You're listening to a Mother Mea podcast. Mother Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was recorded on It's March nineteenth, twenty twenty. Deep in Victoria's Rugget high Country, the warn and Gada Valley is quiet and still, apart from the sounds of the bush birds the sounds of water from the nearby river wind rustling through the trees. It's the kind of place only serious camp as venture into, and Russell Hill and Carol Clay
have just set up their tent in bucks. Camp Aged in their seventies, this couple have a secret. They're having an affair, and going out bush has proven to be the perfect way for them to meet without the fear of prying eyes. Here they have very little phone reception and they rarely have to interact with anyone, but this trip is different. Usually, Russell checks in with his wife every few days via his high frequency radio, but she doesn't hear from him. After day one. As time stretches on,
Robin Hill starts to get worried. The line is never this silence. Something's not right. When police finally reach the campsite eight days later, they find Russell and Carroll's burnt out campsite. Beside it, they find a locked ute with the contents of the couple's wallets strewn across the floor. Russell and Carol are nowhere to be found, and detectives
are immediately suspicious. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations, a Muma Mere podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. The one in Gadda Valley is the perfect place for anyone hiding a secret, anyone who doesn't want to be found, the perfect place to have an affair, but also the perfect place to get away with murder.
Over the years, several people have gone missing there, never to be found again, and that very nearly happened to seventy four year old Russell Hill and seventy three year old Carol Clay. But thanks to some careful police work, detectives were able to track down a man named Greg Lynn. By his own admission, he'd been camping close to the couple in March twenty twenty. Eventually he'd tell them a story about what happened next.
Shouldn't shut Shubert to him? I saw her in the peripheral. I didn't actually see which way she was standing, but when later she was lying face down on the ground.
He says their deaths were accidental. Police say it was murder. But this isn't just a story about what happened at that camping spot. It's a story about an affair that got revealed in the most extraordinary and devastating of ways. Because the very same day Russell's wife and family found out he was missing, they also found out he'd been lying for a very long time, as his daughter's told sixty minutes.
No, we didn't know anything about him and Carol being together. It's been really hard on mum because not only losing her husband, but also all did it talk about Carol. So she's got both. She's lost her husband and she's grieving the lots of her relationship.
This case is still ongoing. A murder trial has just concluded, and Lynn is waiting to find out how long he'll spend by in bars. Journalist and author Sarah Krasnustein is writing a book about the missing campus as the case has been referred to by the media and has been at court for every moment of the trial. She joins us. Now to debrief.
Sarah.
I want to set up the various relationships at play here. First, Russell and his wife Robin. What do we know about the life they created together.
They met in the sixties, they married in nineteen sixty nine, and they had three daughters, and for a time in the seventies Russell worked as a logger. They lived in what could be described as country towns, and then later in life, Russell reunited with his childhood's sweetheart, who was
a woman called Carol Clay. What he had actually been her first boyfriend when they were teenagers, and then they had drifted away and married other people, had children with other people, and then in the early two thousands they reunited socially and romantically. Clay divorced her now ex husband, but Russell stayed with Robin, and at the time of his death they had been married for over fifty years.
So he would I'll meet up from time to time with Carol for getaways and their camping trip in the Wan and Gedda Valley was the last of those.
And what did Robin know or not know about their relationship over the years.
So we heard in the court that he had told her early on that Carol was his first cousin and that kind of accounted for seeing her socially or various catchups, and she believed that, I think for a number of decades. And then a neighbor I think gave him an ultimatum that unless he told Robin about the affair, she was going to do it. So he ended up telling her.
I think there was also mention that Carol and Russell had had an agreement that they would both leave their respective spouses, and she followed through on that and Russell ended up staying with Robin. And so there was also a sense that the families knew about the affair. They all kind of knew Russell and Russell's family knew Carol, but I don't think they were across the details of the frequency of when they would go away together. And on that last camping trip, Robin thought he had got along.
And so these camping trips, this wasn't the first trip that Russell and Carol had taken together.
No, we heard from Russell's mate, one of his radio friends, that Russell had told him earlier about the affair and he was kind of led into that knowledge. He had gone camping with them as well, But there were other of those radio friends in the high frequency radio group that Russell was a part of for a very long time who had no idea, so he seemed to be fairly discreet about it, and the family had reached some
sort of understanding and in the court. I think another point is that we know so much about the private lives of the victims, things that otherwise would have been their business only, and that people may or may not have various opinions or judgments on. But at the end of the day, we only know what we heard in evidence in a trial, and it seemed an added tragedy on top of the loss of life to have this
kind of public knowledge of those private family matters. So it was quite uncomfortable in that respect, but it did draw a picture of what was going on at the time, which was necessary to kind of understand why they were there, who they were, and the loss of life and what it represented to all the people that they left behind.
I just want to touch on something you mentioned, just because people might be like, what do you mean by a high frequency group.
Yes, so, Russell Hill was an amateur radio enthusiast and for most of the rest of us, like myself, who were unfamiliar with radio enthusiasms. Russell had a group of friends. I think they were all men who lived in and around Victoria, and they would chat most nights, if not every night, around six pm, and they all built their own radios. They had special licenses for operating the radios.
The talk wasn't limited to radios themselves, but it was an interest that kind of united this group of older men, and that was a whole world that was interesting and new for me to see this madship that had grown in that context.
And it's significant to this story because where Russell and Carol went camping was so remote that there wasn't much phone cell data. They were mainly relying on these radios if they did need to contact anyone.
Yeah. Absolutely, Like the Wantageta Valley, like many other places in the Alpine National Park, which is in Victoria's high country, does not as a rule have mobile reception, so if you want to have contact with the outside world, they need a satellite phone or a high frequency radio. I think a few of the radio friends were campers as well, and they would use this six pm daily call to check that everything was going well, and they said that they used it in that capacity as well as for
social reasons. We also heard that Robin Russell's wife didn't have the license that would have allowed her to have a chat on the radio and to actually be using the airwaves, but she was allowed to turn it on and listen to it in terms of the licensing regulations, and she would do that as well when Russell went away on his camping chips to check that he was going all right. She wouldn't necessarily listen to the whole thing, but she'd turn it on here his voice, and then
she'd be comforted by that. So the radio did play a huge part in this particular case.
Because Russell camped with Carol, but he also camped alone, didn't he He was quite an experienced bushman.
Yes, he was familiar generally with the high country and then specifically with the Wangata Valley. He'd worked there as a logger, and he also was instrumental in cutting one of the main tracks into the valley, the Ziga Spur track, which was also figured in the narrative of the killings. So he was familiar with this area and he really, by all accounts, loved it. Loved being out in nature, love the solitude and the tranquility of it, and he
also loved to bring the people he loved there. I think he had brought Robin there before, and this last trip he was there with Carol.
Because when we think about going into Australian bushland, especially camping, you might still think bitchuman roads. You know, some nice camping areas with potentially like a pit toilet. But this was rugged as it comes, wasn't it.
Yeah. I mean that's part of my initial attraction to the story was the physical landscape in which the crime occurred. The valley itself is about three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Melbourne where I'm sitting now, and it's surrounded on all sides by very steep mountains, and they're the kind of mountains you'd see in The Man from Snowy River.
The movie of The Man from Snowy River was actually filmed not very far from the area that we're talking about, So very steep sided mountains, mountain cattleman country, and the valley itself is only accessible by foot, horse, helicopter or four wheel drive, but you have to be quite proficient. Had four wheel driving because the tracks leading into it are graded like ski runs, and so they're extremely steep. There've been a number of fatalities of people who weren't
that great drivers. And you need to know what you're doing and have a pretty firm grasp on the weather because it can be quite treacherous just to get there.
So on the day that Russell and Carol go camping, Russell's wife thinks he's going on a solo trip. He picks up Carol. They go into the valley, they start camping. When did it become apparent that something might be going wrong.
They got there, the campsite was called Dry River Camp or Bucks Camp. One of the other things I should mention is that many of these places are not even marked on maps, so they have different names, or they use trails or tracks that are subject to weather changes, and it's a really rugged terrain. So they get there, they set up camp in this beautiful spot. It's a
wonderful spot that they chose near the river. And the last call that Russell made on the radio was the Friday night six pm call on the twentieth of March twenty twenty. It wasn't unknown for one of the group to miss a night here and there, that wasn't a big deal. But when he failed to check in on the Saturday the twenty first, and the Sunday the twenty second, and the Monday the twenty third, the friends generally, and a man named Robin Ashland specifically, who was the head
of the group, knew that something was not right. And so in that sense, he would have known before most of Russell's family that something was not right. Robin was already across this because she had been checking in and not hearing him for that very odd patch of three days. And so they had a chat on the Monday, Robin and he advised her to go to the police, and she did that the next day.
So what did the police do next? Do They immediately head to the campsite.
After Robin had gone into the station. We heard evidence that they called Robin Ashland for exact directions where the campsite was. There is then a slight lag in actually arriving there first. That's, as I understand it, logistical because it takes a degree of preparation to actually get to that spot physically. But also you have to remember that this was the exact time that Melbourne was going into lockdown and the world was closing down. This is literally
when COVID hit. So everything is on fire. And what had been explained to the police with the best knowledge and information that Russell Hill's wife and friend had looked for all intents and purposes like a missing person's case.
So that was the presumption when police arrived at the campsite, and they got there in the twenty eighth of March, so the killings happened on the twentieth of March, and then Robin Hill goes to the police on the Tuesday, which I think was the twenty fourth of March, and then on the twenty eighth the police are there looking at what appears to the naked eye to be really strange scene of a burnt out campsite. So there's no immediate evidence that something has gone wrong, that people have
been killed there. It looks strange and quite confronting because there's this huge burnt out fire. The side of Russell's white Land Cruiser has fire damage. The tent that housed the outdoor camping toilet that they had is still standing. All their equipment is there, all their food is there, but their wallets are kind of strewn in the footwell. The contents of the wallets have all been taken out, so it might be a robbery, but it might be
something else. So there wasn't blood. They were looking at bodies. They had a very confusing scene to process and the immediate thinking was that these were campers who were gone missing. They seemed to have vanished into thin air.
And at that point with the police only looking for Russell, when they arrived, they realized they also had another missing person, Carol.
So immediately or soon after arriving, they could see her wallet with her ID in it, her Medicare card was, their driver's license was there, and there was clearly the equipment of two people. Her handbag there's two straw hats, two sets of runners, So there was that. And then in that week when Carol Clay's family report her missing, is that kind of additional knowledge that her family gives the police that she is probably with Russell.
Obviously, when the police arrives, they can see that the scene looks strange and immediately suspicious. Do they jump immediately to foul play because you've got two people here who they discover are having an affair. I can imagine that they would go down that line of thinking first that potentially they've run away together and they're trying to make out to their families like they've run away. Was that something that was discussed, Yeah.
I think early on it was one of the potential lines of inquiry, and then when there was nothing really to justify that in terms of bank statements or phone records, they moved on to this last in the bush or death by misadventure in the bush, or missing somewhere after something went wrong on a bushwalk. And that high country terrain has seen experienced ampers go missing without a trace, so that would have been part of the thinking as well.
And the early searches were looking for live people who had straight away from the path, which is extremely easy to do in this terrain where the bush is so dense that it's difficult to move through it quickly. It's difficult to move through it at all. In some places you can lose the track even a meter away from the track. And you know, I write for a living, but it's difficult to explain with words unless you're looking
at it. The sheer density of this surrounding bush. So missing person in the bush would have been I think, for a time the most logical conclusion.
There have been reports, and even in researching this story, I've seen lots of chatter about potential strange people that have been seen in this area. One that pops up a lot is the Button Man.
So during the trial we heard from the informant, who was Detective Sergeant Brett Florence, that this particular case generated a notably high volume of information coming through crime stoppers. And in those early months the police were looking at a number of possible theories and eliminating a number of potential suspects, each of whom was eventually cleared of any involvement. And so in the online forums and in the newspapers early on, popular speculation began to cluster around that person
called the button Man. He was described in different ways. He's a white guy around seventy. They call him a loner, oddball, gun bushman. And what is true is that he lives in the High for months at a time at a particular campsite, perpetually camping, and he gathers deer antlers to slice into dear plugs that resemble buttons, and various campers, including some that i've spoken to when I was up there,
have had run into with him. Generally they describe him as kind of like socially a bit weird sort of vibe, but not dangerous or particular scary. But then we hear all of these stories that he just materializes at the campsite and you don't know he's there, or he remains hidden and just kind of pops up, spooking hunters who thought they had been alone, or that campers get home and they find a photo of themselves sleeping on their
camera that he might have took. So all of that reading, I initially thought that was some sort of urban myth or campfire ghost story. And then I read that the police had actually found him and interviewed him for this investigation and cleared him of any involvement.
So the button Man's cleared. Yes, were police able to find anything in tracking the phones or devices. We know that they've got patchy phone reception, but there was a little bit of reception.
There was a little bit of reception. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So one of the early pieces of evidence was through phone analysis of Russell Hill's phone, and it was moving along the Great Alpine Road at a particular time on the morning of the twenty first of March, the Saturday morning, so there was enough analysis for that to be pinpointed. The phones were never.
Found, there were cameras up on one of the roads into the valley that police were able to use to track vehicles, and that actually became pretty much vital to their investigation. Can you describe that why it became so important.
So this landscape, this terrain happens to be where one of the best ski resorts in Victoria is located. And one of the most important early breakthroughs was the CCTV on Mount Hawtham, which I think is used to enforce
the resort's entry fee and has number plate recognition. And so just before ten am on the twenty first of March, it filmed Greg Linn driving his niece on patrol down the Great Alpine Road and so that, in combination with the phone analysis that showed Russell Hill's phone was also traveling down that road at that time, was one of the first solid pieces of evidence that turned police's mind to greglin as the princesspect in this case.
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Jimmy Bath. I'm speaking with Sarah Krasnasdin about the missing campus trial. Up next, Greg Lynn tells detectives his side of the story. Did they get onto that clue and Greg Lynn is a possible suspect fairly quickly? Because that feels like quite intricate police work.
Yes, it is so. Yeah, I mean I think in the sum of things, it was fairly quickly. Once they had eliminated all other kind of case theories, and the footage showed twelve different cars traveling through that area at that time, it was not super unusual. There are so many witnesses in this case, specifically, and witnesses who weren't called because all that COVID buzz was in the air, and people were thinking, Okay, well, maybe this is the last time I can get a weekend away here. Maybe
they're going to close the parks, workers shutting down. We might as well have out. So there was nothing inherently suspicious about being on the road at that time. But Lind's carr was the only one on the road at the specific time that Russell Hill's phone was pinpointed, and then after the passage of some time, he was the only one who hadn't contacted the police. To explain who they were and where they were going. So from about mid twenty twenty they were zeroing in on Redlin.
Can you give us some background on who Greg Limb was in twenty twenty.
So we hear a lot, and I think it's because it's quite unusual that he's a pilot, a commercial pilot. And I think also just earlier I said, we know so much about the lives of the victims in trials like this, but we know comparatively little about the private life of the accused. And that's just part of how
our system is structured. It's related to the presumption of inn since, but it's just something that doesn't sit particularly well in terms of fairness, not legally defined that people who had no choice in the matter have their lives on view while the person who created this tragedy gets
to retain a measure of privacy. We'll find out a bit more about who he is and who he was at his sentencing hearing, when more personal information is presented to the court, psychological information about his personality, makeup, and his experience and background. But at the moment we still have kind of a fairly vague picture of him. He's fifty seven. He was most recently working for jet Star.
He is married to a woman called Melanie Lynn, who is a flight attendant, and she's also the stepmother to his two sons from an earlier marriage to Lisa Lynn, who died in nineteen ninety nine. Linn had wanted to be a fighter pilot initially, and he joined the Air
Force in the mid nineties as a cadet. His performance there did not seem to match his aspirations, and so far as he was not selected for the elite stream, so he became then a commercial pilot, first in Tasmania and then with Anset, and when Ansett collapsed around two thousand and one, he was hired by Qatar Airlines and he returned to a showy on two thousand and seven working for jest Star. I think his last role was
as a training captain. We know that he held a firearms license, that he owns more guns and knives than were admitted into evidence at the trial before the jury, and that he's a keen camper and hunter.
So police have their eye on him, and in July twenty twenty they turn up in his doorstep, not to arrest him though, just to chat what was the purpose of that visit.
So yeah, midway through June to actives pull up at his home in the Melon suburb of Carolina Springs. Those detectives are Bret Florence and Habby Justin. This is the home where Lynn lives with his wife, Melanie and his kids. When the police arrive, they see that the Nissan that they've seen on the camera, the Nissan Patrol, which was dark blue on the camera, has changed color since it was filmed on Mount Hotham is now a tan color.
So they go in. They speak with him in his kitchen, and what they hear confirms their suspicions about his privacy
as the suspect. And so they spend the next few months speaking with witnesses and making various searches in the high country I think for human remains, could have her dogs are used up point and all of that time they're gathering further information about Greg Lynn, until at the start of December in twenty twenty, they're issued with the warrants that allow him to intercept his phone calls and play surveillance devices in his home and in that four World drive.
Well, it takes him another sixteen months to actually arrest him. That's insane. So they spent that whole time just monitoring him before they actually pounced.
They were listening for over eleven months and they made at least five thousand different recordings. That's a literal five thousand.
That's insane.
So they are listening to him for something that can be submitted in evidence. He spoke frequently to himself, which was of some aid. The detective who was on those intercepts listening was Daniel Passingham, and he made a note at one point characterizing what he heard as narcissistic, misogynistic, racist, and chauvinistic to characterize the general tenor of what he was hearing. None of that on its own is an
offense per se. But they were getting a picture of him and trying to compile the case against him so that they could arrest him in charge him.
When they finally did arrest him, what happened. Did he talk? Was he charged immediately? What did that look like?
Well, that story is also interesting on itself. So in early November twenty twenty one, now the police had enough information that they strategically released some of it to the media to the effect that they were closing in on a particular suspect, and that a dark blue four wheel drive Nissan Patrol had been captured on cameras and that they were in a good position to sw the case. So that was a deliberate kind of strategy to put
pressure on reg Lynn specifically, and it worked. So on the twenty second of November, not very long after that information was all over the media. Sixty minutes and in
various newspapers. The surveillance devices showed Lynn heading back to the high Country from his home in Caroline Springs with at least one shotgun, and that he appeared to be mentally distressed, crying, talking about himself in the past, tense out loud on his own in the car, and the self talk was sufficiently concerning that they feared that he might self harm, and so they arrested him and then they took him to the nearest police station, which was
in Sale, which is a country police station about two and a half hours east of Melbourne.
And what happened there.
He spends three days in the police station at Sale. It's freezing in the police station. They have a heating problem, and he is given blankets, he's showered he's fed, and he's not interviewed for three continuous days. He's interviewed over a number of hours each day by the detectives passing him in Florence. He spent the first two days refusing to answer the questions put to him. I mean, I think his first question to them was why am I here?
He spoke to a legal aid judy lawyer who had advised him to make no comment, and he does have that right to silence, and so that seemed to be what he was doing for the first two days, and the police pushed back on that by saying it's making it difficult for them to get an explanation. This is his chance to explain the story, and so eventually greg Lynn says that he wants to give what he called
a pathway to resolution. He then told them his version of what had occurred on the night of the twentieth of March when Hill and Clay died, and he also told them where they could find what was left of their bodies. At the conclusion of that interview, and from listening to it and watching it, it seems that he was slightly surprised by this. He was told by Detective Lawrence that he would be charged with the murder of Russell Hill and with the murder of Carol Clay.
That admission that he gave was incredibly detailed. Yes, can you give us an overview of what he said happened to Hill and Clay.
So the two schools have thought about this in terms of trial argument or advocacy. The first one is that it's a bit unusual for a suspect to give a record of interview that so closely matches the available evidence. On the other hand, it's highly unusual to have a commercial pilot charged with two murders and to have eighteen months as the only living witness to think about a
story that matches the available evidence. His story and the first time I heard it, I thought it couldn't possibly be true because it seemed to stretch the imagination incredibly. Lynn said that on the twentieth of March he was also camping at Bucks Camp and he got into a
dispute with Hill over Hill's use of the drone. After exchanging pleasantries with the couple in the morning, he was slightly taken aback that they were camped fairly close to his site, not super close, but he said he got over that, and they exchanged pleasantries and he went off hunting. When he came back, he finds this drone over him, taking footage of him, and that this was so invasive
that it led to an argument with Russell Hill. Greg Lynn goes back to his campsite, has his dinner, opens the doors of his four wheel drive blasts music loudly. By this point, it's between nine and ten, and Russell and Carol are in their tent. Anyone who's at gun camping, it's fairly late, it's dark. This is a couple in their seventies there in bed, and he's blasting music. The way he explained that was he was rude to me, so I could be rude back, and he also said
it was fairly childish. Fine. As he's having his dinner with the music blaring, he says that. Russell Hill goes into his four wheel drive, takes one of his shotguns and the ammunition to load it, and fires it into the air and takes it back to his campsite. So greg Lynn follows him. There's a tussle over the gun as he tries to get it back off Russell. In the process, it accidentally discharges with Russell's finger on the trigger, killing Carol Clay with a single shot to the head
as she's cowering behind Russell's car. Then Gregland said that Russell was so enraged by this that he got a kitchen knife and came towards greg Lynn with the knife. They then tussled over that. Russell Hill then fell on his own knife, stabbing himself through the chest and died instantly.
Greg Lynn then said he panicked. He thought that it would look as though those two accidental deaths were deliberate, and that they would derail the rest of his life and everything that had given it, meaning his family, his capacity to work as a pilot, and various gun clubs or sports clubs that he had recently joined. So he thought the only thing to do was to eliminate the evidence.
He admitted to burning the items that had blood on them, to wiping blood off of the car as much as you could see it, and then putting the bodies into the trailer on the back of his car and driving them through the night on the Great Alpine Road to hide them at a site on the other side of the valley near a town called Dargo.
And he says that he actually went back to the bodies several months later, doesn't he? What did he do that for?
We heard that he went back twice. So immediately after the killing, Greg Lynn went back to Melbourne and we went down into lockdown, so he had no opportunity to go back and check on the bodies, or to go back and do anything at all and fly under the radar. So as soon as we had a break in that first lockdown, which I think was May, he went back to the site where he had buried them under some sticks and logs. He said to avoid the wild dogs and other animals that are in this area. They had
not been substantially disturbed either by animals or humans. We then went back into lockdown. He returned from that trip, and then when there was the next break, he had started to pick up on enough details, either legitimately or through his own fears, that he thought that he had no other options kind of how he phrased it, than to return to that area and eliminate the only remaining evidence, which was their bodies. He spent all night burning them
I think was twelve hours. He reduced them into tiny bone fragments and a few other remaining pieces of physical evidence, and then he hid the remains in a root ball hole, which is the hole in the ground left when a tree falls over, so all of the space taken up by its roots. He piles all that debris into the root ball hole and he considers that he has, in his words, disappeared.
Were the police able to recover those remains what was left?
They were. We heard from a number of crime scene specialists about the nature of their work, and it has a quiet heroism that is very understated and easily missed. There's a forensic anthropologist who doesn't tell you the cause of death, but can read these bone fragments to tell you what information they hold. So the forensic anthropologist is not going to give you a narrow of about causes.
But in this case, her name is doctor Soren Blau, and she can say these two tiny pieces of cranial bone had DNA that was consistent with Carol Clay's DNA. They show tiny fragments of material that are consistent with being close to a piece of metal like a bullet, And so she is just giving the facts that are part of her work. She was an extremely compelling witness. We heard from a forensic odontologist who is a dentist who works in legal matters about the identification of dental remains.
There was a partial bridge that was found to be russels, and we heard from a forensic entomologist who's an insects specialist about the blowfly maggot casings that were found and how they can actually be used as little clocks or indication about timing because they eat human remains and then they burrow underground, so that's another way of dating the material.
But it's extremely confronting to see what is twenty one hundred tiny bone fragments of two people reduced to almost dust, a small charred watch face, and a small piece of dental bridge. And so the work that they do, the care with which they do it, and the attention that they gave to finding these almost indiscernible things in this vast bush area was a nice counterbalance to just how dark the loss of life was in this case.
That's such a good point to bring up the fact that for the family sitting in that courtroom seeing what was left of their loved ones, can only imagine how horrible that must be.
Each one of these tiny fragments is handled with such care and taken so seriously and restored to the dignity that I think each human life deserves. It's unexpectedly harrowing but also unexpectedly moving when you hear the forensic specialists talk about their work.
So during the trial, Linni is charged with two murders, He's given this account of what he says happened, and it's obviously the prosecution's job to disprove that and poke holes in that. What were the biggest holes they were able to show the court.
They were tasked kind of with this idea that just because he was truthful about some things, the jury shouldn't necessarily assume and in this case it would be unwise to assume that he was truthful about everything. Their task was to show that he intentionally acted twice to deliberately kill each of Russell Hill and Carol Clay. They were up against it because of Greglin's admittedly deliberate destruction of evidence that could aid in constructing the story that took place.
As I mentioned, the phones were missing. He said he took them and he threw them in the Rose River. The drone was missing, and so the prosecution were not able to tell a story in the fullness of its details, provable beyond reasonable doubt. But they did not go with the defense narrative of an accidental struggle in which Carol
was killed first and Russell was killed second. They said that Ussell Hill was probably killed first and in circumstances that were comprised murder, and that Carol Clay was deliberately killed second because she had witnessed what had happened. That they were killed because of this dispute over whatever it was that had been captured by Russell Hill on his phone. And again what that is is a matter of speculation because we do not have the evidence. It could have
been hunting too close to the campsite. It could have been And I still don't understand why this wasn't pinpointed as going to motive. I'll just say that you don't need to prove motive as part of the elements of murder, but it helps persuade a jury about those elements because
they're put in a context of human action. Greg Lynn, and telling this story about how Russell came and took the gun from his car, said that the guns were unsecured, as was the ammunition, and that having unsecured guns and ammunition is a violation of the Firearms Code, and that any violation about firearms would have been sufficient to disqualify him from getting the security clearance required to be a
pilot and he would be unable to work. So then that made me think that if there was a campsite dispute about anything in the morning, and we know that Russell Hill was particularly wary about guns because he had had a relative killed accidentally on a deer hunting trip,
and he didn't have a firearms license. He inherited a shotgun that his father used on his farm when he was young, which would be a relic compared to the source of weapons that greg Lynn had, So there might have been some tension around Greglinn's use of the guns at the campsite, whether he was to be using them safely.
Both of these men seem to have personalities that wouldn't have taken well to being questioned or policed in any way about their activities, and so if Russell Hill took a photo of those guns unsecured or the ammunition unsecured in Gregland's car while greglin had been camping, perhaps that might have been enough to trigger off the subsequent chain of events, or equally, perhaps greg Lynn was hunting too closed against it or carrying the weapon in a way
that violated the code or the laws, and Russell Hill had footage of that. But it's one thing for us to put together evidence in that way. It's another thing for the Crown prosecutor, who is restricted to what they can prove on the evidence available. So they weren't able to put together a theory in those details, but they elicited sufficient information that Greglan's story, at least in relation to Carol Clay, was not persuasive to the jury.
And one of the ways I guess they could do that as well was to prove that the extent that he went to to hide the fact that they died kind of showed that he potentially killed them, because why would you do that? Why would you go to such links?
Correct? And it's accessible now there's a mental ocuatory appeal court judgment, So that means that instead of waiting till the end of the trial to see if a particular point of law was correctly applied and then going to appeal, they can pause the proceedings send that small confined point up to the Court of Appeal, who can give a clear answer and then the trial can proceed on short footing. It's a good use of resources when there's an ambiguity
in the law. But the ambiguity was precisely about this, the circumstances in which what we call post offense conduct like destroying evidence, moving bodies, anything that happens after the offending can be used to reason backwards towards intentioned murder.
And the Court of Appeal said that on the facts of this particular Crown case it could be used for that purpose, and then the jury would need to find in order to use it in that way that there was no other possible explanation for the conduct except that he was guilty of murder, so that it was so disproportionate to an accidental situation. And of course that's complicated by this question of panic. Panic doesn't follow rational rules.
So we're saying, is it possible, Yes, many things are possible.
Is it probable? I don't think so in the circumstance, And is it possible that Greg Lynn, with everything that we know about his training as a pilot, the methodicalness, the diligence, the planning, would have been panicked only at that stage and not previously, or that he wouldn't have stopped and used the radio and called for help or preserve the evidence of these two improbable deaths, and the jury that they could answer that question confidently in relation
to Carol Clay, but clearly not confidently in relation to Russell Hill.
Yeah, I need you to explain this to me, because it's so tricky to understand when you've got these two accidental deaths. You've got the same amount of evidence for both of them, which is very little in terms of physical stuff, and the jury was able to find him guilty of murder for one of the deaths, yes, and not the other. Please explain.
Yes, it's tricky, and we will not know the jury's reasoning process. We're not allowed to ask about it. It remains a locked box. But it seems that they concluded that Hill was killed in circumstances that could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, so that they couldn't confidently say that he was going to see the murder, but that Lynn murdered Carol because she was a witness to that death. So they used the evidence that was presented to come to those two conclusions and the standard that's
required beyond reasonable doubt operated differently. I think, having sat through it, that the fact that there's direct physical evidence relating to Carol's bones coming into contact with the metal that's likely to have been a bullet played a role, and the total absence of physical evidence about Russell's death. There's nothing to say that it was a gunshot. There's
nothing to say that it was a knife. There's nothing at all that obviously weighed on the jury with sufficient weight that they couldn't say what happened beyond reasonable doubt, but they could say that whatever it was that she witnessed, she was killed because of it.
Do you think that this was a particular tricky case. Some cases are quite black and white. You know, there's enough evidence for a jury to go away and deliberate for a few hours. But this jury took days and days and days, and I don't envy what they had to do. It sounds like it was really hard this particular case.
Yes, I had the thought for the whole six weeks of the trial that they were in an almost impossible position, and it's very difficult because you're sitting there and we had access to a whole range of information that the jury did not have access to, and they have to rely on their common sense, as the judge will remind them, and their close attentiveness to all of this information. And then there are twelve very different people in a room
who have to come to an accord unanimously. So there's so many sorts of factors that determine these outcomes, and every jury is in a sense unique, and every verdict is in a sense unique, because most experienced counsel and judges would tell you that you can't be confident until the moment of verdict about what it's going to be. So it was an extremely tricky case for a number
of reasons. The total absence of evidence, the admission about acting despicably, in the words of rig Lunn's lawyer Dermot dan Ac, that it was despicable to destroy this evidence, But that destroying evidence is not the same thing as having proved the unreasonable doubt of two murders. So they have to put together everything that they are seeing and everything that they are hearing and reviewing, and they have to do it all unanimously. So really tricky situation.
What did you make of Lynn's character during the trial, and especially when that one guilty one not guilty verdict came back.
He was interesting to watch and fairly consistent in his affect how he presented from the earliest days of these hearings, which were initially on zoom because we're still kind of coming out of COVID, he has been engaged and attentive to what's been going on. He's also been vigorously taking notes. He has a little yellow file of papers and documents that he carried into the court each day, and throughout weeks and weeks of evidence, he would be looking down
and taking notes. Now, part of that is for the purposes of giving his lawyer instructions, because he is the person who is being represented and again the only living witness, But in my understanding, a lot of that was what sociologists refer to as impression management. We all want to be perceived in a certain way, we all want to
exercise some control over our image. But in terms of the personality type that was being discussed, I found it interesting that this normalization of the vironment that he is at work, that he has important things to be doing, that he is not meeting the gaze of the people who are looking at him, or that it was kind of a distancing measure, and my understanding was that it kind of solidified this image of a man who needed a certain measure of control at any cost.
Can you talk us through what happens next, Because we've got the verdict, Now we wait for the sentencing and within that the victims' families get a chance to say something. Lynn also has the potential to appeal after the fact. What are we looking at for the next few months.
So on the nineteenth of July, there'll be a sentencing hearing. To prepare for the sentencing play, evidence will need to be gathered by both parties for the purposes of arguing what sentence Lynn should receive for the murder of Carol Clay. And then all that evidence will need to be gathered. That'll be slightly different evidence from the evidence we heard at the trial. It'll be evidence about his background and circumstances, his character, both by the Crown and by the defense.
And then there will be the sentencing plea which all of that will be presented to the judge, Michael Croucher, and then there will be time needed to go off and formulate the sentence and the reasons for a sentence, so it'll be another few months before we're aware of what his sentence is going to be.
I keep thinking about Russell's wife and Russell's daughters, because this must be really hard for them, because they did get them not guilty, whereas Carol's family is getting that justice.
That was something that I noticed and that weighed heavily on me at that moment of hearing the verdict. The fourth person was asked about the verdict for Russell Hill first, and so we heard not guilty first. In the press box is located next to additional seating where one of Russell's three daughters, Debbie, was sitting, and watching her receive that verdict can be quite still. It was almost like time stopped, and you could get a small sense of the scope of that pain and that lack of kind
of closure or redemption. Then the four person was asked about the verdict for Carol Klay, and then the guilty came. And when a guilty comes in child's like this, it seems to just expand and fill the room. There's a kind of weightiness to it that is as close as I think I can come to a experience of redemption
in the courtroom, and it's quite a significant thing. And so with outcomes like this, which are ones that might make neither side of the bar table happy, it's a small measure of solace I think to say, Okay, well now he is guilty of murder, and some of that can go towards what happened to Russell Hill. But I think that there will be a feeling of loss there and perhaps of anger for the families.
You're writing a book on this case. You've sat through every single day in court. You know this story back to front. What are you hoping in your writing to bring to this narrative and to share with the world.
So it won't be what many might expect in terms of genre. It will be a trial book, but it will explore this case and these human actions in their broadest possible context, because of the landscape in which this occurred, of the nature of the investigation, and of all the personalities involved in their histories. There's themes here that I think have kept us captivated as readers for the last one hundred and fifty years of Victoria's history. And so
I'm interested in our fixation with this story. I'm interested in my own fixation about the story. Why when we didn't have a word about what happened to these two people for eighteen months and there was literally almost no new information, it remained alive in the headlines.
So do you think that this is one of those stories that in decades to come we will still remember it viscerally? This is kind of a story that really is going to shape the Australian crime scene.
I think there's enough indication so far that the answer has to be yes. There was that full media saturation very early on. Despite having new COVID news every day, we kept these missing campers at the forefront of our minds and at the front of the papers. They're consistently there. People are consistently clicking on them and interested in them. We have the high volume of information coming through crime stoppers.
I think that the police said that it was one of the most responded to cases that they'd ever had. So again, this kind of activation around people going missing, around the particular landscape in which it occurs, the deaths that get our attention and the deaths that don't get our attention, and then who we choose to believe in, why all of those things are operative here in a way that makes people really interested. Now I can't follow
what most people find interested. I'm too anti authoritarian to go like that. I think I would still be working as a lawyer if I wasn't this much of a lone wolf. But I think I'm saying that I'm one of those people who was very interested. I see it in myself, and I'm curious to explore why the attention
is going there, what's at play there. There's so many archetypal themes with any criminal case, with any murder, but particularly ones that have all of these feature They activate something in us, and I'm curious to find out what that is.
Thanks to Sarah Krasnustein for assisting us to tell this story. True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Bath, with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Live Proud. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation