The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns: (True crime gift)

By Mitzi Szereto

Small Town Charm With Deadly Consequences

“In her new true crime book, and the second in her original series, acclaimed author and anthology editor Mitzi Szereto shows us that the real monsters aren’t hiding in the woods: they’re in our towns.” ―January Magazine

#1 Bestseller in Heists & Robberies and Forensic Psychology

A collection of non-fiction accounts by international writers and experts on small town true crime shows readers that the real monsters aren’t hiding in the woods, they’re inside our towns.

Small towns aren’t always what they seem. We’ve been told nothing bad happens in small towns. You can leave your doors unlocked, and your windows wide open. We picture peaceful hamlets with a strong sense of community, and everyone knows each other. But what if this wholesome idyllic image doesn’t always square with reality? Small towns might look and feel safe, but statistics show this isn’t really true.

Tiny town, big crime. Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more,The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Townscontains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story―they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe. Discover how unsolved murders, kidnapping, shooting sprees, violent robbery, and other bad things can and do happen in small towns all over the world.

If you enjoyed Mitzi's last book in the series, The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers, and true crime books like In Cold Blood, Murder in the Bayou, and The Innocent Man, then you’ll love The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns.

THE BEST NEW TRUE CRIME STORIES: SMALL TOWNS
Contributors include Alexandra Burt, Christian Cipollini, Edward Butts, Deirdre Pirro, and Tom Larsen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642502817

Mitzi Szereto

Mitzi Szereto is an internationally acclaimed author and anthology editor of fiction and nonfiction books spanning multiple genres. She has written numerous novels within her The Best True Crime Stories series. She's also written crime fiction, gothic fiction, horror, cozy mystery, satire, sci-fi/fantasy, and general fiction and nonfiction. Her anthology, Erotic Travel Tales 2, is the first anthology of erotic fiction to feature a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Mitzi's Web TV channel "Mitzi TV" has attracted an international audience. The Web series segments have ranged from chats with Tiff Needell, Jimmy Choo, and her ursine sidekick, Teddy Tedaloo. Other on-screen credits include Mitzi portraying herself in the pseudo-documentary British film, "Lint: The Movie." She maintains a blog of personal essays at "Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto's Weblog." To learn more about Mitzi follow her on Twitter and Instagram @mitziszereto or visit her website at mitziszereto.com.

Book preview

Praise for The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns

Here be monsters! This brilliant collection of gruesome small-town misdeeds spanning a century and four continents will have you running for the comfort and safety of the big city.

—Peter Houlahan, author of Norco ’80

"Having written about famous serial killers, as well as murders that occur in small towns, I can tell you that some of the most shocking murders often take place in small towns, small communities, and places so remote that most of the world will never hear about them. However, that’s not the case for those reading The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns, as they’re in for an eye-opening excursion into the world of murder, often committed by the neighbors and friends of those who live in these small towns. Without question, it’s a book you won’t soon forget!"

—Kevin M. Sullivan, author of Through an Unlocked Door: In Walks Murder

Mitzi Szereto has assembled a group of today’s brightest and best authors for this truly extraordinary anthology. Brilliant!

—Dan Zupansky, author and host of True Murder

Remember the saying ‘The devil is in the details’? Well, it’s small towns that deal in details as they unfold in scary, thrilling, and sometimes gruesome fashion. Mitzi Szereto’s new true crime anthology is filled with the devil and the details—great stories and fantastic writing. After reading this book, you will look at your neighbors in a whole new way… Or, perhaps never again!

—Bob Batchelor, cultural historian and author of The Bourbon King: The Life and Crimes of George Remus, Prohibition’s Evil Genius

Mitzi Szereto has compiled another exciting true crime anthology and what sets this apart from the usual examination of horrific crimes is the fact that the authors wrote about gruesome crimes committed in more rural communities. She found stories that look deeper into each crime to reveal the community that spawned the criminals and how that community reacted. A very thought-provoking compilation in the true crime milieu.

—Gary Jenkins, mob author and host of the popular mob podcast, Gangland Wire

Praise for The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers

In this new anthology, editor Mitzi Szereto collects some of the day’s very best true crime writing focused on one (troubling, fascinating, compelling) strand of the crime world: serial killers.

—CrimeReads

The latest collection of true crime stories compiled by Mitzi Szereto will more than satisfy those crime writers and readers amongst us who have that voyeuristic fascination for crime in all its ugly perspectives. From the virtually crime-free, ultra-respectable suburbs of Japan to the mean streets of South America where life is cheap; from the peaceful, but forever-tainted, English cathedral town of Gloucester to a Native Indian reservation in Minneapolis; from the fjords of Norway to the idyll of a Midwest farm in the USA, this book travels the world, examining the history and psychology of some of the world’s most gruesome serial killers.

—Robin Bowles, Australia’s true crime queen

True crime addicts will devour this book. The portraits of these psychopaths will mesmerize and horrify everyone who reads it.

—Aphrodite Jones, bestselling true crime author

This is by far the best book about serial killers I’ve ever read—and I’ve probably read more than is good for my mental health. The writers each have unique insights—sometimes because they have encountered the killers they describe, always because they can get further into the unfathomable minds of the killers through their sensitivity. Chilling, very moving (those poor victims), but above all, essential reading.

—Peter Guttridge, critic and crime fiction author

This compelling collection of serial killer stories is more than its beautifully told parts—it adds up to a clear and startling portrait of murder as an addiction and the very human demons that haunt the lives of killers and victims alike.

—Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-Age New York

An engrossing and multi-faceted anthology for a new era of true crime writing. This fascinating collection goes beyond the procedural to raise important questions about how man’s darkest impulses both threaten and consume us—as individuals and as a culture.

—Piper Weiss, author of You All Grow Up and Leave Me

"The stories in The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers provide insight into a compulsion that’s unfathomable to the average person. Can’t get enough true crime? This thought-provoking, highly readable collection will scratch that itch."

—Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger

The Best

New True Crime

Stories

Small Towns

The Best

New True Crime

Stories

Small Towns

Edited by Mitzi Szereto

Coral Gables

Copyright © 2020 by Mitzi Szereto

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

Cover Illustration: © Debra Millet/shutterstock.com

Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

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The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020934387

ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-280-0, (ebook) 978-1-64250-281-7

BISAC category code TRU002000, TRUE CRIME / Murder / General

Printed in the United States of America

The accounts in this book are true and accurate to the best of our knowledge. They may contain some speculation by the author(s) and opinions/analyses from psychology and criminology experts. This book is offered without guarantee on the part of the editor, authors, or publisher. The editor, authors, and publisher disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

Contents

Introduction

Snowtown

Anthony Ferguson

A Tragedy in Posorja: When People’s Justice Goes Horribly Wrong

Tom Larsen

About a Boy

C L Raven

Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic

Edward Butts

I Kill for God

Mitzi Szereto

The Summer of the Fox

Mark Fryers

Who Killed Gabriele Schmidt: The True Story and

the Mystery Surrounding a Forgotten Murder

Alexandra Burt

Bullets and Balaclavas: The Long, Cold Orkney Shooting

Charlotte Platt

The Black Hand and Glass Eye of Earlimart:

A Killer’s Perspective

Christian Cipollini

Crime Has Come to Penal!

Iris Leona Marie Cross

The Voodoo Preacher

David Brasfield

La Bella Elvira: Murder in the Tuscan Hills

Deirdre Pirro

The Doctor, the Dentist, and the Dairyman’s Daughter

Paul Williams

In the Home of the Cannibal

Joe Turner

Nameless in Van Diemen’s Land

Stephen Wade

References for The Summer of ‘the Fox’ 

About the Editor

About the Contributors

Introduction

Small towns. We imagine peaceful, close-knit hamlets untainted by the dangers of the big city. We conjure up postcard images of picturesque town squares, parades down Main Street, bake sales, church socials. Words such as safe, friendly, and wholesome come to mind. Life is unhurried in small towns. Everyone has time to stop and chat. There’s a strong sense of community, a sense of trust. These are places where people look out for each other. Small towns symbolize the values of the past, the good old days when neighbor helped neighbor and people and property were treated with respect, and no one had to worry about locking doors.

Unlike the anonymity of big-city life, everyone knows each other in a small town. People’s lives are open books: their histories, tragedies, scandals, and joys known to all. In the words of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does. Indeed, it’s hard to keep a secret when everyone knows your business, though some do, especially secrets of a darker variety.

Because sometimes the postcard image is tarnished by a dirty fingerprint.

Small towns might give the impression of being safe, but are they really? According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some towns in the USA with lower populations have a higher violent crime rate than large urban areas such as Detroit, Michigan. In fact, violent crime is actually on the increase in some smaller American rural communities, even rising above the national average. Statistics Canada has also reported similar findings. And it appears that these statistics aren’t exclusive to North America either; small towns in other countries have shown similar patterns as well. So, is the small-town ideal simply a myth?

The sad fact is, criminality can be found wherever human beings can be found. Be it spree killings, drug violence, sexual assault, vigilante justice, juvenile delinquency, property crime, robbery, or murder, bad things can and do happen in small towns all over the world—and they have for generations. No place is immune.

The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns brings together all-new accounts of true crime from around the globe and from various time frames. The international group of writers in this anthology have scraped off the small-town veneer to get to the real story behind the idealized postcard image. In this book, we learn about the crimes and the individuals who commit them. But we also learn about the impact these crimes have had on their communities, often leaving behind an unwanted legacy that, even with the passage of time, is still in place today.

I invite you to immerse yourself in this second volume in my true crime series. I’m sure you will come away from the experience with some fresh insight into the stories behind the headlines, as well as discover true crime cases you might never even have heard about. My contributors and I have worked together to make this book a worthwhile successor to The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers. I look forward to continuing the series and providing true crime readers with the best original content the genre has to offer!

Mitzi Szereto

Snowtown

Anthony Ferguson

I remember a sense of eeriness and palpable shame. A few stray locals eyeballing us suspiciously as we rolled down the main street, windows down, past the disused bank where they found the acid-filled barrels.

Where they found the bodies.

December 1999. It lingers in the memory. Roasting hot. Like Australian summers always are. A dry, scorching, unforgiving, relentless heat. I was moving from the Australian capital city of Canberra, back across the desert 3,718 kilometers (2,310 miles), to my hometown of Perth, Western Australia.

Just for fun, I decided to forgo the airlines and drive my car across the Nullarbor Plain, that vast, flat, empty, dry expanse that divides our major cities, east and west. My Perth-based buddy Scott flew across and came along for the ride. I mapped it out as a comfortable nine-day drive, stopping every night to rest and refuel.

The subsequent peripatetic journey went off without a hitch, bar one punctured tire, which I changed on the edge of the desert highway, while Scott kept watch to make sure a passing road train didn’t dissect my legs as they jutted out from under the car.

We took a few detours here and there to do some sightseeing. One such detour stands out to this day.

South Australia has an unfair reputation as the serial killer capital of Australia. It is their misfortune to have experienced quite an eclectic collection of serial murders over the decades. Perhaps none more bizarre than the ones that ended in the tiny northern town of Snowtown, population 467 (according to the last national census taken in 2016), some 152 kilometers (ninety-four miles) north up the A1 National Highway from the quaint capital city of Adelaide, known as the city of churches.

The case broke and made national and global headlines in May 1999. Eight murder victims found in six plastic barrels in a disused bank on the main street of sleepy Snowtown. When it was over, there were twelve bodies in total and four perpetrators in the most prolific case of serial murder in Australian history to date.

The murders really started in 1992 and weaved their way toward Snowtown down a long, twisted road. The perpetrators were John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and James Vlassakis. A fourth person, Mark Haydon, was later implicated in helping to dispose of the bodies.

There was no real reason for the murders, although an effort was made to use some of the victims’ identities to access social security (unemployment) payments and bank accounts. The victims were all known to the killers, all friends or casual acquaintances.

John Bunting was the ringleader in the killings. A former abattoir worker who professed a hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals, and who, like many ignorant people, thought they were one and the same. He accused many of the victims of these supposed sins. Like many individuals who become serial killers, Bunting had a childhood filled with neglect and abuse. Sexual abuse, in his case. No doubt it was the shame from the memory of it that led him to develop sociopathic tendencies, to detect weakness in others and exploit it. To hate anyone he suspected of being a deviant. History would show that Bunting’s psychopathic behavior and delight in torture increased as the cooling-off period between the murders decreased.

Robert Wagner, another damaged individual with a history of childhood abuse, was a neighbor Bunting befriended before the murders started. Mark Haydon was another neighbor roped in later down the path. James Vlassakis was the son of one of Bunting’s de facto lovers.

The murder spree itself was long and convoluted, a tale tinged with poverty, neglect, ignorance, addiction, and despair. Let’s start at the beginning to get a chronological understanding of how this whole mess transpired.

John Bunting had a terrible upbringing. Born in Queensland in 1966, at the age of eight he was sexually assaulted and beaten up by a friend’s older brother. Naturally this had an indelible effect on his psyche, as the incident was suppressed and never treated. In his early twenties, Bunting found work in an abattoir, where he derived great pleasure in slaughtering animals.

By the early nineties, Bunting was married but estranged from his wife, Veronica. They had no children. He moved into a rental property in Salisbury North, thirty-five kilometers (twenty-two miles) north of Adelaide, where he befriended two of his neighbors, Barry Lane and Robert Wagner. He quickly formed a bond with the two, using his domineering personality to get into their heads.

He impressed on them his hatred of pedophiles and homosexuals. This despite the fact that Lane was a practicing homosexual himself. The three social outcasts were united by poverty and unemployment.

Wagner had a very troubled upbringing, suffering at the hands of a violent stepfather. Lane was a crossdresser who called himself Vanessa. He groomed Wagner as a thirteen-year-old, and the two began a relationship. Lane was initially excused by Bunting because of his links to Wagner, who was totally under Bunting’s spell.

When they weren’t hanging around at Bunting’s ramshackle rental property listening to his anti-gay-and-pedophile rants, Lane and Wagner were befriending a young neighbor named Clinton Tresize, who had recently moved into the area. Clinton was outgoing and flamboyant in nature. When they described him to Bunting, the latter asked to be introduced. Obviously believing that Tresize was a homosexual, and therefore a pedophile, Bunting invited him round for tea on August 31, 1992. At this point Bunting had reached the stage where his inner rage was ready to boil over. As the young man sat unsuspecting on a sofa, Bunting snuck up behind him and bashed his head in with a shovel.

The killer called his two mates over, and they put the body in a car and drove it to a remote farm, where they interred it in a shallow grave. Despite Clinton’s sister attempting to file a missing persons report, most people thought he had willingly disappeared to start a new life. A report would not be filed until his mother did so three years later. Clinton Tresize’s skeletal remains were discovered on August 16, 1994. It would be another five years before he was officially identified.

In the months after this first murder, Bunting roped another gullible neighbor, Mark Haydon, into his cabal of misfits. Around this time, Bunting found himself a new sexual partner, Elizabeth Harvey, a divorcee. She moved into Bunting’s place with her two sons from a previous marriage, Troy Youde and James Vlassakis. Both boys had been sexually abused by their father, and Troy, the older brother, had also sexually abused James. Bunting quickly asserted his will over James, seeing in him another vulnerable, damaged soul to exploit.

Ray Davies was a twenty-six-year-old disabled pensioner living in a caravan not far from Bunting’s place. In December of 1995, he was falsely accused by his landlady of molesting a local child. Word got around the community, and it was a good enough excuse for Bunting to fly into a psychopathic rage. Bunting and Wagner dragged Davies into a car and drove him into the bush, where they gave him a severe beating. Then they took him back to Bunting’s house, where Bunting, Wagner, and Elizabeth Harvey tortured him and strangled him to death with some automotive jumper cables. As he grew more comfortable with the act of murder, Bunting started to get into the humiliation and torture of his victims, orchestrating his minions in how to do it and reveling in his power over life and death. He goaded Elizabeth into stabbing the already-dying victim.

Davies’s body was buried in a shallow grave in the backyard of Bunting’s house. He was not reported missing.

Bunting then met another woman who fell under his psychopathic spell. Suzanne Allen started to hang around his group of misfits, and the two quickly became lovers. Over time Bunting grew tired of her sexual demands, and, in November 1996, Allen disappeared. Years later, her dismembered body would be found in a shallow grave buried in Bunting’s backyard at the Salisbury North property, but her actual cause of death was never established. Bunting would claim that he and Wagner found her dead from a suspected heart attack and dismembered and disposed of her body so they could continue to claim her social security payments.

In 1996, Bunting, with Elizabeth Harvey and her two teenage sons in tow, moved one hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) inland to the big country town of Murray Bridge. He kept in contact with Robert Wagner. By this stage, Bunting had fallen deeper into his obsession with outing and disposing of people among his casual acquaintances who he had convinced himself were pedophiles. He stuck a diagram on his kitchen wall with a list of names, linking them to imaginary crimes. He was also motivated by the ease of accessing their social security benefits.

In September 1997, Wagner alerted Bunting to the presence of a young homosexual he had recently befriended in Salisbury North. Nineteen-year-old Michael Gardiner was another youth with a history of neglect and abuse. He was just starting to get his life together after coming out as gay. An unfortunate but probably innocent turn of events (involving Gardiner playing a game of chase with one of the children of a woman Wagner was having an affair with) led to false accusations of abuse, and of course gave Bunting all the excuse he needed.

Bunting and Wagner abducted Gardiner and took him to a shed in the backyard of Bunting’s rental house. There they abused, tortured, and strangled him to death. They then hacked off his hands and threw the body into an acid-filled barrel in the shed.

Bunting next turned his attention to Barry Lane, who he had only tolerated because of his prior relationship with Wagner. Lane was in a new relationship with a younger man, eighteen-year-old Thomas Trevilyan. They still associated with Wagner.

Bunting heard that Lane had told a casual acquaintance about his involvement in the original murder of Clinton Tresize and decided it was his turn to be dealt with. In October 1997, Bunting, Wagner, and Trevilyan, who had been roped into Bunting’s ideology, cornered Lane at his house and subjected him to hours of torture and abuse. Bunting forced Lane to call and berate his own mother and tell her he was moving away to Queensland and to never contact him again. Growing ever more perverted, Bunting used pliers to crush Lane’s toes before he instructed Wagner to strangle him while he and Trevilyan held him down. Lane’s body was later dismembered and stuck in a barrel of acid in Bunting’s shed.

Lane’s disappearance was reported to the police by a female friend ten days later—the same friend he had told about the murder of Clinton Tresize. However, the recording of Lane’s message to his mother put them off the trail. They assumed Lane had just moved away.

After Lane’s murder, Trevilyan moved in with Wagner and his girlfriend. The youth was concerned for his own safety, and he confided to a cousin his involvement in Lane’s murder. Bunting and Wagner were also concerned that the mentally unstable youth would give them away, so, in November 1997, the two of them abducted Trevilyan, took him into the remote Adelaide Hills, and staged a fake suicide by hanging him from a tree.

The next victim was Gavin Porter, a friend of James Vlassakis’s. By early 1998, still living in Bunting’s house with his mother and brother Troy, James had become addicted to heroin. Porter was a fellow addict who James invited to move into the house. A fatal move, as Bunting had suddenly decided to add drug addicts to his hate list. After befriending Porter and obtaining his bank and social security details, Bunting and Wagner tortured and strangled him in April 1998, storing his body in a barrel in the shed out back of Bunting’s house in Murray Bridge, along with the others.

At this point, Bunting showed Vlassakis the bodies in the barrels, traumatizing the young man enough to force him to take part in his quest to rid the world of the type of people he personally despised. Next to die, and the perfect victim to introduce James to the art of murder, was his own half-brother, Troy Youde.

Bunting convinced James that he needed to avenge himself for the sexual abuse he had suffered at Troy’s hands. In August 1998, Bunting, Wagner, and Vlassakis armed themselves with jack handles and other makeshift