The investigation into the disappearance Russell Hill and Carol Clay focused on a four-wheel drive.
Now,more than four years later,a Supreme Court jury must decide whether it was the deliberate murder of an elderly couple who posed no threat to anyone – or something else:a tragic accident that Gregory Lynn,in his panic and fear,went to extraordinary lengths to conceal.
On Tuesday,the jury was told the only surviving witness to what did happen is Lynn,a former Jetstar pilot and occasional deer hunter aged 53 on the day that Russell Hill and Carol Clay – first loves who’d rekindled their relationship in recent years – were killed in a chance meeting with a stranger in the bush.
Crown prosecutor Daniel Porceddu told the jury he didn’t know why Lynn killed the campers or how Hill was killed,but that it was done with murderous intent;Hill first and then Clay,with a shotgun blast to her head,before Lynn set fire to their tent,took their phones and drove their bodies to another location to hide them in the hollow of a fallen tree.
For two hours,speaking as an accountant might when auditing the books,Porceddu walked the jury through a detailed,two-year chronology that began with Hill picking up an excited Clay at her Pakenham home for a camping trip and ended with police forensics finding in the dirt of Bucks Camp skull fragments and the mangled remnants of a 12-gauge cartridge shot.
Russell Hill’s Toyota Landcruiser and the burnt campsite at Bucks Camp.Credit:Victoria Police
Throughout this time,Lynn sat quietly in the dock,looking at Porceddu over the top of his reading glasses.
Dressed in a dark suit jacket and light grey tie,Lynn betrayed no emotion as the prosecutor recounted the many steps he says the accused took to cover up his alleged crimes:removing credit cards from Hill’s and Clay’s wallets to make it look like a robbery,twice returning to their lonely grave site,respraying his Nissan Patrol and disposing of the trailer he’d taken camping.