The wife of former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn had no idea what she was capturing when she snapped a photo of him painting his 4WD.
Melanie Lynn was not unaccustomed to seeing her husband paint over his beloved Nissan Patrol with ordinary house paint.
Lynn, 57, has pleaded not guilty in the Supreme Court of Victoria to the murders of Russell Hill, 74, and Carol Clay, 73, in the Wonnangatta Valley, in Victoria’s Alpine region, on March 20, 2020.
An image shown to the jury captured Lynn using an ordinary roller to paint over his vehicle in June 2020 – just months after police allege he murdered the campers.
Police had noticed the vehicle had been painted in July that year when they made first contact with the pilot.
Lynn’s vehicle had been captured on CCTV cameras positioned in the mountains at the time of the alleged murders.
But back then, his car had been painted in a distinct dark blue or grey colour.
Greg Lynn used a roller to paint his car after allegedly murdering two campers
In an interview video shown to the jury, Lynn told detectives after his arrest in November 2021: ‘Well, she’s seen me paint it many times before.’
Lynn said he used Dulux Metal Shield to perform the paint job, using a ‘sandbank’ colour he had previously bought for the intention of painting his Jayco Hawk campervan.
‘So, you know, “Oh, here he goes again, he’s painting his car”,’ Lynn told police.
‘If the neighbours saw it, “here he goes again, he’s painting his car”. That might seem odd, but as I explained, it’s just a tool.’
Lynn told police his vehicle had 466,000km on the clock and he had spared no expense in ensuring it ran well.
‘And it actually comes up with quite a reasonable look when you paint it with a nice roller, a good quality roller, it doesn’t look too bad from a distance,’ Lynn boasted.
At the time, Lynn had been stood down from his job as a pilot due to the first of many Covid lockdowns.
‘I didn’t go and buy paint, I just looked around in the garage,’ he told police.
‘So I thought “that’ll do” – it was lockdown, no income, stood down, the car needed to be painted, suited that plan, and so I painted that.
‘And look, it’s – the car, to me, most people would consider a car to be something of prestige, but for me it’s just another tool like any other tool in the garage, like a hammer or a chainsaw. It just needs to be functional.’
Greg Lynn claimed his wife focused on the Covid lockdowns while he painted the car
Melanie Lynn took a photo of her husband painting his vehicle. She has attended his trial everyday
Lynn’s car had been a dark grey or blue when he allegedly committed the murders
Lynn told police his wife had been preoccupied with Victoria’s first lockdown when he returned from his fateful trip into the wilderness.
‘When I came back from that one, the whole world was just falling apart. Yeah. That was on Sunday,’ he told police.
‘I’d spoken to her on the Saturday, and she told me, “Greg, the whole country is going into lockdown, this is absolute pandemonium,” and I said, “I could tell something was up, ’cause of all the cars just driving every which way”.’
Lynn told police his wife was more worried about obtaining basic supplies in the Covid lockdown than what he had been up to out in the bush.
‘And she said, “You can’t buy toilet paper, you can’t buy cleaning stuff ’cause the stores are just empty”,’ Lynn said.
‘When I arrived, she took me to the refrigerator, and she had up there a Covid plan that she’d taken from the paper, and spent the whole afternoon telling me what I missed the past week as the world was – world was unravelling.
‘So that was how that day was spent – she didn’t ask anything about my trip.’
Little did Ms Lynn know her husband had just disposed of two bodies after he claims he become embroiled in a deadly scuffle with Mr Hill.
Lynn’s record of interview was shown to the jury over two days this week.
It concluded with Lynn declaring the campers had died as a result of a tragic accident.
‘I’m innocent of murder. I haven’t behaved well, I’ve made some poor decisions. But murder, as I understand it, I’m innocent of,’ he told detectives after being formally charged with two counts of murder.
Lynn had also taken this rifle with him on the deadly camping trip into the mountains
The 12-gauge shotgun Lynn says Mr Hill stole from him and then accidentally killed Carol Clay with
The jury heard Lynn had been free to return to the original site where he dumped the bodies of his alleged victims despite being questioned by police in July 2020.
In November that year, Lynn said he torched the bodies using skills he had learnt while working abroad.
‘The human body’s 90 per cent water, that was all gone, and the fire was largely self-sustaining, which I was quite shocked by,’ he said.
‘I’ve been to India and Nepal many, many times, I’ve been to the temples there, they have the crematoriums, and I’ve seen them cremating people right in front of me.’
Unlike those crematoriums, which Lynn claimed used two-tonne of wood, he only had to use about 20kg and two litres of kerosene to incinerate his alleged victims.
‘I’ve no reason to lie to you now, it’s just a – it was a self-sustaining fire that burnt from that top down, and at the end of it there was – I had to poke around a little bit towards the end to put it all together,’ Lynn said.
‘And I did add a few sticks along the way, but there was – there was nothing at the end. Nothing bigger than 20 millimetres long.’
Detectives would not put tracking devices in Lynn’s vehicle until weeks later.
The trial continues.
