November 23, 2024 • 51 mins
Carol Clay and Russell Hill were having a secret affair when they went missing on a camping trip in remote Victoria bush. Did they run off together? Did they get lost on a bush walk? Were they dead or alive? No one knew. From the button man to a high profile pilot, Greg Haddrick takes Gary Jubelin through every step of the investigation to catch a killer.
Discover Greg Haddrick's book, In the Dead of Night.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Detective sy 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.
(00:23):
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 to another episode of I Catch Killers.
(00:49):
Today we're going to examine the murder investigation which captured
the attention of the country. We're talking about the death
of two campers in the Victorian Wilderness in twenty twenty.
Our guest is Greg Hadri. Maybe you haven't heard of
his name before, but I'm sure you would be aware
of some of the crime projects he's worked on. Greg
is a writer and producer. He was also involved in
(01:09):
the Underbelly TV series. Greg is a friend of mine
who have known for a long time, and he has
turned his considerable talents to writing a book titled In
the Dead of Night. The book is about the deaths
of secret lovers Russell Hill and Carol Clay and inside
the Painsaking police investigation to catch a killer who happened
to be a Jet Star captain named Greg Lynn. We're
(01:31):
going to talk about the investigation in detail and a
lot of other things about crime in this country. Greg
is a fascinating person, a good storyteller who understands crime
better than most. Greg Hadrick, Welcome to our Catch Killers.
Thank you, Gary. It's good to see you Greg.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's great to see you again too. Been a couple
of years, Yes it has been. Yeah, always good to see.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
You well, no doubt you've been busy and yeah, no
rest for the wicked, so to speak. No. I finished
your book In the Dead of the Night, and I've
got to say it is you've really encapsulated what the
murder investigation is about, which is not surprising given the
projects you've worked on before. But it's a fascinating story,
(02:13):
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It is and that was actually what drew me to it,
that to be able to get inside a homicide investigation
which was so difficult, and be able to bring an
audience or readership inside that investigation, to give them the
feeling of what it is like at each moment as
they're going through it. It was the real incentive behind
(02:34):
writing it.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Well, you've done it very well, and you've traumatized the
next homicide detective who was sitting reading the book and thinking,
I'd love to get involved in this investigation, because it
really started with nothing, nothing, which was unusual.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
What I've heard was that in this day and age,
usually there's you know, people have phones on them, or
there's CCTV not too far away, or there's you know
someone it's someone close to the person involved, et cetera.
There's places they can start the middle of the one
and Gator Valley had no phone reception, there were no cameras,
there was no one who knew Russell and Carroll anywhere
(03:11):
within two hundred kilometers of the site. They had no
idea where to start.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
It was a classic murder mystery, wasn't it. Yeah, when
we'll talk in detail and we'll take it through chronologically
how the investigation evolved. But it brought back old school
detective thinking. Yeah, little red flags, little indicators that you
couldn't hang a case on it, but you're thinking, Okay,
this doesn't quite add up. That's why I found fascinating
(03:36):
about it.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, and that's and a lot of that was circumstantial,
but thread by thread they built it up. And the
way I heard it described is they felt they needed
to get enough threads that you couldn't break the rope.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, that's a good way of a good way of describing.
I think there was something in your book and one
of the detectives we're talking that's like trying to put
the jigsaw together when you haven't got the pitch.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You haven't got the cover, which I thought was a good.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Analogy and sort of added to it. What is it
you think about true crime that fascinates fascinates people? Look,
there's a few answers.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
And because I've puzzled about this for now, you know,
fifteen odd years, tight years, and I think there's one
aspect is to feel safe, people feel they need to
understand exactly what happened, and if they do understand what
the motivation was, what drove that particular murder to happen,
crime to happen. Then they can go, oh, well, I
(04:35):
can avoid, I can feel safe. I know that wouldn't
happen to me because of A, B and C. I
think there's an element of that to it. I think
for a lot of people, it is so tied up
with morality, with what is right and wrong, what is
good and bad? What is punishment? What are consequences?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
And that affects all.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Our daily lives with how we deal with other people,
and true crime just heightens that, takes that and puts
it on steroids.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, it makes you question your own morals and values,
doesn't it. It does when you're looking at how the
impact that crime has in society. Yeah, what about yourself?
What's your interest in? And we will talk a little
bit about your career before we get into the murder investigation.
But you, in your professional career have covered a lot
of crime stories and delivered it on TV and different forums.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
That's right, And I think what's kept me interested? I
mean there's a and again it's no one simple answer.
There is a strand where it's commercially rewarding to do
true crime because you know you have an audience, but
beyond that, for me, it did have to do with morality.
I mean, I've done quite a few legal shows as well,
and they're fairly close. You're always dealing with, you know,
(05:42):
what is suffering?
Speaker 1 (05:43):
How do you relieve it?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
How do society become a safer place for human beings
to live in? Those big questions about you know, where
are we safe and what do we have to do
to make ourselves safe? I think are constantly on the
top of everyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Okay, your career told us a little bit about yourself
before we delve into the murder.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, I was at university before media communication courses really existed,
So I did English honors and then came out not sure,
you know, I wanted to use that in some creative way,
whether that was going to be authorship, which has taken
me thirty five forty years to do, or journalism or whatever.
And it just so happened that the first paying job
(06:26):
by God was in television, and I was lucky. I
seemed to suit it and it worked well. New doors
kept on opening up, it never got boring, and so
I stayed there initially. It's sort of the career has
been in two big parts. The first fifteen twenty years
was working on other people shows as a freelance writer
in story rooms, et cetera, et cetera. And then the
(06:48):
second half has been mostly show running the shows that
I want to make, starting with my husband Killer the
Telling Movie for ten, going through Mary Bryant, Society Murders, MDA,
through to the Underbelly for franchise Janet King and they
were they sort of crossed over Pine Gap and then
Human Era was just last year.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah. Well, you your resumey of shows that you've been
involved in is quite impressive. And when they talk about
unemployed writers or actors, you seem to keep yourself busy.
I have.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, I've been like I guess, yeah, there's an element
of luck, and I guess an element of being in
the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah. Well, the Underbelly TV series, and obviously it's personal
to me, and we'll talk about the Underbelly badness, but
the Underbelly series, the series one with the Melbourne Underworld
that that really, I don't know, it seemed to really exploded.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, that was that was an absolute breakout hit. And
that's the I've been involved with many successful shows, and
there's what It's one thing being a success, it's another
thing being being a real breakout hit, which it was
in Australia.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
And we.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
That the genesis of that first season of Underbelly was
really because Eddie Maguire had absolute control Channel nine for
about six months.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And he was fascinated by it. He was he was
a broady boy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
He knew that world. He always thought it would be
hugely popular. You know, a lot of other people weren't
quite so sure when we when we first started it
was I was lucky that one of the one of
the cops who under the radar helped me with Society
Murders was then on taskwas Paranha. So the link to
(08:27):
Underbelly from Channel nine's point of view was Andrew Ruhlan
and John Sylvester, and the link from my point of
view was the operational cops in taskwors Parana who we
had some help with.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
They really helped well again watching it and it sort
of changed the way a story was told. And like
the Melbourne Underworld murders, that series encapsulated the way it's
reported factually is one thing that then seeing the characters
play out and the personalities and yeah, it was a
world of crime that I sort of understood, like that
(08:58):
some of them are larger than life without glorifying them,
that's just the way they are.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
And you know, Carl Williams was larger than life even
though he walked around in track he's and made a
red rooster. Yeah, and yet he was Everyone liked him,
and he became the boss of that gang. And so
order you to sort of present that and go, look,
this is part of our society. These people are living
next door to you.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
I think it also played out how things can escalate
in that world, like it was a tit for tat
and it just kept going bigger and bigger. It was crazy.
I remember one sitting down talking to you one time,
and we won't name the name of the person, but
I reference this because I think it's quite funny where
one of the villains that you were portraying on their
approached you and you might recall it, but it stuck
(09:39):
with me that said, I don't do litigation through the courts, yes,
And I thought that's one of the most intimidating threats. Well,
how else are you going to do litigation? Basically telling
you you better portray me properly. Yeah, did you read?
But that was a real gangster way of saying things,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
It was yeah, yeah, and you know, with a smile,
and yet you go, I can see you smiling, but.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
That very very chilling. Yes, well, you came crashing into
my life with Underbelly badness, and it'd be amiss of
me if I didn't raise it, because I think it
had an impact on my life. People can judge whether
it's a good impact or a bad impact, but how
our world's collided with that. I think you were speaking
to New South Wales Police. It was on the back
(10:26):
of a couple of other Underbelly series and you approached
senior Police and said, we want to cover a story
where the cops are getting and I think the one
before that was corruption in the Cross and you wanted
to show that the cops and I remember one of
the first conversations I had with you about it when
it was approved by Senior Police, said we want to
delve into your private life, and I think I responded
(10:49):
to you, well, you know, I'm divorced, and I saw
you and some of the other writers seeing there going
well that's good and then I had a relationship with
a lady that I met at a murder trial fantastic
serial killer, and I had a relationship with someone I
work with and they go, perfect, we don't need to
embellish great television. So that it made me go home
(11:10):
and reflect on my private life. But look, I was
proud of what we did on that that yeah, and
when I say well, it was very much a team
effort on an investigation of that scale, and the impact
that had on me the Underbelly Badness series was that
I sort of put the target on my back within
my own organization but also out on the street. That yeah,
(11:31):
you certainly changed the way I went about went about things, and.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
That was our I mean, if you if you backtrack
to the first and I think Badness was that's one
of the ones I'm most proud of as well. I
thought we did. You know, it was a very good
show and it did very very well because there was
a lot of emotional connection to all of the characters
in that the goodies and the badies, because of the
depth we put into that characterization. If you go back
(11:58):
to the to the famous first aes of Funderbilly the
Crims in that were probably more complex than the cops.
Part of that was Victoria Police didn't want us to
use the real police, and for the whole host of
operational reasons, but the effect of that is that the
police are just a little more two dimensional than the
crims are. And we were going, but these guys are
(12:20):
doing great stuff for society, they should be the heroes
more than the crims. So we were wanting to do
one where actually we were talking about real police and
showing them as complex people as well as the crims.
And that was I think the difference between Badness and
that first series.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, and look, yeah I was confronting as it was.
I think I was in the fetal position, sucking the
thumb watching the first episode. You asked me if I
want to see it before it came out, and I thought, no,
some plausible denying ability, but that is the price that
you pay with policing. And yeah, I'm not ashamed of
what my life is, but it's played out warts and
(12:56):
all and the impact that has and I think it
gave the public an understanding of what it takes to
take and the emotions. And you guys spent a lot
of time with us and you saw the emotional rollercoaster.
You were on the high then, you know, yeah, just chaotic,
the chaotic, chaotic life and.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yet ultimately victorious in that case against some you know,
a lot of badness.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah well and yeah, well it was. It turned out
to be a great investigation and one that I'm proud
of and I made a good friend from it. Matt
Nabel who You've got to play me? And I think
you picked the right person. We're good friends and he
got because that was my When you approach and everyone
is this way, and I don't care what they say,
(13:40):
but when you say, oh, they're going to do a
TV show on you're a movie or whatever, the first
question you want to ask is who's going to play me?
But I was trying to be too cool for that
and just oh, yeah, no, that's cool. And when you
put Matt in front of me and we got to meet,
I thought, yeah, he's going to represent me the way
I think I should or would like to get a
great job. Yeah, but both of you. It was an
(14:01):
interesting experience. Another show that you worked on that people
here might be interested was Crownie's. Yeah, that was taking
us into the court world. It did, but It actually
began with the Crime World. It began because we did
the telemovie adaptation of Society Murders, and the book of
Society Murders was written by Hillary Bonnie who had been
(14:22):
a solicitor in the DPP and Victoria and you know,
it was her suggestion that, you know, it'd be a
great setting for a TV show. But as well as
the solicitors, we needed, you know, the barristers that they
and the Crown prosecutors that they worked for. So it
was a combination of the research. A lot of the
research for that was from Hillary from the Crown solicitors
(14:44):
point of view and Margaret Kneen here as the Crown
processor's point of view. Yeah. Well you always get an
interesting story when you got Margaret involved, yep, as we know,
and Janet King the flow on from that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
And the flow on from Crownies, and I think Crownies
is one of the shows that is age really well
at the time.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
The ABC.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
It's no great secret that their majority of their audience
is you know, forty five fifty class, So it was
no great surprise at the end of that first year
is they went well our audience, They did their research
and they said, our audience is actually responding more to
Janet than they are to the twenty somethings, and so
we re engineered it to put that character at the center.
And then the plan was that she would move around
(15:28):
jurisdictions and which actually followed Market, so from Crown Prosecutor
then to Royal Commissioner, then to a sort of special
council sort of thing, and so the hugely experienced Janet
was in a different environment, dealing with different issues each time,
(15:48):
and a lot of that echoed Market's life.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Well, you know, it's a world that I understand, and
I think you captured the essence of it. Yeah, people
sometimes people say, but does that happen? Well, it's not
a docu mentory like there's yeah, there's some creativity in there,
but the essence of what it's about. And that's where
when people ask me about Underbelly Badness, I captured the
essence of what that story story was about. And I
(16:14):
think there were some things that you said we couldn't
put in because people wouldn't believe it, And that's true.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And I often say, even going back to the first Underbelly,
when people ask the question, generally speaking, the more outrageous
things that you can't believe, the more likely it is
it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's interesting and full
credit to you. But having read the book in the
dead of night, maybe you've been wasting your talents. You
should have been writing books right from the start, because
(16:42):
I've got to say, and I'm not you know, I've
read a lot of books here before, guests, come on,
But that took me so deep into a homicide investigation.
I was living and breathing and thinking, Okay, what would
the detectives do now, and the moves that they were
going to make, the corners that they were jammed into.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
The moral dilemmas. I had so many ethical and moral dilemmas.
That is the norm for a homicide investigation. So we're
going to talk about it, but before we do, in
respect to the victims, because when we're talking homicide, we're
talking about the lives of two people. Can you tell
us who Russell Hill was? And Carol Clay will start
off with Russell.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Look a little bit. What I know about Russell was
that he had been a logger and a forestry worker
in the One and Gata Valley for a lot of
his life. He then, toward the later years, drove trucks,
mostly for bunnings or for things to and from for
their timber divisions and all of that sort of stuff.
(17:40):
He'd relatively recently retired. He had always loved the outback
and the outdoors. Sometimes his wife Robin had gone with him.
Many times he'd sort of gone on his own.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He was also.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
A very big radio enthusiast high frequency radio, and there
was a group of about half a dozen also mates
that he contacted quite regularly through high frequency radio, and
they kept in touch when any of them knew they
were out in the books because there's no farm reception,
yeah or whatever, so he'd set up an aerial and
make sure he checked in, you know, six o'clock most evenings.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And at the time of his disappearance, he was in
his seventies. Yeah, seventy four I think, okay, but a
fit seventy four. Yeah, I think when they first went missing,
people thought, oh, two seventy year olds, you know, there's
fallen off their chair. Yeah, and you go no, no, no.
He was quite a tough dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
What about Carol.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Carol was into like she had been president of the
country Women's Association or a very high office holder. She
was very much part of the community. She was someone
who always helped other people, wanted to volunteer for you know, this,
that and the other. Always active. If she wasn't out
helping other people in her community, she was at home,
(18:55):
you know, cooking for various fates and things like that.
So he was someone who always was giving to other
parts of the community. Very widely liked and very highly
thought of.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I saw I think it was on sixty minutes where
her younger sister was in the viewed and described her
as a larger than life personality, always happy, always, always buddly,
looking for funding, funding life. Yeah, the circumstances. If we
talk about the case, I'll just relay what I know
and knew, add the color to it that it was
a campsite that was found abandoned. That was basically the
(19:31):
genesis of the investigation on the back of reports to
the police that Carol and Russell were missing.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yes, it actually started with Russell's by Robin, who reported
him missing when he hadn't checked in on the high
frequency radio for about four or five nights in a row,
and Rob Ashton who was the sort of key figure
in that group of radio enthusiasm. He talked to Robin
and said, something's not right here. So she went to
the police and she didn't know at that stage that
(19:58):
Carol was with Russell, so she just reported Russell missing.
And when the police put out to the media, has
anyone seen Russell, that's when Carol's friends caught in and said, well,
where's Carol? She was with him, and that's when they went, oh, well.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
That's what I was. What I would say on that, Greg,
it's amazing and we'll break it, break it all down.
But these are the type of things that come out
when you start looking into people's lives. It doesn't surprise me,
like you're going to a murder investigation in the country
town and you uncover all sorts of things when you
sort of lift the blanket and go, okay, what's going
(20:36):
on here in this town? So we'll put it out there.
They'd been they'd been friends for a long time. They
had what came out.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
In court, and I I like to be my viewer
version of having a respect for the families is that
I don't go I don't want to go beyond what
came out in the court case and the testimony they go,
I think that's fair. Everything else, I view is irrelevant
to the case. And it was the investigation in the
(21:05):
case that mostly the book was about. But what what
you know was presented at court was that Russell and
Carroll had known each other at school when were teenagers.
Russell didn't want it to get that serious and they
split up. He met Robin, they married, had three daughters,
three lovely daughters. Some many years later he met Carol again.
(21:27):
They began a relationship which Robin found out about, and
Russell said, no, I don't want to break up the family.
You know, the three girls and you were important to me,
so you know, I won't see Carol, and that was
Robin's at that point. Robin thought, well it's over. And
what she didn't know was that for you know, several years,
(21:48):
it would seem that they had had started another relationship
where they would often go camping together.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Okay, now when we talk camping, because we're sitting here
in the sort of in a city Sydney suburb, to
appreciate the wilderness of the area in which they disappeared,
and you talk CB radios and communication. When they go
in there.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
They're off grid, completely off grid. It is, it is
really remote.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Can you describe it to people that might have been
to locations like that?
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Look, it's you can only get in there with the
four will drive, so and you would be generally, unless
you're a very experienced four wall driver, you'd be unwise
to go in on your own, just because anything could
happen and you could be lost forever. It's the the
our Pine. The One and Gata Valley is a small
(22:37):
part of the Alpine National Park and the Alpine National
Park which is pretty much entirely off grid, entire no
phone reception.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
There is huge, you know in the book, I say
it's bigger than Belgium.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Or about the same.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
And you don't just go there for a picnic on
a Sunday.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
You've got the plan. You have to plan.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yes, Applies Russell had a chainsaw with him in case
he needed to you know, you know she often did
have to cut to clear tracks.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Don't you carry that in your card?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Funnily enough, no, so you know, spare petrol, water, food supplies, tent,
the area for the radio. Everything had to be there.
He was very well prepared and most people who go
into that valley to camp in the want to go
a valley, go in very prepared, right.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Russell's wife would be comforted by the fact that she
would often hear him call in at six o'clock if
he's out there with his crew of radio, with.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
His crew of radio enthusiasts, and she knew how to
turn the radio on at home and would always listen in.
She didn't have the license to use it as such,
but she would always switch it on and listen and
make sure he was okay, and he knew that she'd
be listening okay.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
So after a couple of days she hadn't heard from him,
and then that's when she went to the police. What
was the initial response from the police. How did they
treat that?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
They treated it pretty seriously right from the beginning, the
uniform police, I think partly because they knew that was
a remote area and it was if he had been
for years, pretty religious about, you know, checking in on
the radio. Missing five or six days is serious. So
they went up there the following day. A couple of
the guys in a police force will drive. The first
(24:17):
time they met up, they didn't know where to look
and couldn't actually find anything and just told, you know,
bumped into a few people instead of you've seen a
white turtle Land cruiser. And it was actually a guy
called Colin Boyd, I think, one of the people who
he was camping in the valley who did go into
bucks camp and see the turtle Land cruiser and he
had to go back out to get phone reception to
(24:38):
call them. And so when you say the abandoned he
saw when it was found there was Russell's white turtle
Land cruiser and just a completely burnt out campsite next
to it, and that was it. Okay, So there was
someone that had seen that but couldn't report it to
the police until he got out there. He had to
get out of the valley, go back up to how
(24:59):
it planes to be able to get reception to call them.
I think on his phone he could take a GPS
of where it was. And then very very early morning
the next day again too uniform cops from Mafra I
think police station went up there and that was the
first first time police had seen it.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
So they're at that location, they're confronted the remote location,
they're confronted with Russell's car, abandoned and the tent burnt
out and all the camping gear thrown into thrown into
the tent. Yeah, a fairly chaotic, chaotic saint you it's
hard to interpret what's happened there? Yeah, where do you start?
(25:38):
Where do you start?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And you know, at the beginning there was always because
by then they did know that he'd been camping with
Carol and that had been an affair that the Hill
family didn't know about. And so they're thinking, well, is
have they run.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Off stage there? At stage?
Speaker 2 (25:52):
There disappearance somehow? But how it had to be another
car somewhere and who was that? If not, what had happened?
Where were they? Had they just gone walking and got lost?
But if that was the case, who burnt the camp?
Were they missing? Were they dead?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Who? No one knew? Do you know what area of
the police were handling? It was a local police or
when did it get passed up the line to more
of a major investigation.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Was handled initially by well that the first people who
arrived there were uniform cops from MAFRA. Then it went
to Sale and the local detectives at Sale and that
first person in charge of that was Amy Frost and
it was with the local detectives at sale for about
two to three weeks. But the Missing person squad, and
(26:41):
as saying the book that a lot of people think
missing persons and you think, well, there's you know, hundreds
of those.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
A year.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
And the missing person squad itself in Victoria is a
division of homicide. If foul players suspected and there is
no body, then it's a missing person squad. If there
is a body, it's homicide. So the Missing person Squad
knew about this pretty early.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
They were have an overview, they'd.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Have an overview, they were looking at it. They were
staying in the loop. And after about two or three
weeks when the first search and rescue found absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
So they on that. I would imagine their pole air
and the four of the drives and.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Looking they had and they were they were going out
as you would from the campsite and within one hundred
meters you're in very dense bush, et cetera. So they
went five ten k's you know, out that, and they
had some horsemen from the from the valley. They had
I think kadava dogs from New South Wales or something
like that, and they were all looking in that you know,
(27:45):
five ten, fifteen, twenty k circumference from the campsite and
found not nothing, not a not a shoe, not a jumper,
not a thing. And that's when they said, with we
don't know what else we get.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
What do we do? We've done the search, we go
from here? Where do we go from here? So the
Missing Person Squad they took over the investigation and then
what I remember it from the media, I'm assuming it
was early it started getting released in the appeals through
the media. Yeah, if anyone seen these.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
So the head of the Missing person Squad, Andrew Stamper,
he had a media a stand up as they call it,
a day after the Missing Person Squad had officially been
given the case. And that was the first I said, Well,
the only thing we can do is try and identify
everyone who had been in the valley.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Makes sense, Yeah, but that in itself is Yeah, it's
not signing into the local club.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
No, yeah, no, it's not easy at all. So it
had to be an appeal to the public please come forward.
This was at a point in time where the first
COVID restrictions had just come into play and people thought
they are they trying to catch us for being out
when we should have been at home.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Who's paranoid? I'm not.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So they had to say, look, don't worry about that.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
We're not going to try and.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
With COVID regulations, we just need to find out who
was in the valley, okay. And they were looking for
people who would have taken photos on their phone. He
might have had dash cam on there in their car,
anyone who could help them figure out all the people
who'd actually been in there.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And I would suppose at that stage they don't know
if it's stephed by misadventure or they still didn't know,
like it wandered off, they had a fight, they wandered off.
You just don't you don't know, and it's still the
proof of life checks weren't showing anything up, so they
were starting to think it was more likely for out play.
But it was another few weeks before they could say, look,
(29:39):
so the bank accounts haven't been used, used phones, and.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Carol's phone was never found. Russell's phone it was about
two or three weeks after the camp site was found.
They did get records back from Telstra that his phone
had connected to the the Dargo the Dinner Planes mobile
station in the Hotham station, then Mount Buffalo, so they
(30:05):
knew his phone had been in those three range of
those three towers for about twenty thirty minutes or so.
But who knows what that means?
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Well, that's yeah, okay the strongest you know, someone has
taken them.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Has taken the fun Yeah, yeah, that's all. He's got
the phone or someone else has. Did they just find
it somewhere and then just drive out and throw it away?
Where exactly is it?
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So not a lot to go on. And I know
that the way you've delved into the book and a
couple of things that the police started looking at and
looking at it really trying to work out the hypothesis
of what had happened. What were some of the significant
events where they thought, okay, this is foul play. When
do you think they formed that beer? They?
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I guess when they really looked at what had been
thrown inside the tent to get burned, they were like
the whole gas barbecue thing, et cetera, the things that
and the gas bottles themselves.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
It didn't look likely.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
That that Russell and Carroll had burnt that camp site themselves.
You didn't know why you would do that. Why would
you put everything inside the tent and then burn everything
down together? And so just as a hypothesis, they thought
that someone who's done that is trying to destroy any
any record of them being there. And even the fact
(31:31):
that they couldn't find any fingerprints or anything gone to
that X gone to that extent that they gone, someone's
done a really good job of cleaning this site up.
Why would that happen if it wasn't foul play.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
I'm trying to put my homicide hat on and thinking, Okay,
if you're looking at that, was it an accident that happened?
Then it certainly didn't look my interpretation of the crime
scene like it was an accident. Someone was someone had
done it deliberately. So it's giving you something to work
with on that factor. People identifying people would have come forward,
and I'm sure the public would have fawned in and
(32:04):
talked about different people. Did they have lines of inquiry
that they were following that they thought might pay dividends.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
They were dealing with some sightings around about there was
you know, we think we saw Russell and Carroll and
another place just about thirty forty kilometers away, and they
had quite a few of those which they could, and
at your job is to follow all of them up
just in case. But they all proved explicable by other means.
(32:31):
It wasn't rustling Carroll. And although those kept on over
the next four or five months, someone would ring in
and say, Oh, they're at a petrol station Wayala, or
they're at a motel in Perth or whatever, but they
increasingly dismissed all of those, and so they they then
started they were starting to get reports from people who
(32:52):
had been in the valley, and in particular, there were
three weeds brayers who'd spent most of the week in
the valley there they'd said hi, and few cars, et cetera.
And then they were able to start finding out what
those cars were, where those people had camped.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So just to explain to us city dwellers, like weed
sprays in the yeah, I actually you're talking like you
grew up in the high country, yeah sprays. No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
And in fact, I had a completely wrong view of
them when I first heard that as well. And it
wasn't until you know, you hear their full evidence that
you go, oh, I see, so you're not walking around
with a little plastic thing on.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Your back like you are in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
They go in there with full wall drives, with massive
trucks that have hoses hundreds of meters long, and huge
tanks of three different sprays for blackberries, for ox Hie
daisies and cape brewm not just that they're trying to
eliminate over a thirty kilometer square kilometer area massive, So
that's why they're there for a whole week, so they
(33:51):
know the area well, and they know the area would.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, people had come through, and we're not talking a
huge amount of people coming through, are we No.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
In the end, there might have been, you know, twenty fifteen,
twenty twenty five, something like that, most of whom had
snaps from where they camped, et cetera. The first one
that they sort of from memory, the first one they
sat back and went, well, that's interesting. It was a
family who had spoken to the weed sprays. Actually, he
(34:20):
said they had said to him they were going to
go back to New South Wales and they were heading
up via the one and Gata gate at the north
end of the valley and he thought that was closed,
and it was because of the bushfires. Two trees had
crashed across that so at the one and Gata river
that was closed. But the New South Wales family camped
there and think I will go because once it had
(34:41):
got to nightfall, very very few.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
People drive and turned around and turned back.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, so they camped there and at two am someone
else had driven up, had realized that that gate was
closed and had had to do like a fifteen to
twenty point U turn and go back again down through
the valley. And that report and they thought so the
same night that this camp was burnt. They knew from
when it had first been found that that fire had
(35:09):
happened sometime around about ten o'clock to midnight.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Okay, we've been a narrow time timeframe.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
And here at two am there was a four well
drive trying to get out of the north end of
the valley, not being able to do so you turning
and driving back again when almost no one drives at
that time, at that time of the night. So that's
the first time they thought a bit suspicious, bit suspicious.
It had no idea what the car was, but it
sort of fitted the hypothesis that they were building, that
(35:38):
someone else had burnt that and then someone else was
trying to get out of the valley.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And that gate where the roadway was blocked off. How
far are we looking from the camp site? Ten k Yeah,
on a rough to rain, on a rough terrain. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
But then if they had to go back through the
wan to go of and then down through the rest
of the Ourpine National Park to get to Dargo High
Planes Road, that was like a six eight hour full
will drive over really rough tracks in the middle of
the night.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay, dark. So the assumption and this is this is
this is really getting into That's what I liked about
the book. So that's what you're presented with. It's not
evidence on itself. Someone came to a gate that was
closed and did a U turn. But at that time
of night and in those conditions, why didn't the person
like out there just stay there.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Just stay there and can yeah figure wait till the morning.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah, you're not. It's not a matter of oh, I'll
go ten kilometers down the track and be back in
the civilization. No, Okay. So that they're they're the type
of things that I just find fascinating with homicide investigations
that that just doesn't seem normal. There was a couple
of other let's call them persons of interest that the
police looked at my understanding and somewhere with Eastern Europe and.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Shoot, they did know, yeah, and again from a couple
of people in the valley and weed sprays again were
one of them. That there had been two people whose
accident made them sound like they were Eastern European who
were there to hunt, had asked where they could hunt,
were armed, had guns, were a bit crazy drivers, you know,
driving fast down through the valley, and a slight yahoo
(37:17):
element to them, I suppose you might say. And they
didn't they didn't know where they'd gone by the time
they'd camped near the three weed sprays and when the
weed sprays had come back on that sort of Friday
night the Easter, two Eastern Europeans had left. Now that
camp site is about five k's away from Bucks Camp,
(37:40):
which is where the Rustle and Carroll were. So had
they gone there or not? And there was you know,
reports of a white car and that's all that's all
you had. But they were someone they couldn't find for
a long.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Time, Okay, Yeah, And that and the fact that you
can't find them causes you cause you to make Yeah,
why can't why can't they find them? Why haven't they
come forward? That type of thing. And there was also
which is not unique to this investigation, but someone that
was sort of living off the grid, hermit type character
and what was what was his story?
Speaker 2 (38:14):
So he's he was known as the button man Button
because he made buttons out of deerhorns. He would often
be known to be in the in the wan and
Gata Valley or in the Arpine National Park in camp
there for two, three, four or five months at a time,
and there were stories about him going back several years.
The park rangers sawed and knew of him and sort
(38:36):
of knew where most of his spots were, but no
one had had long chats with him, because if the
whole point of him being there was he wanted to
be on his own.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
But he.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
On the one hand, he didn't have a known history
of violence toward campus, but he did several scary things.
And his ability to sort of to their camps at
night time and you know, use their equipment, take photos,
et cetera, without them knowing he'd ever been there, just
(39:06):
gave people he that was.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I think you've reminded me of something in the book
where people have woken up and he's been there taking
a fato on the camera.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
He's taken a selfie on their phone of him holding
a knife inside their tent while they're asleep.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Why would that freak terrified?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
So so he did things like that to try and
scare people away, and it is pretty scary, but there
was there was no evidence he had actually gone further
than that, and and in the end, they took a
while to find him. And you know, as I say
in the book, one of the things I hadn't quite
you know, because you hear in the abbreviated form when
(39:46):
you get the evidence laid down the train and go, oh,
we checked him with the with the button man, and
we could eliminate him. It turns out that we checked
him with the button man took days that had to
find where the hell he was first. Then they realized
that his answers so well set up that he could
see them coming from Columbus away, so he just piss off. Yeah,
So it was yeah, so actually organizing things so they
(40:08):
could actually sit down and talk to him was quite complicated.
And when they did finally and as they did with
everyone including Greg and the air go have a chat
ask him what he was up to, et cetera. And
that's when they found out, Oh, you know, I've I've
got a place in Essendon and I was down there.
Oh so you don't live here full time? No, no, no,
(40:30):
So he'd come there for months, but he also had
a place in the north of Melbourne, and his phone
records backed up everything you said. And phone records get
people out of a lot of trouble as well as
getting a lot of trouble.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
One inculpatory or exculpatory. Yees, yeah, here's my faint. So
how did Greg Lynn come into the picture? How did he?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
While they were while I was still thinking about the
report of the the car that hadne you turned and
driven back through the at two am, they were going
back to the Telstra records and they'd asked telt if
they could have any more details on they All they
knew was what towels that phone had connected to. You
(41:13):
can actually find an awful lot of detail out about phones,
but you need to do the math and that can
take ages. You know, you've got to find people for
free to do it. In the end, it took it
took them, I don't know about nine ten months before
they finally had you know, the full true call data
which pinpointed exactly where the phone where when it bounces
off this hour and the top Yeah, and they can
tell the distance like radar et cetera, and they and
(41:35):
it bounces off, but that's deep in the metadata. At
a month or two into the into the investigation, all
they had was the three towers into connected to for
that twenty or thirty minutes. But it wasn't a stupid
assumption that the phone had been moving. That's why it
went from one tower to the other to the other.
So it'd been traveling up this way. And if it
(41:58):
had come from our National Park then it would have
gone along a road called Dargo High Planes Road and
then on the Great Alpine Road. And they were mostly
thinking about the two Eastern Europeans who they knew had
come from New South Wales, but they knew nothing else
about them, and they were hoping to find a petrol
station that they'd filled up at that they'd used a
credit card something something. As they were driving, they had
(42:23):
no idea these an PR cameras existed because they're private
ones owned by the Howtham Ski Resort. And as they
were driving down Great Airpine Road. They just saw them
and that was Brett Florence and Canvas and they just
pulled over. What the hell are these?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
So these are cameras in the middle of nowhere that
focusing on the.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Roadway, facing on the roadway. They're not vic Roads cameras.
They're just on the Great Alpine Road, you know, way
up in northern Victoria. And well, who's those? And then
they realized they were the Hotham Resort cameras, and Hotham
used them to make sure that, you know, people didn't
try and escape without paying. Okay, So they and there's
there's there's one set to the left of Dargo Highplanes
(43:04):
Road and another set heading southeast. And they were looking
for someone who had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road and
gone down the Great Alpine Road. And at around about
the same time as they knew that Russell's phone had
connected moving long.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
The towers that town.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
And although they needed a lot more math before they
could stand up and court and say we know the
phone was in that car, it was a good enough
guess to go, well, it's a strong likelihood if there
was a car going through the cameras at that time.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Now they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
There could have been ten cameras going through, sorry, ten
cars going through the cameras at that time fifteen twenty
who knew. As it happened at that hour on Saturday morning,
and this is just before the first lockdown, there was
only one car that had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road
and left in the Great Airpine Road and that was Gregg.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Okay, So they had the number plate, They had the.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Number plate from the number plate recognition camera system. They
ran the check and it was a guy called Greg
Lynn who lived in Carolyn Springs, who they'd never heard
of before in their lives, and they went, who's this.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So, looking at it from a police point of view,
you get that name and you'd start to have a look,
who is this person? So let's describe Greg what the
police would have known about him in the early times.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Well, what they found out about him was that he
was living there with his second wife and the kids
from the first marriage and the second marriage were there
a nice upper middle class home in suburban Melbourne. He
worked for Jetstar. He was a check pilot, which is
a very high position. You're the guy who checks that
(44:44):
all the other pilots are doing the right job, so
very high paying. It was somewhere three fifty four hundred
grand a year, very high paying, white collar job. Professional.
He has a job like that, he's held it down
and he's been a responsible member of community. Why on
earth would he be someone who had no connection with
Russell or Carroll?
Speaker 1 (45:06):
What? What could it mean?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
What what?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
What possible motive? What possible motive could he have? And
yet you know, it looked like they couldn't yet prove it,
but it looked like Russell's Fonne had been in his car,
and you.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Go, well, you could just have easily just picked it up.
You don't know until until you speak, until you speak
to it. Yeah, And so that's why the July fourteenth date,
I'd never read it again and again and again. That's
when they decided to do what you know, as you
would know, the first step is in a lot of investigations,
which is just go talk to someone, ask them what
they were doing, listen to them, get them to commit
(45:39):
to a story, and then come back and see can
we corroborate it?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, we're talking about that before we sat down for
the podcast. And that's that's a there's a gray area like,
I thought, that's quite reasonable that we've got his car
going through a camera, we've got details of the phone
that haven't been confirmed. I wouldn't calling him a suspect.
Person of interest might be the different level, and that
becomes a debate, that becomes a big point down the track,
(46:06):
Well what do you mean by a person of interest?
What do you mean by a suspect? But I think
it's reasonable, and I think yeah, it's reasonable for police
to be able to go and ask a person questions
without saying, hey, we're looking at you for a murder,
we're cautioning you. Just tell us where you are. He
might have said, well, actually I was over in the
overseas on the day driving the car. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
All they knew was his car had been on the
Great Our Plane Road, and so all they were asking
him to do was can you just let us know
your movements for those a few days.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
What did he provide to them at that time?
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Very cool, very calm, He said, yeah, yeah, he'd gone,
He said, I left here. I think it was on
the Monday, camped up at how It Planes, which is
the last big camping spot before you head down into
the one and Gata valley in our Pine National Park.
He'd gone into one and Gate of Valley. He'd camped
somewhere on the Wednesday night, and he's ever, he was
(47:01):
never terribly specific about where that was up in the
north end, somewhere, et cetera. Then moved about ten k's
you know, south on the Thursday night, a bit close
to the river, something like that, and then on Friday
went for a bit of a hunt in the morning,
didn't find anything, packed up, left the valley and went
down the Crooked River Track, which is down into the
rest of the Alpine National Park, and about lunchtime on Friday,
(47:28):
camp there. Friday night, went to Dargo High Plains Road,
he actually said, followed the Crooked River Track to Dargo
High Planes Road and then drove out on the Saturday morning.
Now all of that makes perfect sense with what the
police actually.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Knew, and hard to fact check as well, very.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Hard to fact check because he gave them he said
he hadn't he hadn't met anybody, hadn't communicated with anybody.
He was just enjoying his own company, camping and hunting
in the One and go A valley.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
And just let's talk the hunting for a sec too,
because that's a big part of it that people in
the city mightn't appreciate. But a lot of hunters go
down there.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
That's that's a lot of the reason for going.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, So some of them, like Russell and Carroll go
just to be in the wilderness and the bush. At
least half of them were there to hunt, and that's allowed.
You know, you need the proper license, so you need
a hunter's license, and you need a gun license, and
the park rangers to check that. They check Greg he
had done two shotguns with him. He had a ruga
rifle and his breath and Arms shotgun. But that wasn't unusual.
(48:32):
It's not like that's a red flag because half the
people there.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
It's like, if they were there in the ski season,
why are you here because I'm skiing? Yeah? Yeah, So
it leaves them in a difficult position, doesn't it. With
that the other thing that came from that, and again
it was in your book, but again the thinking, and
that's where I like the way that you're getting inside
the mind of police investigating matters like that. They turned
(48:57):
up under the out Citi's place, so it was like
put him on notice. Hey, but you can't find him,
and you've got to phone him. We want to speak
to you about such and such, where he's got time
to prepare himself. So the police are making, which is
quite right, making an assessment of well, he seemed pretty
calm on the surface.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
He was very calm, and he explained it all without
missing a beat.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, so he wasn't rattled, not rattled at all, Because
there are signs that you look out for. If I
knock on the door to speak the greg and I
suspect you of a crime, and.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
You're there and I'm going fuck, and you run out the.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Back shaking as you're trying to drink a glass of water,
I'd be going, okay, well something's going on.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
But there was none of that, none of that. And
even when they noticed he painted his car and asked
about that, I was just a lockdown project, you know,
through some bush brushes at my son's and to get
the outside and we painted the car.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
See that in itself, if a car has been involved
in a crime, I'm thinking, okay. If they tried to
change the car, but he weaved in a story, that's
almost like there'd be a I can imagine in the
incident room with the cops. There be a debate going
WORLL did strange stuff when we're lockdown in lockdown, and
(50:05):
that played the big part too. Just for the investigation.
I can only imagine what they were going through with
people working from home and trying to keep this guy.
It was snowborn. Yeah, it was. It was difficult, very difficult,
and it was right right in the in the middle
throughout the whole investigation. They had those massive lockdowns in Melbourne.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, and that one, you know, when they knocked on
his on his door, was about four or five days
into the into the second lockdown, which was the big one,
went for about one hundred and eleven days, So it
was a very surprising visit and he was completely unrattled.
So you walk away going, well, was he involved or not? Yeah, Now,
(50:44):
when you're in court two years later, in hindsight, you
go with all you had all the clues to put
it together there. But at the time, yeah, there were
so many possible explanations.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
And I as I was reading through the book, I'm thinking,
that's reasonable, that's reasonable. I'm looking at it every step
that they're taking. I was quite impressed by some of
the stuff they were doing as an investigation. We might
take a break here and leave the listeners as confused
as the police were at that particular time, absolutely as
what they've got. But the next part, when we come
(51:16):
back for part two, we'll see how the investigation played
out and how it all unraveled, which is quite fascinating
in itself. Cool,
The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Detective sy 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.
(00:23):
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 to another episode of I Catch Killers.
(00:49):
Today we're going to examine the murder investigation which captured
the attention of the country. We're talking about the death
of two campers in the Victorian Wilderness in twenty twenty.
Our guest is Greg Hadri. Maybe you haven't heard of
his name before, but I'm sure you would be aware
of some of the crime projects he's worked on. Greg
is a writer and producer. He was also involved in
(01:09):
the Underbelly TV series. Greg is a friend of mine
who have known for a long time, and he has
turned his considerable talents to writing a book titled In
the Dead of Night. The book is about the deaths
of secret lovers Russell Hill and Carol Clay and inside
the Painsaking police investigation to catch a killer who happened
to be a Jet Star captain named Greg Lynn. We're
(01:31):
going to talk about the investigation in detail and a
lot of other things about crime in this country. Greg
is a fascinating person, a good storyteller who understands crime
better than most. Greg Hadrick, Welcome to our Catch Killers.
Thank you, Gary. It's good to see you Greg.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's great to see you again too. Been a couple
of years, Yes it has been. Yeah, always good to see.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
You well, no doubt you've been busy and yeah, no
rest for the wicked, so to speak. No. I finished
your book In the Dead of the Night, and I've
got to say it is you've really encapsulated what the
murder investigation is about, which is not surprising given the
projects you've worked on before. But it's a fascinating story,
(02:13):
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
It is and that was actually what drew me to it,
that to be able to get inside a homicide investigation
which was so difficult, and be able to bring an
audience or readership inside that investigation, to give them the
feeling of what it is like at each moment as
they're going through it. It was the real incentive behind
(02:34):
writing it.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Well, you've done it very well, and you've traumatized the
next homicide detective who was sitting reading the book and thinking,
I'd love to get involved in this investigation, because it
really started with nothing, nothing, which was unusual.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
What I've heard was that in this day and age,
usually there's you know, people have phones on them, or
there's CCTV not too far away, or there's you know
someone it's someone close to the person involved, et cetera.
There's places they can start the middle of the one
and Gator Valley had no phone reception, there were no cameras,
there was no one who knew Russell and Carroll anywhere
(03:11):
within two hundred kilometers of the site. They had no
idea where to start.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
It was a classic murder mystery, wasn't it. Yeah, when
we'll talk in detail and we'll take it through chronologically
how the investigation evolved. But it brought back old school
detective thinking. Yeah, little red flags, little indicators that you
couldn't hang a case on it, but you're thinking, Okay,
this doesn't quite add up. That's why I found fascinating
(03:36):
about it.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, and that's and a lot of that was circumstantial,
but thread by thread they built it up. And the
way I heard it described is they felt they needed
to get enough threads that you couldn't break the rope.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, that's a good way of a good way of describing.
I think there was something in your book and one
of the detectives we're talking that's like trying to put
the jigsaw together when you haven't got the pitch.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
You haven't got the cover, which I thought was a good.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Analogy and sort of added to it. What is it
you think about true crime that fascinates fascinates people? Look,
there's a few answers.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
And because I've puzzled about this for now, you know,
fifteen odd years, tight years, and I think there's one
aspect is to feel safe, people feel they need to
understand exactly what happened, and if they do understand what
the motivation was, what drove that particular murder to happen,
crime to happen. Then they can go, oh, well, I
(04:35):
can avoid, I can feel safe. I know that wouldn't
happen to me because of A, B and C. I
think there's an element of that to it. I think
for a lot of people, it is so tied up
with morality, with what is right and wrong, what is
good and bad? What is punishment? What are consequences?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
And that affects all.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Our daily lives with how we deal with other people,
and true crime just heightens that, takes that and puts
it on steroids.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, it makes you question your own morals and values,
doesn't it. It does when you're looking at how the
impact that crime has in society. Yeah, what about yourself?
What's your interest in? And we will talk a little
bit about your career before we get into the murder investigation.
But you, in your professional career have covered a lot
of crime stories and delivered it on TV and different forums.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
That's right, And I think what's kept me interested? I
mean there's a and again it's no one simple answer.
There is a strand where it's commercially rewarding to do
true crime because you know you have an audience, but
beyond that, for me, it did have to do with morality.
I mean, I've done quite a few legal shows as well,
and they're fairly close. You're always dealing with, you know,
(05:42):
what is suffering?
Speaker 1 (05:43):
How do you relieve it?
Speaker 2 (05:44):
How do society become a safer place for human beings
to live in? Those big questions about you know, where
are we safe and what do we have to do
to make ourselves safe? I think are constantly on the
top of everyone's mind.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Okay, your career told us a little bit about yourself
before we delve into the murder.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Well, I was at university before media communication courses really existed,
So I did English honors and then came out not sure,
you know, I wanted to use that in some creative way,
whether that was going to be authorship, which has taken
me thirty five forty years to do, or journalism or whatever.
And it just so happened that the first paying job
(06:26):
by God was in television, and I was lucky. I
seemed to suit it and it worked well. New doors
kept on opening up, it never got boring, and so
I stayed there initially. It's sort of the career has
been in two big parts. The first fifteen twenty years
was working on other people shows as a freelance writer
in story rooms, et cetera, et cetera. And then the
(06:48):
second half has been mostly show running the shows that
I want to make, starting with my husband Killer the
Telling Movie for ten, going through Mary Bryant, Society Murders, MDA,
through to the Underbelly for franchise Janet King and they
were they sort of crossed over Pine Gap and then
Human Era was just last year.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah. Well, you your resumey of shows that you've been
involved in is quite impressive. And when they talk about
unemployed writers or actors, you seem to keep yourself busy.
I have.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yeah, I've been like I guess, yeah, there's an element
of luck, and I guess an element of being in
the right place at the right time.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah. Well, the Underbelly TV series, and obviously it's personal
to me, and we'll talk about the Underbelly badness, but
the Underbelly series, the series one with the Melbourne Underworld
that that really, I don't know, it seemed to really exploded.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, that was that was an absolute breakout hit. And
that's the I've been involved with many successful shows, and
there's what It's one thing being a success, it's another
thing being being a real breakout hit, which it was
in Australia.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
And we.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
That the genesis of that first season of Underbelly was
really because Eddie Maguire had absolute control Channel nine for
about six months.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
And he was fascinated by it. He was he was
a broady boy.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
He knew that world. He always thought it would be
hugely popular. You know, a lot of other people weren't
quite so sure when we when we first started it
was I was lucky that one of the one of
the cops who under the radar helped me with Society
Murders was then on taskwas Paranha. So the link to
(08:27):
Underbelly from Channel nine's point of view was Andrew Ruhlan
and John Sylvester, and the link from my point of
view was the operational cops in taskwors Parana who we
had some help with.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
They really helped well again watching it and it sort
of changed the way a story was told. And like
the Melbourne Underworld murders, that series encapsulated the way it's
reported factually is one thing that then seeing the characters
play out and the personalities and yeah, it was a
world of crime that I sort of understood, like that
(08:58):
some of them are larger than life without glorifying them,
that's just the way they are.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
And you know, Carl Williams was larger than life even
though he walked around in track he's and made a
red rooster. Yeah, and yet he was Everyone liked him,
and he became the boss of that gang. And so
order you to sort of present that and go, look,
this is part of our society. These people are living
next door to you.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
I think it also played out how things can escalate
in that world, like it was a tit for tat
and it just kept going bigger and bigger. It was crazy.
I remember one sitting down talking to you one time,
and we won't name the name of the person, but
I reference this because I think it's quite funny where
one of the villains that you were portraying on their
approached you and you might recall it, but it stuck
(09:39):
with me that said, I don't do litigation through the courts, yes,
And I thought that's one of the most intimidating threats. Well,
how else are you going to do litigation? Basically telling
you you better portray me properly. Yeah, did you read?
But that was a real gangster way of saying things,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
It was yeah, yeah, and you know, with a smile,
and yet you go, I can see you smiling, but.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
That very very chilling. Yes, well, you came crashing into
my life with Underbelly badness, and it'd be amiss of
me if I didn't raise it, because I think it
had an impact on my life. People can judge whether
it's a good impact or a bad impact, but how
our world's collided with that. I think you were speaking
to New South Wales Police. It was on the back
(10:26):
of a couple of other Underbelly series and you approached
senior Police and said, we want to cover a story
where the cops are getting and I think the one
before that was corruption in the Cross and you wanted
to show that the cops and I remember one of
the first conversations I had with you about it when
it was approved by Senior Police, said we want to
delve into your private life, and I think I responded
(10:49):
to you, well, you know, I'm divorced, and I saw
you and some of the other writers seeing there going
well that's good and then I had a relationship with
a lady that I met at a murder trial fantastic
serial killer, and I had a relationship with someone I
work with and they go, perfect, we don't need to
embellish great television. So that it made me go home
(11:10):
and reflect on my private life. But look, I was
proud of what we did on that that yeah, and
when I say well, it was very much a team
effort on an investigation of that scale, and the impact
that had on me the Underbelly Badness series was that
I sort of put the target on my back within
my own organization but also out on the street. That yeah,
(11:31):
you certainly changed the way I went about went about things, and.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
That was our I mean, if you if you backtrack
to the first and I think Badness was that's one
of the ones I'm most proud of as well. I
thought we did. You know, it was a very good
show and it did very very well because there was
a lot of emotional connection to all of the characters
in that the goodies and the badies, because of the
depth we put into that characterization. If you go back
(11:58):
to the to the famous first aes of Funderbilly the
Crims in that were probably more complex than the cops.
Part of that was Victoria Police didn't want us to
use the real police, and for the whole host of
operational reasons, but the effect of that is that the
police are just a little more two dimensional than the
crims are. And we were going, but these guys are
(12:20):
doing great stuff for society, they should be the heroes
more than the crims. So we were wanting to do
one where actually we were talking about real police and
showing them as complex people as well as the crims.
And that was I think the difference between Badness and
that first series.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, and look, yeah I was confronting as it was.
I think I was in the fetal position, sucking the
thumb watching the first episode. You asked me if I
want to see it before it came out, and I thought, no,
some plausible denying ability, but that is the price that
you pay with policing. And yeah, I'm not ashamed of
what my life is, but it's played out warts and
(12:56):
all and the impact that has and I think it
gave the public an understanding of what it takes to
take and the emotions. And you guys spent a lot
of time with us and you saw the emotional rollercoaster.
You were on the high then, you know, yeah, just chaotic,
the chaotic, chaotic life and.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yet ultimately victorious in that case against some you know,
a lot of badness.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah well and yeah, well it was. It turned out
to be a great investigation and one that I'm proud
of and I made a good friend from it. Matt
Nabel who You've got to play me? And I think
you picked the right person. We're good friends and he
got because that was my When you approach and everyone
is this way, and I don't care what they say,
(13:40):
but when you say, oh, they're going to do a
TV show on you're a movie or whatever, the first
question you want to ask is who's going to play me?
But I was trying to be too cool for that
and just oh, yeah, no, that's cool. And when you
put Matt in front of me and we got to meet,
I thought, yeah, he's going to represent me the way
I think I should or would like to get a
great job. Yeah, but both of you. It was an
(14:01):
interesting experience. Another show that you worked on that people
here might be interested was Crownie's. Yeah, that was taking
us into the court world. It did, but It actually
began with the Crime World. It began because we did
the telemovie adaptation of Society Murders, and the book of
Society Murders was written by Hillary Bonnie who had been
(14:22):
a solicitor in the DPP and Victoria and you know,
it was her suggestion that, you know, it'd be a
great setting for a TV show. But as well as
the solicitors, we needed, you know, the barristers that they
and the Crown prosecutors that they worked for. So it
was a combination of the research. A lot of the
research for that was from Hillary from the Crown solicitors
(14:44):
point of view and Margaret Kneen here as the Crown
processor's point of view. Yeah. Well you always get an
interesting story when you got Margaret involved, yep, as we know,
and Janet King the flow on from that.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
And the flow on from Crownies, and I think Crownies
is one of the shows that is age really well
at the time.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
The ABC.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
It's no great secret that their majority of their audience
is you know, forty five fifty class, So it was
no great surprise at the end of that first year
is they went well our audience, They did their research
and they said, our audience is actually responding more to
Janet than they are to the twenty somethings, and so
we re engineered it to put that character at the center.
And then the plan was that she would move around
(15:28):
jurisdictions and which actually followed Market, so from Crown Prosecutor
then to Royal Commissioner, then to a sort of special
council sort of thing, and so the hugely experienced Janet
was in a different environment, dealing with different issues each time,
(15:48):
and a lot of that echoed Market's life.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Well, you know, it's a world that I understand, and
I think you captured the essence of it. Yeah, people
sometimes people say, but does that happen? Well, it's not
a docu mentory like there's yeah, there's some creativity in there,
but the essence of what it's about. And that's where
when people ask me about Underbelly Badness, I captured the
essence of what that story story was about. And I
(16:14):
think there were some things that you said we couldn't
put in because people wouldn't believe it, And that's true.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And I often say, even going back to the first Underbelly,
when people ask the question, generally speaking, the more outrageous
things that you can't believe, the more likely it is
it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's interesting and full
credit to you. But having read the book in the
dead of night, maybe you've been wasting your talents. You
should have been writing books right from the start, because
(16:42):
I've got to say, and I'm not you know, I've
read a lot of books here before, guests, come on,
But that took me so deep into a homicide investigation.
I was living and breathing and thinking, Okay, what would
the detectives do now, and the moves that they were
going to make, the corners that they were jammed into.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
The moral dilemmas. I had so many ethical and moral dilemmas.
That is the norm for a homicide investigation. So we're
going to talk about it, but before we do, in
respect to the victims, because when we're talking homicide, we're
talking about the lives of two people. Can you tell
us who Russell Hill was? And Carol Clay will start
off with Russell.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Look a little bit. What I know about Russell was
that he had been a logger and a forestry worker
in the One and Gata Valley for a lot of
his life. He then, toward the later years, drove trucks,
mostly for bunnings or for things to and from for
their timber divisions and all of that sort of stuff.
(17:40):
He'd relatively recently retired. He had always loved the outback
and the outdoors. Sometimes his wife Robin had gone with him.
Many times he'd sort of gone on his own.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
He was also.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
A very big radio enthusiast high frequency radio, and there
was a group of about half a dozen also mates
that he contacted quite regularly through high frequency radio, and
they kept in touch when any of them knew they
were out in the books because there's no farm reception,
yeah or whatever, so he'd set up an aerial and
make sure he checked in, you know, six o'clock most evenings.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And at the time of his disappearance, he was in
his seventies. Yeah, seventy four I think, okay, but a
fit seventy four. Yeah, I think when they first went missing,
people thought, oh, two seventy year olds, you know, there's
fallen off their chair. Yeah, and you go no, no, no.
He was quite a tough dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
What about Carol.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Carol was into like she had been president of the
country Women's Association or a very high office holder. She
was very much part of the community. She was someone
who always helped other people, wanted to volunteer for you know, this,
that and the other. Always active. If she wasn't out
helping other people in her community, she was at home,
(18:55):
you know, cooking for various fates and things like that.
So he was someone who always was giving to other
parts of the community. Very widely liked and very highly
thought of.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I saw I think it was on sixty minutes where
her younger sister was in the viewed and described her
as a larger than life personality, always happy, always, always buddly,
looking for funding, funding life. Yeah, the circumstances. If we
talk about the case, I'll just relay what I know
and knew, add the color to it that it was
a campsite that was found abandoned. That was basically the
(19:31):
genesis of the investigation on the back of reports to
the police that Carol and Russell were missing.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yes, it actually started with Russell's by Robin, who reported
him missing when he hadn't checked in on the high
frequency radio for about four or five nights in a row,
and Rob Ashton who was the sort of key figure
in that group of radio enthusiasm. He talked to Robin
and said, something's not right here. So she went to
the police and she didn't know at that stage that
(19:58):
Carol was with Russell, so she just reported Russell missing.
And when the police put out to the media, has
anyone seen Russell, that's when Carol's friends caught in and said, well,
where's Carol? She was with him, and that's when they went, oh, well.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
That's what I was. What I would say on that, Greg,
it's amazing and we'll break it, break it all down.
But these are the type of things that come out
when you start looking into people's lives. It doesn't surprise me,
like you're going to a murder investigation in the country
town and you uncover all sorts of things when you
sort of lift the blanket and go, okay, what's going
(20:36):
on here in this town? So we'll put it out there.
They'd been they'd been friends for a long time. They
had what came out.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
In court, and I I like to be my viewer
version of having a respect for the families is that
I don't go I don't want to go beyond what
came out in the court case and the testimony they go,
I think that's fair. Everything else, I view is irrelevant
to the case. And it was the investigation in the
(21:05):
case that mostly the book was about. But what what
you know was presented at court was that Russell and
Carroll had known each other at school when were teenagers.
Russell didn't want it to get that serious and they
split up. He met Robin, they married, had three daughters,
three lovely daughters. Some many years later he met Carol again.
(21:27):
They began a relationship which Robin found out about, and
Russell said, no, I don't want to break up the family.
You know, the three girls and you were important to me,
so you know, I won't see Carol, and that was
Robin's at that point. Robin thought, well it's over. And
what she didn't know was that for you know, several years,
(21:48):
it would seem that they had had started another relationship
where they would often go camping together.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Okay, now when we talk camping, because we're sitting here
in the sort of in a city Sydney suburb, to
appreciate the wilderness of the area in which they disappeared,
and you talk CB radios and communication. When they go
in there.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
They're off grid, completely off grid. It is, it is
really remote.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Can you describe it to people that might have been
to locations like that?
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Look, it's you can only get in there with the
four will drive, so and you would be generally, unless
you're a very experienced four wall driver, you'd be unwise
to go in on your own, just because anything could
happen and you could be lost forever. It's the the
our Pine. The One and Gata Valley is a small
(22:37):
part of the Alpine National Park and the Alpine National
Park which is pretty much entirely off grid, entire no
phone reception.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Nothing.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
There is huge, you know in the book, I say
it's bigger than Belgium.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Or about the same.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
And you don't just go there for a picnic on
a Sunday.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
You've got the plan. You have to plan.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yes, Applies Russell had a chainsaw with him in case
he needed to you know, you know she often did
have to cut to clear tracks.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Don't you carry that in your card?
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Funnily enough, no, so you know, spare petrol, water, food supplies, tent,
the area for the radio. Everything had to be there.
He was very well prepared and most people who go
into that valley to camp in the want to go
a valley, go in very prepared, right.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Russell's wife would be comforted by the fact that she
would often hear him call in at six o'clock if
he's out there with his crew of radio, with.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
His crew of radio enthusiasts, and she knew how to
turn the radio on at home and would always listen in.
She didn't have the license to use it as such,
but she would always switch it on and listen and
make sure he was okay, and he knew that she'd
be listening okay.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
So after a couple of days she hadn't heard from him,
and then that's when she went to the police. What
was the initial response from the police. How did they
treat that?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
They treated it pretty seriously right from the beginning, the
uniform police, I think partly because they knew that was
a remote area and it was if he had been
for years, pretty religious about, you know, checking in on
the radio. Missing five or six days is serious. So
they went up there the following day. A couple of
the guys in a police force will drive. The first
(24:17):
time they met up, they didn't know where to look
and couldn't actually find anything and just told, you know,
bumped into a few people instead of you've seen a
white turtle Land cruiser. And it was actually a guy
called Colin Boyd, I think, one of the people who
he was camping in the valley who did go into
bucks camp and see the turtle Land cruiser and he
had to go back out to get phone reception to
(24:38):
call them. And so when you say the abandoned he
saw when it was found there was Russell's white turtle
Land cruiser and just a completely burnt out campsite next
to it, and that was it. Okay, So there was
someone that had seen that but couldn't report it to
the police until he got out there. He had to
get out of the valley, go back up to how
(24:59):
it planes to be able to get reception to call them.
I think on his phone he could take a GPS
of where it was. And then very very early morning
the next day again too uniform cops from Mafra I
think police station went up there and that was the
first first time police had seen it.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
So they're at that location, they're confronted the remote location,
they're confronted with Russell's car, abandoned and the tent burnt
out and all the camping gear thrown into thrown into
the tent. Yeah, a fairly chaotic, chaotic saint you it's
hard to interpret what's happened there? Yeah, where do you start?
(25:38):
Where do you start?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
And you know, at the beginning there was always because
by then they did know that he'd been camping with
Carol and that had been an affair that the Hill
family didn't know about. And so they're thinking, well, is
have they run.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Off stage there? At stage?
Speaker 2 (25:52):
There disappearance somehow? But how it had to be another
car somewhere and who was that? If not, what had happened?
Where were they? Had they just gone walking and got lost?
But if that was the case, who burnt the camp?
Were they missing? Were they dead?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Who? No one knew? Do you know what area of
the police were handling? It was a local police or
when did it get passed up the line to more
of a major investigation.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Was handled initially by well that the first people who
arrived there were uniform cops from MAFRA. Then it went
to Sale and the local detectives at Sale and that
first person in charge of that was Amy Frost and
it was with the local detectives at sale for about
two to three weeks. But the Missing person squad, and
(26:41):
as saying the book that a lot of people think
missing persons and you think, well, there's you know, hundreds
of those.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
A year.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
And the missing person squad itself in Victoria is a
division of homicide. If foul players suspected and there is
no body, then it's a missing person squad. If there
is a body, it's homicide. So the Missing person Squad
knew about this pretty early.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
They were have an overview, they'd.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Have an overview, they were looking at it. They were
staying in the loop. And after about two or three
weeks when the first search and rescue found absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
So they on that. I would imagine their pole air
and the four of the drives and.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Looking they had and they were they were going out
as you would from the campsite and within one hundred
meters you're in very dense bush, et cetera. So they
went five ten k's you know, out that, and they
had some horsemen from the from the valley. They had
I think kadava dogs from New South Wales or something
like that, and they were all looking in that you know,
(27:45):
five ten, fifteen, twenty k circumference from the campsite and
found not nothing, not a not a shoe, not a jumper,
not a thing. And that's when they said, with we
don't know what else we get.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
What do we do? We've done the search, we go
from here? Where do we go from here? So the
Missing Person Squad they took over the investigation and then
what I remember it from the media, I'm assuming it
was early it started getting released in the appeals through
the media. Yeah, if anyone seen these.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
So the head of the Missing person Squad, Andrew Stamper,
he had a media a stand up as they call it,
a day after the Missing Person Squad had officially been
given the case. And that was the first I said, Well,
the only thing we can do is try and identify
everyone who had been in the valley.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Makes sense, Yeah, but that in itself is Yeah, it's
not signing into the local club.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
No, yeah, no, it's not easy at all. So it
had to be an appeal to the public please come forward.
This was at a point in time where the first
COVID restrictions had just come into play and people thought
they are they trying to catch us for being out
when we should have been at home.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Who's paranoid? I'm not.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So they had to say, look, don't worry about that.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
We're not going to try and.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
With COVID regulations, we just need to find out who
was in the valley, okay. And they were looking for
people who would have taken photos on their phone. He
might have had dash cam on there in their car,
anyone who could help them figure out all the people
who'd actually been in there.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
And I would suppose at that stage they don't know
if it's stephed by misadventure or they still didn't know,
like it wandered off, they had a fight, they wandered off.
You just don't you don't know, and it's still the
proof of life checks weren't showing anything up, so they
were starting to think it was more likely for out play.
But it was another few weeks before they could say, look,
(29:39):
so the bank accounts haven't been used, used phones, and.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Carol's phone was never found. Russell's phone it was about
two or three weeks after the camp site was found.
They did get records back from Telstra that his phone
had connected to the the Dargo the Dinner Planes mobile
station in the Hotham station, then Mount Buffalo, so they
(30:05):
knew his phone had been in those three range of
those three towers for about twenty thirty minutes or so.
But who knows what that means?
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Well, that's yeah, okay the strongest you know, someone has
taken them.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Has taken the fun Yeah, yeah, that's all. He's got
the phone or someone else has. Did they just find
it somewhere and then just drive out and throw it away?
Where exactly is it?
Speaker 1 (30:30):
So not a lot to go on. And I know
that the way you've delved into the book and a
couple of things that the police started looking at and
looking at it really trying to work out the hypothesis
of what had happened. What were some of the significant
events where they thought, okay, this is foul play. When
do you think they formed that beer? They?
Speaker 2 (30:52):
I guess when they really looked at what had been
thrown inside the tent to get burned, they were like
the whole gas barbecue thing, et cetera, the things that
and the gas bottles themselves.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
It didn't look likely.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
That that Russell and Carroll had burnt that camp site themselves.
You didn't know why you would do that. Why would
you put everything inside the tent and then burn everything
down together? And so just as a hypothesis, they thought
that someone who's done that is trying to destroy any
any record of them being there. And even the fact
(31:31):
that they couldn't find any fingerprints or anything gone to
that X gone to that extent that they gone, someone's
done a really good job of cleaning this site up.
Why would that happen if it wasn't foul play.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
I'm trying to put my homicide hat on and thinking, Okay,
if you're looking at that, was it an accident that happened?
Then it certainly didn't look my interpretation of the crime
scene like it was an accident. Someone was someone had
done it deliberately. So it's giving you something to work
with on that factor. People identifying people would have come forward,
and I'm sure the public would have fawned in and
(32:04):
talked about different people. Did they have lines of inquiry
that they were following that they thought might pay dividends.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
They were dealing with some sightings around about there was
you know, we think we saw Russell and Carroll and
another place just about thirty forty kilometers away, and they
had quite a few of those which they could, and
at your job is to follow all of them up
just in case. But they all proved explicable by other means.
(32:31):
It wasn't rustling Carroll. And although those kept on over
the next four or five months, someone would ring in
and say, Oh, they're at a petrol station Wayala, or
they're at a motel in Perth or whatever, but they
increasingly dismissed all of those, and so they they then
started they were starting to get reports from people who
(32:52):
had been in the valley, and in particular, there were
three weeds brayers who'd spent most of the week in
the valley there they'd said hi, and few cars, et cetera.
And then they were able to start finding out what
those cars were, where those people had camped.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
So just to explain to us city dwellers, like weed
sprays in the yeah, I actually you're talking like you
grew up in the high country, yeah sprays. No, I haven't.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
And in fact, I had a completely wrong view of
them when I first heard that as well. And it
wasn't until you know, you hear their full evidence that
you go, oh, I see, so you're not walking around
with a little plastic thing on.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Your back like you are in your backyard.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
They go in there with full wall drives, with massive
trucks that have hoses hundreds of meters long, and huge
tanks of three different sprays for blackberries, for ox Hie
daisies and cape brewm not just that they're trying to
eliminate over a thirty kilometer square kilometer area massive, So
that's why they're there for a whole week, so they
(33:51):
know the area well, and they know the area would.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah, people had come through, and we're not talking a
huge amount of people coming through, are we No.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
In the end, there might have been, you know, twenty fifteen,
twenty twenty five, something like that, most of whom had
snaps from where they camped, et cetera. The first one
that they sort of from memory, the first one they
sat back and went, well, that's interesting. It was a
family who had spoken to the weed sprays. Actually, he
(34:20):
said they had said to him they were going to
go back to New South Wales and they were heading
up via the one and Gata gate at the north
end of the valley and he thought that was closed,
and it was because of the bushfires. Two trees had
crashed across that so at the one and Gata river
that was closed. But the New South Wales family camped
there and think I will go because once it had
(34:41):
got to nightfall, very very few.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
People drive and turned around and turned back.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, so they camped there and at two am someone
else had driven up, had realized that that gate was
closed and had had to do like a fifteen to
twenty point U turn and go back again down through
the valley. And that report and they thought so the
same night that this camp was burnt. They knew from
when it had first been found that that fire had
(35:09):
happened sometime around about ten o'clock to midnight.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Okay, we've been a narrow time timeframe.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
And here at two am there was a four well
drive trying to get out of the north end of
the valley, not being able to do so you turning
and driving back again when almost no one drives at
that time, at that time of the night. So that's
the first time they thought a bit suspicious, bit suspicious.
It had no idea what the car was, but it
sort of fitted the hypothesis that they were building, that
(35:38):
someone else had burnt that and then someone else was
trying to get out of the valley.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And that gate where the roadway was blocked off. How
far are we looking from the camp site? Ten k Yeah,
on a rough to rain, on a rough terrain. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
But then if they had to go back through the
wan to go of and then down through the rest
of the Ourpine National Park to get to Dargo High
Planes Road, that was like a six eight hour full
will drive over really rough tracks in the middle of
the night.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay, dark. So the assumption and this is this is
this is really getting into That's what I liked about
the book. So that's what you're presented with. It's not
evidence on itself. Someone came to a gate that was
closed and did a U turn. But at that time
of night and in those conditions, why didn't the person
like out there just stay there.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Just stay there and can yeah figure wait till the morning.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah, you're not. It's not a matter of oh, I'll
go ten kilometers down the track and be back in
the civilization. No, Okay. So that they're they're the type
of things that I just find fascinating with homicide investigations
that that just doesn't seem normal. There was a couple
of other let's call them persons of interest that the
police looked at my understanding and somewhere with Eastern Europe and.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Shoot, they did know, yeah, and again from a couple
of people in the valley and weed sprays again were
one of them. That there had been two people whose
accident made them sound like they were Eastern European who
were there to hunt, had asked where they could hunt,
were armed, had guns, were a bit crazy drivers, you know,
driving fast down through the valley, and a slight yahoo
(37:17):
element to them, I suppose you might say. And they
didn't they didn't know where they'd gone by the time
they'd camped near the three weed sprays and when the
weed sprays had come back on that sort of Friday
night the Easter, two Eastern Europeans had left. Now that
camp site is about five k's away from Bucks Camp,
(37:40):
which is where the Rustle and Carroll were. So had
they gone there or not? And there was you know,
reports of a white car and that's all that's all
you had. But they were someone they couldn't find for
a long.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Time, Okay, Yeah, And that and the fact that you
can't find them causes you cause you to make Yeah,
why can't why can't they find them? Why haven't they
come forward? That type of thing. And there was also
which is not unique to this investigation, but someone that
was sort of living off the grid, hermit type character
and what was what was his story?
Speaker 2 (38:14):
So he's he was known as the button man Button
because he made buttons out of deerhorns. He would often
be known to be in the in the wan and
Gata Valley or in the Arpine National Park in camp
there for two, three, four or five months at a time,
and there were stories about him going back several years.
The park rangers sawed and knew of him and sort
(38:36):
of knew where most of his spots were, but no
one had had long chats with him, because if the
whole point of him being there was he wanted to
be on his own.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
But he.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
On the one hand, he didn't have a known history
of violence toward campus, but he did several scary things.
And his ability to sort of to their camps at
night time and you know, use their equipment, take photos,
et cetera, without them knowing he'd ever been there, just
(39:06):
gave people he that was.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
I think you've reminded me of something in the book
where people have woken up and he's been there taking
a fato on the camera.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
He's taken a selfie on their phone of him holding
a knife inside their tent while they're asleep.
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Why would that freak terrified?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
So so he did things like that to try and
scare people away, and it is pretty scary, but there
was there was no evidence he had actually gone further
than that, and and in the end, they took a
while to find him. And you know, as I say
in the book, one of the things I hadn't quite
you know, because you hear in the abbreviated form when
(39:46):
you get the evidence laid down the train and go, oh,
we checked him with the with the button man, and
we could eliminate him. It turns out that we checked
him with the button man took days that had to
find where the hell he was first. Then they realized
that his answers so well set up that he could
see them coming from Columbus away, so he just piss off. Yeah,
So it was yeah, so actually organizing things so they
(40:08):
could actually sit down and talk to him was quite complicated.
And when they did finally and as they did with
everyone including Greg and the air go have a chat
ask him what he was up to, et cetera. And
that's when they found out, Oh, you know, I've I've
got a place in Essendon and I was down there.
Oh so you don't live here full time? No, no, no,
(40:30):
So he'd come there for months, but he also had
a place in the north of Melbourne, and his phone
records backed up everything you said. And phone records get
people out of a lot of trouble as well as
getting a lot of trouble.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
One inculpatory or exculpatory. Yees, yeah, here's my faint. So
how did Greg Lynn come into the picture? How did he?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
While they were while I was still thinking about the
report of the the car that hadne you turned and
driven back through the at two am, they were going
back to the Telstra records and they'd asked telt if
they could have any more details on they All they
knew was what towels that phone had connected to. You
(41:13):
can actually find an awful lot of detail out about phones,
but you need to do the math and that can
take ages. You know, you've got to find people for
free to do it. In the end, it took it
took them, I don't know about nine ten months before
they finally had you know, the full true call data
which pinpointed exactly where the phone where when it bounces
off this hour and the top Yeah, and they can
tell the distance like radar et cetera, and they and
(41:35):
it bounces off, but that's deep in the metadata. At
a month or two into the into the investigation, all
they had was the three towers into connected to for
that twenty or thirty minutes. But it wasn't a stupid
assumption that the phone had been moving. That's why it
went from one tower to the other to the other.
So it'd been traveling up this way. And if it
(41:58):
had come from our National Park then it would have
gone along a road called Dargo High Planes Road and
then on the Great Alpine Road. And they were mostly
thinking about the two Eastern Europeans who they knew had
come from New South Wales, but they knew nothing else
about them, and they were hoping to find a petrol
station that they'd filled up at that they'd used a
credit card something something. As they were driving, they had
(42:23):
no idea these an PR cameras existed because they're private
ones owned by the Howtham Ski Resort. And as they
were driving down Great Airpine Road. They just saw them
and that was Brett Florence and Canvas and they just
pulled over. What the hell are these?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
So these are cameras in the middle of nowhere that
focusing on the.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Roadway, facing on the roadway. They're not vic Roads cameras.
They're just on the Great Alpine Road, you know, way
up in northern Victoria. And well, who's those? And then
they realized they were the Hotham Resort cameras, and Hotham
used them to make sure that, you know, people didn't
try and escape without paying. Okay, So they and there's
there's there's one set to the left of Dargo Highplanes
(43:04):
Road and another set heading southeast. And they were looking
for someone who had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road and
gone down the Great Alpine Road. And at around about
the same time as they knew that Russell's phone had
connected moving long.
Speaker 1 (43:20):
The towers that town.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
And although they needed a lot more math before they
could stand up and court and say we know the
phone was in that car, it was a good enough
guess to go, well, it's a strong likelihood if there
was a car going through the cameras at that time.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Now they didn't know.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
There could have been ten cameras going through, sorry, ten
cars going through the cameras at that time fifteen twenty
who knew. As it happened at that hour on Saturday morning,
and this is just before the first lockdown, there was
only one car that had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road
and left in the Great Airpine Road and that was Gregg.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Okay, So they had the number plate, They had the.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Number plate from the number plate recognition camera system. They
ran the check and it was a guy called Greg
Lynn who lived in Carolyn Springs, who they'd never heard
of before in their lives, and they went, who's this.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
So, looking at it from a police point of view,
you get that name and you'd start to have a look,
who is this person? So let's describe Greg what the
police would have known about him in the early times.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Well, what they found out about him was that he
was living there with his second wife and the kids
from the first marriage and the second marriage were there
a nice upper middle class home in suburban Melbourne. He
worked for Jetstar. He was a check pilot, which is
a very high position. You're the guy who checks that
(44:44):
all the other pilots are doing the right job, so
very high paying. It was somewhere three fifty four hundred
grand a year, very high paying, white collar job. Professional.
He has a job like that, he's held it down
and he's been a responsible member of community. Why on
earth would he be someone who had no connection with
Russell or Carroll?
Speaker 1 (45:06):
What? What could it mean?
Speaker 2 (45:07):
What what?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
What possible motive? What possible motive could he have? And
yet you know, it looked like they couldn't yet prove it,
but it looked like Russell's Fonne had been in his car,
and you.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Go, well, you could just have easily just picked it up.
You don't know until until you speak, until you speak
to it. Yeah, And so that's why the July fourteenth date,
I'd never read it again and again and again. That's
when they decided to do what you know, as you
would know, the first step is in a lot of investigations,
which is just go talk to someone, ask them what
they were doing, listen to them, get them to commit
(45:39):
to a story, and then come back and see can
we corroborate it?
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, we're talking about that before we sat down for
the podcast. And that's that's a there's a gray area like,
I thought, that's quite reasonable that we've got his car
going through a camera, we've got details of the phone
that haven't been confirmed. I wouldn't calling him a suspect.
Person of interest might be the different level, and that
becomes a debate, that becomes a big point down the track,
(46:06):
Well what do you mean by a person of interest?
What do you mean by a suspect? But I think
it's reasonable, and I think yeah, it's reasonable for police
to be able to go and ask a person questions
without saying, hey, we're looking at you for a murder,
we're cautioning you. Just tell us where you are. He
might have said, well, actually I was over in the
overseas on the day driving the car. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
All they knew was his car had been on the
Great Our Plane Road, and so all they were asking
him to do was can you just let us know
your movements for those a few days.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
What did he provide to them at that time?
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Very cool, very calm, He said, yeah, yeah, he'd gone,
He said, I left here. I think it was on
the Monday, camped up at how It Planes, which is
the last big camping spot before you head down into
the one and Gata valley in our Pine National Park.
He'd gone into one and Gate of Valley. He'd camped
somewhere on the Wednesday night, and he's ever, he was
(47:01):
never terribly specific about where that was up in the
north end, somewhere, et cetera. Then moved about ten k's
you know, south on the Thursday night, a bit close
to the river, something like that, and then on Friday
went for a bit of a hunt in the morning,
didn't find anything, packed up, left the valley and went
down the Crooked River Track, which is down into the
rest of the Alpine National Park, and about lunchtime on Friday,
(47:28):
camp there. Friday night, went to Dargo High Plains Road,
he actually said, followed the Crooked River Track to Dargo
High Planes Road and then drove out on the Saturday morning.
Now all of that makes perfect sense with what the
police actually.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Knew, and hard to fact check as well, very.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Hard to fact check because he gave them he said
he hadn't he hadn't met anybody, hadn't communicated with anybody.
He was just enjoying his own company, camping and hunting
in the One and go A valley.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
And just let's talk the hunting for a sec too,
because that's a big part of it that people in
the city mightn't appreciate. But a lot of hunters go
down there.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
That's that's a lot of the reason for going.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Yeah, So some of them, like Russell and Carroll go
just to be in the wilderness and the bush. At
least half of them were there to hunt, and that's allowed.
You know, you need the proper license, so you need
a hunter's license, and you need a gun license, and
the park rangers to check that. They check Greg he
had done two shotguns with him. He had a ruga
rifle and his breath and Arms shotgun. But that wasn't unusual.
(48:32):
It's not like that's a red flag because half the
people there.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
It's like, if they were there in the ski season,
why are you here because I'm skiing? Yeah? Yeah, So
it leaves them in a difficult position, doesn't it. With
that the other thing that came from that, and again
it was in your book, but again the thinking, and
that's where I like the way that you're getting inside
the mind of police investigating matters like that. They turned
(48:57):
up under the out Citi's place, so it was like
put him on notice. Hey, but you can't find him,
and you've got to phone him. We want to speak
to you about such and such, where he's got time
to prepare himself. So the police are making, which is
quite right, making an assessment of well, he seemed pretty
calm on the surface.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
He was very calm, and he explained it all without
missing a beat.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, so he wasn't rattled, not rattled at all, Because
there are signs that you look out for. If I
knock on the door to speak the greg and I
suspect you of a crime, and.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
You're there and I'm going fuck, and you run out the.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Back shaking as you're trying to drink a glass of water,
I'd be going, okay, well something's going on.
Speaker 2 (49:34):
But there was none of that, none of that. And
even when they noticed he painted his car and asked
about that, I was just a lockdown project, you know,
through some bush brushes at my son's and to get
the outside and we painted the car.
Speaker 1 (49:45):
See that in itself, if a car has been involved
in a crime, I'm thinking, okay. If they tried to
change the car, but he weaved in a story, that's
almost like there'd be a I can imagine in the
incident room with the cops. There be a debate going
WORLL did strange stuff when we're lockdown in lockdown, and
(50:05):
that played the big part too. Just for the investigation.
I can only imagine what they were going through with
people working from home and trying to keep this guy.
It was snowborn. Yeah, it was. It was difficult, very difficult,
and it was right right in the in the middle
throughout the whole investigation. They had those massive lockdowns in Melbourne.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, and that one, you know, when they knocked on
his on his door, was about four or five days
into the into the second lockdown, which was the big one,
went for about one hundred and eleven days, So it
was a very surprising visit and he was completely unrattled.
So you walk away going, well, was he involved or not? Yeah, Now,
(50:44):
when you're in court two years later, in hindsight, you
go with all you had all the clues to put
it together there. But at the time, yeah, there were
so many possible explanations.
Speaker 1 (50:54):
And I as I was reading through the book, I'm thinking,
that's reasonable, that's reasonable. I'm looking at it every step
that they're taking. I was quite impressed by some of
the stuff they were doing as an investigation. We might
take a break here and leave the listeners as confused
as the police were at that particular time, absolutely as
what they've got. But the next part, when we come
(51:16):
back for part two, we'll see how the investigation played
out and how it all unraveled, which is quite fascinating
in itself. Cool,
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