Supreme Court dismisses Trevor Spencer appeal against murder of Gary Ryan

A Queensland father’s horrific death at the hands of his estranged wife’s new partner and an accomplice has been detailed in a Supreme Court decision.

A Dubbo man has lost an appeal against his life sentence for his role in a ‘frenzied attack’ on a Mundubbera man, one of the Burnett’s most shocking murders in recent memory.

A Dubbo man convicted of helping to murder a Qld father in a “frenzied attack” near Bundaberg in 2016 has lost an appeal against his life sentence.

Trevor Spencer, now 77, was convicted following a 2019 trial along with his friend Mark Stephen Crump, now 43, of the murder of 43-year-old Gary Ryan at his Mundubbera property in August, 2016.

After a retrial in 2021 reaffirmed Spencer’s conviction, he appealed the decision to the Queensland Supreme Court on the grounds that it was not supported by the evidence and that the verdict was a miscarriage of justice on a number of points of law.

The appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court in a decision released on October 31, 2023, with Chief Justice Helen Bowskill finding that the evidence proved beyond reasonable doubt that Spencer was liable for the murder of Ryan.

A neighbour described Trevor Spencer (pictured) as a retired cook, pensioner, unhealthy looking, fat and was ‘pretty functional’ although had some trouble moving around because of his bad knees.

Among the evidence included in the decision, the 2019 trial heard Ryan had been in a relationship with a woman, Marilyn, with whom he had a daughter.

The couple separated when their daughter was about one year old, with the girl mostly living with her father although there were ongoing custody disputes which came to a head in 2016.

In that year, Ryan’s daughter, 15 years old, was to live with Marilyn in the Orange home that she shared with her partner, Mark Crump, only staying with her father for half of each school holidays.

However, soon after the court’s ruling the daughter went to Bundaberg police station and made a sexual assault complaint against Mark Crump in relation to an incident she said occurred while she was staying at the Orange address in early 2016.

As a result of the complaint the daughter stayed with her father, Gary Ryan, at the Mundubbera property he shared with his mother.

Ryan's daughter, Amie Ryan, told That's Life!: "I miss Dad desperately, but still talk to him all the time".

One of the trial witnesses, a neighbour of Spencer, said Spencer told him around August 2016 that “Mark had rang him up and asked him would I go up to Queensland to bash a bloke for them”.

The same witness told the court that soon afterwards Spencer went to Sydney with Crump and returned with a Samurai sword and some other knives.

The witness described Spencer as a good neighbour, saying he was about 70 at the time, a retired cook, pensioner, unhealthy looking, fat and was “pretty functional” although had some trouble moving around because of his bad knees.

Speaking to investigating officers after the murder, Spencer said he had driven to Ryan’s property together with Crump, and first became aware of Crump’s intentions towards Mr Ryan when he produced a sword and gave Spencer a “hell sharp” knife with a 12-inch blade, like a “Crocodile Dundee knife”.

“At that stage I probably had an inkling about what he was intending to do,” Spencer told police.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that … I didn’t really want to do it I am not really into killing people.”

Evidence heard in the trial said that later in August, Mr Ryan was at home with his mother and daughter about 10.30am when he said to his mother “I’ll go and see what this strange looking man wants”, and went outside.

Gary Ryan was murdered next to a shed on his Mundubbera property.

Spencer told police he and Crump walked towards a shed on the property when Mr Ryan approached them, while yelling “what’re you doing?”.

After initially talking about some tyres piled on the ground nearby, Crump asked Mr Ryan when he was going to return his daughter to her mother, Marilyn.

When Mr Ryan told Crump his daughter did not want to go back to her mother, Crump hit Mr Ryan with the sword, knocking him to the ground.

Spencer said Crump then tried to shoot Mr Ryan in the head with a crossbow he had concealed on his person, and when it misfired he dropped down on Mr Ryan and started “pummelling” him with some small knives he was carrying.

Chief Justice Bowskill said Mr Ryan “was killed as a result of a frenzied attack”, with an autopsy revealing 59 stab wounds to his head, neck, mouth, arms and hands.

At 11.15am, after the attackers had left the property, Mr Ryan’s mother went looking for her son and found him lying semiconscious in a pool of blood next to the shed with wounds to the back of his head and neck.

At the sound of her grandmother screaming, Mr Ryan’s daughter also left the house to see her blood-soaked father surrounded by the Samurai sword and smaller knives.

Gary Ryan's mother, Jeanette Ferguson, found her son lying semiconscious in a pool of blood next to the shed with wounds to the back of his head and neck.

Ryan was still alive when paramedics arrived 10 minutes later, but they were unable to stem the blood flow and he died following a cardiac arrest in Mundubbera Hospital soon after 1pm.

Despite Spencer’s appeal stating that Crump “was the only stabber”, Chief Justice Bowskill found DNA evidence including Spencer’s own blood on the Samurai sword and medical evidence of a serious injury to his hand after the attack supported the inference that he had participated in the stabbing, along with Crump.

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Regardless of whether the jury was persuaded beyond reasonable doubt that Spencer had actively stabbed Ryan, the Crown’s case was that he also would have participated in the killing if he had enabled Crump to cause the death of Mr Ryan while knowing that was his intention.

Chief Justice Bowskill ruled that the evidence did not support an inference that Spencer was innocent of the murder of Mr Ryan, and dismissed his appeal with the agreement of two other justices.