On jagged rocks at the base of The Gap lay the mangled body of his girlfriend, 24-year-old model Caroline Byrne.

The former chauffeur to celebrity stockbroker Rene Rivkin said he had woken up in a panic to find her missing from their flat on June 8, 1995.

“There was some kind of spiritual communication … that was occurring to me subliminally to go there,” Wood would later tell police.

What happened that night sparked a long-running mystery that includes a police investigation spanning more than a decade, two inquests, an extradition, two criminal trials, a conviction, a successful appeal and now a failed civil lawsuit.

The 55-year-old’s inability to explain why he was able to pinpoint his lover’s location the night she died led one of the state’s most acclaimed former prosecutors to support a murder charge.

With star Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC’s help a jury in 2008 found Wood guilty of throwing Byrne to her death. But he was acquitted in 2012 after serving just three years of his minimum 13-year sentence.

The self-employed financial consultant later sued the state in the hope of pocketing more than $20 million in damages.

But Wood won’t receive a cent of compensation after a Supreme Court judge ruled yesterday he had not been maliciously prosecuted, despite grossly unfair tactics and misconduct from Tedeschi.

The self-employed financial consultant sought the cash payout for lost earnings and damages over his claims that he was beaten in Goulburn jail, along with the five weeks he spent in custody in London awaiting ­extradition to Sydney following his arrest in 2006.

Wood said he’s been unable to get a job since his acquittal and while he once earned up to $800,000 a year, he is now medically incapable of working due to a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

He’ll now have to stump up an estimated $2 million to cover the state’s legal costs.

Wood claimed in court that the “flawed and ridiculous” case against him was driven by Byrne’s jealous ex-boyfriend who was a cop at the time, while police “poisoned” the mind of a key Crown witness who had a motive to see Wood convicted because he was writing a book on the case.

The Crown relied heavily on an expert witness, Professor Robert Cross, whose evidence Justice Elizabeth Fullerton ruled was fundamentally flawed.

Associate Professor Cross conducted physics experiments which he claimed proved Wood was capable of “spear throwing” Byrne from the Gap.

Wood’s first trial had to be aborted after jurors planned a forbidden visit to the scene of the death

Cross later published a book titled Evidence for Murder: How Physics Convicted a Killer, but his experiments were slammed as unsophisticated by NSW Court of Criminal Appeal judges who quashed Wood’s murder conviction.

During the trial Wood’s barrister Bruce McClintock said if the book had been titled How Dodgy Data Failed to Convict an Innocent Man sales wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

“It is impossible to spear throw an unconscious person — they are limp and are flopping around,” he said.

Wood said the jury was shown a photograph of the clifftop said to have been taken in 1995, when it was actually taken in 2003, while police negligently failed to take photos of the location of Byrne’s body at the time it was found.

Wood claimed police believed Byrne had taken her own life as she had been diagnosed with severe depression about a week earlier and had tried to kill herself in 1992.

But Byrne’s father Tony has always disputed that, and last night he said the family was “very pleased” with the court’s decision.

During the trial Wood’s lawyer also refuted “damaging” claims that his client had asked to see Byrne’s “tits” as her body lay in the morgue. Byrne’s ex-boyfriend Andrew Blanchette, a serving police officer at the time, had corroborated a morgue worker’s accusation that Wood had asked to see her breasts.

Wood alleged the case against him was fuelled by Blanchette and police did not treat Byrne’s childhood sweetheart as a “suspect”.

Wood claimed in court it was Blanchette who was the source of rumours that he was in a gay relationship with his boss, flamboyant financier, the late Rivkin, whose expensive cars he drove.

And then there was the infamous paid television interview aired three years after Byrne died.

With cameras still rolling at the end of the program, Wood asked Channel 7 reporter Paul Barry off-mic: “So do you think I did it?”

Tedeschi, who’s sent some of the state’s most notorious criminals to prison over 35 years as a crown prosecutor, stood down in February and returned to practising as a private barrister.

He successfully prosecuted backpacker killer Ivan Milat, balcony murderer Simon Gittany and baby killer Keli Lane.

His other high-profile cases include three of the four Robert Xie trials for the Lin family killings.

Victims’ advocate Howard Brown admitted Tedeschi’s approach was a little vigorous but insisted he did not breach his duty of care to the law.

“As lawyers we are hopeless at physics … we rely on our experts,” Brown said outside court.

“He is passionate about the law — that may be his Achilles heel.”