Speaker 1: The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Speaker 1: Detective sy a side of life the average persons never
Speaker 1: exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
Speaker 1: For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
Speaker 1: That's what I did for a living. I was a
Speaker 1: homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
Speaker 1: I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
Speaker 1: The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
Speaker 1: from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
Speaker 1: and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some
Speaker 1: of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
Speaker 1: no one who comes in the contact with crime is
Speaker 1: left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into
Speaker 1: this world. Welcome to another episode of I Catch Killers.
Speaker 1: Today we're going to examine the murder investigation which captured
Speaker 1: the attention of the country. We're talking about the death
Speaker 1: of two campers in the Victorian Wilderness in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Our guest is Greg Hadri. Maybe you haven't heard of
Speaker 1: his name before, but I'm sure you would be aware
Speaker 1: of some of the crime projects he's worked on. Greg
Speaker 1: is a writer and producer. He was also involved in
Speaker 1: the Underbelly TV series. Greg is a friend of mine
Speaker 1: who have known for a long time, and he has
Speaker 1: turned his considerable talents to writing a book titled In
Speaker 1: the Dead of Night. The book is about the deaths
Speaker 1: of secret lovers Russell Hill and Carol Clay and inside
Speaker 1: the Painsaking police investigation to catch a killer who happened
Speaker 1: to be a Jet Star captain named Greg Lynn. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the investigation in detail and a
Speaker 1: lot of other things about crime in this country. Greg
Speaker 1: is a fascinating person, a good storyteller who understands crime
Speaker 1: better than most. Greg Hadrick, Welcome to our Catch Killers.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Gary. It's good to see you Greg.
Speaker 2: It's great to see you again too. Been a couple
Speaker 2: of years, Yes it has been. Yeah, always good to see.
Speaker 1: You well, no doubt you've been busy and yeah, no
Speaker 1: rest for the wicked, so to speak. No. I finished
Speaker 1: your book In the Dead of the Night, and I've
Speaker 1: got to say it is you've really encapsulated what the
Speaker 1: murder investigation is about, which is not surprising given the
Speaker 1: projects you've worked on before. But it's a fascinating story,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 2: It is and that was actually what drew me to it,
Speaker 2: that to be able to get inside a homicide investigation
Speaker 2: which was so difficult, and be able to bring an
Speaker 2: audience or readership inside that investigation, to give them the
Speaker 2: feeling of what it is like at each moment as
Speaker 2: they're going through it. It was the real incentive behind
Speaker 2: writing it.
Speaker 1: Well, you've done it very well, and you've traumatized the
Speaker 1: next homicide detective who was sitting reading the book and thinking,
Speaker 1: I'd love to get involved in this investigation, because it
Speaker 1: really started with nothing, nothing, which was unusual.
Speaker 2: What I've heard was that in this day and age,
Speaker 2: usually there's you know, people have phones on them, or
Speaker 2: there's CCTV not too far away, or there's you know
Speaker 2: someone it's someone close to the person involved, et cetera.
Speaker 2: There's places they can start the middle of the one
Speaker 2: and Gator Valley had no phone reception, there were no cameras,
Speaker 2: there was no one who knew Russell and Carroll anywhere
Speaker 2: within two hundred kilometers of the site. They had no
Speaker 2: idea where to start.
Speaker 1: It was a classic murder mystery, wasn't it. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: we'll talk in detail and we'll take it through chronologically
Speaker 1: how the investigation evolved. But it brought back old school
Speaker 1: detective thinking. Yeah, little red flags, little indicators that you
Speaker 1: couldn't hang a case on it, but you're thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: this doesn't quite add up. That's why I found fascinating
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's and a lot of that was circumstantial,
Speaker 2: but thread by thread they built it up. And the
Speaker 2: way I heard it described is they felt they needed
Speaker 2: to get enough threads that you couldn't break the rope.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way of a good way of describing.
Speaker 1: I think there was something in your book and one
Speaker 1: of the detectives we're talking that's like trying to put
Speaker 1: the jigsaw together when you haven't got the pitch.
Speaker 2: You haven't got the cover, which I thought was a good.
Speaker 1: Analogy and sort of added to it. What is it
Speaker 1: you think about true crime that fascinates fascinates people? Look,
Speaker 1: there's a few answers.
Speaker 2: And because I've puzzled about this for now, you know,
Speaker 2: fifteen odd years, tight years, and I think there's one
Speaker 2: aspect is to feel safe, people feel they need to
Speaker 2: understand exactly what happened, and if they do understand what
Speaker 2: the motivation was, what drove that particular murder to happen,
Speaker 2: crime to happen. Then they can go, oh, well, I
Speaker 2: can avoid, I can feel safe. I know that wouldn't
Speaker 2: happen to me because of A, B and C. I
Speaker 2: think there's an element of that to it. I think
Speaker 2: for a lot of people, it is so tied up
Speaker 2: with morality, with what is right and wrong, what is
Speaker 2: good and bad? What is punishment? What are consequences?
Speaker 1: And that affects all.
Speaker 2: Our daily lives with how we deal with other people,
Speaker 2: and true crime just heightens that, takes that and puts
Speaker 2: it on steroids.
Speaker 1: Well, it makes you question your own morals and values,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. It does when you're looking at how the
Speaker 1: impact that crime has in society. Yeah, what about yourself?
Speaker 1: What's your interest in? And we will talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about your career before we get into the murder investigation.
Speaker 1: But you, in your professional career have covered a lot
Speaker 1: of crime stories and delivered it on TV and different forums.
Speaker 2: That's right, And I think what's kept me interested? I
Speaker 2: mean there's a and again it's no one simple answer.
Speaker 2: There is a strand where it's commercially rewarding to do
Speaker 2: true crime because you know you have an audience, but
Speaker 2: beyond that, for me, it did have to do with morality.
Speaker 2: I mean, I've done quite a few legal shows as well,
Speaker 2: and they're fairly close. You're always dealing with, you know,
Speaker 2: what is suffering?
Speaker 1: How do you relieve it?
Speaker 2: How do society become a safer place for human beings
Speaker 2: to live in? Those big questions about you know, where
Speaker 2: are we safe and what do we have to do
Speaker 2: to make ourselves safe? I think are constantly on the
Speaker 2: top of everyone's mind.
Speaker 1: Okay, your career told us a little bit about yourself
Speaker 1: before we delve into the murder.
Speaker 2: Well, I was at university before media communication courses really existed,
Speaker 2: So I did English honors and then came out not sure,
Speaker 2: you know, I wanted to use that in some creative way,
Speaker 2: whether that was going to be authorship, which has taken
Speaker 2: me thirty five forty years to do, or journalism or whatever.
Speaker 2: And it just so happened that the first paying job
Speaker 2: by God was in television, and I was lucky. I
Speaker 2: seemed to suit it and it worked well. New doors
Speaker 2: kept on opening up, it never got boring, and so
Speaker 2: I stayed there initially. It's sort of the career has
Speaker 2: been in two big parts. The first fifteen twenty years
Speaker 2: was working on other people shows as a freelance writer
Speaker 2: in story rooms, et cetera, et cetera. And then the
Speaker 2: second half has been mostly show running the shows that
Speaker 2: I want to make, starting with my husband Killer the
Speaker 2: Telling Movie for ten, going through Mary Bryant, Society Murders, MDA,
Speaker 2: through to the Underbelly for franchise Janet King and they
Speaker 2: were they sort of crossed over Pine Gap and then
Speaker 2: Human Era was just last year.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you your resumey of shows that you've been
Speaker 1: involved in is quite impressive. And when they talk about
Speaker 1: unemployed writers or actors, you seem to keep yourself busy.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been like I guess, yeah, there's an element
Speaker 2: of luck, and I guess an element of being in
Speaker 2: the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, the Underbelly TV series, and obviously it's personal
Speaker 1: to me, and we'll talk about the Underbelly badness, but
Speaker 1: the Underbelly series, the series one with the Melbourne Underworld
Speaker 1: that that really, I don't know, it seemed to really exploded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was that was an absolute breakout hit. And
Speaker 2: that's the I've been involved with many successful shows, and
Speaker 2: there's what It's one thing being a success, it's another
Speaker 2: thing being being a real breakout hit, which it was
Speaker 2: in Australia.
Speaker 1: And we.
Speaker 2: That the genesis of that first season of Underbelly was
Speaker 2: really because Eddie Maguire had absolute control Channel nine for
Speaker 2: about six months.
Speaker 1: And he was fascinated by it. He was he was
Speaker 1: a broady boy.
Speaker 2: He knew that world. He always thought it would be
Speaker 2: hugely popular. You know, a lot of other people weren't
Speaker 2: quite so sure when we when we first started it
Speaker 2: was I was lucky that one of the one of
Speaker 2: the cops who under the radar helped me with Society
Speaker 2: Murders was then on taskwas Paranha. So the link to
Speaker 2: Underbelly from Channel nine's point of view was Andrew Ruhlan
Speaker 2: and John Sylvester, and the link from my point of
Speaker 2: view was the operational cops in taskwors Parana who we
Speaker 2: had some help with.
Speaker 1: They really helped well again watching it and it sort
Speaker 1: of changed the way a story was told. And like
Speaker 1: the Melbourne Underworld murders, that series encapsulated the way it's
Speaker 1: reported factually is one thing that then seeing the characters
Speaker 1: play out and the personalities and yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: world of crime that I sort of understood, like that
Speaker 1: some of them are larger than life without glorifying them,
Speaker 1: that's just the way they are.
Speaker 2: And you know, Carl Williams was larger than life even
Speaker 2: though he walked around in track he's and made a
Speaker 2: red rooster. Yeah, and yet he was Everyone liked him,
Speaker 2: and he became the boss of that gang. And so
Speaker 2: order you to sort of present that and go, look,
Speaker 2: this is part of our society. These people are living
Speaker 2: next door to you.
Speaker 1: I think it also played out how things can escalate
Speaker 1: in that world, like it was a tit for tat
Speaker 1: and it just kept going bigger and bigger. It was crazy.
Speaker 1: I remember one sitting down talking to you one time,
Speaker 1: and we won't name the name of the person, but
Speaker 1: I reference this because I think it's quite funny where
Speaker 1: one of the villains that you were portraying on their
Speaker 1: approached you and you might recall it, but it stuck
Speaker 1: with me that said, I don't do litigation through the courts, yes,
Speaker 1: And I thought that's one of the most intimidating threats. Well,
Speaker 1: how else are you going to do litigation? Basically telling
Speaker 1: you you better portray me properly. Yeah, did you read?
Speaker 1: But that was a real gangster way of saying things,
Speaker 1: isn't it.
Speaker 2: It was yeah, yeah, and you know, with a smile,
Speaker 2: and yet you go, I can see you smiling, but.
Speaker 1: That very very chilling. Yes, well, you came crashing into
Speaker 1: my life with Underbelly badness, and it'd be amiss of
Speaker 1: me if I didn't raise it, because I think it
Speaker 1: had an impact on my life. People can judge whether
Speaker 1: it's a good impact or a bad impact, but how
Speaker 1: our world's collided with that. I think you were speaking
Speaker 1: to New South Wales Police. It was on the back
Speaker 1: of a couple of other Underbelly series and you approached
Speaker 1: senior Police and said, we want to cover a story
Speaker 1: where the cops are getting and I think the one
Speaker 1: before that was corruption in the Cross and you wanted
Speaker 1: to show that the cops and I remember one of
Speaker 1: the first conversations I had with you about it when
Speaker 1: it was approved by Senior Police, said we want to
Speaker 1: delve into your private life, and I think I responded
Speaker 1: to you, well, you know, I'm divorced, and I saw
Speaker 1: you and some of the other writers seeing there going
Speaker 1: well that's good and then I had a relationship with
Speaker 1: a lady that I met at a murder trial fantastic
Speaker 1: serial killer, and I had a relationship with someone I
Speaker 1: work with and they go, perfect, we don't need to
Speaker 1: embellish great television. So that it made me go home
Speaker 1: and reflect on my private life. But look, I was
Speaker 1: proud of what we did on that that yeah, and
Speaker 1: when I say well, it was very much a team
Speaker 1: effort on an investigation of that scale, and the impact
Speaker 1: that had on me the Underbelly Badness series was that
Speaker 1: I sort of put the target on my back within
Speaker 1: my own organization but also out on the street. That yeah,
Speaker 1: you certainly changed the way I went about went about things, and.
Speaker 2: That was our I mean, if you if you backtrack
Speaker 2: to the first and I think Badness was that's one
Speaker 2: of the ones I'm most proud of as well. I
Speaker 2: thought we did. You know, it was a very good
Speaker 2: show and it did very very well because there was
Speaker 2: a lot of emotional connection to all of the characters
Speaker 2: in that the goodies and the badies, because of the
Speaker 2: depth we put into that characterization. If you go back
Speaker 2: to the to the famous first aes of Funderbilly the
Speaker 2: Crims in that were probably more complex than the cops.
Speaker 2: Part of that was Victoria Police didn't want us to
Speaker 2: use the real police, and for the whole host of
Speaker 2: operational reasons, but the effect of that is that the
Speaker 2: police are just a little more two dimensional than the
Speaker 2: crims are. And we were going, but these guys are
Speaker 2: doing great stuff for society, they should be the heroes
Speaker 2: more than the crims. So we were wanting to do
Speaker 2: one where actually we were talking about real police and
Speaker 2: showing them as complex people as well as the crims.
Speaker 2: And that was I think the difference between Badness and
Speaker 2: that first series.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and look, yeah I was confronting as it was.
Speaker 1: I think I was in the fetal position, sucking the
Speaker 1: thumb watching the first episode. You asked me if I
Speaker 1: want to see it before it came out, and I thought, no,
Speaker 1: some plausible denying ability, but that is the price that
Speaker 1: you pay with policing. And yeah, I'm not ashamed of
Speaker 1: what my life is, but it's played out warts and
Speaker 1: all and the impact that has and I think it
Speaker 1: gave the public an understanding of what it takes to
Speaker 1: take and the emotions. And you guys spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time with us and you saw the emotional rollercoaster.
Speaker 1: You were on the high then, you know, yeah, just chaotic,
Speaker 1: the chaotic, chaotic life and.
Speaker 2: Yet ultimately victorious in that case against some you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of badness.
Speaker 1: Yeah well and yeah, well it was. It turned out
Speaker 1: to be a great investigation and one that I'm proud
Speaker 1: of and I made a good friend from it. Matt
Speaker 1: Nabel who You've got to play me? And I think
Speaker 1: you picked the right person. We're good friends and he
Speaker 1: got because that was my When you approach and everyone
Speaker 1: is this way, and I don't care what they say,
Speaker 1: but when you say, oh, they're going to do a
Speaker 1: TV show on you're a movie or whatever, the first
Speaker 1: question you want to ask is who's going to play me?
Speaker 1: But I was trying to be too cool for that
Speaker 1: and just oh, yeah, no, that's cool. And when you
Speaker 1: put Matt in front of me and we got to meet,
Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, he's going to represent me the way
Speaker 1: I think I should or would like to get a
Speaker 1: great job. Yeah, but both of you. It was an
Speaker 1: interesting experience. Another show that you worked on that people
Speaker 1: here might be interested was Crownie's. Yeah, that was taking
Speaker 1: us into the court world. It did, but It actually
Speaker 1: began with the Crime World. It began because we did
Speaker 1: the telemovie adaptation of Society Murders, and the book of
Speaker 1: Society Murders was written by Hillary Bonnie who had been
Speaker 1: a solicitor in the DPP and Victoria and you know,
Speaker 1: it was her suggestion that, you know, it'd be a
Speaker 1: great setting for a TV show. But as well as
Speaker 1: the solicitors, we needed, you know, the barristers that they
Speaker 1: and the Crown prosecutors that they worked for. So it
Speaker 1: was a combination of the research. A lot of the
Speaker 1: research for that was from Hillary from the Crown solicitors
Speaker 1: point of view and Margaret Kneen here as the Crown
Speaker 1: processor's point of view. Yeah. Well you always get an
Speaker 1: interesting story when you got Margaret involved, yep, as we know,
Speaker 1: and Janet King the flow on from that.
Speaker 2: And the flow on from Crownies, and I think Crownies
Speaker 2: is one of the shows that is age really well
Speaker 2: at the time.
Speaker 1: The ABC.
Speaker 2: It's no great secret that their majority of their audience
Speaker 2: is you know, forty five fifty class, So it was
Speaker 2: no great surprise at the end of that first year
Speaker 2: is they went well our audience, They did their research
Speaker 2: and they said, our audience is actually responding more to
Speaker 2: Janet than they are to the twenty somethings, and so
Speaker 2: we re engineered it to put that character at the center.
Speaker 2: And then the plan was that she would move around
Speaker 2: jurisdictions and which actually followed Market, so from Crown Prosecutor
Speaker 2: then to Royal Commissioner, then to a sort of special
Speaker 2: council sort of thing, and so the hugely experienced Janet
Speaker 2: was in a different environment, dealing with different issues each time,
Speaker 2: and a lot of that echoed Market's life.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's a world that I understand, and
Speaker 1: I think you captured the essence of it. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: sometimes people say, but does that happen? Well, it's not
Speaker 1: a docu mentory like there's yeah, there's some creativity in there,
Speaker 1: but the essence of what it's about. And that's where
Speaker 1: when people ask me about Underbelly Badness, I captured the
Speaker 1: essence of what that story story was about. And I
Speaker 1: think there were some things that you said we couldn't
Speaker 1: put in because people wouldn't believe it, And that's true.
Speaker 2: And I often say, even going back to the first Underbelly,
Speaker 2: when people ask the question, generally speaking, the more outrageous
Speaker 2: things that you can't believe, the more likely it is
Speaker 2: it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's interesting and full
Speaker 2: credit to you. But having read the book in the
Speaker 2: dead of night, maybe you've been wasting your talents. You
Speaker 2: should have been writing books right from the start, because
Speaker 2: I've got to say, and I'm not you know, I've
Speaker 2: read a lot of books here before, guests, come on,
Speaker 2: But that took me so deep into a homicide investigation.
Speaker 2: I was living and breathing and thinking, Okay, what would
Speaker 2: the detectives do now, and the moves that they were
Speaker 2: going to make, the corners that they were jammed into.
Speaker 1: The moral dilemmas. I had so many ethical and moral dilemmas.
Speaker 1: That is the norm for a homicide investigation. So we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about it, but before we do, in
Speaker 1: respect to the victims, because when we're talking homicide, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the lives of two people. Can you tell
Speaker 1: us who Russell Hill was? And Carol Clay will start
Speaker 1: off with Russell.
Speaker 2: Look a little bit. What I know about Russell was
Speaker 2: that he had been a logger and a forestry worker
Speaker 2: in the One and Gata Valley for a lot of
Speaker 2: his life. He then, toward the later years, drove trucks,
Speaker 2: mostly for bunnings or for things to and from for
Speaker 2: their timber divisions and all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: He'd relatively recently retired. He had always loved the outback
Speaker 2: and the outdoors. Sometimes his wife Robin had gone with him.
Speaker 2: Many times he'd sort of gone on his own.
Speaker 1: He was also.
Speaker 2: A very big radio enthusiast high frequency radio, and there
Speaker 2: was a group of about half a dozen also mates
Speaker 2: that he contacted quite regularly through high frequency radio, and
Speaker 2: they kept in touch when any of them knew they
Speaker 2: were out in the books because there's no farm reception,
Speaker 2: yeah or whatever, so he'd set up an aerial and
Speaker 2: make sure he checked in, you know, six o'clock most evenings.
Speaker 1: And at the time of his disappearance, he was in
Speaker 1: his seventies. Yeah, seventy four I think, okay, but a
Speaker 1: fit seventy four. Yeah, I think when they first went missing,
Speaker 1: people thought, oh, two seventy year olds, you know, there's
Speaker 1: fallen off their chair. Yeah, and you go no, no, no.
Speaker 1: He was quite a tough dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: What about Carol.
Speaker 2: Carol was into like she had been president of the
Speaker 2: country Women's Association or a very high office holder. She
Speaker 2: was very much part of the community. She was someone
Speaker 2: who always helped other people, wanted to volunteer for you know, this,
Speaker 2: that and the other. Always active. If she wasn't out
Speaker 2: helping other people in her community, she was at home,
Speaker 2: you know, cooking for various fates and things like that.
Speaker 2: So he was someone who always was giving to other
Speaker 2: parts of the community. Very widely liked and very highly
Speaker 2: thought of.
Speaker 1: I saw I think it was on sixty minutes where
Speaker 1: her younger sister was in the viewed and described her
Speaker 1: as a larger than life personality, always happy, always, always buddly,
Speaker 1: looking for funding, funding life. Yeah, the circumstances. If we
Speaker 1: talk about the case, I'll just relay what I know
Speaker 1: and knew, add the color to it that it was
Speaker 1: a campsite that was found abandoned. That was basically the
Speaker 1: genesis of the investigation on the back of reports to
Speaker 1: the police that Carol and Russell were missing.
Speaker 2: Yes, it actually started with Russell's by Robin, who reported
Speaker 2: him missing when he hadn't checked in on the high
Speaker 2: frequency radio for about four or five nights in a row,
Speaker 2: and Rob Ashton who was the sort of key figure
Speaker 2: in that group of radio enthusiasm. He talked to Robin
Speaker 2: and said, something's not right here. So she went to
Speaker 2: the police and she didn't know at that stage that
Speaker 2: Carol was with Russell, so she just reported Russell missing.
Speaker 2: And when the police put out to the media, has
Speaker 2: anyone seen Russell, that's when Carol's friends caught in and said, well,
Speaker 2: where's Carol? She was with him, and that's when they went, oh, well.
Speaker 1: That's what I was. What I would say on that, Greg,
Speaker 1: it's amazing and we'll break it, break it all down.
Speaker 1: But these are the type of things that come out
Speaker 1: when you start looking into people's lives. It doesn't surprise me,
Speaker 1: like you're going to a murder investigation in the country
Speaker 1: town and you uncover all sorts of things when you
Speaker 1: sort of lift the blanket and go, okay, what's going
Speaker 1: on here in this town? So we'll put it out there.
Speaker 1: They'd been they'd been friends for a long time. They
Speaker 1: had what came out.
Speaker 2: In court, and I I like to be my viewer
Speaker 2: version of having a respect for the families is that
Speaker 2: I don't go I don't want to go beyond what
Speaker 2: came out in the court case and the testimony they go,
Speaker 2: I think that's fair. Everything else, I view is irrelevant
Speaker 2: to the case. And it was the investigation in the
Speaker 2: case that mostly the book was about. But what what
Speaker 2: you know was presented at court was that Russell and
Speaker 2: Carroll had known each other at school when were teenagers.
Speaker 2: Russell didn't want it to get that serious and they
Speaker 2: split up. He met Robin, they married, had three daughters,
Speaker 2: three lovely daughters. Some many years later he met Carol again.
Speaker 2: They began a relationship which Robin found out about, and
Speaker 2: Russell said, no, I don't want to break up the family.
Speaker 2: You know, the three girls and you were important to me,
Speaker 2: so you know, I won't see Carol, and that was
Speaker 2: Robin's at that point. Robin thought, well it's over. And
Speaker 2: what she didn't know was that for you know, several years,
Speaker 2: it would seem that they had had started another relationship
Speaker 2: where they would often go camping together.
Speaker 1: Okay, now when we talk camping, because we're sitting here
Speaker 1: in the sort of in a city Sydney suburb, to
Speaker 1: appreciate the wilderness of the area in which they disappeared,
Speaker 1: and you talk CB radios and communication. When they go
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 2: They're off grid, completely off grid. It is, it is
Speaker 2: really remote.
Speaker 1: Can you describe it to people that might have been
Speaker 1: to locations like that?
Speaker 2: Look, it's you can only get in there with the
Speaker 2: four will drive, so and you would be generally, unless
Speaker 2: you're a very experienced four wall driver, you'd be unwise
Speaker 2: to go in on your own, just because anything could
Speaker 2: happen and you could be lost forever. It's the the
Speaker 2: our Pine. The One and Gata Valley is a small
Speaker 2: part of the Alpine National Park and the Alpine National
Speaker 2: Park which is pretty much entirely off grid, entire no
Speaker 2: phone reception.
Speaker 1: Nothing.
Speaker 2: There is huge, you know in the book, I say
Speaker 2: it's bigger than Belgium.
Speaker 1: Or about the same.
Speaker 2: And you don't just go there for a picnic on
Speaker 2: a Sunday.
Speaker 1: You've got the plan. You have to plan.
Speaker 2: Yes, Applies Russell had a chainsaw with him in case
Speaker 2: he needed to you know, you know she often did
Speaker 2: have to cut to clear tracks.
Speaker 1: Don't you carry that in your card?
Speaker 2: Funnily enough, no, so you know, spare petrol, water, food supplies, tent,
Speaker 2: the area for the radio. Everything had to be there.
Speaker 2: He was very well prepared and most people who go
Speaker 2: into that valley to camp in the want to go
Speaker 2: a valley, go in very prepared, right.
Speaker 1: Russell's wife would be comforted by the fact that she
Speaker 1: would often hear him call in at six o'clock if
Speaker 1: he's out there with his crew of radio, with.
Speaker 2: His crew of radio enthusiasts, and she knew how to
Speaker 2: turn the radio on at home and would always listen in.
Speaker 2: She didn't have the license to use it as such,
Speaker 2: but she would always switch it on and listen and
Speaker 2: make sure he was okay, and he knew that she'd
Speaker 2: be listening okay.
Speaker 1: So after a couple of days she hadn't heard from him,
Speaker 1: and then that's when she went to the police. What
Speaker 1: was the initial response from the police. How did they
Speaker 1: treat that?
Speaker 2: They treated it pretty seriously right from the beginning, the
Speaker 2: uniform police, I think partly because they knew that was
Speaker 2: a remote area and it was if he had been
Speaker 2: for years, pretty religious about, you know, checking in on
Speaker 2: the radio. Missing five or six days is serious. So
Speaker 2: they went up there the following day. A couple of
Speaker 2: the guys in a police force will drive. The first
Speaker 2: time they met up, they didn't know where to look
Speaker 2: and couldn't actually find anything and just told, you know,
Speaker 2: bumped into a few people instead of you've seen a
Speaker 2: white turtle Land cruiser. And it was actually a guy
Speaker 2: called Colin Boyd, I think, one of the people who
Speaker 2: he was camping in the valley who did go into
Speaker 2: bucks camp and see the turtle Land cruiser and he
Speaker 2: had to go back out to get phone reception to
Speaker 2: call them. And so when you say the abandoned he
Speaker 2: saw when it was found there was Russell's white turtle
Speaker 2: Land cruiser and just a completely burnt out campsite next
Speaker 2: to it, and that was it. Okay, So there was
Speaker 2: someone that had seen that but couldn't report it to
Speaker 2: the police until he got out there. He had to
Speaker 2: get out of the valley, go back up to how
Speaker 2: it planes to be able to get reception to call them.
Speaker 2: I think on his phone he could take a GPS
Speaker 2: of where it was. And then very very early morning
Speaker 2: the next day again too uniform cops from Mafra I
Speaker 2: think police station went up there and that was the
Speaker 2: first first time police had seen it.
Speaker 1: So they're at that location, they're confronted the remote location,
Speaker 1: they're confronted with Russell's car, abandoned and the tent burnt
Speaker 1: out and all the camping gear thrown into thrown into
Speaker 1: the tent. Yeah, a fairly chaotic, chaotic saint you it's
Speaker 1: hard to interpret what's happened there? Yeah, where do you start?
Speaker 1: Where do you start?
Speaker 2: And you know, at the beginning there was always because
Speaker 2: by then they did know that he'd been camping with
Speaker 2: Carol and that had been an affair that the Hill
Speaker 2: family didn't know about. And so they're thinking, well, is
Speaker 2: have they run.
Speaker 1: Off stage there? At stage?
Speaker 2: There disappearance somehow? But how it had to be another
Speaker 2: car somewhere and who was that? If not, what had happened?
Speaker 2: Where were they? Had they just gone walking and got lost?
Speaker 2: But if that was the case, who burnt the camp?
Speaker 2: Were they missing? Were they dead?
Speaker 1: Who? No one knew? Do you know what area of
Speaker 1: the police were handling? It was a local police or
Speaker 1: when did it get passed up the line to more
Speaker 1: of a major investigation.
Speaker 2: Was handled initially by well that the first people who
Speaker 2: arrived there were uniform cops from MAFRA. Then it went
Speaker 2: to Sale and the local detectives at Sale and that
Speaker 2: first person in charge of that was Amy Frost and
Speaker 2: it was with the local detectives at sale for about
Speaker 2: two to three weeks. But the Missing person squad, and
Speaker 2: as saying the book that a lot of people think
Speaker 2: missing persons and you think, well, there's you know, hundreds
Speaker 2: of those.
Speaker 1: A year.
Speaker 2: And the missing person squad itself in Victoria is a
Speaker 2: division of homicide. If foul players suspected and there is
Speaker 2: no body, then it's a missing person squad. If there
Speaker 2: is a body, it's homicide. So the Missing person Squad
Speaker 2: knew about this pretty early.
Speaker 1: They were have an overview, they'd.
Speaker 2: Have an overview, they were looking at it. They were
Speaker 2: staying in the loop. And after about two or three
Speaker 2: weeks when the first search and rescue found absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: So they on that. I would imagine their pole air
Speaker 1: and the four of the drives and.
Speaker 2: Looking they had and they were they were going out
Speaker 2: as you would from the campsite and within one hundred
Speaker 2: meters you're in very dense bush, et cetera. So they
Speaker 2: went five ten k's you know, out that, and they
Speaker 2: had some horsemen from the from the valley. They had
Speaker 2: I think kadava dogs from New South Wales or something
Speaker 2: like that, and they were all looking in that you know,
Speaker 2: five ten, fifteen, twenty k circumference from the campsite and
Speaker 2: found not nothing, not a not a shoe, not a jumper,
Speaker 2: not a thing. And that's when they said, with we
Speaker 2: don't know what else we get.
Speaker 1: What do we do? We've done the search, we go
Speaker 1: from here? Where do we go from here? So the
Speaker 1: Missing Person Squad they took over the investigation and then
Speaker 1: what I remember it from the media, I'm assuming it
Speaker 1: was early it started getting released in the appeals through
Speaker 1: the media. Yeah, if anyone seen these.
Speaker 2: So the head of the Missing person Squad, Andrew Stamper,
Speaker 2: he had a media a stand up as they call it,
Speaker 2: a day after the Missing Person Squad had officially been
Speaker 2: given the case. And that was the first I said, Well,
Speaker 2: the only thing we can do is try and identify
Speaker 2: everyone who had been in the valley.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, Yeah, but that in itself is Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not signing into the local club.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, no, it's not easy at all. So it
Speaker 2: had to be an appeal to the public please come forward.
Speaker 2: This was at a point in time where the first
Speaker 2: COVID restrictions had just come into play and people thought
Speaker 2: they are they trying to catch us for being out
Speaker 2: when we should have been at home.
Speaker 1: Who's paranoid? I'm not.
Speaker 2: So they had to say, look, don't worry about that.
Speaker 1: We're not going to try and.
Speaker 2: With COVID regulations, we just need to find out who
Speaker 2: was in the valley, okay. And they were looking for
Speaker 2: people who would have taken photos on their phone. He
Speaker 2: might have had dash cam on there in their car,
Speaker 2: anyone who could help them figure out all the people
Speaker 2: who'd actually been in there.
Speaker 1: And I would suppose at that stage they don't know
Speaker 1: if it's stephed by misadventure or they still didn't know,
Speaker 1: like it wandered off, they had a fight, they wandered off.
Speaker 1: You just don't you don't know, and it's still the
Speaker 1: proof of life checks weren't showing anything up, so they
Speaker 1: were starting to think it was more likely for out play.
Speaker 1: But it was another few weeks before they could say, look,
Speaker 1: so the bank accounts haven't been used, used phones, and.
Speaker 2: Carol's phone was never found. Russell's phone it was about
Speaker 2: two or three weeks after the camp site was found.
Speaker 2: They did get records back from Telstra that his phone
Speaker 2: had connected to the the Dargo the Dinner Planes mobile
Speaker 2: station in the Hotham station, then Mount Buffalo, so they
Speaker 2: knew his phone had been in those three range of
Speaker 2: those three towers for about twenty thirty minutes or so.
Speaker 2: But who knows what that means?
Speaker 1: Well, that's yeah, okay the strongest you know, someone has
Speaker 1: taken them.
Speaker 2: Has taken the fun Yeah, yeah, that's all. He's got
Speaker 2: the phone or someone else has. Did they just find
Speaker 2: it somewhere and then just drive out and throw it away?
Speaker 2: Where exactly is it?
Speaker 1: So not a lot to go on. And I know
Speaker 1: that the way you've delved into the book and a
Speaker 1: couple of things that the police started looking at and
Speaker 1: looking at it really trying to work out the hypothesis
Speaker 1: of what had happened. What were some of the significant
Speaker 1: events where they thought, okay, this is foul play. When
Speaker 1: do you think they formed that beer? They?
Speaker 2: I guess when they really looked at what had been
Speaker 2: thrown inside the tent to get burned, they were like
Speaker 2: the whole gas barbecue thing, et cetera, the things that
Speaker 2: and the gas bottles themselves.
Speaker 1: It didn't look likely.
Speaker 2: That that Russell and Carroll had burnt that camp site themselves.
Speaker 2: You didn't know why you would do that. Why would
Speaker 2: you put everything inside the tent and then burn everything
Speaker 2: down together? And so just as a hypothesis, they thought
Speaker 2: that someone who's done that is trying to destroy any
Speaker 2: any record of them being there. And even the fact
Speaker 2: that they couldn't find any fingerprints or anything gone to
Speaker 2: that X gone to that extent that they gone, someone's
Speaker 2: done a really good job of cleaning this site up.
Speaker 2: Why would that happen if it wasn't foul play.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to put my homicide hat on and thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at that, was it an accident that happened?
Speaker 1: Then it certainly didn't look my interpretation of the crime
Speaker 1: scene like it was an accident. Someone was someone had
Speaker 1: done it deliberately. So it's giving you something to work
Speaker 1: with on that factor. People identifying people would have come forward,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure the public would have fawned in and
Speaker 1: talked about different people. Did they have lines of inquiry
Speaker 1: that they were following that they thought might pay dividends.
Speaker 2: They were dealing with some sightings around about there was
Speaker 2: you know, we think we saw Russell and Carroll and
Speaker 2: another place just about thirty forty kilometers away, and they
Speaker 2: had quite a few of those which they could, and
Speaker 2: at your job is to follow all of them up
Speaker 2: just in case. But they all proved explicable by other means.
Speaker 2: It wasn't rustling Carroll. And although those kept on over
Speaker 2: the next four or five months, someone would ring in
Speaker 2: and say, Oh, they're at a petrol station Wayala, or
Speaker 2: they're at a motel in Perth or whatever, but they
Speaker 2: increasingly dismissed all of those, and so they they then
Speaker 2: started they were starting to get reports from people who
Speaker 2: had been in the valley, and in particular, there were
Speaker 2: three weeds brayers who'd spent most of the week in
Speaker 2: the valley there they'd said hi, and few cars, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And then they were able to start finding out what
Speaker 2: those cars were, where those people had camped.
Speaker 1: So just to explain to us city dwellers, like weed
Speaker 1: sprays in the yeah, I actually you're talking like you
Speaker 1: grew up in the high country, yeah sprays. No, I haven't.
Speaker 2: And in fact, I had a completely wrong view of
Speaker 2: them when I first heard that as well. And it
Speaker 2: wasn't until you know, you hear their full evidence that
Speaker 2: you go, oh, I see, so you're not walking around
Speaker 2: with a little plastic thing on.
Speaker 1: Your back like you are in your backyard.
Speaker 2: They go in there with full wall drives, with massive
Speaker 2: trucks that have hoses hundreds of meters long, and huge
Speaker 2: tanks of three different sprays for blackberries, for ox Hie
Speaker 2: daisies and cape brewm not just that they're trying to
Speaker 2: eliminate over a thirty kilometer square kilometer area massive, So
Speaker 2: that's why they're there for a whole week, so they
Speaker 2: know the area well, and they know the area would.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people had come through, and we're not talking a
Speaker 1: huge amount of people coming through, are we No.
Speaker 2: In the end, there might have been, you know, twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, something like that, most of whom had
Speaker 2: snaps from where they camped, et cetera. The first one
Speaker 2: that they sort of from memory, the first one they
Speaker 2: sat back and went, well, that's interesting. It was a
Speaker 2: family who had spoken to the weed sprays. Actually, he
Speaker 2: said they had said to him they were going to
Speaker 2: go back to New South Wales and they were heading
Speaker 2: up via the one and Gata gate at the north
Speaker 2: end of the valley and he thought that was closed,
Speaker 2: and it was because of the bushfires. Two trees had
Speaker 2: crashed across that so at the one and Gata river
Speaker 2: that was closed. But the New South Wales family camped
Speaker 2: there and think I will go because once it had
Speaker 2: got to nightfall, very very few.
Speaker 1: People drive and turned around and turned back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they camped there and at two am someone
Speaker 2: else had driven up, had realized that that gate was
Speaker 2: closed and had had to do like a fifteen to
Speaker 2: twenty point U turn and go back again down through
Speaker 2: the valley. And that report and they thought so the
Speaker 2: same night that this camp was burnt. They knew from
Speaker 2: when it had first been found that that fire had
Speaker 2: happened sometime around about ten o'clock to midnight.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've been a narrow time timeframe.
Speaker 2: And here at two am there was a four well
Speaker 2: drive trying to get out of the north end of
Speaker 2: the valley, not being able to do so you turning
Speaker 2: and driving back again when almost no one drives at
Speaker 2: that time, at that time of the night. So that's
Speaker 2: the first time they thought a bit suspicious, bit suspicious.
Speaker 2: It had no idea what the car was, but it
Speaker 2: sort of fitted the hypothesis that they were building, that
Speaker 2: someone else had burnt that and then someone else was
Speaker 2: trying to get out of the valley.
Speaker 1: And that gate where the roadway was blocked off. How
Speaker 1: far are we looking from the camp site? Ten k Yeah,
Speaker 1: on a rough to rain, on a rough terrain. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But then if they had to go back through the
Speaker 2: wan to go of and then down through the rest
Speaker 2: of the Ourpine National Park to get to Dargo High
Speaker 2: Planes Road, that was like a six eight hour full
Speaker 2: will drive over really rough tracks in the middle of
Speaker 2: the night.
Speaker 1: Okay, dark. So the assumption and this is this is
Speaker 1: this is really getting into That's what I liked about
Speaker 1: the book. So that's what you're presented with. It's not
Speaker 1: evidence on itself. Someone came to a gate that was
Speaker 1: closed and did a U turn. But at that time
Speaker 1: of night and in those conditions, why didn't the person
Speaker 1: like out there just stay there.
Speaker 2: Just stay there and can yeah figure wait till the morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're not. It's not a matter of oh, I'll
Speaker 1: go ten kilometers down the track and be back in
Speaker 1: the civilization. No, Okay. So that they're they're the type
Speaker 1: of things that I just find fascinating with homicide investigations
Speaker 1: that that just doesn't seem normal. There was a couple
Speaker 1: of other let's call them persons of interest that the
Speaker 1: police looked at my understanding and somewhere with Eastern Europe and.
Speaker 2: Shoot, they did know, yeah, and again from a couple
Speaker 2: of people in the valley and weed sprays again were
Speaker 2: one of them. That there had been two people whose
Speaker 2: accident made them sound like they were Eastern European who
Speaker 2: were there to hunt, had asked where they could hunt,
Speaker 2: were armed, had guns, were a bit crazy drivers, you know,
Speaker 2: driving fast down through the valley, and a slight yahoo
Speaker 2: element to them, I suppose you might say. And they
Speaker 2: didn't they didn't know where they'd gone by the time
Speaker 2: they'd camped near the three weed sprays and when the
Speaker 2: weed sprays had come back on that sort of Friday
Speaker 2: night the Easter, two Eastern Europeans had left. Now that
Speaker 2: camp site is about five k's away from Bucks Camp,
Speaker 2: which is where the Rustle and Carroll were. So had
Speaker 2: they gone there or not? And there was you know,
Speaker 2: reports of a white car and that's all that's all
Speaker 2: you had. But they were someone they couldn't find for
Speaker 2: a long.
Speaker 1: Time, Okay, Yeah, And that and the fact that you
Speaker 1: can't find them causes you cause you to make Yeah,
Speaker 1: why can't why can't they find them? Why haven't they
Speaker 1: come forward? That type of thing. And there was also
Speaker 1: which is not unique to this investigation, but someone that
Speaker 1: was sort of living off the grid, hermit type character
Speaker 1: and what was what was his story?
Speaker 2: So he's he was known as the button man Button
Speaker 2: because he made buttons out of deerhorns. He would often
Speaker 2: be known to be in the in the wan and
Speaker 2: Gata Valley or in the Arpine National Park in camp
Speaker 2: there for two, three, four or five months at a time,
Speaker 2: and there were stories about him going back several years.
Speaker 2: The park rangers sawed and knew of him and sort
Speaker 2: of knew where most of his spots were, but no
Speaker 2: one had had long chats with him, because if the
Speaker 2: whole point of him being there was he wanted to
Speaker 2: be on his own.
Speaker 1: But he.
Speaker 2: On the one hand, he didn't have a known history
Speaker 2: of violence toward campus, but he did several scary things.
Speaker 2: And his ability to sort of to their camps at
Speaker 2: night time and you know, use their equipment, take photos,
Speaker 2: et cetera, without them knowing he'd ever been there, just
Speaker 2: gave people he that was.
Speaker 1: I think you've reminded me of something in the book
Speaker 1: where people have woken up and he's been there taking
Speaker 1: a fato on the camera.
Speaker 2: He's taken a selfie on their phone of him holding
Speaker 2: a knife inside their tent while they're asleep.
Speaker 1: Why would that freak terrified?
Speaker 2: So so he did things like that to try and
Speaker 2: scare people away, and it is pretty scary, but there
Speaker 2: was there was no evidence he had actually gone further
Speaker 2: than that, and and in the end, they took a
Speaker 2: while to find him. And you know, as I say
Speaker 2: in the book, one of the things I hadn't quite
Speaker 2: you know, because you hear in the abbreviated form when
Speaker 2: you get the evidence laid down the train and go, oh,
Speaker 2: we checked him with the with the button man, and
Speaker 2: we could eliminate him. It turns out that we checked
Speaker 2: him with the button man took days that had to
Speaker 2: find where the hell he was first. Then they realized
Speaker 2: that his answers so well set up that he could
Speaker 2: see them coming from Columbus away, so he just piss off. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So it was yeah, so actually organizing things so they
Speaker 2: could actually sit down and talk to him was quite complicated.
Speaker 2: And when they did finally and as they did with
Speaker 2: everyone including Greg and the air go have a chat
Speaker 2: ask him what he was up to, et cetera. And
Speaker 2: that's when they found out, Oh, you know, I've I've
Speaker 2: got a place in Essendon and I was down there.
Speaker 2: Oh so you don't live here full time? No, no, no,
Speaker 2: So he'd come there for months, but he also had
Speaker 2: a place in the north of Melbourne, and his phone
Speaker 2: records backed up everything you said. And phone records get
Speaker 2: people out of a lot of trouble as well as
Speaker 2: getting a lot of trouble.
Speaker 1: One inculpatory or exculpatory. Yees, yeah, here's my faint. So
Speaker 1: how did Greg Lynn come into the picture? How did he?
Speaker 2: While they were while I was still thinking about the
Speaker 2: report of the the car that hadne you turned and
Speaker 2: driven back through the at two am, they were going
Speaker 2: back to the Telstra records and they'd asked telt if
Speaker 2: they could have any more details on they All they
Speaker 2: knew was what towels that phone had connected to. You
Speaker 2: can actually find an awful lot of detail out about phones,
Speaker 2: but you need to do the math and that can
Speaker 2: take ages. You know, you've got to find people for
Speaker 2: free to do it. In the end, it took it
Speaker 2: took them, I don't know about nine ten months before
Speaker 2: they finally had you know, the full true call data
Speaker 2: which pinpointed exactly where the phone where when it bounces
Speaker 2: off this hour and the top Yeah, and they can
Speaker 2: tell the distance like radar et cetera, and they and
Speaker 2: it bounces off, but that's deep in the metadata. At
Speaker 2: a month or two into the into the investigation, all
Speaker 2: they had was the three towers into connected to for
Speaker 2: that twenty or thirty minutes. But it wasn't a stupid
Speaker 2: assumption that the phone had been moving. That's why it
Speaker 2: went from one tower to the other to the other.
Speaker 2: So it'd been traveling up this way. And if it
Speaker 2: had come from our National Park then it would have
Speaker 2: gone along a road called Dargo High Planes Road and
Speaker 2: then on the Great Alpine Road. And they were mostly
Speaker 2: thinking about the two Eastern Europeans who they knew had
Speaker 2: come from New South Wales, but they knew nothing else
Speaker 2: about them, and they were hoping to find a petrol
Speaker 2: station that they'd filled up at that they'd used a
Speaker 2: credit card something something. As they were driving, they had
Speaker 2: no idea these an PR cameras existed because they're private
Speaker 2: ones owned by the Howtham Ski Resort. And as they
Speaker 2: were driving down Great Airpine Road. They just saw them
Speaker 2: and that was Brett Florence and Canvas and they just
Speaker 2: pulled over. What the hell are these?
Speaker 1: So these are cameras in the middle of nowhere that
Speaker 1: focusing on the.
Speaker 2: Roadway, facing on the roadway. They're not vic Roads cameras.
Speaker 2: They're just on the Great Alpine Road, you know, way
Speaker 2: up in northern Victoria. And well, who's those? And then
Speaker 2: they realized they were the Hotham Resort cameras, and Hotham
Speaker 2: used them to make sure that, you know, people didn't
Speaker 2: try and escape without paying. Okay, So they and there's
Speaker 2: there's there's one set to the left of Dargo Highplanes
Speaker 2: Road and another set heading southeast. And they were looking
Speaker 2: for someone who had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road and
Speaker 2: gone down the Great Alpine Road. And at around about
Speaker 2: the same time as they knew that Russell's phone had
Speaker 2: connected moving long.
Speaker 1: The towers that town.
Speaker 2: And although they needed a lot more math before they
Speaker 2: could stand up and court and say we know the
Speaker 2: phone was in that car, it was a good enough
Speaker 2: guess to go, well, it's a strong likelihood if there
Speaker 2: was a car going through the cameras at that time.
Speaker 1: Now they didn't know.
Speaker 2: There could have been ten cameras going through, sorry, ten
Speaker 2: cars going through the cameras at that time fifteen twenty
Speaker 2: who knew. As it happened at that hour on Saturday morning,
Speaker 2: and this is just before the first lockdown, there was
Speaker 2: only one car that had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road
Speaker 2: and left in the Great Airpine Road and that was Gregg.
Speaker 1: Okay, So they had the number plate, They had the.
Speaker 2: Number plate from the number plate recognition camera system. They
Speaker 2: ran the check and it was a guy called Greg
Speaker 2: Lynn who lived in Carolyn Springs, who they'd never heard
Speaker 2: of before in their lives, and they went, who's this.
Speaker 1: So, looking at it from a police point of view,
Speaker 1: you get that name and you'd start to have a look,
Speaker 1: who is this person? So let's describe Greg what the
Speaker 1: police would have known about him in the early times.
Speaker 2: Well, what they found out about him was that he
Speaker 2: was living there with his second wife and the kids
Speaker 2: from the first marriage and the second marriage were there
Speaker 2: a nice upper middle class home in suburban Melbourne. He
Speaker 2: worked for Jetstar. He was a check pilot, which is
Speaker 2: a very high position. You're the guy who checks that
Speaker 2: all the other pilots are doing the right job, so
Speaker 2: very high paying. It was somewhere three fifty four hundred
Speaker 2: grand a year, very high paying, white collar job. Professional.
Speaker 2: He has a job like that, he's held it down
Speaker 2: and he's been a responsible member of community. Why on
Speaker 2: earth would he be someone who had no connection with
Speaker 2: Russell or Carroll?
Speaker 1: What? What could it mean?
Speaker 2: What what?
Speaker 1: What possible motive? What possible motive could he have? And
Speaker 1: yet you know, it looked like they couldn't yet prove it,
Speaker 1: but it looked like Russell's Fonne had been in his car,
Speaker 1: and you.
Speaker 2: Go, well, you could just have easily just picked it up.
Speaker 2: You don't know until until you speak, until you speak
Speaker 2: to it. Yeah, And so that's why the July fourteenth date,
Speaker 2: I'd never read it again and again and again. That's
Speaker 2: when they decided to do what you know, as you
Speaker 2: would know, the first step is in a lot of investigations,
Speaker 2: which is just go talk to someone, ask them what
Speaker 2: they were doing, listen to them, get them to commit
Speaker 2: to a story, and then come back and see can
Speaker 2: we corroborate it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking about that before we sat down for
Speaker 1: the podcast. And that's that's a there's a gray area like,
Speaker 1: I thought, that's quite reasonable that we've got his car
Speaker 1: going through a camera, we've got details of the phone
Speaker 1: that haven't been confirmed. I wouldn't calling him a suspect.
Speaker 1: Person of interest might be the different level, and that
Speaker 1: becomes a debate, that becomes a big point down the track,
Speaker 1: Well what do you mean by a person of interest?
Speaker 1: What do you mean by a suspect? But I think
Speaker 1: it's reasonable, and I think yeah, it's reasonable for police
Speaker 1: to be able to go and ask a person questions
Speaker 1: without saying, hey, we're looking at you for a murder,
Speaker 1: we're cautioning you. Just tell us where you are. He
Speaker 1: might have said, well, actually I was over in the
Speaker 1: overseas on the day driving the car. Yeah.
Speaker 2: All they knew was his car had been on the
Speaker 2: Great Our Plane Road, and so all they were asking
Speaker 2: him to do was can you just let us know
Speaker 2: your movements for those a few days.
Speaker 1: What did he provide to them at that time?
Speaker 2: Very cool, very calm, He said, yeah, yeah, he'd gone,
Speaker 2: He said, I left here. I think it was on
Speaker 2: the Monday, camped up at how It Planes, which is
Speaker 2: the last big camping spot before you head down into
Speaker 2: the one and Gata valley in our Pine National Park.
Speaker 2: He'd gone into one and Gate of Valley. He'd camped
Speaker 2: somewhere on the Wednesday night, and he's ever, he was
Speaker 2: never terribly specific about where that was up in the
Speaker 2: north end, somewhere, et cetera. Then moved about ten k's
Speaker 2: you know, south on the Thursday night, a bit close
Speaker 2: to the river, something like that, and then on Friday
Speaker 2: went for a bit of a hunt in the morning,
Speaker 2: didn't find anything, packed up, left the valley and went
Speaker 2: down the Crooked River Track, which is down into the
Speaker 2: rest of the Alpine National Park, and about lunchtime on Friday,
Speaker 2: camp there. Friday night, went to Dargo High Plains Road,
Speaker 2: he actually said, followed the Crooked River Track to Dargo
Speaker 2: High Planes Road and then drove out on the Saturday morning.
Speaker 2: Now all of that makes perfect sense with what the
Speaker 2: police actually.
Speaker 1: Knew, and hard to fact check as well, very.
Speaker 2: Hard to fact check because he gave them he said
Speaker 2: he hadn't he hadn't met anybody, hadn't communicated with anybody.
Speaker 2: He was just enjoying his own company, camping and hunting
Speaker 2: in the One and go A valley.
Speaker 1: And just let's talk the hunting for a sec too,
Speaker 1: because that's a big part of it that people in
Speaker 1: the city mightn't appreciate. But a lot of hunters go
Speaker 1: down there.
Speaker 2: That's that's a lot of the reason for going.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So some of them, like Russell and Carroll go
Speaker 2: just to be in the wilderness and the bush. At
Speaker 2: least half of them were there to hunt, and that's allowed.
Speaker 2: You know, you need the proper license, so you need
Speaker 2: a hunter's license, and you need a gun license, and
Speaker 2: the park rangers to check that. They check Greg he
Speaker 2: had done two shotguns with him. He had a ruga
Speaker 2: rifle and his breath and Arms shotgun. But that wasn't unusual.
Speaker 2: It's not like that's a red flag because half the
Speaker 2: people there.
Speaker 1: It's like, if they were there in the ski season,
Speaker 1: why are you here because I'm skiing? Yeah? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: it leaves them in a difficult position, doesn't it. With
Speaker 1: that the other thing that came from that, and again
Speaker 1: it was in your book, but again the thinking, and
Speaker 1: that's where I like the way that you're getting inside
Speaker 1: the mind of police investigating matters like that. They turned
Speaker 1: up under the out Citi's place, so it was like
Speaker 1: put him on notice. Hey, but you can't find him,
Speaker 1: and you've got to phone him. We want to speak
Speaker 1: to you about such and such, where he's got time
Speaker 1: to prepare himself. So the police are making, which is
Speaker 1: quite right, making an assessment of well, he seemed pretty
Speaker 1: calm on the surface.
Speaker 2: He was very calm, and he explained it all without
Speaker 2: missing a beat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he wasn't rattled, not rattled at all, Because
Speaker 1: there are signs that you look out for. If I
Speaker 1: knock on the door to speak the greg and I
Speaker 1: suspect you of a crime, and.
Speaker 2: You're there and I'm going fuck, and you run out the.
Speaker 1: Back shaking as you're trying to drink a glass of water,
Speaker 1: I'd be going, okay, well something's going on.
Speaker 2: But there was none of that, none of that. And
Speaker 2: even when they noticed he painted his car and asked
Speaker 2: about that, I was just a lockdown project, you know,
Speaker 2: through some bush brushes at my son's and to get
Speaker 2: the outside and we painted the car.
Speaker 1: See that in itself, if a car has been involved
Speaker 1: in a crime, I'm thinking, okay. If they tried to
Speaker 1: change the car, but he weaved in a story, that's
Speaker 1: almost like there'd be a I can imagine in the
Speaker 1: incident room with the cops. There be a debate going
Speaker 1: WORLL did strange stuff when we're lockdown in lockdown, and
Speaker 1: that played the big part too. Just for the investigation.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine what they were going through with
Speaker 1: people working from home and trying to keep this guy.
Speaker 1: It was snowborn. Yeah, it was. It was difficult, very difficult,
Speaker 1: and it was right right in the in the middle
Speaker 1: throughout the whole investigation. They had those massive lockdowns in Melbourne.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that one, you know, when they knocked on
Speaker 2: his on his door, was about four or five days
Speaker 2: into the into the second lockdown, which was the big one,
Speaker 2: went for about one hundred and eleven days, So it
Speaker 2: was a very surprising visit and he was completely unrattled.
Speaker 2: So you walk away going, well, was he involved or not? Yeah, Now,
Speaker 2: when you're in court two years later, in hindsight, you
Speaker 2: go with all you had all the clues to put
Speaker 2: it together there. But at the time, yeah, there were
Speaker 2: so many possible explanations.
Speaker 1: And I as I was reading through the book, I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: that's reasonable, that's reasonable. I'm looking at it every step
Speaker 1: that they're taking. I was quite impressed by some of
Speaker 1: the stuff they were doing as an investigation. We might
Speaker 1: take a break here and leave the listeners as confused
Speaker 1: as the police were at that particular time, absolutely as
Speaker 1: what they've got. But the next part, when we come
Speaker 1: back for part two, we'll see how the investigation played
Speaker 1: out and how it all unraveled, which is quite fascinating
Speaker 1: in itself. Cool,