Tag: paedophile

Mark Haydon, who was involved in Snowtown murders, being released from jail. SNOWTOWN (Justin Kurzel, 2011)

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SNOWTOWN is back in the news at the moment, due to one of the perpetrators being granted parole after serving his 25-year sentence. Mark Haydon was convicted of assisting John Bunting and Robert Wagner in the murders of 11 people, including his wife, between 1992 and 1999.

Haydon reportedly rented the abandoned state bank building at Snowtown in which the bodies were stored in barrels of acid.  A jury deadlocked on the charge that he was involved in the murders of his own wife, Elizabeth Haydon, and of Troy Youde, and he was never retried. His 25-year sentence was completed this year, and he will be freed into the community with no restrictions in May 2024 (unless the government succeeds in attempts to change the law to broaden the definition of a “high-risk offender”).

Above: the real Mark Haydon – then and now.

Relatives of the victims have long voiced their anguish and fear at any prospect of any of the perpetrators being released.

The film Snowtown is a recreation of this case, the most famous serial killer case in Australia (with the exception of the attempted genocide of the Indigenous population). A total of twelve victims were identified, and eight of the bodies were eventually found by police in barrels filled with acid, which were stored in an abandoned bank vault in the small town of Snowtown, in South Australia.

Although the press called this the “bodies in barrels” murders, it soon became known, to the sorrow of that little town, as THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS, even though only one of the murders had taken place there, the rest happening in the big city, Adelaide, between 1992 and 1999.

The final murder that took place in Snowtown, however, involved CANNIBALISM. We’ll have a look at that in this blog, although unfortunately the film doesn’t.

The film is a true Crime retelling, which means that none of the names have been changed to protect – anyone, and of course the dialogue has to be imagined to some extent. But we know a lot of what went on, and so did the film makers.

True Crime has been a popular genre for centuries, and transgressed the line between fiction and non-fiction in 1965, when Truman Capote released In Cold Blood, a “non-fiction novel”, relating or interpreting a 1959 Kansas murder. Modern versions of the genre extend beyond literature to films, podcasts, vodcasts and television shows. They tend to concentrate on the most sensationalistic cases and are grittily and brutally realistic in portraying the violence and gore.

In Australia, where this film originates, a survey found that some 44 percent of podcast listeners had listened to true crime podcasts, with an considerable proportion of them being women.

The protagonist of the film is Jamie Vlassakis, a teenager living with his single mother and two siblings. The mother’s boyfriend is a helpful sort of bloke who makes the kids dinner when mum has to go out, then strips them and takes photos of them for his own gratification. The mother deals quite effectively with this, beating him up and kicking him repeatedly, but soon a new man comes into their lives – John Bunting.

Bunting has a winning smile and a certitude that gets him into the family, and he takes Jamie under his wing. John also has a burning hatred of gay men and paedophiles, two rather different beasts whom he conflates into one evil figure. When Jamie tells him that he was raped by his older half-brother Troy, John tells Jamie he needs to “grow a pair” and take revenge. He involves Jamie in his plans to identify, capture and kill a range of people he considers monsters. He collects detailed information on a “spider wall” in his house. “Rock spider” is Australian slang for a paedophile.

But John Bunting has clearly not read Nietzsche:

He starts by involving Jamie in his plans to drive the erring boyfriend out of town. Jamie finds him in the garden, chopping up and mincing kangaroo body parts to toss onto the neighbour’s front door and sofa.

He involves Jamie in a raucous discussion of paedophile teachers, asking him what he thinks should be done with them. Jamie follows the fatal logic.

John takes Jamie under his wing, teaching him to ride a bike, shaving his head, showing him the spider wall, giving him a gun, and getting him to shoot John’s dog, a brutal blooding. When he introduces Jamie to the act of killing humans, there is also the accompanying deception: each victim is made to record a message that will be played on the answering phone of their loved ones. Jamie’s mum hears Troy say he hates her, and Jamie lies to her, letting her believe that forced call was true. Jamie goes off to doctors and government offices to collect payments, posing as the people they have killed. He doesn’t look happy about it, but he is sinking deeper and deeper into John’s machinations. After a while, collecting the government support payments becomes the motive as in the murder of Gary O’Dwyer; the vigilante pretext is forgotten. O’Dwyer invites the men to his place to watch him feed rats to his python, a process we see in slow motion in which the snake unhinges his jaw to swallow the prey whole, just as the men become unhinged in their growing lust to kill.

So John makes a man of Jamie, in the most toxic sense. He teaches him carnivorous virility – in order to be a man, you have to kill and eat. Not always the same carcass, but that does seem the logical consequence of the objectification of all victims.

The film traces the increasingly violent actions in which Jamie becomes involved, unwillingly at first, but totally under the control of John. He is made to watch them torture his half-brother Troy, who was earlier shown sodomising Jamie, and he finally steps in to finish the killing, tears rolling down his face, while John strokes his cheek and murmurs “good boy.”

Jamie is now a fully-fledged killer and a vigilante, not just an observer and helper the way Mark Haydon (the man currently being released on bail) is portrayed. Mark is a minor character, buying rubbish bags and digging holes for corpses, until near the end of the film, when he tells John he got into a fight with his wife, who called him a pussy. He told her what a big man he was – burying bodies. John brushes the story off, but we know she is next.

Although this murder is not shown in the film, evidence was given that Haydon saw his wife’s body and laughed. Her body was one of the ones found in barrels in the Snowtown bank building.

The final murder was Jamie’s half-brother (through a different father) David Johnson, whose only offence was his fastidiousness and unwillingness to go along with John’s rhetoric of violence. The final scene of the movie shows Jamie persuading David (one of the few wholesome characters in the film) to check out a computer supposedly offered for sale in Snowtown. They stop for a beer, they stop again so Jamie can urinate in a creek. He runs back to the car to accompany David to his death; the car is parked at a crossroads, clearly a symbol, a suggestion that Jamie, who is depicted as hating all the violence, could have chosen a different path at any time.

John Bunting, Australia’s most prolific serial killer, was convicted of eleven murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Robert Wagner, his main accomplice, was convicted of ten murders and sentenced also to life without parole. Mark Haydon was initially charged with two murders but was only convicted on five counts of assisting. The jury did not come to a decision on two murder charges against Haydon, and another charge of assisting murder, which never came to retrial.

More than 250 suppression orders originally prevented publication of the details of this case at the time. In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by the producers of the film Snowtown. Haydon was sentenced to 25 years, which he has now completed; he is back in the community on parole, with the head of the parole board saying he’s well behaved and poses no risk to the community. He has been moved to the Adelaide Pre-Release Centre – a low security facility where prisoners can participate in accompanied and unaccompanied leave, including for work and education. The usual conditions of parole apply (no binge drinking – yet), but he will be a free man in May 2024 when his sentence expires.  

Jamie, presented in the film as an unwilling and even sympathetic killer, pleaded guilty to four murders and provided testimony against the other men, in exchange for a lesser sentence. He testified about the cannibalism that is not shown in this film — that Bunting and Wagner hacked at David’s body to make sure it would fit in the barrel and then sliced off a sliver of flesh from the right thigh. They heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and handed it around. Jamie’s testimony was the only evidence police had that cannibalism had taken place, and was presented by his attorney as proof that he was fully cooperating and deserved a lighter sentence. In 2005, when Haydon’s murder charges were dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions, several suppression orders were lifted. These detailed the murder and cannibalism of the final victim, David Johnson.

Jamie Vlassakis was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years, which means it is possible he could be released on parole in 2025. He will be 45 years old.

The film is gritty and brutal, particularly the scenes of Jamie’s rape, and the torture of their victims. But it is compelling watching, and the acting and directing are quite brilliant, capturing the loss of innocence that starts with abuse and ends with brutality. Bunting’s early life reportedly was very rough; he said he enjoyed killing ants with acid, an idea he later transposed to those humans he saw as vermin. When he grew up, he worked at a slaughterhouse, where he would brag about slaughtering animals, saying that’s what he enjoyed the most. Later, when he moved in on Jamie’s family, he would kill cats and dogs and skin them while making Jamie watch. We see Jamie transform from the innocent teenager who stands around smoking at the start of the film to a shaven-headed killer, and even his little brother is shown with his head shaved, starting his short journey from childhood abuse to callousness.

The film is all about that loss of innocence. At an early age, these kids are introduced to poverty, abuse and violence that is a hallmark of violent, carnivorous society. Children famously love “animals” when they are little, recognising their own infant state of being helpless and unable to communicate, yet are socialised into carnivory by the peer pressure to conform and their recruitment into the ceaseless human war on nature. Animals, particularly the chattel slave animals generally referred to by their monetary value, “livestock”, are nothing and nobody. It is only a small step for John Bunting to assume the same about those he hunts, and so why would he flinch at eating them? It is the logical next step.

The film closes as Jamie shuts the door of the vault, trapping the unfortunate David Johnson with the killer gang. We don’t see the murder, or the frying pan. Unfortunately, that final step over the thin red line between humans and other animals appears to have been a bridge, or a meal, too far for this film.

From transphobia to cannibalism of children – with a side of Nazis

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The recent tour of Australia by British anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull— who also goes by the name of Posie Parker — added cannibalism to the culture wars already raging over transsexual rights.

Keen-Minshull organised a “Let Women Speak” tour of Australia and New Zealand, holding rallies in several cities to claim the push for transgender rights is “silencing”, endangering and discriminating against women.

There has been a lot said about Keen-Minshull, mostly debating her claim to be a warrior for women’s rights and accusing her of being an extremist, expressing views that are designed to be harmful to the transgender community. The rhetoric she uses is far more extreme than usually expressed in Australian politics, although it has become common in other countries, particularly the USA. She suggests, among other claims, that trans women are sexual predators who pose a safety threat to girls in female bathrooms. She describes gender affirmation healthcare as mutilation, and being transgender as a “fetish” — positions totally at odds with the views of experts who work with people who are transitioning. 

Keen-Minshull’s rally in Melbourne was attended by far-right extremists who performed Nazi salutes. Although organisers claimed the masked thugs had “gate-crashed” the event, a trans rights activist and TikTok star known online as LilahRPG said “everyone was just furious, seeing Nazis doing salutes uninterrupted and interacting with the TERFs.” TERF is an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist“.

This is one of the clearest indications that far-right social media is using the “gender-critical” movement to promote membership of their groups.

Keen-Minshull has made a series of videos (see Twitter message above) about “Grooming Gangs” – repeating unproven claims that a young girl in England was killed and eaten as kebab meat. These claims are then used as racist conspiracy theories, saying that the botched police investigation was in fact a cover-up of paedophile elites who, they say, control everything. Keen-Minshull says:

“What we know is that there’s grooming gangs in Telford. A young woman that never actually really made it to mainstream news, wasn’t a big story, was cut up and I think she was put into meat that was sold for human consumption. We know that there are vast numbers of men involved in these grooming gangs, and we know that there’s weird cover-up stuff going on, that only makes sense if the other people in power are also raping children.”

The case she is referring to seems to be the disappearance of 14-year-old Charlene Downes, who disappeared in Blackpool in north-west England in November 2003. Accusations were made of a child-grooming ring, which induced young girls into having sex in return for cigarettes, food and alcohol. At least one newspaper was quick to claim that investigations had been “hampered by political correctness”, because the girls were white and the perpetrators non-white.

Two men, Ilyad Albattikh and Mohammed Reveshi, were tried in May 2007—the first for Downes’ murder, the other for helping dispose of the body—but the jury failed to reach a verdict. A re-trial was scheduled, but in April 2008 the accused were released because of concerns about serious errors in the evidence compiled by Lancashire Constabulary, who were chastised for their inept handling of the case.

The prosecution had claimed Charlene’s body had been cut up and minced into kebabs in a Blackpool takeaway called “Funny Boys”.

At the time of the trial, the court was told the fast food shop owner had “joked” that Charlene Downes had been chopped up and put into kebabs that were sold to the public. 

There is a lot of racism involved in this story. White children being raped by men of colour is stated or implied in many of the reports, although there is little evidence to show that white offenders were not also involved. Many actual cases of the cannibalism of children indicate the opposite – that white men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Albert Fish prey on children of colour, because such missing children are less likely to be investigated by white detectives. Meanwhile, the Indian current affairs website OpIndia did not mince its words about the alleged mincing of the victim:

Groomed by Muslim gangs, minced into pieces, fed as kebabs

Of course, Ms Keen-Minshull did not invent the idea of using cannibalism as a weapon of dehumanisation (Christopher Columbus did that very successfully) or even as a part of the culture wars – recall the hate and scorn aimed at the New York Times when it suggested the “cannibalism has a time and a place… and others suggest that that time is now”.

Classical mythologies told of savage gods who ate their own children, and paranormal entities such as witches, who used body parts for their rituals. Such usages were not exclusively supernatural, with “blood libel” accusations that Jews were killing Christian children to use their blood for religious rituals and cannibalism dating back to the twelfth century, and being revived with nauseating regularity up to the present day.

QAnon has been very successful recruiting members in the US, partly based on accusing everyone from Hillary Clinton to a pizza shop owner of killing and eating children. The accusations are meant to dehumanise the alleged perpetrators, but usually end up doing the same to the victim. Poor little Charlene is now almost unknown, except as the “kebab meat girl”.

Lots more details of her case are available on YouTube investigations such as the one below, some of them are quite lurid.

Cannibal news April 2021: PAEDOPHILES AND CANNIBALS

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Cecil Maurice Mabb, 42, has pleaded guilty to assault and attempted abduction

The headline on the ABC News site on 14 April 2021 read:

“Man who abducted 5yo from campground wanted to eat her, court hears”

Cecil Maurice Mabb, 41, pleaded guilty to assaulting and abducting the girl from Montagu Campground, in Tasmania’s north west, on January 24.

The Prosecutor told the Burnie Supreme Court that the girl went on a bike ride with her four-year-old male friend while her family was pitching their tent at the site.

She said Mabb had parked his ute in isolated bushland near the campground before he grabbed the girl by her legs, threw her over his shoulder and then threw her in his car as she screamed.

The court was told Mabb also strangled the child, who later said she was not able to breathe or speak while his hands were around her neck.

The family was alerted by her young friend, who had been screaming at Mabb to let her go and told them “the man scared me … he got her.”

Another camper found the girl on the beach alone, about one kilometre from the family’s campsite.

Mabb called police shortly after the incident, telling them “it’s all bad … it’s a real emergency … I just tried to kidnap a child”.

Mabb has denied there was ever any intention of doing anything sexual with the girl, and the prosecution did not argue otherwise.

The court has heard he told police he “just needed company, someone to listen to me, someone to give me a cuddle”, and that the child reminded him of his granddaughter.

While in maximum security at Risdon Prison, Ms Prence said Mabb told prison staff his motivation for the abduction was to eat her, and that he had wanted to eat people since he was a child.

His solicitor told the court while he did say that, it was on the advice of fellow inmates, who told him to make his circumstances “as bad as possible” so he had greater access to medication and therapeutic help.

The court was told that between 1995 and 2003, Mabb had been sexually offending, in behaviour he described as “exploring his sexuality with behaviour that had been normalised”.

The headline in The Mercury was more direct:

“Paedophile snatches little girl so he ‘could eat her’”

They paint a different picture of the evidence, with the prosecutor saying:

“intelligence from Risdon Prison indicated Mabb had told staff he told police he was a paedophile because that was better than “what he really was”. He told staff he had taken the little girl so he could eat her.”

Defence counsel Hannah Phillips told the court was no evidence Mabb said those words in jail.

“My client told me he had been instructed by other inmates to make up stories and to make them as bad as possible to get better access to medication.”

Mabb will be sentenced next month for his admitted crimes of assault and attempted abduction. Meanwhile, the locals have decided their own sentence.

Mabb had bought land and set up a caravan and shed at Rosebery in 2019. Those structures have been burnt down since Mabb has been in custody following the attempted abduction.

The interesting point about this story is that the offender has pleaded guilty to what he did and will be sentenced accordingly. But the prurient media interest is not in what he did but in what he said: he said he had grabbed a little girl for a cuddle (?) and that he wanted to eat her. Neither was true, apparently – he wanted to get caught so he would get medicated by the state. Yet the headlines offered another charge: “Paedophile snatches little girl so he ‘could eat her’”. Someone who read that promptly burnt down his shed and caravan, in a form of rough justice.

Wikipedia tells us that paedophilia was first formally recognized and named in the late 19th century. Sigmund Freud was writing then, and knew all about the subject, but wrote in a letter to Marie Bonaparte in 1932 that incest and cannibalism are the two original prohibitions of mankind. If he read the papers today, he might scratch out incest (and decades of work) and substitute paedophilia.

But cannibalism is still right up there, in the top two headline grabbers, the gold medal for salacious scandal.