By Emily Woods, Aap
A calm and collected pilot trained in making quick decisions under pressure, Greg Lynn knew how to act in an emergency.
He would help Jetstar aircrew clean up the cabins of the planes he flew.
“Most of the pilots just take off and leave the cabin crew to do that, but I always grab some gloves, go through and help them clean up,” Lynn said during his murder trial.
In the witness stand he confidently answered every question about his gruesome, yet systematic, disposal of two people’s bodies using those Jetstar gloves.
“The scene was horrendous,” Lynn explained.
He admitted dumping the bodies of Russell Hill and Carol Clay on a bush track in March 2020 and months later returning to burn them.
But first he had to clean the scene – a campsite in the middle of the wilderness.
A blood-soaked tent and camping furniture with splatters scattered across Mr Hill’s ute, inside the seats and across the passenger door.
“I wiped all of that off,” Lynn told a jury.
“And there was a very large pool of blood on the ground in between the LandCruiser and the tent, where Carol Clay was.”
Alone in Victoria’s high country, he burned the couple’s campsite to the ground and moved their bodies into his trailer, taking cash, two mobile phones and a drone.
Lynn dropped the bodies off along the Union Spur Track, putting sticks on top to keep the animals away, but not to disguise them.
“I didn’t hide the bodies. I placed them there. I expected them to be found,” he said.
Lynn drove home to Melbourne, but returned twice to the remains.
Once at midnight, at the end of Victoria’s first COVID-19 lockdown, where he found the bodies decomposed but still in the same position next to the track.
On his second trip back, half a year later, he burned them.
He also sold his trailer, re-painted his Nissan Patrol from grey-blue to brown, and removed the awning.
Lynn feared he would lose his licence to fly planes if found to have been involved in what he claimed were two accidental deaths.
That was why he had to get rid of the evidence.
While the prosecution and defence agreed on this part of his story, what happened to cause Mr Hill and Mrs Clay’s violent deaths is where the two sides differ.
Lynn said he exchanged pleasantries with Mr Hill at Bucks Camp and then noticed a drone flying over him while he was out deer hunting.
Mr Hill told him he had footage of Lynn shooting close to camp, which he was going to turn in to police.
Lynn decided to blast loud music from his car stereo to annoy Mr Hill, and then heard a rustling. He saw Mr Hill walking away from Lynn’s car with a Barathrum shotgun.
He went to Mr Hill’s campsite and fired a few warning shorts before turning the gun on Lynn.
Lynn grabbed the barrel and the pair wrestled over the shotgun when it discharged, went through the LandCruiser side mirror and killed Mrs Clay.
Mr Hill turned on Lynn with a knife, swinging at him, and “the knife went into his chest”.
“From here I panicked and thought: ‘That’s my shotgun, there’s one person dead and he’s dead as well now. I’m going to be found guilty of this,’” he told police.
Evidence was found among the remains that proved Mrs Clay died from a shot in the head, however there was no evidence about how Mr Hill died.
Twelve jurors did not believe much of his story and returned with a split verdict on Tuesday 25 June.
They found him guilty of murdering Mrs Clay and not guilty of Mr Hill’s killing.
It was a trial rife with scandal, intrigue and at times absurdity, much of which the jury was not told but can now be revealed.
Two elderly people go missing together, one of them married, and it’s revealed they were childhood sweethearts who have been engaging in a decades-long secret affair.
Before the trial began, prosecutors said they were speaking with Australia’s defence force to borrow a Chinook helicopter – one of only two in the country – to transport the jury to the remote location of the campers’ deaths.
Defence barrister Dermot Dann joked: “I take it Mr Lynn is not required to fly the plane?”
The plan did not go ahead.
Lynn’s wife Melanie, who attended every day of the weeks-long trial, blew kisses and made heart shapes towards her husband from the upstairs public gallery.
She and Lynn’s son Geordie were moved to be seated in front of the jury in the final days, his head resting on her shoulder and their hands intertwined.
Donning a suit and reading glasses, Lynn diligently scribbled notes into a journal every day of the trial.
Media outlets were banned from taking photos of him next to custody officers.
Zoomed in versions of Lynn were permitted, cropping out the guards, after a rare verbal ruling was made because his lawyers argued it would be “very prejudicial” despite the jury seeing him seated next to officers in court each day.
Prosecutors almost did not get to play Lynn’s police interview to the jury.
He was probed over four days, maintaining his right to silence for two-and-a-half days before telling his story.
Officers tried to convince Lynn that confessing would be good for his mental health, even offering to go camping with him as if to suggest he’d be free once he told his story, pre-trial hearings were told.
Police admitted pressuring Lynn to tell them where the bodies were in order to provide closure for the families, offering a helicopter to get him to the remote bush.
Officers claimed they’d pushed for a confession and made a hasty arrest out of concern for Lynn’s mental health, although once in custody he was not offered psychological support.
Justice Michael Croucher made a pre-trial ruling to ban prosecutors from using the interview against Lynn, due to “oppressive” police conduct, but the jury was shown parts of that video.
Prosecutor Daniel Porceddu closed the case by labelling Lynn’s story “a series of very unfortunate events” – and like the book series of that name “also a complete fiction”.
He tried to introduce a number of theories he claimed proved Lynn’s version of events to be untrue, including that there was a rope tied to Mr Hill’s car which “ruins the whole account” as the men would’ve become entangled during the struggle.
Justice Croucher lambasted the prosecutor once the jury left for the day, saying he “winced” and was “flabbergasted” by Mr Porceddu’s closing address, calling one of the theories he put forward “frog***”.
In Mr Dann’s closing, he labelled the prosecutor as “Inspector Clouseau” – the inept detective from The Pink Panther – and called police blood splatter expert Mark Gellatly “gelati … given the way he melted in the witness box like an ice cream in the sun”.
Mr Gellatly was accused by defence of lying under oath and colluding with the prosecution by introducing a “half-baked” vacuum theory during week three of the trial – that blood could be sucked into the barrel of the gun if a person was shot at close-range.
But he conceded he did not know much about the theory as he was not a ballistics expert.
Leading Senior Constable Paul Griffiths – the prosecution’s ballistics expert – was not asked about the theory.
He held up the shotgun Lynn used in court, at one stage pointing it in the direction of media, leading Justice Croucher to tell him “you’re frightening the journalists”.
Sen Const Griffiths admitted he had no idea what angle the gun would have been facing when it discharged towards Mrs Clay due to a lack of information from investigating police.
“I wish I knew,” he said.
Furious his client had not been given the opportunity to respond to the prosecution theories, Mr Dann said he breached legal fairness rules and asked the judge to rectify it.
Justice Croucher agreed and, before sending jurors away, told them they could reject the prosecution’s closing arguments and accept Lynn’s evidence.
