Bodies in Barrels: The True Story of the Snowtown Murders
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May 1999, South Australian police breached the vault of a disused bank building in the remote town of Snowtown and found eight barrels of human remains, uncovering what would become the most prolific serial murder case in Australian history. The Snowtown murders, also known as the Bodies in Barrels case, resulted in the convictions of John Justin Bunting, Robert Wagner, James Vlassakis, and Mark Haydon for the murders of twelve victims between 1992 and 1999, following an investigation that stands as the longest and most complex in South Australian legal history.
What set this case apart from every other serial homicide in the record books was who the victims were. Every single person John Bunting killed was someone he already knew, someone he had brought close, shaped, and ultimately turned into either a weapon or a target. He built a killing operation from the most isolated and struggling people in his own neighborhood, and he made sure each of them was so deeply implicated in what had happened that silence was the only road left open. Today's episode goes into one of the most psychologically consuming cases I've ever covered, and the part I keep coming back to is just how long all of it went completely unseen.
#SnowtownMurders #BodiesInBarrels #JohnBunting #AustralianTrueCrime #TrueCrime #SerialKiller #ColdCase
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sometimes the most dangerous person in a neighborhood is the one everyone actually likes, |
| 0:05.0 | the one who looks out for people and always has clear ideas about what's right and wrong. |
| 0:11.0 | Today we're in Australia covering one of the most disturbing cases I've ever talked about. |
| 0:15.0 | The Snowtown murders involve 12 victims, 8 barrels of human remains in an abandoned bank vault, and one man |
| 0:22.5 | who spent seven years slowly turning his entire social circle into a weapon. |
| 0:57.3 | ... The town of Snowtown, South Australia, has about 400 residents, a grain silo, and a wheat country silence so complete it feels like you can hear the earth breathe. |
| 1:01.1 | It sits roughly 93 miles north of Adelaide, and most people have never heard of it until |
| 1:06.3 | May of 1999, when police breached the vault of an abandoned bank building and found eight barrels |
| 1:12.8 | filled with the remains of 12 human beings. The case became known as the Bodies and Barrels |
| 1:18.4 | murders, and it stands today as the deadliest serial killing case in Australian history. |
| 1:24.5 | The thing is, almost none of it actually happened there. |
| 1:28.2 | Eleven of the 12 murders originated in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, in a neighborhood |
| 1:33.4 | called Salisbury North. News reports of the era described it as disadvantaged and socially |
| 1:39.1 | fragmented, which is a careful way of saying people were largely left to figure things out on their own. |
| 1:45.4 | The area had high unemployment, transient households, and residents cycling through without much |
| 1:51.0 | connection to each other or to any institution that might notice when someone vanished. |
| 1:56.2 | Disappearances came with ready-made explanations. |
| 1:59.2 | They moved on. They were struggling. They went somewhere to |
| 2:02.5 | start over, that kind of thing. John Bunting understood the machinery of that invisibility |
| 2:08.0 | with extraordinary clarity, and he built everything on it. Bunting was born on September 4, 1966, |
| 2:16.9 | in Queensland, and his early childhood looked unremarkable |
| 2:20.5 | in the ways that tend to reassure the people whose job it is to look at those types of things. |
... |
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