Moment that unearthed one of Australia’s worst murder cases

An investigator who was the first person to open the bank vault in which the Snowtown murder victims were hidden has revealed a chilling detail.

When Gordon Drage opened the plastic lid of an old olive barrel inside the abandoned State Bank in Snowtown, a town whose entire population could fit inside your average school assembly hall, he didn’t know he was blowing the lid on what would become one of the worst serial killings in the country’s history.

“I remember the first one I opened, I could see a semi-mummified foot with some soil on it and the jeans the victim had been wearing,” he recalls on the latest episode of Gary Jubelin’s podcast, I Catch Killers.

“I didn’t know it’d been dismembered at that stage, I looked in the top and I thought, well, someone’s just been shoved in here headfirst and their feet are sticking out.”

And yet only hours earlier, when Drage had woken up on the morning of May 20, 1999, he had no inkling of the bizarre and horrific events that were about to unfold.

Watch Gary Jubelin’s interview with Gordon Drage in the video player above

“I started my shift in Kadina, and my opposite member in the Barossa Valley was on holiday,”

“So when he was on holiday, I would go across and do some jobs in his area, if they urgently needed to be done. So I had this lovely, pleasant country drive across from the York Peninsula across to the Barossa Valley.”

Drage had been called out to inspect an abandoned vehicle, and had just arrived at the scene.

“It was just an abandoned car chassis, stripped down to nothing, just dumped at the side of the road,” he recalls.

Police stand guard outside abandoned State Bank aka BankSA in Snowtown following the discovery of nine bodies in acid-filled drums in bank's vault. Picture: Neon Martin

“So I remember I was looking at that at the time, trying to identify it. And I got a phone call from the bosses in Adelaide who said, ‘look, we’ve got this job at Snowtown. Is there any chance you can be there for 11 o’clock? Because we had a whole team teed up to come, but they’ve had another murder overnight in Adelaide’.”

When Drage arrived, investigators in Snowtown still believed they were working on a series of missing persons cases, and primarily needed Drage’s expertise to photograph a number of potential crime scenes.

“They said, ‘we just need you to go over there and meet with the rest of the detectives. They’re going to take some photos and videos and photograph a house’. They handed me an A4 piece of paper. The top half of that had a list of names, about 10 names. And on the bottom half was a whole list of property. Things like green, three piece leather lounge suites, televisions, that sort of stuff.”

Drage was tasked with photographing the car and home of John Bunting (who would later go on to be convicted of several of the murders), in order to ascertain whether any of the missing items were located there.

“No one had any idea of what we were about to find,” he explains, “at this point, it was just a photo job. And then a detective called me outside for a chat.”

A local had been speaking with detectives, and dropped a bombshell.

“He said, this guy’s just told us that John Bunting has turned up here in that car that they were going to take, and at one time it was full of barrels, which were full of smelly stuff. And he’s told us those barrels are now over at the old State bank.”

Gordon Drage pictured in 2004. Picture: Alex Carter

A police officer removes material evidence from a house in Bundarra Street, Craigmore.

Drage, who had been due to move to Queensland in two weeks time, had just made the discovery of his career, in a case so disturbing it would become forever entwined with the town in which the discoveries were made.

That day, the bodies of eight victims were discovered in the disused bank vault. Two more bodies were found buried in a backyard in Salisbury North, a suburb of Adelaide, with police later linking a further two deaths to the case, bringing the total number of known victims to 12.

Snowtown, SA.

Eventually Bunting, the primary perpetrator and ringleader, would be convicted of 11 murders and given 11 life sentences without parole. Robert Wagner, a key accomplice, was convicted of 10 murders and received 10 life sentences without parole, while James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and became a key Crown witness, receiving four life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years. Mark Haydon was later convicted for assisting in the disposal of the bodies, receiving a 25-year sentence with an 18-year non-parole period.

Many of the victims, socially vulnerable people targeted for their social isolation, drug addictions or perceived transgressions (such as being homosexual or pedophiles, according to Bunting’s twisted ideology) were known to the killers, who continued claiming Centrelink benefits in many of the victim’s names long after their murders.

Snowtown bodies-in-the-barrels serial murderer John Justin Bunting in the kitchen of his home.

Of all the horrific cases Drage worked in his career, the particular horrors of Snowtown remain with him, even now. He says the realisation that they’d eaten lunch on the floor before opening the vaults and discovering what they were dealing with was particularly disturbing.

“We sat there on the floor and realised the carpet was damp,” he says, “We then later found out that the reason it was damp was because they had hosed down that floor after killing [one of the victims, David Johnson] the night before.”

“We just didn’t know at the time, and that leaves a weird feeling in there,” Drage continues.

“You think, ‘I’m sitting on the floor exactly where this person was probably lying at one point before they’ve put him into a barrel. It’s just macabre.”

“There’s still an eeriness to the bank. I went back last year, first time I’d been back into that bank in 26 years. And I could still remember it like it was yesterday. Still visualise everything though it’s changed a bit inside. A lot of the counters and stuff have gone, but the vault

is still there. It was bizarre. It just sticks with you.”

Originally published as Moment that unearthed one of Australia’s worst murder cases