that shocked and horrified South Australia in the last 30 years
From the spinechilling Snowtown murders to killers scattering body parts in a strawberry patch, these are the deaths that shocked and horrified the state.
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From premeditated murder and disposing of bodies in barrels to impulsive crimes of passion, South Australia has witnessed shocking deaths.
Complicated love triangles, drug addicts murdering people who are trying to care for them.
Teen burglars murdering elderly ladies – on more than one occasion, jealous lovers and killers who even stooped to interfering with bodies to hide their crimes.
These are the most horrifying deaths in the state over the past 30 years.
Bodies in the Barrels murders – 1992-1999
Australia’s worst serial killers, John Bunting, Robert Wagner and James Vlassakis were given life sentences for their brutal Snowtown murders.
On May 20, 1999, police discovered eight bodies in six plastic drums hidden in the bank vault.
Police discovered two more bodies in the backyard of a house at Salisbury North on May 23 and 26 and another two bodies were found at separate locations in the city’s north.
Led by Bunting, the killers – and many of the victims – were from the Salisbury North area.
Eight of the victims’ remains were dumped in barrels filled with hydrochloric acid and stored in a Snowtown bank.
The victims were often chosen because of Bunting’s perceived belief they were paedophiles, or gay – or were simply obese or drug users.
In several cases the victims suffered from mental illness.
In total 12 people were killed, over a period of seven years by a variety of disturbing methods, including extreme torture and even cannibalism.
In some instances the murderers stole the victims’ pensions.
Those killed were Cinton Trezise, 22, Ray Davies, 26, Michael Gardiner, 19, Barry Lane, 42, Thomas Trevilyan, 18, Gavin Porter, 29, Troy Youde, 22, Fred Brooks, 18, Gary O’Dwyer, 29, Elizabeth Haydon, 37, and David Johnson, 23.
Bunting and Robert Wagner were found guilty of all 11 of those murders.
James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, including his half-brother and stepbrother, and testified against his fellow killers.
Bunting and Wagner were given life sentences with no parole while Vlassakis was given a life sentence with 26 years non-parole.
Their accomplice Mark Ray Haydon was jailed for 18 years non-parole.
Carolyn Matthews – 2001
The callous murder of Carolyn Matthews arose from a twisted love triangle between her husband and another woman.
Kevin Matthews ensured Carolyn would be home alone to provide a window of opportunity for his lover Michelle Burgess and hit man David Key – who Burgess was also sleeping with – to ruthlessly murder a devoted mother.
Matthews staged his return to the family’s West Lakes Shore home and allowed his sons – then aged 12, 13 and 16 – to find their mum’s bloodied body on the kitchen floor.
Key, who did not know Matthews was having an affair with Burgess, demanded $50,000 to kill Mrs Matthews and Burgess’s husband Darren.
The second murder did not eventuate.
Key pleaded guilty to murder in return for sentencing discounts and outlined the entire sordid plot. He was jailed for a minimum of 20 years.
Burgess and Matthews were jailed for life with a non-parole period of 30 years.
Joanne Lillecrapp and Megumi Suzuki – 2001
While hundreds of police and volunteers were searching for the body of Japanese schoolgirl Megumi Suzuki in 2001, another gruesome discovery was made.
A severed and partially burned human head belonging to Joanne Lillecrapp who had vanished without a trace was found.
The former truck driver and professional wrestler had not merely been decapitated, but also dismembered and flayed.
Parts of her body had been spread across five different SA locations – one of which was the prized strawberry patch in her own backyard.
Ms Lillecrapp’s killers – Donna Lee Casagrande and Nicole Therese Courcier McGuinness – had also disappeared.
A decade later – in 2011 – Casagrande walked into the Redfern Police Station in NSW and gave officers a full confession. McGuinness was then swiftly tracked down.
The women, who were lovers, had met Ms Lillecrapp while they were working as prostitutes to feed their drug habits.
Ms Lillecrapp invited the couple to live with her and took control of their finances to ensure they turned themselves around.
When she refused to hand over their money, Casagrande and McGuinness drugged her, beat her, humiliated and abused her, stabbing her repeatedly in the temples and finally killed her with a blow to the heart.
In 2003, Casagrande was convicted of manslaughter and McGuinness of murder, receiving life sentences with 10-year and 18-year minimum terms respectively.
McGuinness was released on parole this year.
Mark Errin Rust was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences after pleading guilty to the murders of Maya Jakic and Megumi Suzuki.
Ms Jakic was murdered by Rust in April 1999, and her body dumped at the Payneham Police Station, for refusing his offer of “a lift and some fun”.
She remained there – despite a large-scale police search – until Rust made an anonymous triple-0 call revealing her location.
On August 3, 2001, Rust stalked and murdered Ms Suzuki, a Japanese exchange student, on Goodwood Rd at Westbourne Park and stuffed her body into a rubbish bin.
SA Police had to excavate and search 10,000 tonnes of rubbish at the Wingfield dump before locating her in December 2001.
Martin Meffert – 2005
For 15 years, the family of cold case murder victim Martin Meffert wondered how and why their beloved son and brother was killed.
In the Supreme Court in November, last year they got answers at last – discovering it all started with a bank card, a PIN and a request for an iced coffee.
The court heard that, upon his release from hospital in February 2005, Mr Meffert asked a teenager to make a purchase from the Terowie deli on his behalf.
Realising he now had a way of funding his meth and cannabis habit, the teen murdered Mr Meffert – then siphoned his account for the next decade.
He not only hid his crime but also Mr Meffert’s remains, shifting them from property to property, even playing “show and tell” with his victim’s skull to brag to friends.
The man, now 32, pleaded guilty to murdering Mr Meffert, 23, and has already been sentenced to life in prison – the court has yet to determine his non-parole period.
The court heard he stood 8.9m outside his house and shot Meffert through the wall.
Carly Ryan – 2007
Carly Ryan, 15, believed she was talking to a 20-year-old, Texas-born, Victorian emo named “Brandon” online.
But his real name was Garry Francis Newman, and he was 47, a divorced father-of-three.
He had more than 200 online identities.
In February 2007, Newman came to Adelaide on the occasion of Carly’s 15th birthday and posed as Brandon Kane’s father.
He convinced Carly to go to Victor Harbor on February 19 where he murdered her.
Her bashed, suffocated, sand-choked body was found the next day at Horseshoe Bay in Port Elliot.
Police searched Carly’s computer records and when they swooped on Newman, he was logged in and talking to a 14-year-old girl in WA.
He was found guilty in January 2010 and sentenced to life in jail, with a 29-year non-parole period.
Newman appealed his sentence a year later.
It was unanimously rejected.
Carly’s mum, Sonya created Carly’s Law three years later, which makes it illegal for adults to misrepresent their age to children online and helps police to better identify and shut down predatory behaviour.
Pirjo Kemppainen – 2010
The brutal killing of Pirjo Kempannein was at the hands of a 14-year-old who, during sentencing, admitted to being obsessed with killing people since Year 1.
Two boys, known as A and B throughout the trial, were charged over the murder.
B was jailed for at least 15 years after pleading guilty, while A was acquitted by a jury.
The boys had thrown rocks at the 63-year-old’s home earlier that night, prompting her to call police, but no police patrol was dispatched.
Later that night, after the boys met under a tree across the road, B broke into the house and used a knife and brick to inflict 121 injuries, breaking the knife off in Ms Kemppainen’s skull.
He then spent the rest of the night playing video games.
Prosecutors alleged the boys formed a joint plan to kill Ms Kempannein.
They had relied on testimony from B to convict A, but jurors found B to be an unreliable witness and disregarded his evidence.
The Rowe family killings – 2010
It was a jealous, angry man that killed Andrew, Rose and Chantelle Rowe at Kapunda on November 8, 2010.
Jason Downie, a loner whom Chantelle had befriended became sexually infatuated with her.
He parked his car around the corner, climbed through a bathroom window and sexually assaulted Chantelle while stabbing her at least 33 times.
Downie then stripped the girl of her bloody clothes and redressed her.
The body of Chantelle’s father Andrew was found on the kitchen bench with 29 stab wounds.
His wife Rose was nearby and had been stabbed at least 50 times in two separate attacks.
Pieces of knife were found in their bodies.
Downie was arrested on November 16 after voluntarily attending Kapunda Police Station at police request.
Eventually, Downie was sentenced to life in jail, with a 35-year non-parole period – one of the longest non-parole periods in the state.
Anne Redman – 2011
Two teenage would-be burglars, called J and B at trial, cut the power to Seacliff pensioner Anne Redman’s home on January 25, 2011.
J broke in through the bathroom window – when the 87-year-old went to investigate the sound of glass smashing, she saw B crouching behind a bin.
He punched her in the face, breaking her neck.
J then went to their car, retrieving a blunt hunting knife, which they used on Ms Redman who was still alive.
The boys – the 17-year-old son of a policeman and his friend, 16, were arrested months later.
At trial the boys blamed each other as the instigator of the horrific murder.
They eventually pleaded guilty, and in 2013 were given 20-year non-parole periods.
Michael “Macca” McEvoy – 2016
A jury took only two hours to find a woman who stabbed a man in the heart, licked his blood off the knife, and then stabbed him a further seven times, guilty of murder.
In 2017 a Supreme Court jury agreed Leanne Carol Prak’s slaying of Michael “Macca” McEvoy was not manslaughter, but rather the most serious crime under law: murder.
Justice David Peek sentenced Prak to life imprisonment.
Prak stood trial for murder after prosecutors refused to accept her guilty plea to the lesser crime of manslaughter.
They alleged she stabbed Mr McEvoy, 65, once in the heart and seven more times in the back, likely after he collapsed, in his Holden Hill unit in May 2016.
Prosecutors told jurors Prak had licked Mr McEvoy’s blood off the knife after stabbing him in the heart, telling an eyewitness “now you can see what I’m capable of”.
Triple Hillier murder – 2016
The tragic murder of two South Australian children at the hands of their mother’s partner was one that rocked South Australia.
Steven Graham Peet murdered his partner Adeline Yvette Wilson-Rigney and her two children, Amber Rose Rigney, 6, and her brother Korey Lee Mitchell, 5, in May, 2016.
The victims’ bodies were found on a property at Hillier and the court heard all three victims had been strangled with cable ties.
Ms Wilson-Rigney’s body was found under a mattress in the laundry of the house and there was evidence that Korey had tried to remove the tape around his mouth and kick his way out of a wardrobe he had been locked inside.
Peet drove to a relative’s house where he confessed to killing Ms Wilson-Rigney, and he later told police through triple-0 “I killed my lady and her two kids”.
Peet pleaded guilty to the triple murder and was handed a mandatory life sentence.
He is serving his 36-year non-parole period.
Helen Dansie – 2017
Peter Rex Dansie was found guilty of murdering his wheelchair-dependant wife, Helen, 67, by pushing her into a Veale Gardens pond in April 2017.
She was disabled due to a stroke – Dansie has long claimed her wheelchair accidentally went into the pond and she drowned despite his attempts to save her.
Prosecutors alleged he threw her into the water because she was “a burden he was no longer prepared to tolerate”.
They said that, in the six-minute call to triple-0, Dansie was asked 12 times to roll Helen over or lift her head out of the water – he refused each time.
Prosecutors alleged he neglected her care, refused to spend money on her needs and fought with her extended family – and the couple’s own son – over her finances.
In February, last year Justice David Lovell jailed Dansie for life, backdating both the sentence and non-parole period to his conviction in December, 2019.
After six months of deliberations, the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Peter Rex Dansie’s appeal to overturn his murder conviction in November.
The judgment means Dansie no longer has any legal right to his wife Helen’s possessions, potentially clearing the way for their son to take control of the family assets.
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