Inside the Wonnangatta investigation

I'm Andrew rule. This is life in crimes. The story that is consuming probably many Australians of recent times is the trial of Greg Lynn, the former Jetstar pilot who has been charged and stood trial for the murders of pensioners Russell Hill and Carol Clay in a remote spot at Wollongata in eastern Victoria back in March of twenty twenty, a trial in which a jury would find Lynn guilty

of Carol Clay's murder but not Russell Hill's. In fact, as our regular listeners and readers will know, their campsite was discovered burnt out on precisely the weekend that COVID struck Victoria, and so their fate has always been entwined

with the advent of COVID. In Victoria. And there is no doubt that the slow start of the police investigation into their deaths or their disappearance and presumed death, was due to the fact that the entire country, and to some extent the entire globe was suddenly struggling with a mass pandemic. And that is the background to the story.

Now I'm going to take us through the long and winding road of this story to get us to the trial which has just finished, so we all catch up on what happened a long way A year after Carol Clay and Mussell Hill vanished in twenty twenty, police were quietly closing in on a suspected killer with a ghastly secret in his head and a repainted Nissan Patrol in his driveway, a four bill drive of the type that a lot of Australians use, including hundreds of deer hunters

who go shooting in the high country. These investigators were confident they knew the identity of the last person to see Hill and Clay alive twelve months earlier, back in twenty twenty, unless this Nissan driver in suburban Caroline Springs was cleared by a watertight alibi or forensic science, he

would become prime suspect for the couple's presumed deaths. At that stage, police were certain that the missing pair had met a violent end at the Woongata Valley campsite, and that their bodies had been moved away from there by a third party. The timing had helped the third party flee the scene because of the COVID pandemic which had hit Victoria that week, and of course the pandemic dominated media coverage and had hindered public collaboration and police investigation.

But if the Nissan driver felt lucky for the first few weeks, when it still seemed possible that the missing pair were lost in the bush or had secretly run away, he was wrong. In truth, his luck had soured on that first night when he had tried to slip away from the high country by a backtrack towing the trailer that would later mysteriously vanish by chance, risky conditions had caused rangers to lock a gate across the track that

would eventually have brought the driver. The Nissan driver out Myrtleford on the northwestern side of the Rangers without having to detour back to use better roads via Mount Hotham, so if our Nissen man, who is in fact Greg Glynn, if he had been able to use that backtrack, or if he decided to smash the gate and drive through it and take a chance on getting through there, and had he got through, there's every reason to believe that he would have got away with murder because when he

hit that unexpected roadblock and turn around and went via Mount Hotham, his car, his Nissen Fool drive that was blue when he was driving it on that occasion and later he painted a base which is a story in itself. When it went through the resort at Mount Hotham, it was automatically recorded by security cameras which record the number plates of every car going past. And because that happened, police were able to check which cars are gone passed in a certain period, and they also struck some very

good luck. Because the Nissen driver had been forced to go back to Mount Hotham, he came within the range of mobile phone towers because where he'd been at One and Gata there's no mobile phone coverage and it was only when he was forced to drive to Mount Hotham and take basically the high road out that he came within range, and when he came within range, the mobile phones in his car pinged on the towers, and the mobile phone pinged on the tower belonged to Russell Hill.

That somehow, in the hurly burly of taking their bodies out, he'd also taken Hill's phone. And Hill's phone was turned on and it had not gone flat, and it pinned on the nearest tower. And so police subsequently, much later were able to say Russell Hill's phone was traveling in the Mount Hotham area at this particular time, you know, nine o'clock in the morning or whatever the morning after we think Russell Hill was killed, and it was clearly in a car because it was traveling. So which car

is it? So they find the time down by looking at the camera and they say, well, twelve cars went through Mount Hotham at that time, a particular time gap that we're looking at, just twelve cars, and they looked at each of the twelve and one of the twelve was a blue missm And it was that confluence of two events, the blocked backtrack and the fact that he had Russell Hill's phone in his car that caught Greg Lynn. Because before that there was no sign of Greg Lynn.

There was nothing to prove exactly when he'd been in the high country, and he would have been able to lie his way out of it reasonably easily, and he was pretty good at it. Had he got out that backtrack, there's going to be no sign of Russell Hill's phone and no number plate recognition camera recording what car is driving. He would have come out of the bush. Why haven't immertaled for it somewhere many, many many kilometers from the crime scene and made his way back to Melbourne down

the hum Highway. Not a problem. Fortune sometimes goes against the bad guys. As former lawyer Andrew Fraser used to say, really miserable bad people lose. He used a shorter expression. And so the police got two lucky breaks. That meant that, after months of detective work, they were able to narrow the field of potential suspects to a very small number of people who'd been in the mountains on March twenty first,

twenty twenty but had not voluntarily come forward. And of course some people draw attention to themselves by trying not to draw attention. So anyone that the police knew had been up there, who hadn't come forward to tell them that they'd been up there. They were worth looking at. Why had they not come forward? Now, obviously they're not all murderous. If there's six or eight people who haven't come forward, they're not all killers, And in fact none

of them might be killers. But they could be deer hunters who were up there when they shouldn't have been. They might have been people who've got other reasons not to go to the police because they might have a dope crop up there somewhere. Just people who don't want to mix with police, or deal with police, or have anything to do with them. Some of them might have been people from inter state or had gone into state

and hadn't realized that the police wanted them. All sorts of reasons why you may not come forward, But only one person had the big reason not to come forward, and that was Greg Linn, and he did not put himself forward. This evasiveness does not prove criminality, but evasive people greatly interested detectives who were following a couple of

strands of investigation. On those strands, who were, of course the blue Nissen as driven by Greg Lynn and the mobile telephone as previously owned and carried by the vanished Russell Hill. So police have sophisticated ways of analyzing phone data, which is why they now routinely use mobile phone records to pinpoint suspects in high profile murders such as Jill Mars's death in Brunswick in twenty twelve, and will ultimately

prove vital to the Samantha Murphy case. Hunting international terrorists has improved interpretation of mobile phone data, which is why the Woe and Gatter investigators, the missing Persons people looked for overseas help. They went to the experts. When the police started reeling in persons of interest, they asked them what they were doing at Wollongata on certain days in

March twenty twenty. A flat denial might be a provable lie, and that would be a reason for suspicion and a mission would set up the next question, why not voluntarily identify yourself the way that other people have? And after that, of course, the questions would get tougher and they would lead to the big one. Okay, where are the bodies? Investigators were playing a long game after a slow start.

By the time of Passing Camper reported Russell Hill's burnt out tent and scorched Toyota to Sail police several days had passed. Initial reports did not make that time lapse clear, which confused potential witnesses. They weren't sure when it was

that the police thought something bad had happened. At first, it seemed reasonable that the pair had got lost and that their tent had coincidentally burned down, either accidentally totally accident accidentally when a campfire had been blown by the wind or something, or through arson by opportunist thieves who'd pilfered the camp and then set light to it opportunist thieves,

not killers. The fact that Russell Hill's expense he drone was missing raised the possibility that the pair the missing pair Hill and Clay, went looking for it in the bush and had become lost and then died from exposure, which can happen up there very easily, And if that had happened, their bodies would soon be eaten by wild dogs.

Now that might sound far fetched, but as we've often discussed in this podcast, that grisly scenario has often played out in the mountains over many decades, and not just those mountains either. In other patches of bush around Victoria, bodies have been consumed by wild dogs, to the extent that one body buried by criminals way back in the bad old days. All they found was one of his shoes and the remains of a tweed jacket which had the maker's tag in it, and that enabled the police

to identify the victim. The rest of him had been eaten by the wild dogs. Apparently dogs aren't clean on tweed jackets and shoes. Two things pointed towards sudden and violent deaths at one and gatter. First, the organized searches, in good searches, lots of them, could find no trace of the missing people nothing. Second, investigators calculated that their sleeping bags were missing because when they looked in the

bashes of the fire, they couldn't find any zips. So they reckoned that sleeping bags had been taken, and that was an indicator. Probably they'd been used as body bags. They didn't think they'd carried them away. Meanwhile, it was increasingly clear that the pair did not stage their own disappearance. We all know the reasons why these days, computerized banking credit cards, nationwide network of security cameras and traffic cameras

showed no signs that they were alive, not one. Russell Hill was an experienced bushman, he'd worked in the area as a logger and was unlikely to get lost. Against that was the macabre, longshot possibility of an elaborate murdered suicide committed by a secretive man leading a double life. Now, as we all know now, Russell Hill was conducting long

time affair with his childhood sweetheart Carol Clay. They'd been sweethearts as kids, and despite the fact they both married other people, they'd renewed the spark of romance at some stage later in life. And it was true that Russell Hill, although under pressure from Carol Clay to end his marriage

and marry her, was leading a double life. He'd been reluctant to leave his own family and he preferred to lead a double life, and that, of course raises the possibility that he could become depressed about it and commit a murder suicide such as one as we've seen down in the Otway region in recent weeks, where a couple of about this age met their end, and it clearly

was a murder suicide committed with a gun. And that was something that police could not discount, but they did such thorough searches that they believed that a third party was involved. Time makes mysteries deeper and darker. The fact that three other people had disappeared in the High Country in the previous nine years bred rumors about an eccentric spear hunter that was dubbed button Man, so cool because he used to make these sort of buttons out of

deer antem put them in his ears. Nothing wrong with that, just a thing he did detect his look back to. When Hill picked up Carol Clay from near her Pakenham home on the morning of March nineteenth, twenty twenty. To a casual observer, there wasn't much to see, just an older man in a Toyota land Cruiser with a very pleasant woman of his own age. They were just gray nomads off on a trip, except for the one thing. No one else in either family knew that they were

going camping together. That was a secret from their respective family, as everyone knows. Russell Hill and his wife Robin were longtime friends of Carol, who was well known in the Country Women's Association. The Hills lived in Druen after returning from Hayfield up in Gippsland, where they'd spent the nineteen eighties, while Russell worked in the bush logging, often in the big timber coops towards the old Wollongatt station site, which

is why he knew the area so well. Hill apparently drove his Toyota on his usual route through Hayfield and Lo Cola to Wollongatta. The pair vanished sometime in the eighteen hours after Hill made a radio call to a friend late on March twentieth. He said he was about to camp near the old station sometime that night or next morning. The pair disappeared. By the time a passing traveler saw their camp around two pm next day, the tent had burned down and it had scorched the toyota.

The ashes were cold, and so was the trail. When sale police arrived, they found the toyota locked. They assumed that Hill was probably carrying his keys and his mobile phone. Fair enough, a man who'd lived in the country all his life, he was probably unlikely to have locked his car while sitting next to it, but he probably would lock it if they both went off for a walk, because you know, even up in the remote spots, casual theft can happen, and there's quite a lot of people

go through that area. If you park there for twenty four hours, there would be cars go past, and some of them might be driven by people who might pinch stuff from your camp. The tent fire was puzzling. Was it arson or was it an accident? Thieves often set fires, whether maliciously or to destroy fingerprints and DNA, same with killers. Over time, detectives canned the idea the pair were lost, but they couldn't quite rule it out comple Maybe they went for a walk with the drone and got bushed

after losing the drone in the early stages. An alternative theory for the drone's absence was that Hill left it in the tent and that a passing opportunist stole it before torching the camp. The question was whether such a thief would also kill and dispose of two harmless pensioners. Police believed that someone had. They had a fair idea who was the last to see the missing pair alive long before they made a move. When police first interviewed Greg Lynn in July twenty twenty, less than four months

after the presumed double homicide, he wasn't a suspect. They came knocking at his house because his vehicle registration was one of several recorded by the cameras at Mount Hotham Missing Persons. Detective Abbi Justin would later tell a court that when she and another investigator questioned the then Jetstar pilot in his kitchen at Caroline Springs, he was just

a potential witness. Still, they were interested in his movements as they were in other people's movements, and they were intrigued by the fact that he had painted his blueness and bronze and sold his trailer, or he said he sold it. The pilot's answers did not satisfy the investigator's curiosity, which had been pricked many weeks before, back in May twenty twenty, which is only two months after the pair

went missing. That, of course, was when the analysis of Russell Hill's mobile phone data showed that between nine twenty six and nine fifty precisely on March twenty first, his phone was moving towards Mount Hotham from the Dargo direction, so as moving north from Dargo, Hill had not been in contact with any one since the previous evening when he had his regular call with his fellow amateur radio enthusiasts.

Police were confident the fatal confrontation was later that night, on the twentieth, which meant that if Hill's mobile phone was traveling next morning, it was with someone else, not with Hill, or not with Hill alive, perhaps with a dead Hill. And as we know, just twelve vehicles passed through Hotham in that time frame, and one of those twelve was Gregg Lynne's Nissen, which then was Blue. Police spent five weeks researching the pilot before knocking on his door.

On July the fourteenth, Abby Justin and her boss, Acting Sergeant Brett Florence, came knocking. The police recorded the conversation and Lynn provided a statement he was a person of interest well on the way to becoming a suspect. One of the problems legally, speaking with recording the conversation is that in so doing it showed that he was a suspect. But if you are a suspect, you should be cautioned

about your rights and your right to silence. But of course the police didn't want to caution him and put him on guard. They wanted him to feel reasonably comfortable so that he might make further mistakes or admissions which would firm up their suspicions about him. So it's understandable what the police did because ultimately their job was to find the remains of the dead people, and the only way to do that was to keep their best suspect

on the hook without him breaking the line. Between July and December that year twenty twenty, police checked out Lynn with banks and government agencies. They obtained more images from the cameras at Mount Hotham, they spoke to a witness who had been in the area at the time, and they went back to the hills to search again by early December, so this ispot eight months after the disappearances. Other possible candidates had fallen away and Lynn had become

the focus of the investigation. He was under surveillance with GPS trackers, telephone intercepts, and bugs in his house and vehicle. Police spent most of the following year doing further searches, including one at Howart Plains, where Kadava dogs were used to check anywhere that Lynne might have camped since the murders. Meanwhile, police were listening to Lynd's conversations, mostly him talking to himself. He had the professional pilots had as stating what he

was doing as he did it. A legacy of endless hours piloting aircraft fitted with flight recorders monitoring Lyne's movements

in real time forced the case to a head. Brett Florence and another detective were listening to Lynn speaking to himself as he was driving in late November twenty twenty one, so this is twenty months after the disappearance, and Lynn appeared to be crying and talking to himself and talking in the past tense about himself, and he was acting in a quite a bizarre way and saying bizarre things, which was concerning to the police because they thought that he was so agitated and acting in such a way

that he could pose a danger to himself or to other people. He was heading back to the high Country ostensibly to go hunting, but investigators feared he might be planning suicide, so they had to make instant decisions to protect the interests of the grieving families, the Hills and the Clays. By this stage, police had no doubt that the missing pair had met violent deaths. Their duty to the distressed relatives in such cases is to extinguish all

hope by finding human remains. They see that as their main mission. After a year of watching and waiting, detectives felt obliged to stop Lynn harming himself and to ask him to consider the family members desperate to locate their loved one's remains. In a crisis like this, the urgent outweighs important, so police threw together a plan to stop Linn. Special Operations Group members headed for the Hills in helicopters to intercept him at his camp at a place called

h Buckle Junction. He didn't resist when he was surrounded on November twenty second, twenty twenty one. He was armed with the SOG. Special Operations Group have ways of disarming people. Apprehending him seemed the humane thing to do, but it skewed a copybook investigation. Now the police had to build the plane after take off. As one of them said, Lynn spent four days at Sale police station helping PA with their inquiries. What he told them was correctly suppressed.

He gave vital information because he steered investigators to another district up at wong Gara, which is past Dargo, where they uncovered the remains of the missing victims a long way from where they had been killed further west at Wonongata. No details were released, naturally, but investigators undoubtedly discussed certain scenarios, such as Linn being upset by Hill's drone and getting

into a confrontation with him. The likely scenario is, in fact, that Hill used the drone to film Linn engaged in using guns in some way he shouldn't or whatever doing something. Linn took objection, and they had a blue and Lin's shot him, and then he said to kill the witness. That is the logical explanation for what happened. A fight between I when an old angry man and a younger angry man ending in an inevitable result because one was armed and inclined to kill things, as we found out since.

And then the chilling logical conclusion that he would kill the only witness and try to get away with it and destroy all the evidence in such a way that he almost did get away with it. The summary of police evidence is this the accused contaminated and staged the crime scene, intentionally destroyed evidence within the crime scene, and removed evidence from the crime scene before transporting and disposing of the bodies and mobile devices to further conceal his

involvement and distance himself. In other words, he set fight of the camp and fled with the bodies in his trailer, disposing of them a long way from modern Gatup. Then disposed of the trailer, and then I returned to the scene in May and the following November November eight months later, where he burned the remains to a very fine ash and dispersed the little bits so there were no big pieces that could really carry much forensic investigation. The absence

of bodies did not stop the investigators. When Hill's mobile phone went in the car the morning after the murders, it created an electronic trail that led slowly but surely to Lynn's door. To a lay person, it might have seemed inevitable that the accused would be convicted of a double homicide on what it first appeared to be damning evidence, but that perception was altered during the course of the trial.

The absence of a contrarie version of events left open a gap through which a brilliant defense council might well steer a judge and jury, and as it turns out,

the judge was steered through that gap. The jury was a bit harder because the jury could not swallow despite the legal contortions of the system and of the court, they could not swallow the proposition that two people, two unarmed old pensioners, had both died instantaneously, as described by the accused in separate incidents separated by a few minutes, that one had been accidentally shot by a ricochet shot that had bounced off the mirror of the Toyota, and

that the other had died when he'd rushed at Greg Lynn with a knife and fallen over and stabbed himself. The defense was that those two things happened, that they both died accidentally instantly, because of course, if they hadn't died instantly, if they were just wounded, either of them, any decent Jetstar pilot would use a radio to radio out to get help, or they would drive out to get help, or they would do something to get help for the wounded. But he did not do that. He

acted as if he was the murderer. And that was in the end, the prosecution case, and that, in the end was what the jury believed. Because the jury found that although it couldn't make a safe finding of murder about Russell Hill, that they would find Lynn guilty of Carol Clay's murder because her murder was a cover up for an unlawful killing of Russell Hill. So in the end, the jury found a way to fit itself through the eye of the needle and find the accused guilty of

at least one of these killings. And that at this point means that Greg Lynn should go to jail for a very long time. However, as we sit here and talk about this, there is no doubt that Greg Lynn and his counsel will be considering an appeal, and so it may not be very long before we see an appeal run. And it would not shock some legal observers if such an appeal got up, if he walked on appeal. Now, I'm no expert, and it'd be a shocking turn of events,

but it wouldn't necessarily surprise. Now. This has alarmed some observers, including various stute lawyers who work in and around the media, and one of them said to me this week that this is a new thing in murder trials. It seems to him because we have an accused who comes to court with the presumption of innocence that we all enjoy.

We're all presumed innocent until proven guilty. That's fine, But also what this guy had when he came to court was a total absence of damaging evidence because he had very carefully destroyed every fragment of evidence. The bodies had been destroyed so much that the scientists couldn't really reconstruct any element of the crime scene and put forward a coherent account of how he might have killed those people for the prosecution to put up before a jury. And

because he destroyed the evidence, there was no evidence against him. Now. Yoking together of the presumption of innocence and this destruction of evidence means that this accused had a really good walk up start on being acquitted. And most observers of this trial are surprised that he was not acquitted, not because they think he didn't do it, but because that was the way the court seemed to be nudging the jurors. In the end, the jury members were something that they

should be. They were light detectors. The beauty of a jury is that twelve ordinary people can sit there and listen to appear someone like themselves. The accused give evidence

or not. They can listen to all the witnesses for and against, and make up their own mind on the basis of their own common sense, their own life experience, whether that case is safe and strong or not, and to acquit or convict based largely on the evidence, but also on their own perception of the evidence and whether they can trust any of it or all of it. And these jurors in this case were effectively light detectors. They detected a lie and they had the guts to

act on them. God bless them. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts sold And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.