The wife of former Jetstar pilot Greg Lynn had no idea what she was capturing when she took a photo of him painting his 4×4.
Melanie Lynn wasn’t used to seeing her husband paint his beloved Nissan Patrol with regular household 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 Wonnanangatta Valley in Victoria’s alpine region on 20 March 2020.
An image shown to the jury captured Lynn using a regular roller to paint on her vehicle in June 2020, just months after police allege she murdered the campers.
Police realized that the vehicle had been painted in July of that year when they made first contact with the pilot.
Lynn’s vehicle had been captured by CCTV cameras located in the mountains at the time of the alleged murders.
But back then his car was painted a distinctive dark blue or gray color.
Greg Lynn used a roller to paint his car after allegedly murdering two campers
In a video interview shown to the jury, Lynn told detectives after her arrest in November 2021: “Well, she’s seen me paint it many times before.”
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.
‘If the neighbors saw him, ‘here he goes again, he’s painting his car.’ It may seem strange, but, as I already explained, it is just a tool.
Lynn told police his vehicle had 280,000 miles on it and he had spared no expense to ensure it was in good working order.
“And it actually gets a pretty reasonable look when you paint it with a good 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 buy paint, I just looked around the garage,” he told police.
“So I thought ‘that’ll do’: I was locked up, no income, I retired, the car had to be painted, it suited that plan, and that’s how I painted it.
“And look, it’s… the car. To me, most people would consider a car to be something of prestige, but to 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 Covid lockdowns while he painted the car.
Melanie Lynn took a photo of her husband painting his vehicle. She has attended her trial every day.
Lynn’s car was dark gray or blue when he allegedly committed the murders.
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 talked to her on Saturday and she said, ‘Greg, the whole country is going to shut down, this is absolute pandemonium,’ and I said, ‘I realized something was happening, because with all the cars driving around 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.”
What Lynn didn’t know was that her husband had just disposed of two bodies after claiming he was involved in a deadly fight with Mr. Hill.
The record of Lynn’s interview was shown to the jury over two days this week.
It concluded with Lynn stating that the campers had died as a result of a tragic accident.
‘I am innocent of murder. I haven’t behaved well, I’ve made some bad decisions. But, as I understand it, I am innocent of the murder,” 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 that Lynn says Hill stole from her and then accidentally killed Carol Clay with.
The jury heard that 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 of that year, Lynn said he burned the bodies using skills he had learned while working abroad.
“90 percent of the water in the human body was gone and the fire was largely self-sustaining, which surprised me quite a bit,” he said.
“I’ve been to India and Nepal many, many times, I’ve been to the temples there, they have crematoriums and I’ve seen them cremate people right in front of me.”
Unlike those crematoriums, which according to Lynn used two tons of wood, he only had to use about 20 kg and two liters of kerosene to incinerate his alleged victims.
‘I have no reason to lie to you now, it’s just a… it was a self-sustaining fire that burned from top to bottom, and at the end there was… I had to snoop around a little towards the end. to put it all together,” Lynn said.
‘And I added some sticks along the way, but there was nothing at the end. Nothing larger than 20 millimeters long.
Detectives did not place tracking devices on Lynn’s vehicle until weeks later.
The trial continues.
