The wife of former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn was notably absent from court as a jury found him guilty of murder.
Hand in hand with Lynn’s son Geordie (from the now convicted murderer’s ill-fated first marriage), Melanie Lynn had been a constant beacon of support during the six weeks of her husband’s trial.
Day after day, the glamorous stewardess walked past the group of media waiting to take their seats in court three of the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Mrs. Lynn blew kisses to her shackled husband as he entered the courtroom and waved furiously at him from the upper level.
Towards the end of the six-week trial, Lynn and Geordie sat directly across from Lynn, who was sitting in the dock a short distance from them both.
But on Tuesday, when the verdict sealing Lynn’s conviction was announced, only Geordie braved the packed courtroom.
Alone, he was forced to face the media horde that descended on him when he left the Supreme Court.
Melanie Lynn and her son Geordie attend court together during Greg Lynn’s trial
Greg Lynn leaves the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne on Thursday
The jury heard that Ms Lynn and her stepsons had no idea Lynn had been living a secret double life right under their noses until police charged him with two murders.
Lynn, 57, was found not guilty Tuesday of the murder of Russell Hill, 74, but guilty of the murder of Carol Clay, 73.
Lynn had managed to convince his entire family that he had nothing to do with the caravan mystery, which the jury found had been the subject of extensive media reporting for more than a year before the pilot’s arrest.
When a car matching the description of Lynn’s appeared on 60 Minutes, the court heard his wife couldn’t contain her laughter, such was the similarity.
“You could say he laughs like a hyena,” Judge Michael Croucher observed as the jury was safe.
The audio had been captured on secret police listening devices at Lynn’s home in Caroline Springs and was never played for the jury.
Wrapped in a blanket inside the freezing interview room at Sale police station in Victoria’s Gippsland region, Lynn told detectives his wife had no idea what he had been doing since their fateful encounter. with the elderly campers.
While Lynn always denied murdering the couple, the jury repeatedly heard that he freely admitted to cleaning up the alleged crime scene and destroying evidence.
When Lynn was arrested in November 2021 in the rugged wilderness of Victoria, his wife was completely shocked.
Geordie Lynn walks past journalists outside the Supreme Court in Melbourne on Tuesday.
Greg Lynn used a roller and regular household paint to disguise his Nissan Patrol
“The car in the pictures looked a lot like mine,” Lynn explained to the jury while on the witness stand.
‘Uh, um, it was my car. My family still didn’t believe it was my car. Um, they thought it was pretty comical that he looked so familiar.
“But it certainly looked like my car and removing the awning made it look less like it.”
The jury was also shown a video of Lynn removing the awning from his 4×4.
It showed Lynn pull into her driveway with a tank of gas before returning to remove the distinctive awning that was attached to the vehicle in the image shown on 60 Minutes.
Lynn had already made efforts to change the color of her vehicle and sell the trailer featured on the show.
An image shown to the jury captured Lynn using a regular roller to paint his vehicle in June 2020, just months after police alleged he murdered the campers.
His own wife had taken the supposedly happy photo which was later used as evidence against him.
“Well, she’s seen me paint it many times before,” Lynn told police during the recording of her interview.
Lynn said he used Dulux Metal Shield to carry out the paint job, using a “sandbank” color he had previously purchased with the intention of painting his Jayco Hawk motorhome.
“So, you know, ‘Oh, here he goes again, he’s painting his car,'” Lynn told police.
At the time, Lynn had been stood down from his job as a pilot due to the first of many Covid lockdowns.
Melanie Lynn arrives at the Supreme Court of Victoria past a waiting cameraman
Greg Lynn took the top off his car after seeing a 60 Minutes report showing his 4×4.
Melanie Lynn was a flight attendant when her husband allegedly killed the campers.
Lynn told police his wife had been worried about Victoria’s first lockdown when he returned from his fateful trip to the desert.
‘When I came back from that, the whole world was falling apart. Yes. That was Sunday,” she told police.
“I spoke to her on Saturday and she said, ‘Greg, the whole country is going to shut down, this is absolute chaos.’
“I said, ‘I could tell something was going on, because all the cars were going in all directions.'”
Lynn told police his wife was more concerned about getting basic supplies during the Covid lockdown than what he had been doing in the bush.
“And she said, ‘You can’t buy toilet paper, you can’t buy cleaning supplies because the stores are empty,'” Lynn said.
“When I got there, he took me to the refrigerator and he had a Covid plan there that he had taken from the newspaper, and he spent the whole afternoon telling me what I missed last week, what the world was like: the world was falling apart.
“That’s how I spent that day: she didn’t ask anything about my trip.”
Lynn took the witness stand and told the jury that he had not yet spoken to his family about what happened in the desert.
Geordie, Melanie and Elliott Lynn enter court on May 16
Carol Clay was shot in the head. What happened to Russell Hill is only known to Greg Lynn, who claims he fell on his own knife during a fight.
An image of Lynn’s vehicle as it appeared on 60 Minutes. The police already knew who it belonged to and were listening to Lynn on secret recording devices.
He stated that he did not tell his wife for fear of making her an accomplice in the crime of destroying evidence.
“I lied to my wife,” Lynn said.
‘It would involve involving her in a problem that had nothing to do with her… I lied to my wife to protect her… If I told her, then she would be involved in this.’
Lynn told the jury that Covid-19 lockdowns had put him in financial difficulty immediately after the alleged murders.
‘At the time I was living with my wife and we still had a mortgage on our house. She had a part-time job as a flight attendant, which is not well-paid and would have caused us serious financial hardship, because I still had two children living at home at the time; one in high school,” Lynn said.
At the time of his arrest, Lynn had worked as a pilot for 36 years.
“I once picked asparagus during a period of unemployment,” Lynn said.
‘I’ve been fired several times and done menial jobs. I once worked as a river guide in Tasmania, but I don’t have any formal qualifications for anything.
Lynn maintained that the campers died as a result of a tragic accident, alleging that Hill shot Clay to death before falling on his own knife moments later in a deadly struggle.
The jury did not believe him.
