06 Huntsman | Lisa's family speaks

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I'm driving through the north of Tasmania, past the port of Bernie. It's bustling with freight traffic.
Fog curls around the blinking lights on the ship masts.

This is the region where Lisa Lynn grew up, back back when she was Lisa Searle.

I'm here because something huge has happened in this investigation. Something I've been waiting for ever since I started reporting on this story.
Lisa's parents have decided they want to talk.

They've never spoken to the media before.

For 26 years, they've kept their silence.

Until now.

I'm nervous. A lot hangs on this.

Will their memories line up with what I've heard so far? Or is there more we don't know?

I'm Rachel Brown, and this is Huntsman, the latest season of Unravel.

Hello, that's

Lisa's parents, Kim and David Searle, lead us down the hall of their big double brick house with a curious border collie, Flo, at our heels. Come on in.
Just kind of dress very cute.

Can you join us in here? I'm with Elise Kinsella, another ABC reporter who's covering this story. You'll hear her asking questions alongside me in this episode.
How long have you been here?

In this house?

On the way to the lounge room, we pass a cabinet of glass trinkets. Uranium glass, Kim tells me.
Then she says, watch this. Oh, yes.

She flicks on a UV light and the whole cabinet glows this brilliant emerald green. which illuminates the dark hallway.
It reminds me of the Emerald Palace in The Wizard of Oz.

Kim ushers us into the lounge room.

Knickknacks jostle for space on the walls, in cabinets, and atop heaving bookshelves. But there is order here.
Kim's catalogued every book like a library.

This endearing fastidiousness extends to copious notes on her daughter Lisa, which lie at her feet. as she sinks into her lounge chair.
Yeah, throw the cushions down on the floor if you don't want it.

Kim's notes and and memories map Lisa's doomed marriage to Greg Lynn. But Kim and David say in the beginning they had no idea about what was going on.
Greg was our son-in-law for over 10 years and

we actually did some canoeing trips together and different things like that. The canoe trip you down the Franklin River was a real hairy trip.
It was 10 days.

It rained for eight and the river's right up. We're lucky to get away with our lives.

But I just remember there was no issues with them at all. But a few years into her marriage Lisa opened up to her dad.
David remembers the moment.

He says they were driving on a roundabout just outside Launceston.

She just came out with the fact that he was denigrating her

and pulling the rug from under her feet and demeaning her and I thought

he's treating her like his worst enemy and it just flawed me to be honest and I was pretty upset and I

obviously straight away said well

I'll need to go and talk to him and she absolutely pleaded with me not to

because of repercussions.

He didn't go and talk to Greg and it's haunted him ever since. Kim didn't realise something was up until Lisa asked her to hide documents.

The first time I came to realise there was a problem was when Lisa handed me some papers, mortgage

papers and payments, and I said, why would I want them? She said, I might need them one day.

I wondered. Kim has a quiet ferocity about her.
David's more reserved. If they end up talking over each other, he'll stop to give her the floor.
They met young.

dated for just three weeks before David proposed. There seems to be a lot of love and respect here.
It's oceans apart from what they watched in their daughter's marriage.

The insults, the tiptoeing, the cruelty, the threats, and finally the terror. Kim saw at firsthand the times she visited Mount Massodon to help Lisa and her sons.

Ah, it was terrible. He put her down.

He was so demeaning and

language was not good.

Throwing books at her, pushing her around,

very tense, very tense, all the time. Because Lisa, well, her description was, I'm walking on eggshells from morning till night.

Keep the children quiet, don't do the wrong thing, don't say the wrong thing, cook the right meals. It was so

demanding.

He's a control freak.

He really is a control freak. You do as he says, the way he says it and when he says it, and that's it.

At times, Kim roughly and repetitively rubs one hand over the other, her fingers through the webbing of the other hand.

Oh, he'd just lose his temper and get furious in a rage. It's always someone else or some other thing to blame.
Never his fault. Never.

And at some stages, if he got angry with the children at night, he'd pitch a tent in his backyard and sleep there.

And it wasn't because he had to go to work the next day he just wanted peace and quiet children upset him I came to Tasmania to see if Kim and David's memories of Greg match what I'd heard from Lisa's friends and they do but they're worse he would not allow animals anywhere near his garden and so on and Apparently the way he treated them was just horrible, absolutely horrible.

Do you really want me to tell you?

Well, I heard that he would get a cat

and bury it up to its neck and run the lawnmower

over it.

And Lisa did confirm that nobody would leave their cat out at night.

We haven't been able to independently verify this lawnmower story, but it lines up with many stories about cruel treatment of animals from multiple people who lived near Greg and Lisa across two states.

Lisa told her mum that dog owners were fearful too, for good reason.

I was told that the dog had the audacity to come onto his garden, so he killed it and to teach the neighbours a lesson, straddled it across the fence so that they would see it when they came for their early morning walk the next morning.

And then, of course, there was Lisa's pet pig.

She was away on one of a flight

and apparently

Greg would let the pig out to furrow around in the dirt while he did some gardening or various things.

And then he'd call the pig and put it back. This time, the pig didn't come back.
He got angry, got an axe, and he killed it with an axe.

Then he walked inside apparently and had visitors there and just said, I've just killed the pig.

Lisa phoned me up

and she was so

distraught,

oh she was on the phone for ages, because she was in the early stages of pregnancy and she said to me, look mum, I put off having a child and now this and I'm so scared.

That's as apart from the loss of the pig, it was that aspect as well.

After Lisa died, Kim went to her house in Mount Massodon to pack up her things and help with the children.

One day, in the back of a wardrobe, bundled up in some clothes hidden away, she discovered Lisa's diary.

We were just so shocked.

I mean, she told us about a lot of things and then she'd actually written it down. And

I know that was the first diary. Kim says she knew that Lisa had a second diary, a more recent one, but Kim tells me that after Lisa's death, that diary was gone.

As were the answering machine tapes Lisa had kept, with recordings of Greg making obscene threats. Phone tapes.
There was a bag of them. I knew where they were.
I went to get them and they were gone.

They're gone. Kim and David let me read Lisa's diary.
It's like a voice from the past. Her actual words.
charting the final year of her life. Lisa died on October 26, 1999.

This diary covers January to April of that year. It covers one of the most tumultuous chapters of Lisa's life, the dying days of her marriage.

It also includes her memories of Greg's cruelty and threats. She writes,

Bloody mean and stupid bitch. Greg's feelings are always someone else's fault.
Not responsible.

By his own admission, had not fed his little baby for six hours, leaving him screaming on the floor.

It was abusive behaviour, telling him shut up and calling him an idiot for spilling Greg's hot chocolate. Greg has perfected appearance management.
Even now I'm still taken in by it. Fool am I.

Lisa calls herself a fool a lot. There's even entries where she speculates about Greg killing her.

She writes, There'd been a murder show on TV in which a father employed a hitman to bring about the death of his wife, to which Greg commented that I should take notice of it.

He asked, what do I have to do to make you hate me? It's all going to burn unless...

I just kept trying and trying to make myself acceptable. I'm beginning to see it wasn't me.
It wasn't me.

The diary charts from the breakup to the break-in.

Greg breaking into the house with a sledgehammer in the dead of night in March 1999, sparking an intervention order, and David says, even more of Greg's ire.

Once a woman takes an intervention order like that, they're more and more vulnerable that husbands quite often hate that to happen.

And there's some plenty of examples where it was totally counterproductive.

And I think this might be one of those cases. As we know, Greg breached the order.
He visited the house on his son's birthday in April and later that night phoned. The call got heeded.

He threatened to kill Lisa.

When David found out about this, he couldn't stand by anymore. He asked a mate who was a Tasmanian detective for advice.
He said to get her out of the house.

She will either lose her mind or lose her life. So he says he then spoke to a police officer in the region where Lisa lived.
I I explained the situation to him that my daughter was in this house.

Her husband has a five-year restraining order and she's fearful for her life and that she's still getting death threats. And

he said something I'll never forget.

If he kills her, then we can do something.

But soon police did start raising the alarm. When they arrested Greg after he'd breached the intervention order, Greg fled into the bush.

Knowing he might have access to guns, the police were worried. One of Lisa's girlfriends told me that police warned her to flee interstate.

Greg had suggested he was going to pay this girlfriend a visit. She tells me she'd once seen Greg's guns in his shed, so she heeded the police advice.

and hid out in the Dandenong Rangers, with her husband initially sitting guard at the top of their their stairs into the night in case Greg showed up.

And Kim Sell remembers the warning to Lisa. The police phoned her and said, get the nanny and the boys and get them out of here.

And they came to Tasmania that night. They were with us for five weeks.
Lisa sent her very young sons to her parents, but she stayed put.

out of fear Greg would burn the house down. Because she knew that if that house was empty, he would burn it.
That's what she told me.

So I can't leave it and there'll be no insurance, there'll be no nothing because it will be arson, but that's his way to get back at me.

Lisa's diary also has notes she'd taken of his venomous phone calls. One side of her notebook, she'd written contact numbers for the local police and church pastor.

On the other side, what appears to be a record of Greg's threats.

You will soon be dead. I'll watch you bleed and die slowly.
Your life will be over.

I'm going to burn you. I'm going to get the shotgun and start killing.

Kim says she heard about even worse threats from Lisa.

He was going to get the swords and cut out her eyes and cut off her ears and then he finishes up by saying, And the last thing your children will hear are their mother's screams, as if he's real pleased with himself.

Then there was the call Kim heard for herself. Lisa held the phone in between them so Kim could hear the vitriol.

This was 35 days before Lisa's death. I'm going to kill you.
There'll be blood in the streets. The blood will flow.
It'll be full of your blood. It's all your blood.

And he went on and on and on in that vein. In a police statement, Greg later admitted to making threats, but said he never intended to carry them out.

Kim was frantically worried about Lisa and asked a solicitor for advice. And she said, try and get her to make a will, which I did.

And

she

stood in front of the glass doors and just said, Mum,

if I need a will, I will already be dead. He will have succeeded in killing me.

And that was it.

And not only that, she told friends, I know he's going to kill me. She told me, I know he's going to kill me.

Did you believe that's what was going to happen at that point? Possibly.

What could I do?

Some memories never go away.

Never forget that.

That poor girl.

The last time Kim spoke to Lisa was a Sunday. They chatted about little things, food she was planning to make, her dad's upcoming visit to Mount Massedon that week.
And then they said goodbye.

She said, well,

this sounds silly.

I just phoned to say I love you.

And I said, I love you too.

And it's the last thing I said.

On Sunday, I love you.

On Tuesday, three different words. A phone call from Lisa's sister that changed everything.

The phone rang and three words. Mum,

Lisa's dead.

In Kim's kitchen, she makes us a cup of tea. On the kitchen bench, she's methodically laid out memories she'd like to show us.

Next to a potato salad sits a row of things that chart the evolution of document storage through the ages.

From a plastic container full of USBs to DVDs, a cassette, photo albums, and yellowed newspaper clippings.

Oh, that's when she won her award. Now,

that's in there,

and she won won this excellence award

we turn on a home movie

and there she is

lisa

i've mostly seen her trapped in photos but here she is a close-up of her in a kitchen pots and pans in the background Her brown curls framing her face, debating the merits of treacle versus golden syrup.

They've got an ingredient ingredient in them that just makes them stay that way. We can bend them into the cookie jar.
Oh, when you dissolve your treacle and your sugar, you do that yellow treacle.

Lisa's mate Joe described her voice like rich chocolate. She's right.
She reminds me of a 1950s silver screen siren.

The tapes contain hours of footage of Lisa and her sons, singing to them, rocking them, smiling adoringly as they play.

In one, Lisa pretends to fall on the floor and the boys laugh as they climb over her.

The videos were filmed by Kim and David and almost all of them are loving close-ups of Lisa and her boys. But Greg is in some of them too, mostly as a disembodied voice, out of frame.

Who's your favourite person? Is it dad, dad, dad?

Then, Kim hands me a cassette tape. Take it,

take it, because I've got these others and I can copy them.

In impeccable handwriting, it says side one, Memorial Service Lisa, 30th of October 1999.

It's the song that Lisa would play on the piano.

That was packed.

And some of them, three hours

that they driven for. Yeah.
Yeah.

It was amazing. I walked it.
I couldn't believe it.

The pastor who led the memorial was close to Lisa, someone she'd confided in. Her integrity, her faith, her love, her character was clearly seen time and time again.

When the pastor comes to describing Greg and Lisa's relationship, he does not hold back. It's no secret that in the last two years, cracks began appearing in Lisa and Greg's marriage.

Despite the physical violence perpetrated upon her and the constant mental and emotional abuse and the torrent of threats delivered to her, I never once saw or heard Lisa complain or condemn Greg or anybody else.

Although on many occasions he would have deserved it I think. It's remarkable to me that he calls Greg out in front of hundreds of people by name.
I chatted with Lisa and she told me,

I know Greg hates me and blames me for everything going wrong, but I still love him.

When Kim heard about where Lisa's body was found, it made no sense to her.

Curled on her garden lawn, in pajamas and bare feet, where presumably she'd lay all through the freezing night, an empty glass and a lemon slice outside, and inside, a vodka bottle, a half-used packet of sleeping medication, and that Nick Cave song, Nobody's Nobody's Baby Now, playing on repeat.

It's rather strange because

she doesn't drink. She have, you know, a few sips of wine and so on, but she's not

a drinker.

But thinking of the odd times that Lisa did drink long before she died, My colleague Elise asks whether Lisa might have done something out of character and combined things that she shouldn't have.

Having a few drinks and then couldn't sleep and took some tablets and they've acted badly together.

No, she wouldn't do that. That's something you're really sure of? Yes, I am sure of it.
She had to remain completely focused in case anything happened to those boys.

They could have woken in the night. There's no way she was going to be drink, had a drink or anything at all.
And Kim doesn't believe that this was an intentional overdose.

No, she was facing the future. She wouldn't suicide.

And it wasn't just me. Everybody said the same thing.
It's the first thing they said. She would never, ever leave those boys.

Now, you might remember that at the time of Lisa's death, Kim wrote a statement for the coroner that said, I accept from what the police have informed me regarding the circumstances in which she died that she was alone on the night.

Well, since then, Kim's views on this have shifted. And you think there was someone else there? Oh, there was somebody.
Of course there was.

How did that door get open? There was a side door unlocked.

How did that get open? This is one of the details that niggles Kim. She says, ever since Greg broke into the house with a sledgehammer, Lisa triple-checked the locks every night.

Yet this side door, which she apparently never used, was open. And there were other details Kim thinks were weird.
She doesn't even come downstairs in her pajamas.

Every morning she comes down fully dressed with her hair made up,

fully makeup, everything.

Where she walked is very, very sharp gravel. You couldn't walk on it in bare feet at all.
Why did she go outside in the first place? Why didn't she use her phone if she was going for help?

She's also bothered by the Nick Cave song on repeat. I did buy that Nick Caves CD to find out which one it was to get the words.
It says explicit language on the front.

Lisa wouldn't buy a thing like that. Not only that, she didn't know how to get a CD to repeat the same track over and over.

When she used to play for the children, she'd stop the CD, start it again and put it on the track. And she did that over and over because that's all she knew.

And there were little things in the kitchen that made no sense to Kim either.

I saw a chopping board with half a lemon and a knife on the corner of the table, which was absolutely ridiculous because it had been carried from the other side of the room.

She never did any preparations on the table at all. That was simply for serving meals.

And Kim tells me there were other things, like in the lounge room. She says detectives told her the contents of Lisa's wallet were strewn around the floor, around the photo albums.

But there could be explanations for these things.

Maybe the CD was Greg's that he'd left at the house post-separation.

Maybe drinks reacted badly with her medication. And maybe after drinking vodka, the gravel drive didn't feel so sharp.

Could Lisa's wallet have been rifled through by her son, who was known to play with it?

In his statement to police, Greg said, I'm extremely sorry regarding the circumstances of Lisa's death.

Whilst I admit that relations between us had deteriorated dramatically, and that I did make certain threats against her, I had absolutely nothing to do with her death.

A detective who reviewed the scene found no sign someone else had been there. No sign of foul play.
He then left the case to a local team, and that team seemed to move on.

But Kim says, at a minimum, police should have been more interested in what she had to say. Now, 26 years on, she winces at how she says she was treated.
With contempt.

With disdain. I asked them, would they please record what I was saying? They wrote things down, but I don't think there was any record.
And then...

The police officer took me outside, lit a cigarette and said, do you think we're not doing our duty, what we should do? And I said, I don't know what I think.

All I know is things are not right.

The aftermath of Lisa's death didn't give her parents much space to grieve in peace. Even with Lisa gone, Greg's wrath continued.

Just sending an email was

his title for me, Hell's Bitch. That's how I was addressed.
Every email, Hell's Bitch. And Greg's pilot colleagues, who'd supported Lisa, were also served up spite in envelopes.

December 1999, they found Christmas cards from Greg in their work pigeonholes. I'd heard about these cards.
We talked about them in the podcast. But Kim has actually kept copies of some of them.

And they're far from festive. One reads, ho ho ho, get fucked.
I wish you would keep your big mouth shut at work.

And then there was this Christmas card to a man who'd lost his dad to suicide just weeks earlier in that same year, 1999. Try to smile.
99 wasn't so bad.

And we are looking forward to a fantastic future, cheers Greg, with a smiley face. Sent to a man who just lost his father.

Another one to another colleague. Have you ever thought of where Lisa might

be today if you hadn't stuck your ugly bald head into my business? You and Lisa lost everything.

I want everything

underlined.

This is one of the reasons why this family has taken so long to talk.

Fear.

They say fear of Greg and fear of losing the last piece of Lisa, her sons, their grandsons, who they haven't seen for two decades. Sometimes

you just have to sit and wait, but they've grown up. They're not boys or little children anymore.
I want them to know that their mother was a beautiful person,

a woman of courage

and strength

with admirable qualities who loved them as much as any mother could love any children

and they should be proud to be her sons.

I don't know where they are, how they are.

I would love to speak because I

just want to hold them.

Yeah.

For years after Lisa's death, Kim and David fought for a deeper investigation or an inquiry.

The scene of Lisa's death, Greg's threats and his behaviour after she died, all of this led Kim and David to believe police needed to look harder. Her death was very, very suspicious and

she deserves justice.

This kind of pain, it can fuel you, but it can also break you. The heaviness just gets too much.

So for their sanity, they had to give in.

In the finish, I realised you can hit your head against a brick wall and all you get's a headache or a cracked wall. You have to stop, you have to get back to living, or

it will ruin you. But two decades later, The name Greg Lynn punctured their lives again.

When did you first learn that Greg Greg Lynn had been charged over the death of two campers up in the high country in Victoria?

I got a phone call from one of Kim's nurses

and

she

said,

can you possibly guess who?

And I cast around and I couldn't think who

who it could possibly be. And when she told me, I thought,

wow,

unbelievable

and Kim realized that just ignoring that wound hadn't healed it when this news came through

it hit me and I realized I'd never grieved

the way I should

After I spoke to Kim and David, I had another stop to make to meet Lisa's two sisters.

Karen and Linda are also still living in the north of Tassie, around a half hour's drive from their parents. I meet them both at Karen's house.

Hello!

Hi!

I'm Rachel. Oh, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.

Anyone? I'm okay, meeting you. The sisters take me inside the house and show me an ornate wooden box, a Lisa memory box.
There's a cookbook, a stuffed toy, porcelain figurines of angels, an old watch.

That was Lisa's love heart like she always just wore simple, beautiful,

unpretentious jewellery, didn't she? Linda tenderly holds the age-tarnished silver heart, transfixed by it, like she's suspended in time. It was Linda who broke the news to their mum.

that Lisa was dead. She starts describing to me what that time was like when Lisa was gone, after Greg took the kids and moved overseas.

Mum couldn't literally speak for, I don't know how long that was, it was a matter of days or even weeks. She literally couldn't speak.

Now it lives on her body. The image of Kim scratching at her hands pops into my head.
So she can wake up in the night and there'll be blood everywhere because she's just got

rashes and

yeah, it's hard.

When the family decided it was time to talk, it was Karen who emailed me. She wrote, we are ready to fight this and to give our all.

And they mean it.

They have their own stories of Greg's animal abuse. I'd thought I'd heard them all, but there were more.

Tales of Greg drowning cats in a 44-gallon drum.

Shooting a neighbour's dog. with a bow and arrow.
And then they tell me about the fear they say he instilled in Lisa. On those nights he was creeping around in the dark.

He would go to a window and he would put a pig's, a pig's mask on and I'll cut you up. Karen and Linda agree with their parents and Lisa's friends.
They think there was something off

about the scene of Lisa's death. So I put to them what Detective Brendan Hickman said.
He was the cop who studied the scene back in 1999 and found nothing out of place.

And he said, look, I was there when I took the intervention order, you know, so I was looking for signs of a disturbance, but there was nothing.

There's no evidence of someone else having been there that night. What would you say to that?

Well, that Greg was...

Greg was calculating and clever. I mean,

how many crime scenes are there where there doesn't look like there's a disturbance? And that side door never

got unlocked. It just was never used.
And that side door was unlocked. The sisters are as adamant as their mum.
It wasn't suicide. And they don't believe it was an accidental overdose either.

But I have to gently probe something.

Two incidents back in 1993, during a difficult phase in her marriage, when Lisa landed herself in hospital, once by taking pest-killing poison and another after drinking cooking alcohol.

What would you say to people?

who say, well, you know, maybe it was an accident or deliberate because she had these incidents earlier in her life of these explosive binges, whether deliberately or accidentally.

Could this have been like that?

Lisa in 1993 was a wife and Lisa in 1999 was a wife and a mother. And

as we know as parents, it's...

And knowing of Lisa and again her history of being

that person and being that mother and that

devotion and dedication to those boys.

You just don't do anything to compromise not only them there, but their future.

Since Greg's arrest for the deaths of the high country campers, detectives have been quietly dealing with an avalanche of calls from the public about Greg Lynn. More than a thousand.

They've spent three years interviewing more than 60 people, just on Lisa's case alone. And once they'd gathered all that that evidence, they put a fresh brief before the coroner.

You live two decades of your life thinking that you might not get answers about 1999. Two detectives come back into your life.
They've done all this work. They've travelled overseas.

Momentum is building. You've got force behind you.
Where is it at now? Victoria Police have had a huge cut in funding and they don't want to

fund for a staged crime scene investigation needed to further investigate our sister's death.

The family tells me the coroner has read the new brief but is waiting for more documents from police.

Detectives are keen to get an expert report on whether the scene of Lisa's death could have been staged, to make it look a certain way.

Now remember, Greg Lynn admitted to manipulating the scene of the two campus deaths. He told police he'd thought about making it look like a robbery, so he'd rifled through the campus wallets.

So the detectives think this expert report on the scene of Lisa's death could be valuable, but the family has been told there's no money for it, and so everything has come to a standstill.

Well, it's an Australian expert and it costs $9,000, and so it's just a matter of that money

that Vic police won't

release.

So

everything's come to a halt because of $9,000.

Essentially.

My personal reaction would be, well, give you the $9,000. We all said that.

We actually said that.

I loved it that when mum proposed that, I'm like, oh, that would be like bribing police.

But I actually did propose that to one of the detectives and she said, well, look, we'll see, like, maybe we can look into that or something. And then that hasn't been brought up again.

Karen and Linda hope somehow the expert report will get done and then the coroner can look into their sister's death.

I think the truth needs to come out as hard as that it is going to be for certain members of our family and and for Greg's family.

But as I sit in front of the sisters, we aren't even allowed to tell Lisa's story. Our podcast, ready for close to a year, has sat on the ABC servers, unpublished.

because of a court-imposed suppression order that prevents us from even breathing a word of Lisa's story in connection with Greg Lynn.

And because of this suppression order, Victoria Police won't answer our questions about what's happened to the investigation into Lisa's death and whether it really has ground to a halt because of the cost of one crime scene analysis.

So everything is at a standstill because of this suppression order.

Even after Greg was convicted of murder, This order stopped Lisa's story being heard, just in case Greg successfully appealed his conviction. And just in case, down the track, there was a retrial.

To me, it seemed unfair that Lisa's story was still hidden, all these years later, just in case Greg gets another chance.

But I'm here with Lisa's family in the hope that one day soon, the suppression order will lift and we can finally tell her story.

And the story of Lisa's parents and her sisters, who've missed out on so much with with Lisa having been absent from their lives.

In my opinion we're best friends and lose not just my sister and yeah to have the

three of us and

just to share life and

it's

in um

yeah

Linda whips her gaze to the roof. Her eyes burn red.
Karen can't even look at her.

If there is anybody out there and they have any sort of information to please come forward and share it on anything that's relevant to this case.

And I imagine there'd be people out there because there have been who have absolutely feared for their life. Yes.

But they don't need to do that anymore from my opinion because the one who was fearful in their eyes is locked away.

As I fly out of Tasmania, back over the Bath Strait, I turn over a small trinket in my hand. It's a little glass owl that glows green under UV light.

A memento pressed into my hand despite my protests as I left Kim and David's house.

Later I'm back in court, as media lawyers push to have the suppression order overturned. I sit through court hearing after court hearing, delay after delay.

In the courtroom, the little owl sits in my coat pocket. But time after time, decisions are put off or don't go our way.
I despondently text Kim Searle of an umpteenth delay.

That the good luck charm in my pocket didn't work.

She replies, he looks ordinary now, but given the right circumstances, he'll shine and glow, just like you.

Hang on.

So we hang on. And eventually, the suppression order lifts.

And now you can hear this whole podcast.

Lisa's story can finally be illuminated.

It just needed the right light.

This is the last full episode of Huntsman, for now.

But make sure you hit subscribe or follow on the Unravel podcast, because soon we'll release a bonus episode that goes further into what happened behind the scenes of the reporting on this story.

We'll answer some of your questions in that episode too, so if you have some, get in touch at unraveltruecrime at abc.net.au.

If you've liked this podcast, please leave us a review or a rating wherever you're listening. It does actually help us get this out to more listeners.

This season of Unravel is hosted and reported by me, Rachel Brown. We've been making this story on Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Wadurong Land.

This story was developed in collaboration with the ABC's Regional Investigations team under editor Edwina Farley.

Research and production by Charlotte King, Andy Burns and Ayla Darling. Our supervising producer is Yasmin Parry.

Sound design and additional music by Hamish Kemaleri.

Theme and additional music by Martin Perelta and Ashley Cadell.

Eric George is our manager of podcasts, and our executive producer is Tim Roxborough.

Hi, it's Norman Swan. And Teagan Taylor with a podcast recommendation for you, selfishly, our podcast.
What's that rash, where we answer the health questions everyone's asking?

Do you really have to have a shower every day? Can dairy give you acne? Do you need to worry about microplastics?

We do the hard work for you, so you don't have to waste time and money figuring out the latest wellness trend is a scam. They usually are.
But we won't be leaving you hanging.

We'll also tell you what really works. Listen on Radio National or on the ABC Listen App.

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