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  The Leicester Police said the evidence collected by the Portuguese police against the McCanns was so insubstantial that it could not lead to their prosecution. Nevertheless, the case was passed to a local prosecutor who, in turn, passed it on to a judge who authorized the seizure of Kate McCann’s diary and Gerry McCann’s laptop. The Portuguese authorities were eager to read his emails and see what websites he had been visiting. But, again, this line of investigation met a dead end. Eventually, on 21 July 2008, the McCann’s arguido status was lifted and it was decided to “close the file on the investigation concerning the disappearance of the minor Madeleine McCann due to lack of evidence that any crime was committed by the persons placed under formal investigation”.

  The files have been archived but they will be reviewed periodically and could be reopened if new evidence emerges, said Portugal’s Attorney-General Fernando José Pinto Monteiro.

  Again the case had moved on. In June 2007, it was revealed that another DNA sample had been retrieved from the McCanns’ apartment that did not match anyone in the family. But by the time a British CSI team had been brought in with special ultraviolet equipment that could detect a spray of fine particles of blood, they found that the apartment had been cleaned up and reoccupied. The Portuguese authorities said they brought in a specially trained sniffer dog that could detect the scent of a dead body and had been in situ for two hours or more. It was said to have identified the presence of a corpse, but British police dog-handlers said that this was unlikely as the odour of death dissipated within a month.

  In 2011, Kate McCann put the case back in the news with the publication of her book Madeleine to raise money for the search. As a result, Scotland Yard reopened the case and assigned thirty detectives to the investigation.

  SNOWTOWN

  ON 20 MAY 1999, the sleepy bush town of Snowtown in South Australia came to international attention. Some 75 miles (120 km) north of Adelaide, it had a population of just 600. On the corner of the High Street and Railway Terrace was a disused red-brick building that had once been the Snowtown branch of the State Bank of South Australia. Like many rural branches, it had been closed long ago. Even so, it attracted an unusual amount of visitors. In this quiet town, people had begun to notice vehicles belonging to strangers parked nearby. This eventually incited the interest of the police, who were involved in a year-long investigation of a growing number of missing-persons cases in the state. On 20 May 1999, they decided to take a look inside the bank. Behind the 4 in. (10 cm) steel door of the bank’s vault they found six black plastic barrels that gave off a stomach-churning smell.

  Detective Steve McCoy recalled: “The stench was unbearable. It was the stench of what I would say was rotting flesh, rotting bodies, human bodies. It was putrid. It permeated your hair, your clothing, everything you had on the stench got into. It was horrific.”

  The acid-filled drums contained partly dissolved human body parts. Among them were fifteen feet, leading the police to conclude that the drums contained the remains of at least eight murder victims. Worse, along with the corpses they found rubber gloves, a bloodstained saw, ropes, tape, handcuffs, knives and electrical equipment designed to give excruciating shocks. It seemed that the victims had been tortured before they were killed.

  The following day, three homes in a blue-collar area of northern Adelaide were raided. Three men were arrested and charged with the murder of an unknown number of people between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999. The suspects were forty-yearold Mark Haydon of Smithfield Plains, thirty-two-year-old former abattoir worker John Justin Bunting of Craigmore and twenty-seven-year-old Robert Wagner of Elizabeth Grove. Given the horrific nature of the crimes of which they were accused, they were denied bail.

  The missing-persons investigation had begun in November 1998 when Haydon’s wife, thirty-seven-year-old Elizabeth, had gone missing. Her brother did not believe Haydon’s inconsistent, even contradictory, stories of her disappearance. Nor did he believe that she would have voluntarily upped and left her two young sons. When her brother went to the police, they found it suspicious that her husband had not reported her missing. Then they noticed that she was connected to two other people who had disappeared – twenty-two-year-old Clinton Trezise, who had vanished in 1993, and his friend, the forty-year-old flamboyant transvestite and convicted paedophile Barry Lane, aka Vanessa, who had last been seen in October 1997. A missing-persons taskforce, codenamed Chart, was set up and Haydon’s house was bugged. This provided evidence that was later used in court.

  When it became clear that a good many more than three people had gone missing from Haydon’s immediate circle, the taskforce swelled to thirty-three. They followed Haydon’s car. It led them to Snowtown. As cars from out of town tend to attract attention in small outback towns like Snowtown, the sightings of the other unfamiliar vehicles led detectives to the other suspects.

  The barrels found in Snowtown had done the rounds before ending up in the bank vault. They had first been stored in a shed behind Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge in April 1998. Three were then moved to Haydon’s house at Smithfield Plains. Later, one was stored in the back of a Mitsubishi Sigma at Murray Bridge, while five were kept in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser at Hoyleton on the Adelaide Plains. The barrels had been moved to the bank, which Haydon had rented under the name “Mark Lawrence” about three months before they were discovered, after complaints about the smell. The accused had claimed that the barrels contained kangaroo meat.

  Forensic scientists had the distasteful task of trying to identify the victims from their dental records and fingerprints. The killers had made the mistake of using hydrochloric, rather than sulphuric, acid. This tends to mummify bodies rather than dissolve them. Nevertheless, before they had been dunked in the acid, the bodies had been mutilated and dismembered, and were badly decomposed. So the then new and expensive technique of DNA profiling was used. Even body parts that had been marinated in acid for some time produce useful DNA. This could be extracted and compared with hair from combs or samples left on soiled clothing by suspected victims. Soon seven of the eight victims found in the bank vault had been identified.

  It turned out that some of the victims had been on Disability Support Benefit. The authorities had not been informed of their deaths and the money was still being collected. Others, who had formally been declared dead, were still, apparently, drawing their benefits. It seemed that the prime reason for the murders was financial as the killers were drawing AUS$100,000 a year due to their dead victims. But there were other more personal motives for the killings. Robert Wagner, for example, was a neo-Nazi who, purportedly, hated Asians and gays. John Bunting, himself an abused child, had a pathological hatred of homosexuals and paedophiles. And the terrifying treatment that had been meted out to the victims in the run-up to their deaths indicated that the killers took a sadistic glee in their crimes.

  As if eight victims were not enough, the police, convinced there were more bodies, continued their search. On 23 June, a taskforce of overalled crime scene officers arrived at Waterloo Corner Road in North Salisbury, the site of a semi-detached house where Bunting had once lived. It had since been demolished, but the police were convinced that the site might still yield vital evidence.

  First they broke up a concrete slab in what had been the back garden and removed it. Then they used sophisticated ground-penetrating radar equipment, first developed to detect plastic landmines laid during the Falklands War. As the radar scanner moved over the exposed earth, ominous black shadows appeared on the TV monitor, showing that something lay beneath the soil. After digging down some six feet, the detectives found a corpse, wrapped in black plastic bags, which had been in the ground for more than three years. This was identified as forty-seven-yearold Suzanne Allen, a former lover of Bunting. He and Wagner claimed that she had died of a heart attack, but they had cut her up and buried her so they could continue to claim her benefits.

  Below that they found a skeleton that was even older. This was t
wenty-six-year-old Ray Davies. In 1995, Suzanne Allen had rented a caravan to him. After Davies was accused of being a paedophile, Bunting and another of his lovers, Elizabeth Harvey, tortured and killed him, burying him in the garden. His disappearance was never reported. The death toll was now in double figures.

  At the beginning of June 1999, a fourth suspect was arrested. This was nineteen-year-old James Vlassakis. He was the son of Elizabeth Harvey, who died of cancer soon after his arrest. Initially, Vlassakis was charged with just one murder that had taken place on 4 May 1999, though the name of the victim was suppressed. After his arrest Vlassakis repeatedly attempted suicide and was moved from prison to the secure wing of a psychiatric hospital. In a taped phone call played at the trial, he told his teenage girlfriend Amanda Warwick about the bodies in the barrels and said that he would soon be charged. She asked if he had anything to do with the murders. He replied: “It’s too big, I can’t tell you.”

  Another house in Murray Bridge was raided and an eleventh body was unearthed. The police then went through their unsolved crimes file and discovered that bones found in the field at Lower Light in 1994 belonged to Clinton Trezise. His head had been beaten in with a shovel by Bunting, after he had been invited into his home in Salisbury North.

  The body of eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan had been found hanging from a tree near Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills in 1997. Initially, his death was thought to have been a suicide, but he was later implicated in the murder of Barry Lane. Gavin Porter, a missing man from the neighbouring state of Victoria, also appeared to be a victim. A heroin addict and friend of Vlassakis, he had been killed after Bunting had pricked himself on a discarded syringe and decided he must die.

  More properties were raided in the wheat belt around Snowtown and along the Murray River. This led to press speculation that the gang extended much further than the four already in custody. Indeed, the gang had once been bigger. It became clear that some of the victims had earlier been perpetrators. The gang had turned in on itself and began killing its own. It was thought that the transvestite Barry Lane had a hand in the murder of his boyfriend Clinton Trezise, before he himself was killed. Lane had lived with Robert Wagner – despite his vociferous hatred of homosexuals – just a block away from Bunting’s demolished house where two corpses were unearthed.

  The four accused went on trial in November 2000. Bunting, Wagner and Haydon were charged with ten counts of murder, but remained silent and refused to plead. Vlassakis, who was then charged with five counts of murder, reserved his plea. The evidence given in court was deemed so gruesome that suppression orders were used to keep the horrific details from the public. The Snowtown murder case was subjected to over 150 suppression orders in all. However, in Britain, the Daily Telegraph ignored the ruling and revealed that the victims had been sadistically tortured. According to the medical testimony, some victims had burn marks on their bodies. Others were found with ropes around their necks. They were gagged. One victim died with his arms handcuffed behind his back and his legs tied together. Another had received electric shocks to the genitals. A burning sparkler had been pushed into his urethra. His nose and ears were burnt with cigarettes and his toes were crushed before he was left to choke to death on his gag. Another had been put in a bath and assaulted with clubs. He had been beaten around the genitals and had his toes crushed with pincers, before being garrotted with a length of rope and a tyre lever.

  Victims’ bodies had been mutilated and dismembered. The head and arms of Elizabeth Haydon had been cut off. Her torso had been stripped of its flesh and her breasts and genitals removed. The final victim, David Johnson, had been cooked and partially eaten.

  Before they died, victims had been forced to call their tormentors “Lord Sir”, “Chief Inspector”, “Master” and “God”. They had also been forced to record carefully scripted phrases, which were then left on the answerphones of friends and relatives to allay suspicion. Gang members then impersonated their victims at benefit offices to collect the money due.

  In July 2002, Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and was given a life sentence with the stipulation that he must serve twenty-six years before he was eligible for parole. He had struck a deal with the prosecution, otherwise he would have had to serve forty-two years before he was eligible. By then the charges against Bunting, Wagner and Haydon had increased to twelve counts of murder.

  On 8 September 2003, after an eleven-month trial in front of the South Australian Supreme Court, Wagner was found guilty of the murder of seven people, on top of the three murders he had admitted earlier. Bunting was convicted of eleven murders. The jury was hung on a twelfth charge – the murder of fortyseven-year-old Suzanne Allen, whose body had been found wreathed in plastic under Bunting’s demolished house. The defence claimed that she had died of natural causes.

  Many of the charges against Haydon had been dropped due to lack of evidence. He was not convicted of any of the murders, but pleaded guilty to having helped dispose of the bodies. Both Wagner and Bunting refused to stand when the judgment was read, while Bunting protested loudly that details of the deal that Vlassakis had made to get a shorter sentence in return for giving evidence against them had not been revealed to the jury, some of whom had undergone counselling after hearing his testimony. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  Vlassakis’s testimony alone had lasted thirty-two days. He claimed that he had been involved in the killing of his half-brother Troy Youde, stepbrother of the last Snowtown victim, David Johnson. He vomited when he recalled how he had found Wagner cooking Johnson’s flesh in a frying pan and been offered some.

  The victims, Vlassakis said, were relentlessly tortured. The eighth victim, Fred Brooks, had been beaten in a bath and had lit cigarettes stuck in his ear and nose. Wagner and Bunting, the prosecution said, boasted that “the good ones” never screamed. Their targets, they maintained, were primarily homosexuals, who they claimed to loathe.

  The murders have given Snowtown a terrible notoriety. With street hawkers selling Snowtown Snow Shakers featuring body parts and barrel-shaped fridge magnets bearing the logo “Snowtown – you’ll have a barrel of fun”, the inhabitants are worried that the town may never shake its sick image. There has even been a proposal to change the name to Rosetown. Few think it will help.

  RACHEL NICKELL

  ON THE MORNING of 15 July 1992, twenty-three-year-old part-time model Rachel Nickell was walking on Wimbledon Common, close to her home in south-west London, with her two-year-old son Alex and their pet labrador Molly. She was brutally attacked. A passer-by found Alex clinging to Rachel’s blood-drenched body under a silver birch tree, crying: “Get up, Mummy.” She had been stabbed repeatedly and raped. Her throat had been slit – all while her son looked on. A bungled investigation led to the wrong man being charged, while the killer went on to kill again. But crime scene evidence eventually led to the conviction of the murderer sixteen years later.

  Apart from Alex, there were no witnesses to the attack, but one person saw a man carrying a dark holdall towards the spot where Rachel’s body was found and another saw the killer washing his hands in a stream. The killing was thought to be a murderous escalation of the “Green Chain rapes”, a series of 106 sexual assaults that had taken place near green spaces across south London in the early 1990s. The police had already been tipped off to a possible suspect when the mother of Ministry of Defence warehouseman Robert Napper called them, telling them that her son had admitted to a rape. However, she got the details wrong, saying that the assault had taken place on Plumstead Common when, in fact, it had happened in a house nearby. As the report did not match the record of any crime, the police did not act on the tip-off, though Napper had a previous conviction for carrying a loaded air gun in a public place.

  By the time Rachel Nickell was killed, Robert Napper was suspected of four sexual assaults, three of which he has since been convicted for. They demonstrated an increasing use of vio
lence. Napper admitted attempting to rape a seventeen-year-old girl who was walking to a friend’s home on the Caldwell Estate in Hither Green, south-east London, not far from his home in Plumstead in 1992. Eight days later he sexually assaulted another teenage girl at knifepoint in a field in Mottingham. In May, he grabbed a twenty-two-year-old mother pushing her two-year-old daughter in a buggy along the Green Chain Walk, Eltham, in broad daylight. He put a ligature around her throat, battered her and raped her on the footway. Neither the daylight nor the presence of the child seemed to discourage him.

  Rachel Nickell was attacked at between 10.20 and 10.35 a.m. on a bright, sunny day. Her son Alex was found with blood completely covering his face, chest and arms. He had put a piece of paper on his mother’s head as a makeshift bandage. When examined, he was found to have linear abrasions and bruising on the forehead, cheeks and mouth. The consultant paediatrician who examined him said these injuries were consistent with the child being dragged across the ground face down. There were flakes of paint in his hair.

  The sexual nature of the attack on his mother was palpable. Her jeans and underwear had been pulled down to just above her ankles to expose her buttocks. The pathologist later said that it appeared something, such as a finger or round object, had been inserted into her anus. There were knife cuts to the T-shirt and bra, and the left cup had been pulled down to expose the nipple.

  A total of forty-nine stab wounds were found, mostly to the front and rear of the upper body. The most severe stab wounds were to the front and side of her neck. Her heart and left lung had been stabbed while she was alive, while the right lung and liver were penetrated after death. A defence wound was found on her left hand, showing that she had tried to fend off her attacker. The killer also left a sample of his DNA, which was collected by swab from her intimate areas.