Former pilot Greg Lynn set to learn appeal outcome over missing camper Carol Clay’s murder

The former Jetstar pilot convicted of murdering an elderly woman is set to learn if his appeal is successful in Victoria’s highest court on Thursday morning.

Greg Lynn, 59, was jailed for 32 years in October last year for what Justice Michael Croucher described as the “violent, brutal, horrific death” of Carol Clay, 73, more than four years earlier.

Ms Clay, a stalwart of the County Women’s Association, vanished while camping with her boyfriend Russell Hill, 74, in Victoria’s High Country in March 2020.

Following a blockbuster five-week jury trial, Lynn was found guilty of murdering Ms Clay but acquitted of the murder of Mr Hill.

Lynn is expected to appear in the Court of Appeal on Thursday morning at 9.15am, where President of the Court of Appeal Justice Karin Emerton, Justice Phillip Priest and Justice Peter Kidd deliver their judgment.

He has spent the past four years in custody after his arrest in November 2021 — 20 months after the couple disappeared.

The keen huntsman led police to Mr Hill and Ms Clay’s remains after four days in a police station where he was intensely questioned.

Much of what he said over nine hours of recorded interviews was later barred from reaching the jury, after Justice Croucher found detectives had sought to undermine his lawyers advice through a “withering barrage of oppressive and improper inducements”.

Lynn has always maintained he is innocent of murder, giving an account, first to police and then secondly to the jury, of two accidental deaths occurring in the context of a fight with Mr Hill.

“I’ve made some poor decisions but murder, as I understand it, I’m innocent of,” he told detectives at the end of a three-day interview.

Lynn admitted at trial he torched the couple’s campsite in the Wonnangatta Valley and dumped their remains on the side of the Union Spur Track while returning home to Melbourne.

He returned twice in the following months, where he incinerated Ms Clay and Mr Hill’s bodies.

During his appeal against both his conviction and sentence, heard over two days in October, Lynn argued prosecutors breached fairness rules that govern trials and that the jury’s verdict indicated they travelled down an “impermissible pathway” to reach the verdict.

His barrister, Dermot Dann KC, said it was likely the jury had found Ms Clay was killed to cover up Mr Hill’s death, a line of thinking they were expressly barred by Justice Croucher from following unless they were satisfied beyond reasonable doubt Mr Hill was murdered.

“This was done as an all or nothing case, there was never a pathway laid out by the prosecution on how you could have a split verdict,” he said.

“What’s on the line is the prospect of dying in jail.”

Lynn also argued his sentence — seven years above the standard sentence — was too tough and should be revisited.

Victoria’s top prosecutor, the Director of Public Prosecutions Brendan Kissane KC, acknowledged there were issues with the way the trial prosecutor ran the case, but maintained the result was not a miscarriage of justice.

He argued the jury was entitled to reject Lynn’s account and find him guilty of Ms Clay’s murder using the evidence of her death and his post-offence conduct.

“It was well open for the jury to find the accused not guilty in relation to Mr Hill but guilty in relation to Ms Clay,” he said.