Squiz Shortcuts: The Snowtown murders
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This is a squeeze podcast. Where your shortcut to being informed.
Mm-hmm. Oh Yeah. Mm-hmm.
One of Australia's most notorious murder cases, which is known as the Snowtown Murders or the Bodies in Barrels case, has been back in the news this week with the release on parole of the youngest man involved. It was a case that shocked the nation, and it made the South Australian town of Snowtown famous for all the wrong reasons. So in this squeezed shortcut, we'll get you across what happened and the concerns that have been raised over releasing a convicted serial killer back into society. with shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories. I'm Andrew Williams.
And I'm Larissa Huntington.
Larissa, the name Snowtown sounds like it might be home to some pretty alpine scenery, some tall snowy trees, mountains, that sort of thing, but it's nothing like that.
What is the Snowtown murders case and why is it back in the news?
It's flat, it's dusty, and there's certainly no snow anywhere to be found. It's a quiet farming community on a rural highway about one hundred and fifty Ks north of Adelaide. Bit of a blink and you'll miss it type of town. I don't suppose you've ever been there.
Uh no, not even driving through. Um, but mostly it's not really high on my list given its history.
And that's a fair approach. Uh a lot of people would probably avoid it given what they know about it, but some people don't. So for some people it's exactly that history that's arguably brought more visitors there than ever before. This is a phenomenon called dark tourism, and in Australia, Snowtown is high on the list of people who get into it.
This is a whole thing I've learned. So there are businesses set up around this idea selling souvenirs and things. And for interest's sake, if you'd like to know, some of the other dark tourism spots in Australia are the old Melbourne Jail where Ned Kelly was hanged, Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory, up around where Peter Falconio's murder happened, and the Belengalos State Forest in New South Wales, which is the site of Ivan Mullat's crimes. So it's quite the list. But back to Snowtown, there's one particular place that people go to see, and that's the old bank building.
And that's a nondescript plain brick building on the town's main street. And the reason that people go there is because that's the place where eight of the eleven murder victims in the Snow Town murders were discovered. So it's the main site that people go to when they want to learn more about what happened.
Yeah, it is. And that was back in nineteen ninety nine when they were discovered. Now the details of this case are pretty grim to say the least, but it's this aspect of it that was particularly shocking. So the bodies were found in six plastic barrels full of acid in an old vault inside the bank.
And in terms of how they were found there, police had been working on a number of unexplained disappearances across Adelaide, and detectives had noticed suspicious welfare claims, so dole payments, disability pensions, other social security payments that were linked to the missing people. Now, that investigation was known as Task Force Chart. One of the disappearances was a woman named Elizabeth Hayden, who vanished from Adelaide's northern suburbs in late 1998. So police were watching her husband. Mark Hayden and his kind of circle of acquaintances. And then a witness came forward. She'd seen a man outside one of the suspects' houses forcing garbage bags into the back of an old Toyota land cruiser which had been stacked from the floor to the roof.
By the time police heard about it, the four-wheel drive was gone and they spent the next six months looking for it. And then it turned up in the driveway of a house in Snowtown, which is what brought detectives into the town on the twentieth of May nineteen ninety nine. And they'd come to search that house and seize the car, but that soon led them to the old bank building across the road.
And it then came out that that bank building was being rented by Mark Hayden, as we said, the husband of the missing woman, along with a friend of his named John Bunting.
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