New source says eavesdropping sealed Korumburra publican’s fate

Twenty one years after Mike Lowry was gunned down in his Korumburra pub, a new tip claims eavesdropping from a hidden room in his bar proved fatal for the popular publican.

A new source has a theory on the unsolved murder of Korumburra publican Mike Lowry’s death.

Mike Lowry was a confident, handsome man, but not everyone loved him. Twenty-one years ago this week, one of his critics shot him point blank in the skull with a .22 bullet.

It was the hour before midnight on the third Thursday of the new millennium — January 18, 2001.

Lowry, licensee of what locals still call “the middle pub” in Korumburra, had gone upstairs while his staff cleaned up about a handful of dedicated drinkers nursing their last pots in the bar below.

He and his Thai wife, Nunta, and their two children lived in the jumble of rooms above the bar and gaming room in the Korumburra Hotel, a local landmark since the days when the South Gippsland town had at least three big pubs.

No one except the shooter now knows exactly what happened but it’s clear that the alert publican sensed danger: he told his nearby six-year-old stepson “Eddie” to run when he saw the woman intruder coming for him.

Nunta heard the sounds of an altercation and rushed to help her husband. She saw a woman, unknown to her, run towards the fire escape.

Lowry wasn’t dead but might as well have been. The end came six months later, when he slipped from a coma at The Alfred hospital in Melbourne.

Mike Lowry outside his pub just a month before he was murdered.

The tiny projectile had entered his brain just enough to do fatal damage. Police deduced it was from a crude pen pistol. At that range, anything else would have killed him outright.

From January, until he died in July, Lowry couldn’t speak. The secret of who shot him, and perhaps why, probably died with him.

Despite that gap in the investigators’ knowledge — or because of it — one troubled and troublesome local woman was accused of his murder after an investigation that began as an armed robbery probe.

Various suspects came up but there was no forensic evidence to implicate any of them. So those inquiries were dropped in favour of another that had no forensic facts to substantiate it, either — only circumstantial evidence and opinion.

The fact is that Vickie Wyhoon deliberately attracted attention to herself.

The mother of three showed signs of mental disturbance and a personality disorder. She could be hostile and argumentative and she self-medicated on cannabis and alcohol.

Vickie fell out with many people but actively hated Mike Lowry. The reason was no mystery: the publican had barred her from his hotel, which incensed her. This made her an obvious, maybe convenient, target.

In April 2002, police led Wyhoon, then 33, into Moe Magistrates’ Court in handcuffs. After a three-day committal, she was ordered to stand trial for murder on July 15.

The prosecutor persuaded the magistrate that the bewildered and angry woman in the dock was so dangerous that she should be remanded behind bars pending trial, which is what happened for several months, as the court date was pushed back before finally being abandoned.

In late 2002, prosecutors quietly filed a “nolle prosequi”, meaning the charges were dropped and Vickie was released to face life as an accused murderer who could still be charged. Her already precarious marriage to respected local volunteer fireman Len Wyhoon was shattered, and it took a toll on their children.

The Herald Sun coverage of Lowry’s shooting in 2001.

It was true that Vickie had exhibited steadily more agitated and aggressive behaviour as she had grown more mentally unstable over time.

It was true that Mike Lowry had angered her so much she had struck him, and that he had taken out intervention violence orders against her, preventing her from coming within 200m of him.

But it’s also true that many publicans have to cope with nuisances like Vickie Wyhoon. To those who knew her well, it still seems unlikely, despite her bluster, that she would obtain a concealed firearm to carry out an execution-style murder, complete with getaway plan.

It took the law another decade to catch up with local opinion that she might be a hot-tempered pest but not a cold-blooded killer. She deserved the benefit of considerable doubt.

In 2013, a coroner finally made an open finding: Mike Lowry died of a deliberate gunshot wound but there was no evidence to indicate who pulled the trigger.

So what actually happened?

The Korumburra district is small enough that everyone knows, or knows of, everyone else. As a sometime cannabis user, Vickie knew local drug dealers.

Of three known dealers in town, one was a former prostitute, a habitual criminal with strong connections to outlaw motorcycle gangs, notably Hells Angels, and with crime matriarch Kath Pettingill, longtime resident of nearby Venus Bay.

That female dealer’s adult daughter has told the Sunday Herald Sun that Vickie Wyhoon, the only person of interest ever named in the case, was a dupe for the real killers.

This source claims that one of two women involved in the shooting persuaded detectives to switch the investigation away from her and her co-offender by blaming Wyhoon.

The story the whistleblower tells has leaked from members of her now estranged family and their shady associates.

Mike and Nunta Lowry. Nunta tried to run to the aid of her husband as he was attacked.

Mike Lowry was a good-looking, ambitious and shrewd man who had already run for state parliament as an independent and was a fierce critic of both the Kennett Liberal Government and its successor, the Bracks Labor Government.

Lowry wrote sharp, lively letters to newspapers bagging what he — and many disgruntled country voters of the time — saw as the arrogance and waste of the major parties and major banks.

In fact, Lowry was setting himself to run for the federal seat of Gippsland against the sitting member, Peter McGauran.

He pitched himself as champion of the battler and small business, accusing mainstream politicians of being in bed with big banks that exploited little people. He attacked high excise on tobacco and alcohol, hardly surprising for a publican.

Lowry accusing the banks of predatory and exploitative behaviour was a bit rich, coming from someone whose pub ran 20 poker machines, a goldmine sucking money from low-income battlers. He also reputedly sold alcohol after hours to the same desperates.

Lowry’s conservative politics went with his tough law-and-order stance. Like a lot of country publicans, he was on good terms with local police, who could make his life hard or easy depending on their interpretation of licensing laws.

It was this cosy relationship with certain police that got him killed, the source alleges.

What happened played out like a low-rent twist on the Calabrian Mafia’s murder in 1977 of another small-town businessman and political candidate, Donald Mackay, over his struggle against cannabis growers and bent police in Griffith.

But there was a difference between knockabout Lowry and the respected Mackay, says the source, who alleges that Lowry’s seedy private life sealed his fate.

A sleazy woman in her mother’s circle had allegedly met Lowry in a room above the bar and while there, found he could hear conversations below, including people discussing drug deals.

The woman told bad people that Lowry relayed eavesdropped information to local police. And that, says the source, is what led one local drug dealer to manipulate a local woman to shoot Lowry and another to drive the getaway car.

A police image of the shooter.

Another photofit of the woman.

She names both alleged offenders, although the Sunday Herald Sun has chosen not to use their real names — the alleged killer and her accomplice.

The alleged killer was once heavy-set with dark hair cut short in a V-shape on the nape of her neck. This matched the description of the shooter given by Lowry’s stepson Eddie (actual name Akharawut) and his mother, Nunta.

More importantly, the description did not fit Vickie Wyhoon, who (at 31) was smaller and lighter than the shooter and did not have the hairstyle the witnesses described.

The alleged killer apparently left town after Lowry’s death, lost weight, changed her name and developed a fierce drug habit. Her alleged co-offender, the getaway driver, remained in the area.

The source says both women were manipulated by a local drug dealer to do her dirty work. The supposed shooter was also known to have a grudge against Lowry.

Although the “hit” was botched, Lowry was so brain-injured he could not identify the shooter, leaving open the way to blame Vickie Wyhoon.

To be fair, Vickie deliberately suggested she was involved in the shooting, which was typical of her: she craved notoriety and often claimed involvement in offences to get attention.

When she left jail after the charges were dropped, Vickie’s marriage was effectively finished. She moved to Leongatha, resumed her family name of Delios and did the best she could. Her husband eventually remarried and started a new family but Vickie and her children suffered.

The coroner’s finding in 2013 brought a new flurry of publicity. A local reporter interviewed Vickie afterwards and found a sad and bitter woman.

“I’m still the suspect,” she told him. “I live with the stigma.”

In February 2019, it got too much. At 50, it seems, Vickie took her own life.

Meanwhile, the supposed shooter of Mike Lowry is in northern Queensland and her alleged getaway driver is still in South Gippsland.

Vickie’s ex-husband Len had good reasons to leave her but he does not believe she did the crime. As he told police, and swore in evidence, she was in bed when he went to sleep on the night of Lowry’s shooting and she was there when he woke up.

Even if she had left the house secretly and returned without his knowledge, he doubts she shot Lowry.

Regardless of who pulled the trigger, the woman our source claims most likely organised the shooting still lives in Korumburra.

She has good reasons for not moving: everyone knows her place is where you buy drugs.