An Australian academic has been arrested on a small Pacific island two years after she disappeared following a bloodbath in a love triangle that left her ex-partner quadriplegic.
Lisa Lines, 43, is detained in Koror, a small, isolated piece of land 4 km long, part of the Palau archipelago and with a population of 18,024, located 1,000 km east of the Philippines and 1,000 km north of Indonesia, in the western Pacific Ocean. .
The mother of two disappeared in 2021, sparking an Interpol alert and international manhunt until her arrest this week.
Her former tenant and secret lover, Zacharia Josef Bruckner, 36, was also arrested in Queensland on charges of attempted murder and conspiracy to murder.
The arrests followed an attack on Dr Lines’ ex-partner Jonathon Hawtin in 2017. He was struck repeatedly in the neck and head by an axe, suffering devastating injuries.
Mr. Hawtin, the father of Dr. Lines’ children, was left paralyzed from the neck down and is now permanently confined to a wheelchair and requires 24-hour care.
He was found in a pool of blood outside Dr Lines’ home in Littlehampton, South Australia’s Adelaide Hills, in 2017, alongside Mr Bruckner, who had been shot in the stomach.
Australian academic Lisa Lines has been arrested on the small Pacific island of Palau two years after she disappeared following a bloodbath in a love triangle that left her ex-partner quadriplegic.
Jonathon Hawtin (pictured), the father of Dr Lines’ children, was left paralyzed from the neck down and is now permanently confined to a wheelchair and requires 24-hour care.
Both men blame each other for the attack.
Bruckner lived and worked for Dr. Lines before the ax attack on Mr. Hawtin, with whom she had separated three months earlier.
Mr. Hawtin was later charged with attempted murder for shooting Bruckner, but was cleared of all charges in 2019 in a court case where Dr. Lines was a witness.
During the four-week trial it emerged that Dr Lines wanted to separate from Mr Hawtin in June 2017 and, two months later, she began a relationship with Bruckner.
She denied wanting Mr Hawtin to be “excluded” to avoid shared custody of her children. She is no longer dating Mr. Bruckner either, she said at the trial.
Dr Lines also refuted suggestions she then had a relationship with a woman she met on a dating app.
The Supreme Court heard Mr Hawtin went to his ex-partner’s home to show Mr Bruckner his gun collection before shooting him with a rifle.
The court heard Mr Hawtin suspected Bruckner of having an affair with Dr Lines after living with the couple for “years”.
The couple insisted they only began a sexual relationship in August 2017 and believed they had kept it a secret before the October attack.
Lisa Lines, 43, is detained in Koror, a small, isolated piece of land 4 km long, part of the Palau archipelago and with a population of 18,024, located 1,000 km east of the Philippines and 1,000 km north of Indonesia, in the western Pacific Ocean.
Jonathon Hawtin was later charged with attempted murder of Dr Lines’ tenant and secret lover, Zac Bruckner (pictured above), but a jury found him not guilty.
The South Australian Police Major Crime Investigation Branch launched a review of the case in 2020 and revealed in 2021 that Dr Lines had gone missing overseas with his children.
A warrant for her arrest was issued in August 2022, and detectives used foreign police and federal authorities to track Dr. Lines to her remote Pacific home.
The arrest warrant for her alleges there was a second attempted murder of Mr Hawtin in January 2018 and an alleged plot with Bruckner to murder Mr Hawtin between December 2019 and August last year, reports THE Adelaide Advertiser.
The warrant also alleges there was another murder plot to kill Rhonda, Mr. Hawtin’s mother.
A suppression order prohibiting publication of details of the case was revoked Thursday.
