Andrew Rule: The day a camper crossed paths with Greg Lynn

When Cam Stuart saw a photo of the man who had been arrested over the deaths of campers Russell Hill and Carol Clay, he knew his face. They had shared a campsite almost two decades before — and the encounter was chilling.

When Greg Lynn was arrested in late 2021 for killing two campers in the Victorian high country, a Gippsland man we will call “Cam Stuart” was stunned when he saw photographs of the accused.

He didn’t know Lynn by name but had never forgotten the chilling effect of his unwelcome company for a few frightening hours 24 years earlier.

When he saw the photographs, he recognised him immediately. It had been seared into his memory on one weird afternoon in late 1997.

Cam grew up in the once thriving timber town of Heyfield, where farmland meets the deep bush on the Gippsland side of the Great Divide.

Cam had known Russell Hill as a logging contractor ...

... so he was intrigued when Hill, and his childhood sweetheart Carol Clay, went missing in March 2020.

In Heyfield in the 1980s, Cam had known Russell Hill as a logging contractor and so he was intrigued when Hill and his childhood sweetheart Carol Clay went missing in March 2020, the day before their burnt-out campsite was first noticed in the Wonnangatta Valley.

The pair’s disappearance and the inevitable (but delayed) suspicion of foul play hit home for Cam because he had not only lived in East Gippsland all his life but knew the Wonnangatta area well from shooting and camping.

In fact, it was on a camping trip there that Cam and his then wife and their two children brushed against the man he firmly believes was the pilot who was ultimately unmasked as a murderer.

The campsite from where Russell Hill and Carol Clay disappered. Picture: Supreme Court of Victoria

It happened like this.

Cam and his family had gone camping in the Wellington River catchment in a borrowed Chesney campervan in late September, 1997.

They set up camp in the early afternoon on a bend of the Wellington near a spot now known as Cockatoo Camp, just south of the river’s junction with Breakfast Creek.

No one else was around when they unpacked the van and set up a campfire. But, late that afternoon, around 5pm, a cream-coloured vehicle arrived, driven by a lone man wearing complete camouflage gear — including high, lace-up black commando boots.

“Who wears that sort of gear?” Cam recalls as his first reaction to the menacing image the outsider conveyed.

Cam and his wife weren’t pleased when the man asked if he could camp near them.

To the couple’s unease, the man deliberately and calmly set up within metres of their van, a breach of the unwritten code that states when there is unlimited space, you don’t crowd out those who got there first.

The intruder said: “Do you mind if I camp here?” but in a way that made it clear it wasn’t really a question.

Cam and his wife weren’t pleased, given the limitless space the stranger had to choose from in a wilderness that spread virtually from East Gippsland to the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales.

The more they thought about it, the more it seemed he had deliberately looked for someone camped by themselves. But they didn’t want to object, given his menacing military dress — and his disturbing habit of talking to himself.

Cam, keen to stay on good terms, tried small talk. He asked the stranger if he was on holidays and what he did for a living.

“He told me his name was Greg and said ‘I am in the aviation industry’,” Cam recalls. “He didn’t say he was a pilot.”

The couple’s qualms turned to fear when the “Greg” set up what Cam describes as “mannequin heads” on nearby rocks — then shot them with a hunting rifle.

“I had a firearms licence and I knew it was either a .30-06 or a .308,” Cam says, identifying heavy-calibre rifles designed for big game like feral deer and pigs.

It was unnerving to watch “Greg” using such a weapon to obliterate targets representing humans. The thing that disturbed Cam and his wife was that the camouflage-wearing stranger seemed to be enjoying it too much.

“He was laughing to himself,” Cam says.

Cam never forgot the man’s strange behaviour — or what he looked like. Picture: Supplied

They retired early to avoid any more contact with their heavily-armed “neighbour.”

To avoid scaring the children, Cam waited until they were asleep then got out his pump-action shotgun, loaded it, covered it with a towel and put it in easy reach.

All night they wondered if Greg the suburban soldier would disturb the peace. All Cam could think of was that if there was a threat to his family, he’d try to shoot first.

Dawn came at last and nothing happened. But Cam never forgot the man’s strange behaviour — or what he looked like.

“I never forget a face,” he told the Sunday Herald Sun last month. “When they arrested this Greg Lynn and I saw him on the news, I remembered straight away.

“It was him.”

Greg Lynn was arrested in 2021 over the deaths of the Wonnangatta campers. Picture: NewsWire

Around this time Greg Lynn became estranged from most of his longtime Ansett workmates.

After the collapse of Ansett in 2002, Lynn landed a job flying in Qatar. He didn’t live down his reputation in the aviation industry as a weird loner but, for several years, he was a long way from most of his former colleagues, which suited them fine.

When he was arrested over the Wonnangatta campers double killing in 2021, pilots and air crew who knew him in the 1990s were shocked. But not at all surprised.

Neither was Cam Stuart when he saw the photograph of the man who’d frightened him and his wife on a camping trip all those years ago.