Meshel Laurie
speaker
11,805 appearances
100 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard today
Meshel Laurie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 100 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 23.
Appearances
Australian True Crime · Snowtown: The Bodies in the Barrels Murders *Re-Issue* · 17 Sep 2026
podcast
This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie.
Big news in the world of Australian true crime this week with the release on parole of Jamie Vlasakis, the youngest member of the Snowtown Bodies in the Barrels gang.
In May 1999, South Australian police investigating the disappearance of Adelaide woman Elizabeth Hayden and acting on a tip-off entered a disused bank in the tiny hamlet of Snowtown, a couple of hours north of Adelaide.
Upon entering the bank, they discovered the dismembered remains of eight people in barrels of acid.
One of them was indeed Elizabeth Hayden.
From there, the investigation moved quickly and within weeks, police had arrested John Bunting, Robert Wagner and Elizabeth Hayden's husband, Mark Hayden.
Days later, they arrested 19-year-old James Vlasakis.
Bunting was the leader of the gang.
He presented the killings to the others as a cleansing of society of pedophiles and homosexuals.
There's an argument that James Vlasakis was another victim in this story.
He was 14 when his mother started a relationship with Bunting.
He'd been molested by his older brother, Troy Youde, who became one of the gang's victims.
And Vlasakis confessed to his involvement in the crimes during his first interview with police, before he was even suspected of taking part.
As of his upcoming release, Vlasakis will have served 27 years in custody.
It's hard to do this story justice in summary, so we're reissuing a conversation from some years ago with journalist and author Jeremy Pudney, who wrote the definitive book on the subject, Snowtown, The Bodies in Barrels Murders.
This is Australian True Crime.
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
I often look for books written by journalists when it comes to these big cases in Australia.
Right now, there are a couple of cases where I'm sort of waiting and hoping that a journal, a crime writer...
we'll be working away on something because I want that kind of eye.
Showing 1321–1340 of 11,805 · page 67 of 591
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