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The Veil - A True Crime Podcast with Ryan Wolf
E05 | The Snowtown 'Barrel Bodies' Murders
In the late 1990s, the quiet South Australian town of Snowtown became the unlikely epicentre of Australia’s most infamous serial murder case. Behind the doors of an abandoned bank, police uncovered six plastic barrels. Inside were the acid-preserved remains of eight people — men and women who had been strangled, tortured, mocked, and discarded by John Bunting, Robert Wagner, and their small circle of accomplices.
Over seven years, twelve lives were taken. Victims included neighbours, friends, even family. Some were killed for their sexuality, some for their disability, some simply for being inconvenient. At trial, jurors were confronted with not only photographs and forensic evidence, but also tapes — audio recordings of victims being humiliated and begging for mercy while their killers laughed.
The Veil pulls listeners inside the full story: Bunting’s twisted rise from a childhood of cruelty to self-styled leader; the spider’s web chart that mapped out his hatred; the growing group of followers who became entangled in his violence; and the police operation that finally exposed what lay hidden in the barrels.
But Snowtown is more than a catalogue of murders. It is about betrayal, complicity, and the fragility of trust in the most ordinary of places. It is about how prejudice can mask cruelty, and how silence can allow horror to thrive.
Behind every closed door is another veil. In Snowtown, when it was torn open, the truth was almost too grotesque to comprehend.
While some dramatic license is taken during the retelling of these stories, but you can be sure that these true crime stories are all based 100% on real events and facts.
If you would like to suggest a case, you can message us via our website at www.brevityplus.com
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This podcast is researched, and written by the Brevity Studios team using AI tools, and is narrated in its entirety by - Ryan Wolf.
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19. E19 | The Man on the Hill - The Koiterangi Incident
40:44||Season 1, Ep. 19In October 1941, a struggling West Coast farmer named Stanley Graham shot four police officers on his remote Koiterangi property, then vanished into the New Zealand bush. What followed was the largest manhunt in New Zealand history — hundreds of police, soldiers, and Home Guardsmen, aircraft overhead, a tank in the valley — all hunting one wounded man for thirteen days. By the time it ended, seven people were dead. This is the story of how a quiet farming community was torn apart, how a nation at war turned its attention inward, and how some crimes leave wounds that never fully close.
18. E18 | The Body in the Wych Elm
34:10||Season 1, Ep. 18In April 1943, four boys trespassing in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire, discovered a human skull inside a hollow wych elm. Police found an almost complete female skeleton, folded into the narrow trunk while the body was still warm. She was approximately thirty-five years old, five feet tall, and carried a cheap wedding ring. Nobody reported her missing. No suspect was ever charged. Then, in 1944, graffiti began appearing on walls across Birmingham: Who put Bella in the Wych Elm? The author was never identified. The case was officially closed in 2014. The remains have since been lost. The question endures.
17. E17 | The Body in the Copse - The Last Day of Shelley Morgan
43:21||Season 1, Ep. 17On a clear June morning in 1984, Shelley Morgan left her Bristol home with a camera, a commission, and a day full of plans. She never came back. Her body was found four months later in a rural Somerset copse, eight miles from where she was last seen. Fourteen stab wounds. Every belonging removed. No arrest in forty years. This is the story of a woman, a blue van, and a question that has never been answered.
16. E16 | The Enigma of the Dark - The Claremont Killings
38:10||Season 1, Ep. 16In 1996, three young women vanished from the same affluent Perth suburb within fourteen months. Sarah Spiers, Jane Rimmer, and Ciara Glennon were the last known victims of Australia's most expensive homicide investigation — a case that gripped an entire city for over two decades. This episode traces the crimes, the hunt, and the man who hid behind an ordinary life. Some cases get solved. Not all of them get answered.
15. E15 | The Girl in the Basement - Jon Benet Ramsey
35:47||Season 1, Ep. 15Six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in her family’s Boulder, Colorado home on Christmas Day, 1996. What followed was a baffling investigation marked by a ransom note, a compromised crime scene, and suspicion that shifted repeatedly between family members and unknown intruders. Decades later, despite forensic advances and renewed scrutiny, the case remains unresolved—an unsettling study in media pressure, investigative missteps, and the enduring question of what truly happened inside that house.
14. E14 | The Mystery of the Somerton Man
30:23||Season 1, Ep. 14In December 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide. He carried no identification. Clothing labels had been removed. Hidden in his pocket was a scrap of paper bearing the words Tamám Shud—“ended.” Investigators uncovered an unclaimed suitcase, a cryptic code, and a trail that led nowhere. The case stalled, then lingered, becoming one of Australia’s most enduring mysteries—defined not by what was discovered, but by what could not be explained.
13. E13 | Double Jeopardy - The Bowraville Murders
25:25||Season 1, Ep. 13The Bowraville murders refer to the deaths of three Aboriginal children in the NSW town of Bowraville in the early 1990s. Despite strong community advocacy and multiple investigations, only one accused was tried, acquitted, and no convictions followed, leaving families seeking justice decades later amid allegations of systemic investigative failures.
12. E12 | Streets of Blood - Jack The Ripper
43:38||Season 1, Ep. 12In the gas-lit slums of Victorian London, terror stalks the streets. Women are butchered with surgical precision. Bodies are left mutilated, posed, and abandoned in the shadows of Whitechapel. As panic spreads and the press fans the flames, police chase a killer who seems to vanish into the fog itself. This is the story of Jack the Ripper—his victims, his violence, and the city that bled while the world watched.
11. E11 | Mother - The Ed Gein Story
45:23||Season 1, Ep. 11Plainfield, Wisconsin was a quiet farming town where everyone knew everyone else. That’s why no one paid much attention to the man who lived alone on the old family property at the edge of town. Ed Gein was polite, soft-spoken, and harmless — or so it seemed. But when Bernice Worden vanished in 1957, the door to Gein’s world was forced open. What investigators found inside wasn’t just evidence of murder — it was the collapse of a mind shaped by isolation, devotion, and grief. This episode pulls back the silence surrounding Plainfield, and the horror it unknowingly lived beside.