The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective see a side of life the average persons never exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes in the contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into
this world. Welcome back to Part two of my chat with Greg Hedrick, the TV writer, producer and author of the book In the Dead of Night, which is about the twenty twenty murder investigation in the disappearance of Russell Hill and Carol Clay, whose burnout campsite was governed in remote Victorian wilderness.
Greg, welcome back, Thanks Garry. Well we left you with well.
We left our listeners in part one with all the information that the police had at the time and just rehashing it that these couple were camping. Their campsite was found abandoned and it had been set alight. Their car had been abandoned. The police got a report of their disappearance about five days later. When the communications weren't coming through from the remote location. Then there was lines of inquiry.
Police were trying to establish who was in the era and when we talked remote, we're talking extra really remote, extremely remote, and they came through a number plate recognition camera. They got the name of Greg Lynn. The police were spoken to Greg Lynn. He gave an account and was forthcoming in his movements down there, and that's basically where the police had been left with.
That's and in fact, even at that stage they still hadn't talked to the button man they went. It was a few weeks after that they take that, and there was an other suspect that they had that other homicides told them about who lived nearby, who was as likely
as Greg was. And in fact, the way it was described to me, as I say in the book, was that it was only when those two were eliminated as well, that they looked on their board of all the people who'd been in the valley or all the people who were suspects, and they could eliminate everyone except Greg.
So on the version of events he had, they couldn't corroborate.
That's right. It sounded, you know, really feasible, but they could corroborate nothing, So it.
Makes it difficult.
I always approached complex investigations with opportunity, capability of motive. Maybe who's a hard one with this, because it's why were these people killed. Opportunity is about being in the vicinity and capability have they got that?
Are they the.
Type of person that could commit a crime of that nature. They've gone through all the people they've identified in the area, so they're looking at opportunity. So they're ticking those and then eliminating people. I assume because of the information they provided. They had cameras, you said, pictures of Jim camping or whatever,
had people with them that could where they were. But you've got Greg sitting there on his own, that's given the version, and the police had nothing, nothing that could corroborate it or contradict it.
That's right, So where do you go? So what do you do?
What do you do?
And I would imagine. I would imagine that would be the briefing what happens now? You would all be standing I get how this would play out. You'd always standing in the interview room looking at the whiteboards, staring there and going, well, what do we do?
What we do? The first thing? What the first thing they did was go, let's he's a jet Star pilot. Let's see if we can ask other Jet Star pilots what they think of him. And they quickly realized that he's someone who people like to stay clear of, wary of that, he's a little bit feared, very good at his job, but not well liked at all. And so it just starts to put him in a different category. When they're thinking, well, is he someone who conceivably could
have done this? You're looking at someone who's known to be cold and calculating, not particularly friendly, not particularly warm, and they just build up a picture.
Well looking, you've been trying to get the profile of the type of person you're looking at. Yeah, So before we move on, and I think, because investigations of this nature and I can see how hard the cops have worked, tell me a little bit about the about the investigative team.
The ones. There are some I don't know about. The ones the ones that I do know about. The first informant was Abby Justin, who very smart, capable young woman in the mid thirties. From the very beginning, Brett Florence was around. Brett is the one that goes the whole way. Even though so Abby was the first informant, Brett stayed with investigation right through to the final interview. Another one involved was Candace Robson, and she was involved for a long time, but then she took leave to have a
child about halfway through. And after Candace left, the head of the missing person squad who oversaw everything, Andrew Stamper, He and Brett decided they sat down and decided to bring in Dan passing him which was an interesting move because Dan Dan was a cop who was known to be good camper, four wheel driver, recreational shooter, et cetera, so he could talk Greg's language.
I thought that was a really interesting, interesting move and a clever move on behalf of the team bringing Dan in because Dan, yeah, understood the type of person he was in the world that Yeah, the others might have been city dwellers and yeah, trying to understand that world of four will driving and hunting and hanging out in the bush.
And that did pay off in the interview, in the report of interview.
Okay, well we'll get back to Greg.
So you got this situation, he's your best person of interest at this point in Tom what saw the moves did the police make.
To the next thing? They took the I think the big pictures They took the view. They were not confident they had enough to just arrest and charge. Now they were developing theories and he was the only one left that they knew about. But there was so much they still didn't know. There was nothing that actually connected Greg to the burnt out campsite at all yet. So they decided,
as often happens with homicide investigations, they needed surveillance. They needed to see if they could that The theory was put surveillance in his house and you know, car, etc. Then try and calibrate things so you could just prod him to think about that event, but not far enough
to make him think he was the suspect. And of course what they found in terms of putting the surveillance devices inside his house was it was far more difficult than usual because it was COVID lockdown and everyone was living in the house.
Yeah, thats it makes it very hard, very difficult situations. They managed to do it. We won't reveal how they did it, but they managed.
To do it.
There was a couple of things when they're building the case and they're working on hypothesis this might have happened, that might have happened. There was a couple of Really I think smart police work in what they've done and how they've interpreted things. One of the information correct me if I'm wrong. One of the information that Greg provided the police in that informal chat when they first spoke to him was that he got up in the morning,
left at seven am when it was light. But they had records of his car having the car headlights on at ten am in the morning. And I think one of the detech is I don't know who they would attribute it to, but it was in a group discussion said well that's unusual. Maybe he was driving all night and forgot to turn his lights off.
That's clever thinking, yeah that and I think that was Brett. It might have been heavy, but I think it was Brett. And yeah, so they had from the shots they had of his car going through the AMPR cameras Crade Outline road. The one the public saw later was the one from behind, but they also had the one from in front as it was approaching the camera and his lights were on. That's right, and they and it wasn't it was. It wasn't that. As soon as they got the phone, day
went aha. It was later on they went, well, hang on, why would he's saying He actually said something like the sun comes up, you pack your camp camp up and you get going, and they're going. If he's not packing his camp up till the sun comes up, and he's been there since four o'clock, why are his headlights on?
Simple thing? Simple thing like that. But that says little details that can get missed, and full credit to him that they okay, that's enough to pike your interest and look a little bit deeper at him. Then you start adding things like this and this is not it's not enough to get a person convicted. He changed the color of his car, Okay, So that's saying, well, okay, what's going on there. We know whatever happened at the camp site,
the person was trying to cover up things. Then you've got a person that's changed the color of his car. Reasonable explanation. I'm sure a highly paid defense barrister could go, well, we all did strange things during COVID. Yeah, he just changed the color of his car. But they're little things that added up. When we're looking at a person of interest, you're trying to build a profile, the history, what this person's done. They've spoken to the Jetstar employees and he's
not well liked, and a few other things that were said. So, okay, he's a bit of an outlier. He's not your average person. But there was something else about the victim, Russell Hill, that was quite interesting that comes into play. Then that's the victimology. That his nephew was killed in a hunting accident. Yes, his nephew in the mid nineties. His nephew Gary was actually mistaken for a deer and was shot by a
dear hunter. The important thing was that a deer hunters had mistaken his nephew for a wild animal and had shot him accidentally and killed him. And Russell from that had never been a shooter anyway, but from then was kept a close watch on any hunters when he was camping. Did not like hunting and shooting all that much, and kept maps of where the hunting areas were, you know, where they couldn't couldn't hunt. So he's almost like his own little policeman in terms of policing the hunters in
the various outback areas that he went and knowing. And that's where it gets interesting. You've got profiling the person of interest, you're profiling the victim, and you're trying to work out well, if they've met, has there been a class? So you've got this shooter that doesn't like being told, as in Greg, and then you've got Russell that doesn't like shooters, that.
Doesn't like shooters and likes to put them in their place. And Greg who owned seven weapons. Okay, so you know, not many I don't know many jets star pilots would own seven weapons, but you know he did.
And other things that they built a case, and the case theory more than anything. But the victim's phone was on. Now, the assumption being well, if you're in the room location, why have you got your why would the phone be turned on? But there's an explanation for that, yeah there is. And again it took them a little while to go ah. Of course he about a month or two before he'd
bought a drone. Russell Hill had bought a drone, and he was very proud of being able to sort of fly his drone around and you know, check on what was happening in the in the various areas. You know, we might be good for fishing or camping or whatever. And what they realized was that, you know, drones are
controlled through your phone. So while almost everybody who goes into the wond and gat a valley or the Great Alpine Road turns their phone off because you can't get recept anyway save the battery, his was on because it was controlling the drone. And so that's almost certainly why it was still on when it was being driven past those towers. And someone mightn't have realized that or forgot, They wouldn't have the attention the detail whether it.
Was gregor whether it was Greg or someone else. The likelihood is that they never did find the drone, But the likelihood is the phone wasn't right there, and if they just picked up Carol and Russell's phone, the assumption would be they'd both be off.
So they're building this case and all these red flags, indicators and all that. But you start to put it together, but still it's just a hypothesis of what might have happened that it can't be put any stronger. At what stage we talked about the data for the far the movement did they did that start to tighten up in the movements of confirm what they thought it was. It's basically locking it in. It is this is the path the phone travel.
It was about nine or ten months later but they finally had the the full true call records I think they're called I think It's true call and where the mathematical analyst who was doing that could pinpoint at ten second intervals where Russell's phone was, and it was it was going up the Dargo Highplanes Road, it was turning left into Great Alpine Road and where the A ANDPR cameras are. It sort of hit bounced against the Mount Hotham tower just before and just after and in that
time Russell's car went straight through the camera. In court, you can pretty much prove the phone had been in that car.
And then you look at possible defenses building the case. Did someone just plant the phone in there? Someone throw the phone in there? All sorts of things that come in. But the case is starting to get stronger now, so it'd certainly been in the suspect stage. But that opens another consideration. This dude's a jet Star pilot, and I'm sure they they had issues because quite often when we're looking at people and you know what they're doing, well, are they potentially if we stir them up, are they
going to do something horrific? Someone in charge of flying planes as a high risk How did that play out? Because I would imagine the police would be, well, the moment we put this up, he's going to they're going to have to take him away from his work so that the game's up that we're looking.
It was a real there was a real crisis point for them when they realized that they as Jetstar. For the first few months the investigation, Jetstar wasn't flying, it was COVID. Then when jets Star started back up again, they thought, well, we can't. You know, what do we do If we'd call Jet Star head of security and say, look, it's one of your check pilots is just on the quiet, just on the quiet, and an investigation for a double murder, they'd be grounded immediately. And they'd have to tell him
while he was grounded, he would know. And what they knew was if Greg knew, definitely he was their number one suspect. He shut up and they would never have any chance of getting any further evidence. On the other hand, if they if they didn't say anything. Some of the police psychologists were saying, well, if he starts to twig or you know, think about what had happened, or think maybe he might be in the frame, there's a chance he will crash a plane and they go.
That would be a hard one to explain.
That would be a very difficult one. So they were in a bind, and they were very close to actually picking up the phone to jet Star and resigning themselves to the fact that they'd gone as far as they could. When he was stung by one of his own bees. He'd brought some bee hives during lockdown, and one of his own bees stung him and he had an anaphylactic reaction, which meant his pilot's license was canceled for another six months until he got a health check again.
I don't know how the police got the bees in there, but he did.
Well. Him stung by a bee, we were thinking that we make an electronic you know, vic pop be that did it, et cetera. But no, it was just it was sheer luck, sheer.
Luck, because that would be a real hard decision to make and you'd probably have to err on the side of the cause. And as it got tighter and tighter, you couldn't sit on that and let him fly planes. You'd have to have to move. So that was fortunate. Sometimes you need those lucky breaks. And that's incredible. I'd be really impressive if they managed to orchestrate that. That's one of the best undercover operations I've ever seen, getting someone stung by a bed.
Okay, So that's given them some breathing space.
They're working physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, and covert electronic surveillance. And you also addressed the difficulty of getting approval for having an electronic surveillance and you know, you've got to go through judges and everything that goes with that. And it's not just granted, it's not. So they were working with the pressures of that. What so what was their next move or when did they decide to.
Live on their next move? Because having when they first put all that surveillance on him. Their thought was, most times someone has a confidence somewhere in their life. You know, it can be your wife or your husband, but often it's not. Often it's whoever you know Joe at the pub, and they were surprised to realize that Greg didn't have anyone. He actually didn't have any close friends at all, and so they thought, well, let's try and give him one and see if. And so it was going to be
tricky to do. To get someone to become an acquaintance stroke friend of someone who actively avoided friendship wasn't going to be easy. So they needed someone with a particular set of circumstances that would appeal to Greg, that was very like minded, et cetera. And they had to go to Wa to find a cop who had all the boxes tipped as someone who could probably pull this off for them and get Greg just to slip up for
three to five seconds. All they needed was to him to say the wrong thing for three to five seconds, and suddenly the case wouldn't be just circumstantial. They'd have something. And they had this all in place, and if you remember, there was a COVID positive test in Perth and Mark McGowan closed the Wa Borders.
I love the power of those premieres.
Let's close the world, I do remember.
And it was a hard border shutdown and Wa you cut itself off from the rest of the world and they couldn't get him over And so that was like.
And the detail is in the book and people want to find the detail. I can only imagine how frustrating that would be and going real like, can we just sort this out? But no, A hard lockdown is a hard lockdown. Okay, So they've got a case I would describe as circumstantial, but a fairly weak circumstantial.
You put it before the courts.
You'd be worried about him walking out on it, So they need more. There was one other thing that he did, if I remember it correctly, after the lockdown was removed from Victoria that midnight. First thing he does is drive straight straight back, yeah, back down there.
That's the other clue they had, is they and it was before they had put all the surveillance on it, because they had so much trouble getting the surveillance on it. But when they were checking his phone records and they realized that after the first lockdown finished at midnight before one am, his phone was on the road driving straight back to we want to get highly.
So who's desperate to get down?
He was desperate to get there, and they did think who does that? Well again, there's like defense barishes are great at coming up with reasons. But you present that.
At court and they go, he's been lockdown. Weren't we all frustrated during COVID?
You didn't. We just want to get free, And you go.
I know, So it's funny you look at it through the lens of Okay, Well, that's certainly painting the pitch from a prosecution point of view. But the alternative is the defense can rip it apart.
So they're still looking for more.
But they decide they're going to have to move on him, and they came up with a plan, as I understand that, to put pressure on all the people, priful people, on him when he's doing one of these trips when he's off grid. So when he comes back, the phone's just going to beep and all his friends' associates are going to be going, why the police knocking on their door talking.
To m Yeah, they came to the view because the surveillance that the timeframe for the surveillance sports was running out, and they knew they wouldn't get another extension, So there's a sort of ticking clock here as well. So yes, they decide, first there's the segment they did on sixty minutes, and then later at the moment you're talking about, they
felt they needed to rattle him somehow. They had to get him rattled so that in an interview situation he'd tell them more than he might otherwise do, and to do that he Jetstar was about to put him back in the air again. They didn't want that to happen.
He told Melanie he was going to go camping up in the Grampians, which is sort of the Northwest, and yet they came up with this plan that to really rattle and panick him that when he came back on the grid, he would find that almost everybody he knew suddenly been spoken to.
And there was a lot of I have jumped ahead, so I'll wind it back because the use of sixty minutes with the media. They'd been consulting with a psychiatrist or psychologist about how to put pressure on Greg to make him trip up or get further evidence, and the opportunity presented itself in sixty Minutes reached out to them to do a segment on the story. Yeah, and they
came to an agreement with Andrew Andrew Stamper. Stamper came to an agreement, Yet, we should do it, and we control what we're going to release.
Yeah. Yeah, and I believe you know sixty Minutes' main point was they wanted to do for them. It's human interest. It's the emotional side, you know, the grief and stress that the families are going through, and you know, can the public help them, etc. And as far as Breton Andrew Stampho were concerned, it was that's great, can we also do this? And although it was dressed up and sold to sixty Minutes with how much they believe it or not, I don't know that it would be an
appeal to the public about the car. For them, it was an appeal to one man. They knew he watched sixty Minutes. They knew Melanie was interested in the case. It was all designed for Greg and the idea was, and I think this came from the psychologists as well, was if it had been clean and simple Greek sort of deals with that you know, he's a very cool make a checklist, you do that. That's how I deal with this situation. If it somehow doesn't quite make sense.
It sort of does, but sort of doesn't. He's there going, what the fuck are they talking about? Is it? Is it my car?
Is it not?
I thought they knew I've already been talked to. If I have been talked to, why are they doing this If I haven't, why does it look like my car? And so the idea was just to throw him off balance and get him a little bit panicked, and it worked.
I think that's great use of strategy, using the media or taking opportunities and playing that and the subtlety of it. That's what I really enjoyed about reading the book and really enjoyed full credit to the cops looking at the subtle, subtle ways of putting pressure on people, because it's not you can't just crash through a door on this. It's got to have meaning. So they got the sixty minutes out, though he didn't. He went to bed because what was it dancing with the start?
It was the block? It was in reality it is the finale of the block. So they were frustrated because he didn't watch it on the on the night because the block ran over and so it didn't start on schedule.
So it was watched a couple of days later.
Okay, So that's sort of pressure, and that's you know, and this is what the point I want to make Greg, like going through the ball. This is the way a murder investigation evolves. This is the way you're trying this, and you've put all your hopes there and go, this will break it, This will break the person. He's going to start talking, and you know, the message to panic and confuse him. This is what we want to do because that's the type of personality.
Yeah, fascinating.
So wind at forward now to when I said they were going to rattle all the people around him when he was going off into the bush. What happened there? They're surprised. They thought he was going to head to the Grampians and they were getting ready to do that, but instead that was another lie to Melanie. He headed straight back to the one to go a valley and that did throw them a little bit and they went, oh my god, where's what's he doing?
Where's he going? So they quickly canceled what they were planning. To do because they were listening to him in his car. Microphones were still on in the car, and they realized he really was stressed, and he really was thinking a net was closing, and he really didn't quite know, you know, where this was going and what they knew and what they didn't know. It got to the point where the investigators were they were starting to worry that he would kill himself. And at that point, if he did, they'd
lose any chance of finding the bodies. They wouldn't be able to have closure for the families, they wouldn't know what really happened, they wouldn't even know if it really was him. So for a whole host of reasons, they said, we can't let that happen. And so that's when they called the Special Operations Group and the helicopters swooped in and he was arrested, and the surveillance worments were about to run out anyway, they knew they had to act
within days. But that's when they decided to pounce now, and we have to arrest him, and we have to roll the dice on the fact that we have pushed him to that level that during an interview situation, we can make that work for us.
Okay, even that was dramatic in the circumstances because of the location. So you got two helicops, we the soggies on board being dropped off and then creeping into his camp site from every direction. And when the men in black jump up and yeah, tell him to not move, you're under arrest or whatever comments were made, he didn't.
React, didn't react at all. So they had someone who was so stressed out in his car they thought he might be about to kill himself. And yet when he's confronted, what do you guys want can help? Scary figures coming out the teeth?
Yeah, yes, in black.
So that's the other side of Greek and we're totally cool, unflappable, nothing. Just just got to think my way through this, and so he just switched.
Okay.
So this is a delicate time in the investigation. You've got your circumstantial brief, but you don't know whether that's enough to get you across the line, whether it's enough to charge him. Even at that stage, if that's the game that you want, all the path you want to go down. So the detectives were looking to get more information from him in the interview, and this has been it was a contentious interview for a lot of reasons, and argued in court and all sorts of things happened
with it in court. Do you want to just take us through the story there?
Yeah, well very quickly. I mean one of the things the book does, which wasn't because that first six hours, first day and a half of that interview was still ruled in admissible, so the jury never got to see that at all. And yet from my perspective, that was some of the greatest work of the investigation. There was also a sense that they had to get him talking because he was the only one who could tell them where the bodies were, and that their prime priority was
to locate the bodies. They were the Missing Persons squad, They had spent a lot of time with the families, and they I think also they knew that if they arrested and charged him without finding where the bodies were, it would be a really, really difficult case. And yet he was the only one who could tell them where they were. So that's what the police are confronted with.
They charged with that circumstantial brief of evidence. So I'm just thinking from a defense point of view, I'd be playing the card they deceived their partners for all these years. Why don't you think they've deceived us and run off and lived happily ever after. So we haven't even got bodies. So I don't even have the bodies. Greg's version was that, yes, Russell had been using his drone to film him while
he was doing a hunt. In Greg's version, he hadn't done anything wrong on that hunt, but that Russell said he had, and that he was going to take that footage to the police, et cetera, et cetera, and the
breach of I was gonna say crime. I guess it is a crime that Greg admits to is he leaves his shotgun on and his rifle on the back seat of his car, and the properly secure, not properly secure, but that night he just left them on the back seat with magazines of ammunition on the front seat, and that Russell had and he blasted the music up to really annoy this is Greg Greg Greglin has turned the music right up to annoy Russell and Carrol because Russell
said is going to dob him into the police. Russell's come over. Russell has not. There's one report his daughter has of him using what we think was a brake action shotgun back in the early eighties. Other than that, he hasn't He's had an active dislike of shooters and hunters and hasn't touched a gun in thirty six years.
But he gets Greg's Breatham shotgun from the back seat, finds the right magazine of bullets on the front seat in the dark, loads it in the dark, knows he has to prime it to be able to fire it, fires it twice, then primes it again so that it's ready to fire again.
He's clever.
And goes back to his camp with one of the two guns, leaving the other rifle on the back seat. You go anyway, This is Greg's version of events. Greg goes over to his car to try and actually get his gun back, and he's crouched down by it because he hears the second shot, I think. And he crouched down by the driver's side door of Russell's white Toyota land Cruiser. He sees Russell put the barrel over the front of
the bonnet. Greg jumps up, wrestles with the gun, puts, you know, pulls Russell on the front of the car. They're wrestling over the shotgun. It veers like this, it goes off accidentally. The shot goes through the side rearview mirror of the car and hits Carol in the head, who's crouching down beside the wheel, beside the rear wheel. And a million to one chance of that happening why Carol's there, who knows, But anyway, that's his version having
shot a woman in the head. What Greg does next is take the shotgun back to his car, fired in the air again to make sure it's unloaded. In other words, it doesn't go and check out Carol is But anyway, this is the version. And next thing he knows, Russell is running toward him with a knife, furious because he's killed his girlfriend. Parry Is Russell. They get into a wrestle, fall to the ground, and the knife goes through Russell's
heart again. Highly So there are two once in a lifetime miraculous freak accidents that happen to people twice in five minutes. Yeah, but it does. There is given what they found afterwards, because now they know what they're looking for with all the particles they've raked up from the ground. Et cetera. They do find some cranial segments from Carol's skull. They do find some blood spatter inside the canopy of the Total land Cruiser when they always thought it was closed.
They do find the bullet which still has Carol's DNA on it that shot her, So that the evidence that Carol was shot while she was crouching down by the rear wheel of the land cruiser is overwhelming. The evidence for what happened, And to Russell, there's none. The body's been completely destroyed in a blue.
So that's the version of events he's given given the police. And this is over a.
Two day or yeah, this is the end of the end of the second day into the third day. Yeah, okay, what they've got there at the risk of it being thrown out, they would be desperate for the body. How did they recover any body?
Party?
He had to tell them the full story. He'd said where he'd placed the bodies, which was on the Union Spur track, which is I think about one hundred and ten and twenty k's away from the camp. So the reason why they didn't find anything was it's miles away on a track that doesn't go anywhere. They but then he also said he'd gone back in early November and he'd burnt both bodies to dust and then destroyed whatever it was left that wasn't burnt, et cetera, so they
wouldn't find anything. And the cops went up there knowing they had they'd been warned by the DPP on the that come before the end of the third day they had to charge him. This was getting ridiculed, and so they drove back, hopefully to find the bodies before they charged him. But it was just the investigators, it was Dan and Andrew I think who went back up there. It just looked like burnt bark and trees from bushfire.
Yeah.
Yeah, they couldn't identify anything, so they they got into a forensic psychiatrist who couldn't get there until sorry, forensic anthropologists who couldn't get there until the following day. So they they actually charged Greg before they were they'd been to the spot where he said he'd dropped the bodies and then destroyed them. They were yet to confirm that the bodies.
Were actually their body parts.
Yeah, but they had to charge him anyway.
So they charged him and the next day they got the anthropologist.
Yeah, the next day they went up there with Siren, and being a forensic anthropologist who's worked in war crime zones all around the world, she does know what she's looking at. And yeah, there's that line which is in the book, which is I'm told is real where she went there, you go, that's a piece of human sterner and they went, well we found them. That.
Yeah, a lot of a lot of relief for a lot a lot of people. The story and the pressure of the investigation, then the fact that two lives have been taken, well, yeah, that's can you imagine how terrifying it would have been.
For it's Yeah, I often think you know when well, particularly later when Justice Crouch is talking about, you know, fairness for the accused, he is very big on that. You think, what was Carol thinking when she was crouching beside a rear wheel with a shotgun aimed at her head? Yeah, I know that's and and you know, even in the interview he's he's after sympathy for himself and how they've ruined his life, and you think, you know, they've lost both their lives.
So again that's what the jury get presented with.
And that's what you know, a lot of people in the public gallery who sort of knew the biggest story we're going So, first of all, the interview in the statement he did when they first went around to see him on July fourteen, completely in admissible, thrown out concution. Yeah, and you're right. Originally the whole record of've new you're
thrown out. Yeah, And I think that that's one of the points I try and make in the book, is that is that, Yeah, if if you're saying to a jury you are the deciders of what is fact and not fact, then you trust a jury to be able to take their job very seriously. And I'm told, and I certainly believed in this case, juries in murder trials do take their job very seriously. They can decide, you know, when they think the police are being oppressive, if they're
being oppressive, or when they're not, et cetera. They can make those decisions on fact and not fact. It's all there, it's unedited.
You see it all.
I pushed for an open justice system and show everything, don't have a filtered version. What was the end result with the jury went out the trial ramp for about five weeks.
Five weeks, Yeah, and the jury was out for about eight days.
Okay. That would been the nervous time for everyone involved.
It would have been at the beginning of the trial, Gregor's facing two charges of murder and two charges of manslaughter at the end before the jury retired for reasons I still find a little bit I can sort of understand intellectually, but I find it puzzling anyway, they took manslaughter off the agenda, so he was only and I think the short position of that is the prosecution's main
case regarding all the incriminating behavior that he'd done. Posts the deaths could only be explained if he'd murdered them. Only a murder. We haven't got that, yeah, could only be explained to my murder or maybe manslaughter. No, it was only murder.
Okay, that's interesting.
And although the you know, the jury don't need to explain that. When they came back after eight days, which is nerve wracking for the cops and the families, and I'm sure it was ne vacking for greg too. The first thing they're asked is about Russell, and he's found not guilty, and you could sort of sense everyone going because the whole prosecution case had been built on he must have killed Russell first and then killed Carol because
she was a witness to it. And yet if they'd found him not guilty of the murder of how are they going to do that? But when they're asked, they're verdict on the murder of Carol, they say guilty. And on the one sense, there's sort of relief from those who believe he is guilty from the families. It's never the jury never explains it. The best understanding is given there was not a scrapper forensic evidence about how Russell died at all anywhere. Can you say murder beyond reasonable doubt?
Okay, so they might have got stuck on that.
They might have got stuck on. It only needs one of them to get stuck at the twelve to go, well, you know, maybe that was Maybe they got into a fight and it was an accidental, unlawful killing. Maybe it wasn't murderous intent. So the best thinking is that not all twelve of them believed they could say he murdered
Russell beyond reasonable doubt to find Carol guilty. I believe they must have bought the prosecution case that that death happened first, which is what the cops always believed and that Carol's murder.
Was cleaning up, cleaning up witness.
Yeah, cleaning up the witness.
Do you get a sense of how the victim's families felt.
Look, I personally haven't approached the families. They gave a very dignified statement to the press after that where they were thanking the police um and they were clearly irritated by the criminal justice system. I think Russell's daughters in particular feel particularly aggrieved that he's been found in a sin of their fathers.
I can understand their thanks that that that would be a real and frustrating feeling the anger for them. So it's fascinating case. The detectives. They came under a lot of criticism. And it doesn't matter what you do. If you go to a murder trial, you're going to be criticized. I say that to young homicide detective starting ready, get ready, and you can see some people are shocked. But we didn't do anything wrong, I know, but we're going to get criticized.
It does not matter.
But for them to do what they did, and they pushed it, but they pushed it. It wasn't just out of vego. It wasn't how it was pushing it for the right reason and testing the waters. If they didn't go down that path, I dare say that he wouldn't be convicted.
Of any match.
I don't think he would have been.
And it's you see the frustration with the justice system, which I thought should be therefore to serve the society that the system set up for. I don't think you'll have any police, any reasonable minded police, understanding that you need to protect the rights of the accused. We understand, we understand that, but I would just like people to understand that when you sit down in an interview room with someone that you suspect of murder, you haven't got
a house to sell it. You're not like a real estate agent going, hey, Greg, do you want to buy this house? They're going to if they're sitting there, they're trying to talk their way out of a horrendous crime, and you've got to do certain things.
What are the expectations of society? What are the standards the normal law abiding member of society expects from police in that situation.
And at no time did I get the sense in the way it's been portrayed that Greg felt intimidated or out of his depth. It was his ego that got him talking more than you think. That was my take on it. Well, it's been a fascinating story in the way you've relayed it. And I want to shout out for the book, Like, if you want to get a sense of what the murder investigation is like, have read that book. And that was a horrendous crime that captured everyone's attention, wasn't it.
It was? Yeah? But thanks Gary, thank you.
Is this the start of you your career? It well could be.
I mean, I'd never like to be bored and so you know, something new, if the right right story came along, I'd.
Have to do it again.
Yeah.
Well, I think all those years that were doing the TV shows, you learned something from the crooks, You learned something from the cops, and you really understand the little subtle nuances of what it's all about. What other projects are you're working on at the moment.
At the moment, I'm doing an audio series for BBC Sounds and BBC Radio four over in the UK, and that's but that's available here in Australia on BBC Sounds, Google Central Intelligence Stars Kim Katrell and Ed Harris, they're big names and yeah, and it was great to see
them work. And it's about the CIA's director of operations in the forties, fifties and sixties, and all the intent of the shows to show that to a large degree or a significant degree, the world we live in now is because of the operations they ran then in Iran and Guatemala and Indonesia and Romania and everywhere Chile.
That's a deep, dark world to dive in. It is, Yeah, that would be fascinating.
It is fascinating.
Okay, well, look great to see you. Thanks for coming in and pleasure.
All the best.
Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.
Greg Hadrick has a fascinating insight into the world of crime. I think it's from all the stories and the TV series he's been involved in. His book In the Dead of Night is a fascinating read and it really takes you on into an insight into what it's like to be involved in the police investigation. And whenever we're talking about murders, we shouldn't forget the victims, Russell Hill and Carol Clay. It was a tragic set of circumstances where they lost their lives. Then the du Diem