01 Huntsman | Lisa and Greg Lynn

When the police raided the Stonewall Inn back in 1969, they had no idea that it would eventually lead to the birth of gay pride.

We started standing up for ourselves, we stood tall and said, This is who we are, and you're going to accept us.

I'm Mark Finnell, and I am the host of the ABC Radio National podcast, No One Saw It Coming.

Each week, we unravel a moment in history that changed the course of the world, but well, no one saw it coming. To hear it, search for No One Saw It Coming on the ABC Listen app.

ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

Just a warning before we start. This podcast has some strong language and covers some intense material.

I had to wait for the roads to reopen after the snow, because this is all locked off in the winter time.

And that's where bodies were placed.

However, you won't find any bodies there now.

Why is that?

Because I'll finish the story.

It's a spring night on a bush track, just going on dusk. No one much comes out here.
It's dense with shrubs and ghostly eucalyptus trees.

It runs through the beautiful but unforgiving Victorian high country. You could get lost in there and never be found.

I saw that track leading up to the left. It was covered with branches and leaves.
It looks like it hadn't been used in years.

A man crouches at the edge of a campfire, stoking it occasionally as the sun sets.

Except

the fire is not for warmth.

It was surprisingly small.

Like I said, I didn't use much wood at all.

The man has done something unthinkable, and he's hoping this fire will destroy all trace of it.

My intention was to get rid of the evidence because I clearly had failed to make myself disappear off the radar.

The man is burning the bodies of two people.

In the fire are the remains of two campers in their 70s, Carol Clay and Russell Hill, who've been missing for eight months. Eight months of their family's anguish.

Eight months of misguided hope they might still be found.

It was

a horrific thing to have to deal with. I was sick when I was there several times.

But I stealed myself for it and I worked through the night.

The crouching shadow stokes the campfire until dawn.

Until almost nothing is left but ash and bone.

There was nothing.

The human body is 90% water. That was all gone.
There was just ashes left.

There is literally nothing there.

The man stoking the campfire is stocky. He's an outdoorsman, a camper, a hunter, and now...

He's a murderer.

This is a man used to making rapid decisions. He quickly staged the scene of the murder to make it look like a robbery.
He's carefully covered his tracks.

But he's made one tiny mistake. As he's driven around with the dead man's phone in his car, the phone has been quietly connecting to cell towers high in the mountains.

And these pings of cell towers will be his undoing.

Campfires are the sites of ghost stories, of shadows in the dark.

But you know the scariest monster? It's the one you wouldn't look twice at if they passed you on the street. Normal.
Someone who flies under the radar.

Like a 54-year-old pilot with a wife, kids, and hobbies. Someone with secrets simmering just beneath the surface.

Someone like Greg Lynn.

The man hunched over this fire.

That's the scariest monster.

I'm Rachel Brown and in all my time reporting on crime and courts for the ABC, I've seen a lot of monsters destroy a lot of lives.

But this crime chilled me more than the others.

I think it's because of the careful, methodical and seemingly unemotional way that Greg Lynn covered up his atrocity.

So how did a respected pilot, a captain no less, come to be crouched over a fire burning bodies?

These things don't just happen.

Violence and cruelty are practiced.

I wanted to understand who this man was and what he was like before all this happened.

I wanted to know the full story, from the decades leading up to the murder, right through the crime and the cover-up.

I wanted to know if there were signs, if there were clues, showing what he was capable of.

And I wanted to know who was paying attention to them.

It turns out, to answer those questions, and to understand Greg Lynn, you have to know the disturbing untold story of his previous marriage. to a woman named Lisa.

How they met and fell in love.

How things began to rot.

And how it all ended in a different tragedy two decades earlier.

This is Huntsman, the latest season of Unravel.

The morning after Greg Lynn is charged with murder, ABC journalists start receiving messages. There's more you need to know, call me, says one.
I'm intent on pursuing this, will you help me?

says another.

It seems like a lot of people have a story to tell about Greg Lynn's past. So I start travelling around the country, talking to them.

So we've just left Hobart and we're on our way to do a very key interview with Jo Matthews. She reached out to me and she said, my best friend was married to Greg Lynn.

Greg's first wife wife was named Lisa and Jo Matthews says she's held on to Lisa's secrets for too long.

She's carried this for, well, 25 years.

I'm on my way to finally meet her and hopefully finally tell Lisa's story.

I have lived with this feeling that one day Greg Lynn is going to stuff up

and that's when I'll get my opportunity.

Jo still remembers the first time she met Greg Lynn. Lisa was a fantastic cook and the table was always beautifully laid and she was the perfect host.

It was 1990 in the picturesque Tasmanian town of Evondale. Greg and Lisa were hosting a dinner.
Lisa was famous for her dinner parties. They were always

really great events.

Jo had been living out of town for a while, so this was a long overdue catch-up. And she was finally getting to meet her best friend's new husband.

Lisa was nervous and excited to introduce them, but it didn't go according to plan. I was expecting...

The tall, dark, ruggedly handsome pilot, dark hair, rugged face, the jawline. There was this whole image that Lisa had created for me, yes.
And who did you meet?

I met this kind of slightly pudgy guy dressed in a beige safari suit. Was it a dress-up party?

You know, it wasn't fancy dress and it wasn't Halloween. And he had a beige safari suit on.

And it was totally incongruous with this

picture that Lisa had painted of this suave, sophisticated, wealthy, elegant pilot, you know. Did Lisa ask you that night or soon after? Oh, what did you think? Yeah, she did

because it was really, really important to her that I liked Greg, that

he had my approval, that the tick.

And I think I probably

didn't tell her about that feeling because I thought it was unkind. And also,

you know, sometimes you second guess yourself and you don't know whether you've imagined something. Joe says she couldn't put her finger on what she didn't like about Greg.
He was perfectly polite.

He was

open and effusive and

the ultimate welcoming country gentleman. I have this memory of him

wide-armed and welcoming his wife's best friend into their home and his face was open and smiling and

but

my spidey senses were set off.

Why,

if he was being so charming, why did you feel that? I felt like it was a performance. I felt like I was

a character. walking into a stage set.
And I remember thinking, not very long into that evening, I remember thinking oh Lisa

what have you done

at Jo's home in the south of Tassie I sit on her couch beside her cocker spaniel Clementine who dozes beside me nestled in woolen blankets Jo's memories of her friendship with Lisa are interwoven with music so as she collects her thoughts about her friend She sits down at her grand piano and begins to play.

Joe met Lisa Searle when they were both 12 years old and starting high school. Before then, Joe hadn't met anyone like her.

I actually don't remember meeting anyone else that day, but Lisa. There was just something about her.
There was this energy, this

spark, this wild feeling that really appealed to me that

we just hit it off right from the beginning. There was something about her that lit a fire.

They were students in the sleepy town of Bernie on Tasmania's north coast and they were itching for adventure. They bonded over music.

Lisa played guitar and I played piano and a little bit of guitar.

Every time that we spent together there'd be her getting out the guitar and me playing the piano and we'd strike up a song and one of us would sing harmonies and the other would sing the the melody.

What was her voice like?

She had the most unusual, incredibly rich,

deep alto voice and

she used to

love to sing tenor in the choir and there's never enough tenors but she had this really luscious, syrupy,

if you can imagine rich dark chocolate cake with chocolate sauce, that's Lisa's voice.

As they became closer, Jo would have sleepovers at Lisa's house at her parents' dairy farm. One of Lisa's jobs was to milk the cows in the mornings.

And on the occasions that I stayed there, I was just expected to go milk the cows with Lisa. And, you know, that was a bit of a trial by fire in the deep end.

You know, cowpoo and freezing cold mornings. And like a lot of teenagers, they dreamed about one day getting out of their small town, that one day their lives would be bigger.

She used to say that the other kids that we went to school with were little bundles of mediocrity.

Not in any pretentious way, but there was this sense that we're not going to be bundles of mediocrity.

And there was always this tight feeling that if we just hang in there, just hang in there, there's a life outside of the northwest coast of Tasmania.

But just before they entered their final year of school, Lisa suddenly dropped out.

After a while, she became engaged to a man in the Air Force.

The couple were driving together one day when they were involved in a horrific accident.

One of her sisters got in touch with me and said, Lisa's been in a car accident, so her fiancé was killed and she was thrown free of the car, but

she wasn't expected to survive. She was in a coma for about a week.

She had a terrible brain injury. A lot of bones were broken.
Lisa had been asleep on the back seat and wasn't wearing a seatbelt. She survived, but her fiancé David didn't make it.

For a long time afterwards, she was deeply traumatised.

She couldn't accept the fact that her fiancé had been killed. She, in fact, didn't believe that he'd been killed.

She used to look for him. She used to phone the RAAF base where he used to be stationed and ask for him.
It took a long time for Lisa to recover, both physically and emotionally.

She was badly scarred on her face and she made a lot of effort to...

deal with how she felt about the scars. Eventually, she decided that like her late fiancé, she wanted to join the Air Force.

They said no, they just refused her because she wasn't fit enough.

And they told her that it would be physically impossible for her to ever march out at the end of her training. And that

she was given the knockback again and again and again, and she just kept... bashing at that door and eventually

I'm not sure whether she in fact worked her fitness up to a state where they would take her or whether she just wore them down and they got sick of having to deal with her.

So they allowed her to enlist. But that was what Lisa was like.
Once she'd put her mind to something, there was no point in telling her that she couldn't do it.

Even with all the odds stacked against her, through the pain of her injuries, she studied hard and she aced it.

She marched out on her graduation as the highest scoring cadet in her intake.

Her life was coming back together, bit by bit. And soon another thing fell into place.
She met someone new. Another pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force.
A young trainee named Greg Lynn.

It's always stuck in my memory that

Lisa

met Greg, and his birthday

was the same day that David had died. It was the same day as the car accident.
And she took that

with a lot of weight. And she believed that

meeting Greg was something that was meant to be.

Lisa's trauma was still fresh in her memory. It wasn't so long ago she'd been at Rock Bottom.
She'd been a high school dropout, severely injured in a car crash.

But now, here was a man who loved her, and his prestigious career fitted with her aspiration for a life of adventure.

Greg Lynn arrived like a dream.

I've got no doubt that Greg absolutely love-bombed her in the beginning. He consumed her.

The vision that

a pilot's lifestyle was exciting and

there was

colour and movement and travel and exotica and culture and

this whole cornucopia of offerings that were out there and Lisa she was always on that pathway. That's where she was going and nothing was going to stand in her way.

But then she felt she had to make a choice. choice, her partner or her career.
There was this ridiculous rule that cadets didn't fraternise with officers.

She resigned from the Air Force. Lisa and Greg were married within seven months and Lisa Searle became Lisa Lynn.

Greg Lynn had big plans to join the RAAF's elite flying squad, but the testing was rigorous and he failed to make the team. So instead, he set his sights on becoming a commercial pilot.

He got a job in Launceston, and three years into their marriage, the couple moved to Evondale to be near the airport.

I went to their old house with Joe.

Oh, the roses are still here. Beautiful, beautiful, pale pink.
Yeah, they were all the same colour.

Lisa's favourite.

That used to be Lisa's bedroom. Yeah.

We round the corner where Greg's shed was.

Did you ever go in there or no girls allowed? No girls allowed there. Yeah.

It's a garden cottage on a corner block with a lot of Tasmanian timber. She bought it here because this was good for Greg.

So close to his work.

Yeah. She furnished it.
She loved it. She cared for it.
she entertained here, she brought her friends here.

As she created the life she always wanted in this new country town, Lisa began a new career managing a local cafe.

She was building this lifestyle that she desperately wanted, and the successful pilot and

the whole picture. But Jo knew things at home weren't right.
Yeah, this was a house that had

holds sad memories.

It was a sad house.

There was a darkness about this house.

Six weeks after Greg started at the airline they'd moved to be near, the company went under and he lost his job. And he quickly got on the wrong side of the neighbours.

Greg had rows with them about their pets wandering into his garden. Joe says Lisa would rush around after him, trying to fix it.
She smoothed things over all the time. She made excuses for Greg.

She protected Greg from his own behaviour.

When Joe went over to the house, Greg wasn't welcoming anymore.

More and more when I

went to visit Lisa

and Greg was present.

He would make himself scarce.

It got to the point where he would be there when I arrived and he would exit out into the garden or he would leave and go somewhere else.

Was that just a good husband giving his wife space with her friend?

I believe that's what it was in the beginning until Greg could no longer be bothered keeping up the pretence of being pleasant to me.

Joe says she also started seeing his disdain for Lisa too.

And

I used to see the body language,

the side looks at Lisa when I'd arrive or the

tension

that would hang in the air. The word is probably reckless in the way that he thought that he was getting away with

the nasty little sneer that he thought no one else saw. Maybe it was a look, a sideways glance, a curl of the lip, some sarcastic comment and I thought, right,

I've got you. I know who you are.

Lisa would confide in Joe about how he'd insult her, and not just any insults.

Joe says he told her she was fat, she was ugly. Who else would want her with her scars? But Lisa seemed to blame herself.

If only she could be better, if only she could love Greg more, if only she could be a better wife, if only she she internalized all of it and if only she was better or thinner or good looking or if she didn't have scars on her face or if she wasn't embarrassing or if she didn't annoy Greg

everything

was turned to

make it Lisa's fault

on the outside Lisa and Greg seemed like a regular young couple. They became active members of the local Pentecostal church.
They gave to charity and sponsored a child in India.

They even fostered a few teenage girls during this time.

But at home, their marriage was rotting.

Joe watched as the sparkling, witty version of Lisa retreated and was replaced by self-loathing and jitteriness.

She used to have this beautiful, huge old, antique farmhouse kitchen table and we'd sit at the table and I can remember her sitting with her head in her hands and her elbows on the table and

she'd be in tears and

she would wring her hands and

I'd be saying, Lisa, Lisa, it's not meant to be like this. You don't have to have this.

And I remember saying that really stupid thing like, Lisa,

there are plenty more fish in the sea. You'd think I could think of something better to say than that, but that's what I said.

And I recall her saying, I don't want other fish, I want Greg fish. And then we both just laughed because that sounded so stupid.

I used to get exasperated, not with Greg, I used to get exasperated with her.

And more and more and more, the times that I went to visit her would be spent with her in tears and

me

trying to support her, but it would be working through her trauma around what am I going to do to stop this from getting any worse? And I'd be saying, you can't stop it from getting any worse.

This is getting worse, regardless of any effort you can make.

It used to annoy me.

I was really, really frustrated. because I felt like

she couldn't hear me. Then Joe began to see physical signs of the abuse.

Then there was a day when I arrived, and Lisa was sitting in her lounge room, and she was sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace when I walked in.

And she didn't say anything, but she had sunglasses on. And as I walked into the room, she just took the sunglasses off and turned her face to me

with just this

sad face and she had a black eye.

She didn't need to say anything. We didn't discuss it.

But she knew that I knew

and she knew I knew she didn't have to tell me.

Jo says she also saw bruises on Lisa's arms, a cut lip.

She told Lisa to get help. She used to seek counselling from, and we didn't call it counselling, she just used to say that she'd had a chat with the pastor and

she told the pastor what had happened between her and Greg, and that

when the pastor came to have a word with Greg,

he raised the issue that Greg had hit Lisa.

Greg said to the pastor, yes, I did hit her,

and I'll hit her harder next time.

And that

sums up

everything you need to know about Greg.

He is ultimately right, supremely correct, and he's not responsible. And that's a funny thing that Lisa used to say.
Greg is not responsible. On Greg's gravestone, it will say Gregory Lynn,

not responsible.

I checked with the pastor. He confirmed that he'd had that conversation with Greg and that Greg admitted he'd hit Lisa and said, I'm going to hit her harder next time.

According to a police document from many years after this, Greg said,

I have never hit Lisa, but I have on occasion pushed her away during an argument.

I used to talk to her about,

Lisa, love isn't meant to hurt. If you love someone, it's not meant to hurt.
Jo was at a loss at what to say, how to help.

She suggested maybe Lisa try anti-anxiety medication or antidepressants, but she was quickly shut down. She wouldn't have a bar of it, would not have a bar of it.
She saw it as an intrinsic failure.

She believed that she was strong enough, that she should be able to cope with this herself, that she had all of this shit that had gone down in her life in the past. She'd survived that accident.

She'd got better from a brain injury. She was coping with the scars on her face.

Her fiancé had died. She had, through sheer guts and determination, she had got her way into the Air Force.
She'd risen above all of that.

And she had this ultimate faith in herself that she had the capacity to fix this too. It's just that she couldn't.
Whatever she did, Greg outsmarted her.

By mid-1992, Greg had moved to Sydney for work, while Lisa stayed in the house they owned in Evondale.

Greg told people they were on a trial separation. Lisa, however, told people they were just doing long distance.

For the next year, he'd continue to fly back and forth from Sydney to Tasmania as they tried to work on their marriage.

Lisa still hoped they'd get things back on track, and they went as a couple to her friend Joe's wedding.

At Joe's house in Tasmania, we sit on the couch and flip through Joe's wedding album from 1993.

There's sepia toned photos of men in bow ties, and with the 80s not long gone, there's also lots of pearls and perms.

So yeah,

1993.

Wow. Joe's friendship with Lisa was before before the time we had cameras in our pockets, when people's private lives were a lot more private.

So she doesn't have as many pictures of Lisa as she'd like. So I found some photos of Lisa.

But we find one from that day, the day of Jo's wedding. Lisa's wearing a sage, sleeveless shift dress, her hair in a French roll, some tendrils around her face.
We find another.

People smile and mingle in the churchyard, waiting for the ceremony to start.

And in the background, away from the crowd, I spot Lisa and Greg.

They're not talking. He's looking down.
She's clutching her handbag and looking away.

That actually looks like not a happy moment, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's far away, but she doesn't look happy.
No.

That day, Greg was furious at Lisa.

But initially, he kept a lid on it. There was no evidence that Greg was as angry as Lisa was telling me he was, but I believed her.

She told me that on the journey from the church, which was at Windermere, a little bit outside of Launceston, their car had run out of petrol.

And that Greg was furious. And I remember thinking, why is Greg furious at you? He was driving, but the car ran out of petrol and it was apparently Lisa's fault.

Joe says in public, Greg would hide his fury and disdain for Lisa. At the reception, he swaned around with other guests.

Being all hail fellow, well met and

having lovely conversations and chats with the chaps who were at our wedding. But sometimes, Greglyn would have what Joe calls a reckless moment.
A moment where his mask would slip.

We were standing on the deck of this restaurant, which is in a beautiful garden setting, and there were peacocks on the lawns. And

somebody said to Lisa, gosh, you look gorgeous.

And in that moment, Greg said, She looks like a prostitute.

There was this cavernous,

awful

silence.

Put his head down and kind of muttered it out the side of his mouth. It was for Lisa's benefit, that comment, but everyone else heard it, and

I just.

It was as though Lisa had, it was as though someone had stuck her with a cattle prod.

She tried not to react, but I could see there was this,

oh my gosh, I don't believe he just said that.

And the people standing around were embarrassed for her.

And I felt sick for Lisa.

That day mark an implosion in their relationship. Greg told Lisa he thought the marriage was over and he went back to Sydney.

When Jo got back from her honeymoon, she went to visit Lisa and she discovered what Lisa had done after that horrible day at the wedding. She said, yeah, I ate about a tablespoon of snail pellets.

Lisa had eaten pest poison, then she called Greg.

According to a police document from many years later, Greg says that Lisa ate rat sack as well as snail pellets and that she told him she was going to kill herself.

Greg remembered being concerned at the time, but in hindsight he wondered if she was serious given she'd called him straight away.

Lisa was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

In the months after that, they tried to work things out. But Lisa discovered that Greg was having a brief affair with a woman in Sydney, and things took another dark turn.

Lisa quickly quickly drank cooking alcohol, collapsed and seemed to stop breathing. Those who came to her aid were struggling to find a pulse, so Greg started CPR.
She was rushed to an emergency.

That's twice in six months, that at a low point in their relationship, Lisa did something that landed her in hospital.

Some of Lisa's friends believe that Lisa never intended to seriously harm herself in these incidents, and that they were impulsive acts to get Greg's attention.

Despite the turmoil, despite what Greg had done, the relationship continued. I know what you're probably thinking.
Lisa, just leave, give up. It's all too messy and hard.

But this whiplash, this tortured push and pull, it's often rooted in things more complicated than outsiders can understand.

I've covered a lot of cases like this and seen a lot of dysfunctional relationships. And it's not uncommon for women to return to their partners to try again and again.

After this rocky period, the couple were looking for a fresh start, so they moved to Victoria. They settled in a house perched on the edge of the wilderness around Mount Massodon.

For a while, life in their new country house was peaceful.

But then, things started to fray again.

And it was was here, in Mount Macedon, where Greg's anger would start to boil over in new ways that were strange and disturbing. She had a little pig,

a little mini pig that she just adored. You know, used to go wherever she went and it was just like a little pet.
And so, yeah, then the next time I went out to see her,

yeah, there was no pig.

And I said,

where is it? She said,

she had tears in her eyes, and she pretty much told me then that he killed.

He killed the pig.

Next episode on Huntsman, The Pig.

This season of Unravel is intended to be listened to as a whole, so if you haven't heard all the episodes, you shouldn't draw any conclusions because you haven't heard all sides of this story.

If you or anyone you know needs help, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact Australia's National Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Counselling Service 1-800-RESPECT

on 1-800-737-732.

If you'd like to get in touch with me or my team about this story, please email us on unraveltruecrime at abc.net.au

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

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 Camilleri. Theme and additional music by Martin Peralta and Ashley Cadell.
And our executive producer is Tim Roxburgh.

You ever watch the news and think, whoa, this seems unprecedented? Unprecedented. It's unprecedented.
This has never happened before. This is unprecedented.
Well, that's not always quite true.

I'm Matt Bevin, and my show, if you're listening, is about finding times that what's happening now has happened before and figuring out what we can learn from it. Learning from history.

I mean, who could imagine? Find new episodes on ABC Listen every Thursday.

You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio, and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.