The jury reaches verdicts, plural. Gregory Lynn is a murderer, singular

The air pressure in the vast space beneath the big old courtroom’s elaborate plaster ceiling-rose, the scene of uncounted dramas since its inhabitants began weighing the scales of justice in 1884, felt for a moment as if it had expanded enough to cause the ears to pop.

“We the jury have reached a verdict,” said the note to Justice Michael Croucher.

Gregory Lynn is led from court after the verdict on Tuesday.Credit: Jason South

Four years of investigation into a ghastly mystery, five weeks of trial in this very courtroom and 6½ days of jury deliberations behind closed doors ...

And here was the climax.

“I don’t know if that is singular or plural,” mused the Supreme Court judge of the word “verdict”.

There were two charges of murder here: had Gregory Lynn, pilot and High Country hunter, murdered both Carol Clay and Russell Hill, or had he murdered one and not the other, or was he not guilty of both?

Lynn’s son Geordie is escorted from court by lawyers on Tuesday.Credit: Jason South

The jury went for the plural of verdicts.

Not guilty of murdering Hill.

Guilty of murdering Clay.

If the air pressure had expanded with expectation, it expelled itself at the delivery of these short, sharp words.

A sort of dazed lassitude settled upon those gathered on the floor of the court and in the public gallery above, as if time were needed to absorb the contrasting judgments.

Neither immediate relief nor much disbelief registered on those most affected.

Lynn looked straight ahead, as impassive as he’d appeared on every long day of his trial, now no longer the accused, but a convicted murderer.

His son, Geordie, seated barely two metres away from his father, dropped his head and shook it a little from side to side for a moment, but otherwise offered no emotion.

One of Hill’s daughters, Colleen Turnbull, seated maybe a metre behind the murderer’s son, looked at her hands, but allowed no display of passion, either.

Russell Hill and Carol Clay were a couple in their youth and rekindled their relationship years later.

Murder trials are frequent enough that some of them pass without causing more than a few paragraphs to appear on a website or a short item on the TV news, accompanied by pictures of lawyers in the street and the tears or words of condemnation and that much-used term, “closure”, from a victim’s family.

But the Wonnangatta camper deaths was a mystery that morphed into a trial that transfixed Victorians, small squadrons of journalists reporting long tracts of evidence, camera crews camped day after day on the steps of the great pile of bricks arranged in the classical revival style that is the Victorian Supreme Court building.

A major trial like this strips all veneer of privacy from both accused and victims and often enough, the dignity and illusions of the innocent who love them.

This one had so much – too much, perhaps – of the elements that fire the human imagination.

Russell Hill’s daughter, Colleen Turnbull, outside court in May.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Secret love. Violent deaths.

Inexplicable disappearance in a faraway mountain valley eventually explained as a near unthinkable act: the remains of two bodies burnt to cinders by the man who insisted their deaths were accidental, but who has been found now to have murdered one of them.

The mortal story of the two dead campers excited headlines for uncompromising days.

Hill, 74, and Clay, 73, were lovers in their youth, it emerged, and the relationship was rekindled years ago, though both were married by then to different people.

Russell Hill’s wife, Robyn, outside court in May.Credit: Joe Armao

Clay left her husband, but Hill, who’d initially introduced Clay to his wife, Robyn, as his cousin, couldn’t find it within himself to dissolve his marriage.

Robyn Hill, frail but stoic, told the court last month that she had thought the affair was over. She’d packed her husband’s medication and a few drinks for him on the day he left for his camping trip to the Wonnangatta Valley not knowing he was to be joined by Clay.

“He was happy,” Robyn Hill told the court. “He liked going up there. It’s a lovely place.”

And in that lovely place, unknowable violence occurred and Hill and Clay vanished forever.

Even with the verdicts, we are left to ponder precisely what happened up there in the High Country in the early autumn four years ago.

Only Gregory Lynn, self-described hunter since the age of 16, knows for certain.

He is the only witness living.

He admits he burnt and wiped away the evidence – “horrendous”, he called the scene – of what occurred at Bucks Camp.

Months later, he returned to the place where he’d hidden the dead pair and spent an entire night stirring the embers of a fire in the remote alpine bush to ensure nothing but ash remained of their bodies.

All along, from the interview he gave police after they arrested him in November 2021 until the end of his trial, Lynn, 57, maintained the deaths of Hill and Clay were dreadful accidents.

His shotgun discharged when an argument with Hill over a drone escalated to a struggle, he upheld, and Clay died of the shotgun blast to her head. Hill then came at him with a knife, and the blade penetrated the older man’s chest when they fell.

As to why he had destroyed the evidence, Lynn said he wanted to get on with his life and leave the events at Bucks Camp behind.

His security clearance as an airline pilot, and thus his livelihood and his family’s wellbeing, would be at risk if a death associated with his shotgun was revealed.

A police crime scene photo of Bucks Camp in the remote Wonnangatta Valley.

And he worried that his membership of two sporting shooters clubs, gained only recently, would evaporate, too.

His only crimes, he told the court, were disposing of evidence and the improper storage of a firearm.

Nonsense, the prosecution insisted.

Hill was killed first and Lynn killed Clay because she was witness to Hill’s murder, Crown prosecutor Daniel Porceddu said.

Reporters and camera crews outside the Supreme Court last week, as the jury deliberated.Credit: Eddie Jim

But without bodies to be studied forensically, the prosecution had an uphill battle to prove its charge of murderous intent.

“Be careful” of Lynn’s account, Porceddu urged the jury when considering the lack of forensic evidence, because it was Lynn who was responsible for its destruction. His account was nothing but “an elaborate fiction”, the prosecutor said.

Lynn’s defence barrister, Dermot Dann, KC, calculated how many answers Lynn gave in his police interview, and reached for a courtroom flourish that, bizarrely, channelled former treasurer Paul Keating’s enthusiasm for the national accounts in December 1989.

Lynn had supplied, Dann said, “1057 pieces of information. Zero lies. They are truly a beautiful set of numbers.”

No one was unkind enough to mention in court that a year after Keating released his beautiful numbers, Australia’s economy slid into what he called “the recession we had to have”.

And now, after long days of what the judge said had surely been difficult deliberations, the jury has unravelled Gregory Lynn’s story.

As the jurors filed out, the barometric pressure in Melbourne’s grandest courtroom, sombre as the grave, returned to something approaching normal; justice, for want of a better word, having been served.

A new podcast from 9News, The Age and 9Podcasts follows the court case as it unfolds. The Missing Campers Trial is the first podcast to follow a jury trial in real time in Victoria. It’s presented by Nine reporter Penelope Liersch and Age reporter Erin Pearson.