Murder in the Goldfields: What happened to Ray and Jennie Kehlet?

Seven years ago, Ray and Jennie Kehlet went searching for gold in the outback, and never returned.

Seven years ago, Ray and Jennie Kehlet went searching for gold in the outback, and never returned.

In March 2015, Ray and Jennie Kehlet went searching for gold in the Western Australian outback.

Neither of them came back. 

Three weeks later, Ray's body was found at the bottom of a 12-meter mine shaft. His death was ruled a homicide. Jennie, 49, is still missing. In 2021, WA coroner Ros Fogliani established “beyond all reasonable doubt” that she had “died tragically at or about the same time as her husband.” 

Seven years on, what happened to the couple remains a mystery. As Ray, 47, and Jennie’s families continue to search for answers, hoping that charges may be laid after foul play was ruled, Caroline Overington examines what happened in the goldfields in a new investigation for The Weekend Australian Magazine. 

Jennie and Ray on their wedding day. Photo: Channel 7/Supplied.

Dream trips turned into nightmares are no uncommon occurrence in the Australian outback. Horror stories of abduction, murder, and rape in desolate isolation are a haunted fixture and fascination in this country. These are more than stories, they are unsolved crimes, and if the Lynn Dawson case proved anything, it’s that these mysteries can be resolved. “Someone has got away with a ­double murder in the WA goldfields. What’s to say they won’t strike again?” writes Overington.

Ray and Jennie Kehlet’s story is full of unsettling details. 

Photo: Channel 7/Supplied

Coroners found that Ray’s cause of death was a homicide

Contrary to rumours that Ray met his death after tripping down the the mine shaft, coroner Ros Fogliani found that he “came to harm at the base of the mineshaft” in a 2021 inquest. 

"His death was violent and attributable to trauma, from injuries sustained as a result of the actions of a person or persons unknown."

Ray had sustained blunt force trauma. As Overington writes: “He stood for a short time in a pool of his own blood at the base of the mine shaft. There was no blood at the top of the mine shaft, no blood around the ­timber collar, no blood on the walls. He couldn’t have bashed himself to death down there, so somebody must have done it.” 

The inquest also heard about a fracture on Ray’s neck, on the hyoid bone — the small, horseshoe-shaped bone that supports the tongue. 

The third man on the scene

There was another man that accompanied Ray and Jennie on their prospecting trip to Sandstone, roughly 650 kilometres north-east of Perth. Graham Milne, a friend, and colleague of the couple. 

Milne met Jennie in 2014. She was suffering chest pains at work, and he was the Cloudbreak emergency services officer. “He suggested a massage. He also suggested that he was just the man to give her one.”

Milne claimed to be an experienced prospector. He told the couple that he “knew the whereabouts of a secret vein of gold.” A $3 million reef that was missed by miners during the original West Australian gold rush. 

Milne is the last known person to have seen Ray and Jennie alive. 

Graham Milne. Photo: Channel 7/Supplied

When questioned by WA police, Milne said he had returned from the three days after they’d all set off. He said that the couple’s rescue dog — a Great Dane named Ella — had annoyed him because she kept running away.

“Milne said he left the camp on foot and went prospecting on his own, returning at 3 am on March 22, having “specced” for gold all through the night,” writes Overington. “He assumed that Ray and Jennie were asleep in their tent when he returned and he didn’t want to wake them to say goodbye. He got in his LandCruiser and headed back to Perth.”

Ray and Jennie Kehlet rescue Great Dane Ella. Photo: WA Police.

When questioned by Coroner Fogliani as to why “someone would go prospecting for approximately 20 hours straight, on their own” and “take a long drive back to Perth?” without sleeping or saying goodbye to his friends, Milne suggested it would be “inconsiderate” to wake them.

 He also said “He wanted to get home to unpack his gear and get ready for his next shift at the Cloudbreak mine, and he says he did have a little two-hour nap on the journey home,” writes Overington. 

Changing his story to police

Milne has admitted to lying to police about the exact route he took home to Perth when leaving the campsite, providing police with two conflicting accounts of his return trip. 

“In the first version, he says he took a sealed road through Mount Magnet. It’s about 70km longer than the unsealed route through the bush by which he’d come, but he said he was worried about his car playing up or hitting a kangaroo,” writes Overington.

“When police examined a GPS tracker on his phone, though, it showed he had spent some time heading for Perth on the unsealed road.”

Milne admitted to briefly driving on the gravel “shortcut” road, after considering going back to to campsite. 

"I was actually going to go back to the camp. I thought … I might as well stick with them [the Kehlets],  but I was due to go to work and the crew would be short,” he said in the 2021 inquest. 

"I was going to ring them and tell them I wasn't coming in. I suppose my conscience got the better of me after I stopped and thought about it."

Milne said he was ‘embarrassed’ to admit this because "it made me out to be an idiot.” 

Three cigarette butts

Whilst searching for Jennie’s body, police found three cigarette butts on the ground, three metres from the mine shaft where Ray’s body had been found.  “They were close together as if somebody had been standing there for a while, smoking,” writes Overington.

DNA analysis found that one of the butts belonged to Milne. The other two belonged to Jennie. The coroner’s court heard the butts were first seen on April 8, 2015, when Mr. Kehlet’s remains were found but were not seized by police until May 7.

Milne told the court that he was never standing near the shaft, and doesn’t know how his cigarette butt landed at its entrance. “He suggested it may have travelled on the wind after he’d flicked it away while riding his quad bike, or that it had been carried there on a policeman’s boot during the search, ending up just 30cm from Jennie’s butt near the opening of the mine shaft,” writes Overington. “The ­coroner found this explanation “improbable”.”

Botched crime scene

As Ray’s death was initially believed at first to be accidental, police failed to properly preserve the mine shaft and campsite as a crime scene. 

“Rescue workers and others stomped all over these sites. And although one of the searchers had seen the three cigarette butts beside the shaft on April 8 while Ray’s body was being retrieved, police didn’t collect them until May 7, leaving open the possibility that they had, as Milne suggested, been carried there on a police officer’s boot,” writes Overington/

Ray and Jennie Kehlet pictured on their wedding day.

The investigation into the deaths of Ray and Jennie remains active. A $250,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to the discovery of Jennie’s body. 

 “I want her found because we want to lay her to rest,” says Jennie’s daughter Britney. “But I also believe that when we find her, we will find evidence that she was murdered.”

Murder in the Goldfields, an investigation into the death of Ray and Jennie Kehlet, will air on the Seven Network on October 16.