Forensic experts have long debated how John Bunting and Robert Wagner, men with sharply different views and personalities, became accomplices. For ten years, this criminal duo kept southern Australia in fear.
Bunting, according to people who knew him, could exert an almost hypnotic influence through his speeches and had a pathological hatred of homosexuals. Wagner, by contrast, was gay and did not hide his orientation. It was from him, according to the account, that Bunting received information about men he later selected as victims, believing they deserved punishment.
This went beyond murder alone. According to investigators and later testimony, the victims were subjected to elaborate torture over periods of weeks. Bunting’s stepson, James Vlassakis, later said that his stepfather told him that by looking into a victim’s eyes during torture, one could see the person’s soul.
Psychiatrists later largely came to the same conclusion: what brought the two men together was that both of them enjoyed killing too much.
Bunting and Wagner met in 1992, when Bunting moved into a house on Waterloo Corner Road on the outskirts of Adelaide. He had arrived in the city at 18, worked at a slaughterhouse, and had married a woman with a child. Wagner became his neighbor, and the two grew close despite Bunting’s hatred of gay men. It was also considered possible that Bunting himself had been subjected to sexual abuse in childhood.
They committed their first murder in August 1992. Bunting was 26 at the time, Wagner 21. Their victim was Wagner’s sexual partner, Clinton Trezise. Bunting believed he was not only gay but also a pedophile. Trezise was beaten to death with a shovel, and his body was buried on the outskirts of Adelaide.
Clinton Trezise’s remains were found only in August 1994, but for a long time investigators could not identify them. In 1997, a computer-generated reconstruction of Trezise’s face was shown several times on television. According to Vlassakis, Bunting smirked when he saw the image and said, “My work!” The teenager told no one what he had heard, because he idolized his stepfather.