The inside story on catching the High Country killer

For the freshly minted recruit given the job of sweeping the roundabout outside the police academy at sunrise it was a comedown from protecting a UK cabinet minister high on the IRA hit-list.

The minister for Northern Ireland, Tom King, later Baron King of Bridgwater, lived at his farm near Bath, and was the target of an IRA sleeper unit that set up camp nearby.

Three men arrested in 1988 were convicted of conspiracy to murder, although the conviction was later quashed.

Andrew Stamper was a young cop with the Wiltshire police force who drove around in a Range Rover armed with a Heckler and Koch handgun and an Uzi machinegun.

Detective Inspector Andrew Stamper.Credit: Joe Armao

A year later he was armed with a broom at the Glen Waverley Police Academy.

Born in Melbourne from English parents, his family returned to the small village of Hollingworth in north-west England when he was two. They ran the local fresh produce store, and his uncle was the local Bobby.

His older brother, Martin, joined the Manchester Police Force and Andrew followed, applying to every force in the country. “Wiltshire was the first to respond,” he says.

“I was on the beat, patrolling one up, without a gun and just with a truncheon.”

He remembers attending a family violence call. “The male was a senior RAF officer and here I was, at 19-years-old, trying to tell people how to run their lives. It is something I have always remembered. We throw our young police into the most difficult situations and expect them to have the answers.”

With an interest in top-end investigations, he eventually made his way to the homicide squad that led to cases with massive public profiles, including becoming a foundation member of the Purana gangland murder taskforce.

Long before the Erin Patterson mushroom case dominated the headlines, Melbourne was fascinated with the 2002 “Society Murders”.

Like the mushroom case, Matthew Wales prepared a drugged meal to kill his relatives, mother, Margaret Wales-King and stepfather, Paul King.

Matthew Wales on the day of his arrest in 2002.Credit: Ben Richards

On April 4, he drugged their vegetable soup, then bashed them to death when they were unconscious, burying them in a shallow grave near Marysville. Their bodies were discovered about three weeks later by two park rangers.

“In the Wales-King case, the media scrutiny was intense with journalists doing their own investigations. You would wake up wondering what headlines we would be facing,” Stamper says.

“It was just luck we found the bodies. A couple of park rangers were driving along when one glanced and saw what he thought was a lyrebird nesting mound. They checked it out and found them.”

Matthew Wales confessed and was sentenced to 30 years with a minimum of 24.

Experienced at homicide, Stamper had to change his thinking when he took over the suspicious missing persons unit.

In homicide the priority is catching and convicting the offender. In missing persons, it is about finding the body for the sake of the families.

“There is no grief like that suffered by the families of the missing. There is no such thing as closure, but finding remains can provide some answers,” he says.

Of all the big cases there was none bigger than the disappearance of High Country campers, Russell Hill and Carol Clay.

On the evening of March 20, 2020, camping at Dry River Creek Road in Wonnangatta Valley, Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn had a dispute with Hill. It ended with Clay and Hill dead and Lynn engaging in a detailed cover-up.

Gregory Lynn’s sketch of the Bucks Camp site for police; Gregory Lynn (top right); Carol Clay and Russell Hill.

“What he did to those people is beyond imagination,” says Stamper.

After dark by torchlight and headlights he gathered the couple’s possessions, removed the gunshot-damaged external mirror from Hill’s camper and put them inside their tent.

He forensically cleaned the area, placed their gas bottle inside the tent, slightly opened the valve to cause a fire rather than an explosion to burn the evidence. He left Hill’s empty wallet to make it look like it may have been a robbery, then drove to one of the remotest parts of Victoria to dispose of the bodies.

Not satisfied, he later returned to pulverise and burn the remains to make sure they would never be found.

“In the early days Lynn emerged as a person of interest. If we could eliminate him, we could move on, but we couldn’t. The more we learned about him the more concerned we became,” says Stamper.

“He created the maximum amount of confusion. He was brilliant, evil but brilliant.”

Police knew he had been in the area at the time, that Hill’s phone had pinged close to where Lynn’s four-wheel-drive was recorded on a road camera and the suspect had painted his car a different colour after the couple had disappeared.

But they would need more. Stamper and the team decided to use the media to add pressure on Lynn, using the frog-in-a-pan method, slowly ramping up the heat until it was too late.

In October 2021, 60 Minutes reporter Sarah Abo contacted Stamper with a request to do a story on the missing campers. Knowing Lynn watched the program, Stamper agreed on the condition the story would run three weeks later.

Stamper enlisted the victims’ families to talk and provided the footage of Lynn’s car leaving the mountains as Hill’s phone pinged.

When it went to air, Stamper says, “I was literally sitting on the edge of the couch watching the program, biting my nails. I was thinking, ‘What if it’s not him?’ We would have been back to square one.”

Brett Florence with Andrew Stamper at Wonnangatta.Credit: Sarah Abo

Then the twist. It was the final episode of The Block that ran one hour overtime. “Lynn and his wife went to bed without watching it. But they recorded it, and they watched it a week later.” To add pressure, police planted another story in the Sunday Herald Sun and began planning the arrest phase, but that changed when Lynn changed his plans.

Stamper says the suspect had five days off and was to go camping in the Grampians. Instead, he drove the other way back towards the High Country.

“We were dealing with a heavily armed, high-functioning psychopath. We believed he was a suicide risk and if he killed himself, we would never find out what happened to Russell and Carol.”

It would have to be a high-risk arrest in the bush with the suspect armed with deadly hunting rifles.

When six Special Operations Group members emerged from the bush carrying machine guns Lynn was cooking steak and mushrooms. “He was cool as a cat, saying ‘What’s going on?’ When he was told he was being arrested [over the deaths] he said, ‘I thought I’d already sorted that out’.”

As part of the plan, Stamper wanted to get to know Lynn. “I had them stop at Licola on the way to Sale to pick me up. I introduced myself as the head of the investigation.

“He said, ‘Good day Andrew, nice to meet you.’ He was in crisis management and completely calm.”

His interview with police continued over several days and would later be criticised in court with much of it deemed to be inadmissible.

Stamper defends the process. “If we had stopped the interview, he would have walked away and would still be flying at Jetstar. We would never have known what happened to Russell and Carol.

“Lynn believed he was the smartest person in the room and was enjoying the challenge. He gave a version along with selective no comments. When we entered the challenge phase we told him certain things he said couldn’t have happened. Painted into a corner he went with Plan B as he always had a contingency plan.”

This version he repeated in court. There had been an argument, Hill took a gun from Lynn’s car and in the subsequent wrestle Hill accidentally discharged the shotgun, hitting the rearview mirror and then Clay, killing her instantly. Lynn said Hill then attacked him with a knife, fell and fatally stabbed himself.

He claimed he panicked, cleaned the crime scene then removed and destroyed the bodies.

A jury convicted Lynn of the murder of Clay but acquitted him on Hill. He has appealed.

Recently investigators returned to the scene to repair and clean a small memorial to the victims – “so there is somewhere for the families to visit”.

They followed the same route Lynn had taken to dispose of the bodies and return to Melbourne. “We went through there in daylight. He went at night towing a trailer – it was a masterful piece of navigation. It was scary in the day let alone at night.”

Stamper mentions the key investigator in the case, Detective Sergeant Brett Florence. “He spent years of his life committed to this case with passion, skill and dedication. His work was the best I have ever witnessed.

“You have got to be everything for everyone, you have to solve the case and be the main point of support for the victims.”

Not that long ago, Stamper took a long service leave break and reflected on his career and future.

“I just knew my time was up. I’ve had enough,” which is why he has retired after 40 years of policing.

Many cops leave broken and bitter. Stamper is not one of them. “I still love the job.”

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.