In what's become Australia's worst serial murder case, police said they have found the remains of ten people -- eight in vats of corrosive chemicals in a deserted bank vault, and two buried in a suburban backyard of a house once occupied by one of the suspects. The suspects, Robert Joe Wagner, 27, John Justin Bunting, 32, and Mark Ray Haydon, 40, allegedly were involved in a social security fraud scheme in which they were cashing the pension checks of their victims.
Police found the Snowtown bodies after a yearlong investigation into the disappearances of Elizabeth Haydon, 37, who vanished from a northern Adelaide suburb late last year, and two other missing persons. Police said they expected the murder toll could rise to 11, as they had yet to account for two missing people who had been expected to have been among the victims.
Two of the victims where identified as Clinton Trezise, 22, who disappeared in 1993 but was not reported missing for two years. The other, Barry Lane, 40, a transvestite and convicted pedophile who lived with anf had an affair with the youngest of the three suspects.
The possibility that some or all of the victims -- whom were mostly men -- were killed for their pensions appears to be the most likely motive. But Adelaide police emphasis the killings were not random and that the group involved appeared to have preyed upon itself. South Australia's chief of police said this is the most complex case in the department and assigned 33 police specialists in areas such as missing persons, crime scenes, and forensic analysis. The number of offenses involved is higher than in any other single investigation in the State's criminal history.
Meanwhile the patience of the residents of Snowtown has been wearing thin following their week of media attention. Snowtown's councillor Barbara Turner asked the media and sightseers to let their town get back to normal. "We're a quiet little rural community and we're just not used to all this: the media and the TV crews and helicopters and that," she said.