Speaker 1: By the time of passing traveler saw their camp around
Speaker 1: two pm. Next day, the tent had burned down and
Speaker 1: it had scorched the toyota. The ashes were cold, and
Speaker 1: so was the trail. Fortune sometimes goes against the bad guys. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: their job was to find the remains of the dead people,
Speaker 1: and the only way to do that was to keep
Speaker 1: their best suspect on the hook without him breaking the line.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrew rule. This is life in crimes. The story
Speaker 1: that is consuming probably many Australians of recent times is
Speaker 1: the trial of Greg Lynn, the former Jetstar pilot who
Speaker 1: has been charged and stood trial for the murders of
Speaker 1: pensioners Russell Hill and Carol Clay in a remote spot
Speaker 1: at Wollongata in eastern Victoria back in March of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: a trial in which a jury would find Lynn guilty
Speaker 1: of Carol Clay's murder but not Russell Hill's. In fact,
Speaker 1: as our regular listeners and readers will know, their campsite
Speaker 1: was discovered burnt out on precisely the weekend that COVID
Speaker 1: struck Victoria, and so their fate has always been entwined
Speaker 1: with the advent of COVID. In Victoria. And there is
Speaker 1: no doubt that the slow start of the police investigation
Speaker 1: into their deaths or their disappearance and presumed death, was
Speaker 1: due to the fact that the entire country, and to
Speaker 1: some extent the entire globe was suddenly struggling with a
Speaker 1: mass pandemic. And that is the background to the story.
Speaker 1: Now I'm going to take us through the long and
Speaker 1: winding road of this story to get us to the
Speaker 1: trial which has just finished, so we all catch up
Speaker 1: on what happened a long way A year after Carol
Speaker 1: Clay and Mussell Hill vanished in twenty twenty, police were
Speaker 1: quietly closing in on a suspected killer with a ghastly
Speaker 1: secret in his head and a repainted Nissan Patrol in
Speaker 1: his driveway, a four bill drive of the type that
Speaker 1: a lot of Australians use, including hundreds of deer hunters
Speaker 1: who go shooting in the high country. These investigators were
Speaker 1: confident they knew the identity of the last person to
Speaker 1: see Hill and Clay alive twelve months earlier, back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, unless this Nissan driver in suburban Caroline Springs
Speaker 1: was cleared by a watertight alibi or forensic science, he
Speaker 1: would become prime suspect for the couple's presumed deaths. At
Speaker 1: that stage, police were certain that the missing pair had
Speaker 1: met a violent end at the Woongata Valley campsite, and
Speaker 1: that their bodies had been moved away from there by
Speaker 1: a third party. The timing had helped the third party
Speaker 1: flee the scene because of the COVID pandemic which had
Speaker 1: hit Victoria that week, and of course the pandemic dominated
Speaker 1: media coverage and had hindered public collaboration and police investigation.
Speaker 1: But if the Nissan driver felt lucky for the first
Speaker 1: few weeks, when it still seemed possible that the missing
Speaker 1: pair were lost in the bush or had secretly run away,
Speaker 1: he was wrong. In truth, his luck had soured on
Speaker 1: that first night when he had tried to slip away
Speaker 1: from the high country by a backtrack towing the trailer
Speaker 1: that would later mysteriously vanish by chance, risky conditions had
Speaker 1: caused rangers to lock a gate across the track that
Speaker 1: would eventually have brought the driver. The Nissan driver out
Speaker 1: Myrtleford on the northwestern side of the Rangers without having
Speaker 1: to detour back to use better roads via Mount Hotham,
Speaker 1: so if our Nissen man, who is in fact Greg Glynn,
Speaker 1: if he had been able to use that backtrack, or
Speaker 1: if he decided to smash the gate and drive through
Speaker 1: it and take a chance on getting through there, and
Speaker 1: had he got through, there's every reason to believe that
Speaker 1: he would have got away with murder because when he
Speaker 1: hit that unexpected roadblock and turn around and went via
Speaker 1: Mount Hotham, his car, his Nissen Fool drive that was
Speaker 1: blue when he was driving it on that occasion and
Speaker 1: later he painted a base which is a story in itself.
Speaker 1: When it went through the resort at Mount Hotham, it
Speaker 1: was automatically recorded by security cameras which record the number
Speaker 1: plates of every car going past. And because that happened,
Speaker 1: police were able to check which cars are gone passed
Speaker 1: in a certain period, and they also struck some very
Speaker 1: good luck. Because the Nissen driver had been forced to
Speaker 1: go back to Mount Hotham, he came within the range
Speaker 1: of mobile phone towers because where he'd been at One
Speaker 1: and Gata there's no mobile phone coverage and it was
Speaker 1: only when he was forced to drive to Mount Hotham
Speaker 1: and take basically the high road out that he came
Speaker 1: within range, and when he came within range, the mobile
Speaker 1: phones in his car pinged on the towers, and the
Speaker 1: mobile phone pinged on the tower belonged to Russell Hill.
Speaker 1: That somehow, in the hurly burly of taking their bodies out,
Speaker 1: he'd also taken Hill's phone. And Hill's phone was turned
Speaker 1: on and it had not gone flat, and it pinned
Speaker 1: on the nearest tower. And so police subsequently, much later
Speaker 1: were able to say Russell Hill's phone was traveling in
Speaker 1: the Mount Hotham area at this particular time, you know,
Speaker 1: nine o'clock in the morning or whatever the morning after
Speaker 1: we think Russell Hill was killed, and it was clearly
Speaker 1: in a car because it was traveling. So which car
Speaker 1: is it? So they find the time down by looking
Speaker 1: at the camera and they say, well, twelve cars went
Speaker 1: through Mount Hotham at that time, a particular time gap
Speaker 1: that we're looking at, just twelve cars, and they looked
Speaker 1: at each of the twelve and one of the twelve
Speaker 1: was a blue missm And it was that confluence of
Speaker 1: two events, the blocked backtrack and the fact that he
Speaker 1: had Russell Hill's phone in his car that caught Greg Lynn.
Speaker 1: Because before that there was no sign of Greg Lynn.
Speaker 1: There was nothing to prove exactly when he'd been in
Speaker 1: the high country, and he would have been able to
Speaker 1: lie his way out of it reasonably easily, and he
Speaker 1: was pretty good at it. Had he got out that backtrack,
Speaker 1: there's going to be no sign of Russell Hill's phone
Speaker 1: and no number plate recognition camera recording what car is driving.
Speaker 1: He would have come out of the bush. Why haven't
Speaker 1: immertaled for it somewhere many, many many kilometers from the
Speaker 1: crime scene and made his way back to Melbourne down
Speaker 1: the hum Highway. Not a problem. Fortune sometimes goes against
Speaker 1: the bad guys. As former lawyer Andrew Fraser used to say,
Speaker 1: really miserable bad people lose. He used a shorter expression.
Speaker 1: And so the police got two lucky breaks. That meant that,
Speaker 1: after months of detective work, they were able to narrow
Speaker 1: the field of potential suspects to a very small number
Speaker 1: of people who'd been in the mountains on March twenty first,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty but had not voluntarily come forward. And of
Speaker 1: course some people draw attention to themselves by trying not
Speaker 1: to draw attention. So anyone that the police knew had
Speaker 1: been up there, who hadn't come forward to tell them
Speaker 1: that they'd been up there. They were worth looking at.
Speaker 1: Why had they not come forward? Now, obviously they're not
Speaker 1: all murderous. If there's six or eight people who haven't
Speaker 1: come forward, they're not all killers, And in fact none
Speaker 1: of them might be killers. But they could be deer
Speaker 1: hunters who were up there when they shouldn't have been.
Speaker 1: They might have been people who've got other reasons not
Speaker 1: to go to the police because they might have a
Speaker 1: dope crop up there somewhere. Just people who don't want
Speaker 1: to mix with police, or deal with police, or have
Speaker 1: anything to do with them. Some of them might have
Speaker 1: been people from inter state or had gone into state
Speaker 1: and hadn't realized that the police wanted them. All sorts
Speaker 1: of reasons why you may not come forward, But only
Speaker 1: one person had the big reason not to come forward,
Speaker 1: and that was Greg Linn, and he did not put
Speaker 1: himself forward. This evasiveness does not prove criminality, but evasive
Speaker 1: people greatly interested detectives who were following a couple of
Speaker 1: strands of investigation. On those strands, who were, of course
Speaker 1: the blue Nissen as driven by Greg Lynn and the
Speaker 1: mobile telephone as previously owned and carried by the vanished
Speaker 1: Russell Hill. So police have sophisticated ways of analyzing phone data,
Speaker 1: which is why they now routinely use mobile phone records
Speaker 1: to pinpoint suspects in high profile murders such as Jill
Speaker 1: Mars's death in Brunswick in twenty twelve, and will ultimately
Speaker 1: prove vital to the Samantha Murphy case. Hunting international terrorists
Speaker 1: has improved interpretation of mobile phone data, which is why
Speaker 1: the Woe and Gatter investigators, the missing Persons people looked
Speaker 1: for overseas help. They went to the experts. When the
Speaker 1: police started reeling in persons of interest, they asked them
Speaker 1: what they were doing at Wollongata on certain days in
Speaker 1: March twenty twenty. A flat denial might be a provable lie,
Speaker 1: and that would be a reason for suspicion and a
Speaker 1: mission would set up the next question, why not voluntarily
Speaker 1: identify yourself the way that other people have? And after that,
Speaker 1: of course, the questions would get tougher and they would
Speaker 1: lead to the big one. Okay, where are the bodies?
Speaker 1: Investigators were playing a long game after a slow start.
Speaker 1: By the time of Passing Camper reported Russell Hill's burnt
Speaker 1: out tent and scorched Toyota to Sail police several days
Speaker 1: had passed. Initial reports did not make that time lapse clear,
Speaker 1: which confused potential witnesses. They weren't sure when it was
Speaker 1: that the police thought something bad had happened. At first,
Speaker 1: it seemed reasonable that the pair had got lost and
Speaker 1: that their tent had coincidentally burned down, either accidentally totally
Speaker 1: accident accidentally when a campfire had been blown by the
Speaker 1: wind or something, or through arson by opportunist thieves who'd
Speaker 1: pilfered the camp and then set light to it opportunist thieves,
Speaker 1: not killers. The fact that Russell Hill's expense he drone
Speaker 1: was missing raised the possibility that the pair the missing
Speaker 1: pair Hill and Clay, went looking for it in the
Speaker 1: bush and had become lost and then died from exposure,
Speaker 1: which can happen up there very easily, And if that
Speaker 1: had happened, their bodies would soon be eaten by wild dogs.
Speaker 1: Now that might sound far fetched, but as we've often
Speaker 1: discussed in this podcast, that grisly scenario has often played
Speaker 1: out in the mountains over many decades, and not just
Speaker 1: those mountains either. In other patches of bush around Victoria,
Speaker 1: bodies have been consumed by wild dogs, to the extent
Speaker 1: that one body buried by criminals way back in the
Speaker 1: bad old days. All they found was one of his
Speaker 1: shoes and the remains of a tweed jacket which had
Speaker 1: the maker's tag in it, and that enabled the police
Speaker 1: to identify the victim. The rest of him had been
Speaker 1: eaten by the wild dogs. Apparently dogs aren't clean on
Speaker 1: tweed jackets and shoes. Two things pointed towards sudden and
Speaker 1: violent deaths at one and gatter. First, the organized searches,
Speaker 1: in good searches, lots of them, could find no trace
Speaker 1: of the missing people nothing. Second, investigators calculated that their
Speaker 1: sleeping bags were missing because when they looked in the
Speaker 1: bashes of the fire, they couldn't find any zips. So
Speaker 1: they reckoned that sleeping bags had been taken, and that
Speaker 1: was an indicator. Probably they'd been used as body bags.
Speaker 1: They didn't think they'd carried them away. Meanwhile, it was
Speaker 1: increasingly clear that the pair did not stage their own disappearance.
Speaker 1: We all know the reasons why these days, computerized banking
Speaker 1: credit cards, nationwide network of security cameras and traffic cameras
Speaker 1: showed no signs that they were alive, not one. Russell
Speaker 1: Hill was an experienced bushman, he'd worked in the area
Speaker 1: as a logger and was unlikely to get lost. Against
Speaker 1: that was the macabre, longshot possibility of an elaborate murdered
Speaker 1: suicide committed by a secretive man leading a double life. Now,
Speaker 1: as we all know now, Russell Hill was conducting long
Speaker 1: time affair with his childhood sweetheart Carol Clay. They'd been
Speaker 1: sweethearts as kids, and despite the fact they both married
Speaker 1: other people, they'd renewed the spark of romance at some
Speaker 1: stage later in life. And it was true that Russell Hill,
Speaker 1: although under pressure from Carol Clay to end his marriage
Speaker 1: and marry her, was leading a double life. He'd been
Speaker 1: reluctant to leave his own family and he preferred to
Speaker 1: lead a double life, and that, of course raises the
Speaker 1: possibility that he could become depressed about it and commit
Speaker 1: a murder suicide such as one as we've seen down
Speaker 1: in the Otway region in recent weeks, where a couple
Speaker 1: of about this age met their end, and it clearly
Speaker 1: was a murder suicide committed with a gun. And that
Speaker 1: was something that police could not discount, but they did
Speaker 1: such thorough searches that they believed that a third party
Speaker 1: was involved. Time makes mysteries deeper and darker. The fact
Speaker 1: that three other people had disappeared in the High Country
Speaker 1: in the previous nine years bred rumors about an eccentric
Speaker 1: spear hunter that was dubbed button Man, so cool because
Speaker 1: he used to make these sort of buttons out of
Speaker 1: deer antem put them in his ears. Nothing wrong with that,
Speaker 1: just a thing he did detect his look back to.
Speaker 1: When Hill picked up Carol Clay from near her Pakenham
Speaker 1: home on the morning of March nineteenth, twenty twenty. To
Speaker 1: a casual observer, there wasn't much to see, just an
Speaker 1: older man in a Toyota land Cruiser with a very
Speaker 1: pleasant woman of his own age. They were just gray
Speaker 1: nomads off on a trip, except for the one thing.
Speaker 1: No one else in either family knew that they were
Speaker 1: going camping together. That was a secret from their respective family,
Speaker 1: as everyone knows. Russell Hill and his wife Robin were
Speaker 1: longtime friends of Carol, who was well known in the
Speaker 1: Country Women's Association. The Hills lived in Druen after returning
Speaker 1: from Hayfield up in Gippsland, where they'd spent the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: while Russell worked in the bush logging, often in the
Speaker 1: big timber coops towards the old Wollongatt station site, which
Speaker 1: is why he knew the area so well. Hill apparently
Speaker 1: drove his Toyota on his usual route through Hayfield and
Speaker 1: Lo Cola to Wollongatta. The pair vanished sometime in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hours after Hill made a radio call to a
Speaker 1: friend late on March twentieth. He said he was about
Speaker 1: to camp near the old station sometime that night or
Speaker 1: next morning. The pair disappeared. By the time a passing
Speaker 1: traveler saw their camp around two pm next day, the
Speaker 1: tent had burned down and it had scorched the toyota.
Speaker 1: The ashes were cold, and so was the trail. When
Speaker 1: sale police arrived, they found the toyota locked. They assumed
Speaker 1: that Hill was probably carrying his keys and his mobile phone.
Speaker 1: Fair enough, a man who'd lived in the country all
Speaker 1: his life, he was probably unlikely to have locked his
Speaker 1: car while sitting next to it, but he probably would
Speaker 1: lock it if they both went off for a walk,
Speaker 1: because you know, even up in the remote spots, casual
Speaker 1: theft can happen, and there's quite a lot of people
Speaker 1: go through that area. If you park there for twenty
Speaker 1: four hours, there would be cars go past, and some
Speaker 1: of them might be driven by people who might pinch
Speaker 1: stuff from your camp. The tent fire was puzzling. Was
Speaker 1: it arson or was it an accident? Thieves often set fires,
Speaker 1: whether maliciously or to destroy fingerprints and DNA, same with killers.
Speaker 1: Over time, detectives canned the idea the pair were lost,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't quite rule it out comple Maybe they
Speaker 1: went for a walk with the drone and got bushed
Speaker 1: after losing the drone in the early stages. An alternative
Speaker 1: theory for the drone's absence was that Hill left it
Speaker 1: in the tent and that a passing opportunist stole it
Speaker 1: before torching the camp. The question was whether such a
Speaker 1: thief would also kill and dispose of two harmless pensioners.
Speaker 1: Police believed that someone had. They had a fair idea
Speaker 1: who was the last to see the missing pair alive
Speaker 1: long before they made a move. When police first interviewed
Speaker 1: Greg Lynn in July twenty twenty, less than four months
Speaker 1: after the presumed double homicide, he wasn't a suspect. They
Speaker 1: came knocking at his house because his vehicle registration was
Speaker 1: one of several recorded by the cameras at Mount Hotham
Speaker 1: Missing Persons. Detective Abbi Justin would later tell a court
Speaker 1: that when she and another investigator questioned the then Jetstar
Speaker 1: pilot in his kitchen at Caroline Springs, he was just
Speaker 1: a potential witness. Still, they were interested in his movements
Speaker 1: as they were in other people's movements, and they were
Speaker 1: intrigued by the fact that he had painted his blueness
Speaker 1: and bronze and sold his trailer, or he said he
Speaker 1: sold it. The pilot's answers did not satisfy the investigator's curiosity,
Speaker 1: which had been pricked many weeks before, back in May
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, which is only two months after the pair
Speaker 1: went missing. That, of course, was when the analysis of
Speaker 1: Russell Hill's mobile phone data showed that between nine twenty
Speaker 1: six and nine fifty precisely on March twenty first, his
Speaker 1: phone was moving towards Mount Hotham from the Dargo direction,
Speaker 1: so as moving north from Dargo, Hill had not been
Speaker 1: in contact with any one since the previous evening when
Speaker 1: he had his regular call with his fellow amateur radio enthusiasts.
Speaker 1: Police were confident the fatal confrontation was later that night,
Speaker 1: on the twentieth, which meant that if Hill's mobile phone
Speaker 1: was traveling next morning, it was with someone else, not
Speaker 1: with Hill, or not with Hill alive, perhaps with a
Speaker 1: dead Hill. And as we know, just twelve vehicles passed
Speaker 1: through Hotham in that time frame, and one of those
Speaker 1: twelve was Gregg Lynne's Nissen, which then was Blue. Police
Speaker 1: spent five weeks researching the pilot before knocking on his door.
Speaker 1: On July the fourteenth, Abby Justin and her boss, Acting
Speaker 1: Sergeant Brett Florence, came knocking. The police recorded the conversation
Speaker 1: and Lynn provided a statement he was a person of
Speaker 1: interest well on the way to becoming a suspect. One
Speaker 1: of the problems legally, speaking with recording the conversation is
Speaker 1: that in so doing it showed that he was a suspect.
Speaker 1: But if you are a suspect, you should be cautioned
Speaker 1: about your rights and your right to silence. But of
Speaker 1: course the police didn't want to caution him and put
Speaker 1: him on guard. They wanted him to feel reasonably comfortable
Speaker 1: so that he might make further mistakes or admissions which
Speaker 1: would firm up their suspicions about him. So it's understandable
Speaker 1: what the police did because ultimately their job was to
Speaker 1: find the remains of the dead people, and the only
Speaker 1: way to do that was to keep their best suspect
Speaker 1: on the hook without him breaking the line. Between July
Speaker 1: and December that year twenty twenty, police checked out Lynn
Speaker 1: with banks and government agencies. They obtained more images from
Speaker 1: the cameras at Mount Hotham, they spoke to a witness
Speaker 1: who had been in the area at the time, and
Speaker 1: they went back to the hills to search again by
Speaker 1: early December, so this ispot eight months after the disappearances.
Speaker 1: Other possible candidates had fallen away and Lynn had become
Speaker 1: the focus of the investigation. He was under surveillance with
Speaker 1: GPS trackers, telephone intercepts, and bugs in his house and vehicle.
Speaker 1: Police spent most of the following year doing further searches,
Speaker 1: including one at Howart Plains, where Kadava dogs were used
Speaker 1: to check anywhere that Lynne might have camped since the murders. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: police were listening to Lynd's conversations, mostly him talking to himself.
Speaker 1: He had the professional pilots had as stating what he
Speaker 1: was doing as he did it. A legacy of endless
Speaker 1: hours piloting aircraft fitted with flight recorders monitoring Lyne's movements
Speaker 1: in real time forced the case to a head. Brett
Speaker 1: Florence and another detective were listening to Lynn speaking to
Speaker 1: himself as he was driving in late November twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: so this is twenty months after the disappearance, and Lynn
Speaker 1: appeared to be crying and talking to himself and talking
Speaker 1: in the past tense about himself, and he was acting
Speaker 1: in a quite a bizarre way and saying bizarre things,
Speaker 1: which was concerning to the police because they thought that
Speaker 1: he was so agitated and acting in such a way
Speaker 1: that he could pose a danger to himself or to
Speaker 1: other people. He was heading back to the high Country
Speaker 1: ostensibly to go hunting, but investigators feared he might be
Speaker 1: planning suicide, so they had to make instant decisions to
Speaker 1: protect the interests of the grieving families, the Hills and
Speaker 1: the Clays. By this stage, police had no doubt that
Speaker 1: the missing pair had met violent deaths. Their duty to
Speaker 1: the distressed relatives in such cases is to extinguish all
Speaker 1: hope by finding human remains. They see that as their
Speaker 1: main mission. After a year of watching and waiting, detectives
Speaker 1: felt obliged to stop Lynn harming himself and to ask
Speaker 1: him to consider the family members desperate to locate their
Speaker 1: loved one's remains. In a crisis like this, the urgent
Speaker 1: outweighs important, so police threw together a plan to stop Linn.
Speaker 1: Special Operations Group members headed for the Hills in helicopters
Speaker 1: to intercept him at his camp at a place called
Speaker 1: h Buckle Junction. He didn't resist when he was surrounded
Speaker 1: on November twenty second, twenty twenty one. He was armed
Speaker 1: with the SOG. Special Operations Group have ways of disarming people.
Speaker 1: Apprehending him seemed the humane thing to do, but it
Speaker 1: skewed a copybook investigation. Now the police had to build
Speaker 1: the plane after take off. As one of them said,
Speaker 1: Lynn spent four days at Sale police station helping PA
Speaker 1: with their inquiries. What he told them was correctly suppressed.
Speaker 1: He gave vital information because he steered investigators to another
Speaker 1: district up at wong Gara, which is past Dargo, where
Speaker 1: they uncovered the remains of the missing victims a long
Speaker 1: way from where they had been killed further west at Wonongata.
Speaker 1: No details were released, naturally, but investigators undoubtedly discussed certain scenarios,
Speaker 1: such as Linn being upset by Hill's drone and getting
Speaker 1: into a confrontation with him. The likely scenario is, in fact,
Speaker 1: that Hill used the drone to film Linn engaged in
Speaker 1: using guns in some way he shouldn't or whatever doing something.
Speaker 1: Linn took objection, and they had a blue and Lin's
Speaker 1: shot him, and then he said to kill the witness.
Speaker 1: That is the logical explanation for what happened. A fight
Speaker 1: between I when an old angry man and a younger
Speaker 1: angry man ending in an inevitable result because one was
Speaker 1: armed and inclined to kill things, as we found out since.
Speaker 1: And then the chilling logical conclusion that he would kill
Speaker 1: the only witness and try to get away with it
Speaker 1: and destroy all the evidence in such a way that
Speaker 1: he almost did get away with it. The summary of
Speaker 1: police evidence is this the accused contaminated and staged the
Speaker 1: crime scene, intentionally destroyed evidence within the crime scene, and
Speaker 1: removed evidence from the crime scene before transporting and disposing
Speaker 1: of the bodies and mobile devices to further conceal his
Speaker 1: involvement and distance himself. In other words, he set fight
Speaker 1: of the camp and fled with the bodies in his trailer,
Speaker 1: disposing of them a long way from modern Gatup. Then
Speaker 1: disposed of the trailer, and then I returned to the
Speaker 1: scene in May and the following November November eight months later,
Speaker 1: where he burned the remains to a very fine ash
Speaker 1: and dispersed the little bits so there were no big
Speaker 1: pieces that could really carry much forensic investigation. The absence
Speaker 1: of bodies did not stop the investigators. When Hill's mobile
Speaker 1: phone went in the car the morning after the murders,
Speaker 1: it created an electronic trail that led slowly but surely
Speaker 1: to Lynn's door. To a lay person, it might have
Speaker 1: seemed inevitable that the accused would be convicted of a
Speaker 1: double homicide on what it first appeared to be damning evidence,
Speaker 1: but that perception was altered during the course of the trial.
Speaker 1: The absence of a contrarie version of events left open
Speaker 1: a gap through which a brilliant defense council might well
Speaker 1: steer a judge and jury, and as it turns out,
Speaker 1: the judge was steered through that gap. The jury was
Speaker 1: a bit harder because the jury could not swallow despite
Speaker 1: the legal contortions of the system and of the court,
Speaker 1: they could not swallow the proposition that two people, two
Speaker 1: unarmed old pensioners, had both died instantaneously, as described by
Speaker 1: the accused in separate incidents separated by a few minutes,
Speaker 1: that one had been accidentally shot by a ricochet shot
Speaker 1: that had bounced off the mirror of the Toyota, and
Speaker 1: that the other had died when he'd rushed at Greg
Speaker 1: Lynn with a knife and fallen over and stabbed himself.
Speaker 1: The defense was that those two things happened, that they
Speaker 1: both died accidentally instantly, because of course, if they hadn't
Speaker 1: died instantly, if they were just wounded, either of them,
Speaker 1: any decent Jetstar pilot would use a radio to radio
Speaker 1: out to get help, or they would drive out to
Speaker 1: get help, or they would do something to get help
Speaker 1: for the wounded. But he did not do that. He
Speaker 1: acted as if he was the murderer. And that was
Speaker 1: in the end, the prosecution case, and that, in the
Speaker 1: end was what the jury believed. Because the jury found
Speaker 1: that although it couldn't make a safe finding of murder
Speaker 1: about Russell Hill, that they would find Lynn guilty of
Speaker 1: Carol Clay's murder because her murder was a cover up
Speaker 1: for an unlawful killing of Russell Hill. So in the end,
Speaker 1: the jury found a way to fit itself through the
Speaker 1: eye of the needle and find the accused guilty of
Speaker 1: at least one of these killings. And that at this
Speaker 1: point means that Greg Lynn should go to jail for
Speaker 1: a very long time. However, as we sit here and
Speaker 1: talk about this, there is no doubt that Greg Lynn
Speaker 1: and his counsel will be considering an appeal, and so
Speaker 1: it may not be very long before we see an
Speaker 1: appeal run. And it would not shock some legal observers
Speaker 1: if such an appeal got up, if he walked on appeal. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm no expert, and it'd be a shocking turn of events,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't necessarily surprise. Now. This has alarmed some observers,
Speaker 1: including various stute lawyers who work in and around the media,
Speaker 1: and one of them said to me this week that
Speaker 1: this is a new thing in murder trials. It seems
Speaker 1: to him because we have an accused who comes to
Speaker 1: court with the presumption of innocence that we all enjoy.
Speaker 1: We're all presumed innocent until proven guilty. That's fine, But
Speaker 1: also what this guy had when he came to court
Speaker 1: was a total absence of damaging evidence because he had
Speaker 1: very carefully destroyed every fragment of evidence. The bodies had
Speaker 1: been destroyed so much that the scientists couldn't really reconstruct
Speaker 1: any element of the crime scene and put forward a
Speaker 1: coherent account of how he might have killed those people
Speaker 1: for the prosecution to put up before a jury. And
Speaker 1: because he destroyed the evidence, there was no evidence against him. Now.
Speaker 1: Yoking together of the presumption of innocence and this destruction
Speaker 1: of evidence means that this accused had a really good
Speaker 1: walk up start on being acquitted. And most observers of
Speaker 1: this trial are surprised that he was not acquitted, not
Speaker 1: because they think he didn't do it, but because that
Speaker 1: was the way the court seemed to be nudging the jurors.
Speaker 1: In the end, the jury members were something that they
Speaker 1: should be. They were light detectors. The beauty of a
Speaker 1: jury is that twelve ordinary people can sit there and
Speaker 1: listen to appear someone like themselves. The accused give evidence
Speaker 1: or not. They can listen to all the witnesses for
Speaker 1: and against, and make up their own mind on the
Speaker 1: basis of their own common sense, their own life experience,
Speaker 1: whether that case is safe and strong or not, and
Speaker 1: to acquit or convict based largely on the evidence, but
Speaker 1: also on their own perception of the evidence and whether
Speaker 1: they can trust any of it or all of it.
Speaker 1: And these jurors in this case were effectively light detectors.
Speaker 1: They detected a lie and they had the guts to
Speaker 1: act on them. God bless them. Thanks for listening. Life
Speaker 1: and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true
Speaker 1: crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns,
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