Andrew Rule: Murderers should not be discouraged by the half-and-half guilty verdict in the Greg Lynn trial

If Greg Lynn appeals, which he almost certainly will, the wife-bashing, pet-killing, car-painting, camouflage-wearing gun crank could soon be back on the street.

Murderers and potential murderers and the experts who defend them should not be discouraged by the half-and-half guilty verdict in the Greg Lynn trial.

It’s true that the wife-bashing, pet-killing, car-painting, camouflage-wearing gun crank and sacked pilot was handed a go-back-to-jail card when the jury returned its verdict in the Supreme Court during the week.

But if Lynn appeals, which he almost certainly will, it’s only too possible he could pull off the legal escape of the century. Which means Houdini with a riot-squad shotgun and a skinning knife will be back on the street and in the bush.

If that’s how the Wonnangatta killings eventually play out, it means a calculating psychopath will have created a legal blueprint for how to create reasonable doubt through the deliberate and meticulous destruction of evidence.

He first hid the victims’ bodies, then returned months later to burn and pulverise them into fragments so tiny it’s beyond forensic science to reconstruct any sort of crime scene. Then, when eventually arrested, he claimed the deaths were accidental. In other words, he made a “confession” to a far lesser crime than he was charged with. And was found guilty of, by a jury.

If Lynn appeals, he could pull off the legal escape of the century.

If Lynn does get to game the system and go free, the public will see it as a travesty of commonsense justice, an outrage.

The idea that two harmless pensioners were both accidentally and instantaneously killed within minutes (or seconds) is so preposterous it’s beyond sensible human belief. That’s why a jury of sensible humans followed their own beliefs and produced a just result — despite being herded in the other direction by the contortions of a legal process dominated by a pugnacious, popular and persuasive defence counsel.

Okay, some might say, our adversarial trial system has always been a raffle: pick a different prosecutor, a different defence lawyer, a different judge and jury and you can get a wildly different result.

That has always been so. But this is something else, according to longtime legal observers alarmed that the Lynn case could set a dangerous precedent.

Some lawyers say there’s a worse long-term outcome than simply the (potential) freeing of a chillingly efficient killer whose past is now being combed for signs of other suspected crimes.

If the Lynn defence ultimately succeeds, and he once more walks amongst us, it threatens to open an escape hatch in future homicide cases where the accused “does a Greg Lynn.”

As a senior lawyer spelled it out to this column, in this case the accused was allowed to exploit a double advantage.

The idea that Carol Clay and Russell Hill were killed both accidentally and instantaneously within minutes is preposterous.

Legal observers have warned the Lynn case could set a dangerous precedent.

One, rightly, was the presumption of innocence that we all have under the law. But the other advantage was something new — that an accused can obliterate an entire crime scene then be allowed to rely on the resulting lack of evidence to build a self-serving, one-sided account of what happened.

This development, says well-known media lawyer Justin Quill, could send waves through legal, police and media circles once its full implications fully register.

“This case is like no other case,” declares Quill, senior partner at major law firm Thomson Geer Lawyers, who represents News Corp and several other media companies.

He argues that by splicing the time-honoured presumption of innocence with the deliberate destruction of evidence, it will frustrate detection, investigation and prosecution. And that would throw up acquittals clearly not in the public interest.

Quill makes it clear that the risk of a “Lynn defence” applies only when the accused admits destroying the crime scene (and relevant evidence) then demands the prosecution prove guilt without the said evidence.

Greg Lynn was photographed by his wife, Melanie, repainting his car on June 4, 2020. Picture: Supplied/ Supreme Court of Victoria.

“Obviously we can’t throw out the presumption of innocence,” he says. On the other hand, for a court to reward deliberate destruction of evidence is to trample the rights of victims.

“We shouldn’t be doing something about this because it’s already a problem — we should do it in case it becomes a problem,” he warns. The problem being that if Lynn ultimately has his murder conviction overturned on appeal, “then it becomes a playbook for other offenders.”

“Lynn meticulously destroyed all the evidence and then said to the prosecution ‘You have to prove my guilt using evidence — and, by the way, I have destroyed the evidence’.

“We can’t reward that. Our lawmakers should consider changing the law so that someone who clearly destroys evidence can’t get the benefit of doing so.”

On Tuesday the jury found Lynn guilty of Carol Clay’s murder but had to acquit him of murdering Russell Hill through lack of the forensic evidence he’d so carefully destroyed and hidden over eight months.

We will probably never know the details of what really happened at the Wonnangatta Valley camp site in March 2020. But the odds of the nightmarish events there unfolding in the bizarre way that Lynn so carefully describes them in his statement are thousands to one against. Maybe millions to one.

Greg Lynn's Nissan Patrol and trailer were captured by an automatic number plate recognition camera travelling along the Great Alpine Rd at 9.48am on March 21, 2020. Picture: Supplied/ Supreme Court of Victoria

Not just one instantaneous accidental death — but two? That’s like tossing a coin and having it land on its edge.

The reality, say medicos, is that very few people die instantly from a knife wound (as Lynn claims Hill did) unless it severs the spinal cord in the way a guillotine beheads someone.

They might suffer a heart attack from the terror of being attacked, or they might “bleed out,” but the instant death unblinkingly claimed by Lynn for Russell Hill is simply too far-fetched. Even more outrageous is his claim that an unaimed shotgun fired randomly “ricocheted” from a car mirror and killed Carol Clay by striking her head.

The jury, or some members of it, weren’t swallowing that nonsense. They did not need to be ballistic experts to work out that a shotgun at close range usually destroys what it hits but doesn’t ricochet its relatively slow-moving slugs the way a high-velocity rifle might (with a solid-nose bullet).

Lynn’s Barathrum Arms SP-12 shotgun, which was used to murder Carol Clay. Picture: Supreme Court of Victoria

The more logical explanation as the prosecution put their case is this: that poor Carol Clay was a witness executed to stop her testifying about the unlawful killing of Russell Hill. Because if Hill’s death wasn’t unlawful, why did Lynn kill her as well?

It takes very little imagination to comprehend the terror of that poor woman as she was chased around the campsite and shot like an animal. Members of the jury must have been able to visualise that searing image, and so steered their own course.

Their verdict is a tribute to the value of the jury system. Whether it is allowed to stand is another thing.

Regardless of appeal results, Lynn’s success in completely destroying the crime scene — then having his lying answers to more than 1000 questions ruled inadmissable — is a how-to guide for a calculating killer.

So what’s the remedy?

Perhaps courts can restore the balance of justice by instructing juries they are entitled to draw a damaging negative inference against an accused shown to have deliberately destroyed a crime scene.

Call it for what it is: consciousness of guilt.