A man who helped cover up Australia’s worst serial killings will be let out of prison on parole, it has been announced.
South Australian Parole Board Presiding Member Frances Nelson said Mark Haydon’s move to a pre-release centre was a “stepping stone” into the community for the 65-year-old.
He was jailed almost 25 years ago over the “bodies in the barrels” case.
Nelson said they’re “confident he will comply with parole conditions”, saying his “behaviour has been excellent throughout his incarceration”.
Prisoners can go out to work and to see family but they have to return at a certain time.
He has been assessed as “low risk” for reoffending
He will be subject to electronic monitoring she said, to “give some reassurance to the community given the notoriety of his offences”.
While on parole he will also report to a community corrections officer, won’t be able to go to pubs, contact victims or communicate with the media.
The Snowtown murders are Australia’s worst serial killings, and Haydon was one of four people arrested in 1999 when the bodies of some of the 11 victims were found in barrels, in a disused bank vault, in the state’s mid-north.
Those barrels had also for a time been stored at Haydon’s northern Adelaide home, and among the victims was his own wife.
Haydon was jailed for at least 18 years for assisting John Bunting and Robert Wagner in seven of the 11 killings.
Nelson said she didn’t have a date yet for his move to the Adelaide pre-release centre.
From May 10, when Haydon’s sentence ends, he will be released into the community, Nelson said.
However, when asked how the families of the victims might feel, she said planned areas they don’t want him to live in had been noted.
“I imagine that these killings had the most dreadful effects on the families, they were callus they were cruel,” she said.
Haydon applied once for parole before, in 2017, but bosses thought he needed resocialisation at that time
Nelson said Haydon had been “drawn in” by John Bunting, who became his stepfather when he was 14, for fear of his life.
“At times he was worried he’d be the next victim and if he disclosed what he knew he would be killed,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said Bunting had shown “no empathy” during his own parole interviews.
“He has no insight into his offending, he’s quite proud of being a serial killer. He’s completely indifferent to the effects his crimes have had on anyone else,” Nelson said.
