Ray and Jennie Kehlet murder: Seven years on, this family is still hunting for answers
They loaded up their 4WDs and headed to the goldfields in search of a fortune. They never came back. Now WA police are on the hunt for their killer.
Ray Kehlet was a handsome, happy-go-lucky father who died while searching for gold in Western Australia in 2015. Who killed him? Because, contrary to rumours that swirl around the goldfields, he didn’t trip and fall down the mine shaft in which he was found. His death was a homicide. This we know because forensic experts have said that Ray, 47, sustained blunt force trauma. 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 – but who?
In the seven years since flies were found buzzing over Ray’s body, no arrests have been made. WA Police maintain they are still working on the case. Perhaps they’ll also be able to find his wife, Jennie, 49 – because she is still missing and whoever killed him probably killed her, too. Meaning someone has got away with a double murder in the WA goldfields. What’s to say they won’t strike again?
Ray and Jennie Kehlet were already in their 40s with five kids between them when they met in the country town of Beverley, WA. They weren’t naïve about love. They fell headlong into it. Ray was a capable, fun-loving man who worked as a plant operator at Fortescue’s Cloudbreak iron ore mine in the Pilbara. Jennie, a warm, vivacious woman, was one of his co-workers, driving massive trucks. They married in 2007. Being FiFO workers, they earned good money, and decided to buy a little hobby farm. They also got a rescue dog – a Great Dane named Ella, which has a key role to play as we unpick the mystery of their deaths.
Ray and Jennie dreamt about one day being able to retire to their farm. In the meantime, they were enjoying camping and fishing, and just being together. Then, one day in 2010, Jennie suffered chest pains at work. She went to see the Cloudbreak emergency services officer, a man called Graham Milne. He suggested a massage. He also suggested that he was just the man to give her one. Jennie was friendly to everyone, and it seems she wasn’t immediately repelled. On the contrary, she introduced Milne to her husband, and a friendship developed between the three of them. Colleagues recall seeing them sitting together at the breakfast tables at the mine site, deep in conversation. What might they have been talking about?
Milne was a big talker. He apparently told the couple that he was an experienced prospector who knew the whereabouts of a secret vein of gold, a $3 million reef that had gone unnoticed by miners with their pans and pickaxes during the original West Australian gold rush. This idea might seem fantastic to east-coasters, but plenty of gold nuggets are still found by amateur fossickers using only metal detectors and shovels.
Jennie was intrigued and amused, and so was Ray. The three of them began making plans to go hunting for this gold. They obtained some abseiling equipment and learnt how to use it, apparently with the aim of lowering themselves into some old, abandoned mine shafts, which exist in their thousands across the WA goldfields.
They set a date: March 19, 2015. And on that day, in the hours before dawn, they headed out in their loaded 4WDs in search of the $3 million patch. Ray and Jennie had every reason to believe it would be a lot of fun. They never came back.
You know how some places are said to be “in the middle of nowhere?” The old gold mining town of Sandstone, WA, is in the middle of a glorious nowhere, a six-hour drive north-east of Perth. It’s a fabulous little place, all red dirt, desert flowers and dazzling night skies. There’s one pub, in which Skimpies – barmaids dressed only in lingerie – pass pots across the beer-soaked mats.
Setting out for Sandstone on that March morning, Jennie was driving an old LandCruiser with a quadbike on the trailer, and Ray was driving a Land Rover Discovery with a trailer. Their big friendly rescue dog, Ella, was with them; no way would they leave her behind. Three hours into the drive, they met up with Milne for breakfast on the highway. He was in a LandCruiser with the numberplate 01Grumpy, and towing a trailer with a quad bike. A few hours later – now in a convoy of three cars, with three trailers – they set up camp in the bush near some mine shafts about 30km south of Sandstone.
They hadn’t told anyone exactly where they were going. This kind of secrecy isn’t unusual among gold prospectors. Ray and Jennie had simply told their family they might be out of range for 10 days, and not to stress about it.
The first sign of trouble came on March 28, nine days after the convoy set up camp, when the manager of the Sandstone Caravan Park, Carolyn Cramp, noticed a fiercely thirsty Great Dane wandering the grounds. “She was alone, and she looked tired,” she says. “I put some water down and she gulped at it.” Cramp examined Ella’s contact details and called the council. Everyone rallied, like good people will, to try to find the dog’s owners, but nobody answered Ray or Jennie’s phone. Luckily, there was a third number on the tag – Ray’s daughter, Mel – who expressed alarm. “I knew then,” Mel says. “There was just no way Ella should have been on her own, no way they would have left her.”
She called the other siblings; it had been a week since anyone had heard from Ray and Jennie. They contacted police, and then an officer rang Milne – one of Jennie’s kids knew that Ray and Jennie were supposed to be with him – only to find him back at work. He had returned from the bush on March 22, just three days after they’d all set off. Milne told police he had grown frustrated during the trip because Ella kept running away, and he hadn’t gone to Sandstone to chase a dog around. As for where his friends were, maybe they’d gotten bogged or lost?
Police launched a search. They found the trio’s campsite easily enough – it was barely 2km from the nearest road. It was not packed up. Jennie’s car was there, with a key inside. There was an unwashed frying pan, coffee cups on the camp table, clothes on the clothesline. They also found Ray’s wallet in his unlocked vehicle.
Police also heard via some campers in the area about a “horrible” smell emanating from an abandoned mine shaft about 2km from the trio’s campsite. Two officers went to look. They smelt something like a carcass and saw a swarm of flies. They shone a torchlight down the shaft but couldn’t see the bottom. One of them saw a dead kangaroo nearby and thought it might account for the flies and the smell. They declared the shaft “clear”.
In the days that followed, police continued to search for Ray and Jennie using 4WDs, helicopters and planes. The story – missing fossickers in the barren goldfields – began to make the news, and on April 8 a Perth reporter asked police if they could stage some shots of a search-and-rescue worker going down a mine shaft for a TV bulletin. Police chose the shaft where the flies had been congregating – the one that had already been cleared. They sent a Perth firefighter named Ashley Gasmier down on ropes and pulleys for the TV cameras. When his eyes adjusted to the light from his headtorch, he immediately started to shout. He had found a body at the base of the shaft.
It turned out that the mine shaft was bulb-shaped, flaring out wide at the bottom. Ray’s body was off to one side, so it couldn’t be seen from the surface. He was face-up, wearing boots and pants, but shirtless. His legs were splayed, like he’d been dragged by the ankles. He had been dead for many days, and police knew it would take some time to ascertain the cause of death.
In the meantime, where was Jennie? Because she wasn’t in the mine shaft.
In January 2020, WA Coroner Rosalinda Fogliani opened an inquest into the deaths of Ray and Jennie Kehlet. The first matter she needed resolved: how – and why – did Ray die?
Testimony was taken from a search-and-rescue expert, Senior Sergeant James Whitehead of Queensland Police, who examined the case file on behalf of WA Police. The fact that Ray had been found with no shirt on suggested a hurried exit from his campsite. His quad bike was found about 500m from the camp, in working order and not bogged. The camp hadn’t been packed up. The dog, Ella, had been found wandering.
Whitehead offered this plausible scenario: Ella ran off; Ray and Jennie went to look for her on the quad bike; Ray ran up the mound that surrounds the opening of the old mine shaft and fell in; Jennie sat for a while, wondering what to do, before getting lost, trying to find her way back to the quad bike or the campsite, and fell into a different mine shaft, or died in the bush.
But this scenario doesn’t really stack up on close examination. For one thing, all the mine shafts around the one where Ray’s body was found have now been searched and Jennie’s body has not been located. The quad bike was quite near the mine shaft, and it seems unlikely that she wouldn’t have been able to find it, even in a distressed state. Their camp, and the road, were also not far away. The tracks back to it are good.
Also, if Ray fell by accident, how to account for his injuries? His body was badly decomposed, but an autopsy led by forensic pathologist Dr Judith McCreath found that his skeleton was intact. His legs and ankles were not broken. There was a break in the bone near his throat (the hyoid) which is most often the result of strangulation. He had “sustained blunt force trauma” to his upper body, an “injury that resulted in significant bleeding”. Blood was found deep in the tread of his boots, suggesting he’d been standing in a pool of his own blood, at the base of the shaft.
“His injuries were not accidental,” Coroner Fogliani said. “He came to harm at the base of the mine shaft. His death was violent… a result of homicide.” But who killed Ray? And why?
WA Police turned for answers to the last person known to have seen Ray and Jennie alive: their camping buddy, Graham Milne. He had already told police that Ray and Jennie had annoyed him during the trip by not tethering Ella. The dog had kept running off and he didn’t want to deal with that. He was there to find gold, he said.
In interviews with police – he would not speak to me – Milne said he left the camp on foot and went prospecting on his own, returning at 3am on March 22, having “specced” for gold all through the night. 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.
The first question Coroner Fogliani wanted answered, when Milne came to testify, was why “someone would go prospecting for approximately 20 hours straight, on their own” and then, with little or no sleep, “take a long drive back to Perth?” Why not catch a few hours’ sleep and say goodbye to his friends first? Milne insisted this was normal behaviour for him. 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.
The next question Coroner Fogliani wanted answered: which route did he take? Milne had previously provided police with two conflicting accounts of his journey home. 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. When police examined a GPS tracker on his phone, though, it showed he had spent some time heading for Perth on the unsealed road. Oh yes, he said, he’d changed his mind about leaving the Kehlets, decided to head back to the campsite, then changed his mind again and headed off toward the sealed road. He told the coroner’s court he’d been “embarrassed” to admit this, and it made him “look like an idiot”.
Police told the coroner that Milne’s car had not been captured by the only CCTV camera at the Mount Magnet service station, which surprised them, because it’s hard to miss when you’re on the sealed road. Milne suggested he’d dodged it by taking a dirt shortcut behind the service station to avoid a stop sign. Plenty of people do make that shortcut. There are deep tracks in the dirt, and the coroner accepted this. But a third piece of evidence was less easily explained.
During the search for Jennie’s body, police had discovered three cigarette butts on the ground about three metres from the opening of 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. Police had them sent to the lab for DNA analysis – and the result, when it came back, stunned the coroner’s court. One of those butts belonged to Graham Milne. The other two? They belonged to Jennie.
Was Graham Milne having an affair with Jennie Kehlet? This is just one of the rumours that swirl around the goldfields: that they were in love and wanted to get rid of Ray so they could be together. But if that’s right, where is she? And why would they need to kill Ray? Why not just run off together? Also, nobody who knew Jennie believes she would ever be involved with Milne. Jennie was sunny and gorgeous and madly in love with Ray, and the feeling was mutual. They have been described by friends as “laminated together”.
“He came to harm at the base of the mine shaft. His death was violent… a result of homicide”
Milne has denied being in a relationship with Jennie. He did seem to really like her, however. He cannot explain how a cigarette butt with his DNA came to be found near the edge of the mine shaft, next to two butts from Jennie’s cigarettes. (Ray was not a smoker.) Had they all been standing there, considering the wisdom of going down into the shaft? Had Ray agreed to go first? Was he followed in? Milne denies this. He told the coroner’s court he was never standing near that shaft and doesn’t know how his cigarette butt ended up beside it. 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. The coroner found this explanation “improbable”.
The trouble with an unsolved homicide is that there is no closure. Coroner Fogliani found that Ray’s injuries “were not accidental” and that “his death occurred as a result of homicide by a person or persons unknown”. The coroner was also “satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that Mrs Kehlet is deceased and that she died tragically at or about the same time as Mr Kehlet”. An open finding was made as to the manner of her death.
It’s clear that WA Police made mistakes. Two officers were told about the smell coming from the mine shaft on April 1, 2015, and one of them noted the flies buzzing around, yet Ray’s body wasn’t found until a week later; it is not known what evidence may have been lost as he lay decomposing.
Police did not properly preserve the mine shaft, or the campsite, as a crime scene after Ray’s body was found, believing it at first to be an accidental death; 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.
The coroner referred her report to the DPP, saying she believed an offence had been committed. But she could not say who was responsible. “It is important for me to state that the referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions is not made by reason of any belief that I have formed concerning any action or omission on the part of Mr Milne in relation to Ray or Jennie,” the coroner said. In June the DPP declined to press any charges, saying in a statement: “There are no reasonable prospects of conviction on the available evidence.”
The idea that Ray and Jennie’s families would leave the matter there was always unlikely. Dave Kehlet says of his brother Ray: “I loved him. We did not always see eye to eye but I know, if this was me, he would be trying to get justice. The coroner has found that my brother was murdered and we don’t want to think about what happened to Jennie after that. Somebody got away with it. That’s not a problem for police? That somebody has killed two people fossicking for gold? That somebody might do it again?” Jennie’s three children – Darcy, Kelly and Britney – are also seeking answers, breaking down when they talk about their Mum. “The thought of her being frightened for her life, being out there, lost in a shaft somewhere, it’s almost too much,” Britney says.
WA Police have said the investigation remains active. A $250,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to the discovery of Jennie’s body. That’s quite the incentive, although the families would like to see police up the reward to a million dollars. Many, many people go out prospecting in Western Australia, hoping to find treasure worth a lot less than that. “I want her found, because we want to lay her to rest,” says Britney. “But I also believe that when we find her, we will find evidence that she was murdered.”
Because killers, they always make mistakes.
Murder in the Goldfields, an investigation into the death of Ray and Jennie Kehlet, will air on the Seven Network on October 16.