The day Robert Xie confessed to gruesome Lin family murders

Robert Xie had the perfect plan — in jail suspected of the Lin family slayings, he would plant the fingerprints of a dead person on the murder weapon. All he needed was a body. Enter undercover operative Josh Harris. EXCLUSIVE AUDIO

• Part 1: The Undercovers
• Part 2: Birth of a hitman
• Part 3: The Roger effect
• Part 4: Catching a killer

When Robert Xie was handed five life sentences for the 2009 Lin family murders, the public was given a glimpse into the undercover operation that gleaned his crucial admissions about the crime.

Now, that story can be told in full, courtesy of Josh Harris, the operative who sat down with Xie in the visiting room of Parklea Correctional Centre.

“He was a very calm man, very softly-spoken, but quite smart and cunning,” Josh said.

“I could see him taking it all in. I mean, I always thought he did it, but why would he meet me if he hadn’t?”

The Xie operation became one of Josh’s most critical assignments, the case horrifying the community and demanding justice.

Just after 9:50am, on July 18, 2009, officers answered a distress call from a two-storey home on Boundary Road, North Epping. Inside they located gruesome scenes.

Min Lin and wife Lily with sons Henry and Terry, who were murdered in their North Epping home by Robert Xie in July 2009.

In the master bedroom they found Min Lin and his wife Lily, aged 45 and 44, their faces bludgeoned beyond all recognition. In another room lay their two boys, Henry and Terry, aged 12 and 9, and in a third they found Lily’s sister, Irene, aged 39.

Homicide detectives spent two years ruling out Chinese Triads and a slew of alternative theories before finally arresting Xie, the family’s uncle, on May 5, 2011.

Bloody footprints from the crime scene matched with his ASICS-brand running shoes. Surveillance footage showed him cutting up a shoebox and flushing away its remnants.

And crucially, detectives had located a blood stain inside Xie’s garage, known as ‘Stain 91’, that positively matched with Terry Lin’s DNA profile.

‘HITMAN’ HIRED BY MODEL: ‘SHE WAS COLD AND RUTHLESS’

But even with this web of circumstantial evidence, there were doubts about whether a jury would convict. “We needed admissions,” Josh explained.

A year after the arrest, as Xie awaited trial, some unexpected help arrived from a prison informant who’d met with Xie inside Long Bay Correctional Centre.

The informant possessed incredible new details about the murders.

In exchange for a reduction to his charges, he offered graphic accounts of his conversations with Xie, claiming that he’d sedated his wife Kathy on the night of the slayings, and that he’d purchased the murder weapon at a two-dollar shop fitted with dummy security cameras.

The North Epping home where Robert Xie murdered four members of the Lin Family and sister-in-law Yun Lin.

The upstairs landing area leading to the master bedroom where the bodies of Min and Lily Lin were found.

Blood splattered on a wall and power socket inside Min and Lily’s bedroom.

But the informant also provided some stunning new information. Xie, he said, had a plan to exonerate himself: if he was made to stand trial, he was going to arrange for a dead person’s fingerprints to be planted on the murder weapon, which hadn’t been located.

Detectives seized on the details and began planning an operation.

GOING UNDER

Detectives needed an ‘undertaker’, someone who could meet with Xie and draw out admissions by discussing the plan with him. Josh’s appearance, menacing and brooding, combined with his long-standing experience and absolute calm under pressure, struck his bosses as a winning combination.

The first meeting was held on April 26, 2013, a few months out from Xie’s pre-trial hearings. Josh spoke with him for a half-hour inside the visiting area of Parklea prison, the recording marred by background conversation.

“The environment was very difficult because it was in a prison,” Josh said.

“But I was pretty proud of the information we received off him.”

Tributes to the slain Lin family outside the Epping newsagency run by Mr Lin.

The conversation ended with a tiny admission to get Josh started.

“Go ahead,” Xie had muttered to Josh, when he was asked about sourcing a body.

Josh would return to the prison for a final time a month later, a team of police eavesdropping as Xie brought up the murder weapon, then the cadaver.

Finally, in a moment that stunned everybody, he made admissions to the killings.

“He actually said, ‘I did it’ — ‘I did it, I did it’,” Josh said, explaining that Xie repeated himself when the operative pretended he couldn’t hear him.

“It was awesome,” Josh said.

“It was the money ball; but he still never told me about the weapon and where to find it.”

Originally published as The day Robert Xie confessed to gruesome Lin family murders