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them.
    In the early morning of the following day, police raided houses in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. Three men – John Bunting, twenty-seven-year-old Robert Joe Wagner and forty-year-old Mark Ray Haydon – were arrested and charged with the murder of an unknown person between 1 August 1993 and 20 May 1999. It was almost certain that more charges would be made as the investigation proceeded. They were remanded in custody until 2 July 1999.
    The media, of course, were having a field day, speculating wildly about the motives for the killings. Some suggested that the neo-Nazi links of one of the accused might provide the reason, while others posited that there might be psychosexual motives. To the police, however, it seemed clear that there was a financial motive behind them. They believed the answer lay in social security payments. The Australian agency responsible for these, analysed the list of missing persons provided by the police and discovered that a number had never been reported to them as missing or dead. Their payments, therefore, were still being issued and were being collected years after their real beneficiaries had disappeared.
    On 2 June, police raided another property in the northern suburbs and arrested nineteen-year-old James Spyridon Vlassakis. Vlassakis had met John Bunting when he was just fourteen after his mother moved in with him. He worshipped him and was entirely in thrall to Bunting’s overwhelming personality. He attempted to kill himself twice during his first week in custody, adding even more sensational elements to an already sensational case. For his own safety, they locked Vlassakis up in James Nash House, the South Australian Department of Correction's maximum security psychiatric clinic.
    Meanwhile, more houses were raided and searched, possibly as a result of information provided by Vlassakis.
    Six of the eight bodies found in the Snowtown bank vault had been identified by 3 June but the names were withheld. Furthermore, another body was still expected to be found. Police searched back through cold case files until they discovered that an as-yet unidentified corpse had been found by a local farmer in a field in the rural agricultural area of Lower Light, fifty kilometres north of Adelaide, on 16 August 1994. As DNA cross-matching was begun, police raided another two properties, one in Riverland, near the Murray River, the other to the north of Adelaide.
    The names of some of the dead began to be released to the media and the public, revealing a fascinating network of relationships with the accused. The Acting Police Commissioner stated that this was a group that ‘preys upon itself’.
    Forty-year-old Barry Lane was a convicted sex offender and transvestite who went under the name ‘Vanessa’. He had lived for eight years with one of the accused, Robert Wagner, at 1 Bingham Road in Salisbury North, just a street away from John Bunting’s house at Waterloo Corner Road, where bodies would later be found. Wagner would help to kill Lane.
    Lane had also had a relationship with Clinton Trezise whose disappearance had begun the investigation. John Bunting, for his part, was engaged to Gail Sinclair, sister of another victim found at the bank, Elizabeth Hayden, who was the wife of another accused man, Mark Hayden.
    The remains found at Lower Light were identified as those of Clinton Trezise. It was a significant breakthrough.
    The search for bodies was not over, however. On 23 June, the former address of John Bunting, on Waterloo Corner Road, was searched. Officers used ground-penetrating radar, developed from technology created by the British Army for finding land mines during the Falklands War. It had already proved its worth in criminal investigation during searches of the property owned by English serial killer, Fred West.
    A concrete slab, once covered by a rainwater tank, outside the house’s back door was smashed and the device was wheeled over the exposed earth. It showed that an