Moment former Jetstar pilot took a paint roller to his 4WD after he allegedly murdered an elderly couple – and how it led detectives to his door

The wife of the former Jetstar Pilot Greg Lynn had no idea what she was capturing when she snapped a photo of him painting his 4WD.

Melanie Lynn wasn’t used to seeing her husband repaint his beloved Nissan Patrol with regular house paint.

Lynn, 57, has pleaded not guilty in the case High Council of Victoria until the murders of Russell Hill, 74, and Carol Clay, 73, in the Wonnangatta Valley, in the Alpine region of Victoria, on March 20, 2020.

An image shown to the jury showed Lynn painting over his vehicle with a regular roller in June 2020 – just months after police alleged he killed the campers.

Police had noted in July of that year that the vehicle was painted when they first made contact with the pilot.

Lynn’s vehicle was captured on CCTV cameras set up in the mountains at the time of the alleged murders.

But his car was painted a striking dark blue or gray color at the time.

Greg Lynn used a roller to paint his car after allegedly killing two campers

In an interview video shown to the jury, Lynn told detectives after his arrest in November 2021, “Well, she’s seen me paint it before.”

Lynn said he used Dulux Metal Shield to do the paint job, using a “sandbar” color he previously purchased with the intention of painting his Jayco Hawk camper.

“So, you know, ‘Oh, there he goes again, he’s painting his car,'” Lynn told police.

‘When the neighbors saw it, ‘there he goes again, he’s painting his car’. That may seem strange, but as I explained, it’s just a tool.’

Lynn told police his vehicle had 466,000 miles on the odometer and that he had spared no expense to ensure the car ran smoothly.

“And it actually looks pretty decent if you paint it with a nice roller, a good quality roller, it doesn’t look that bad from a distance,” Lynn boasted.

At the time, Lynn had been laid off 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’s enough’ – it was lockdown, no income, stopped, the car needed painting, fit that plan, so I painted that.

‘And look, it’s… the car. To me, most people consider a car as something prestige, but to me it’s just a tool, just like any other tool in the garage, like a hammer or a chainsaw. It just has to be functional.’

Greg Lynn claimed his wife was focusing on the Covid lockdowns while he painted the car

Melanie Lynn took a photo of her husband painting his car. She attended his trial every day

Lynn’s car had been dark gray or blue when he allegedly committed the murders

Lynn told police his wife was preoccupied with Victoria’s first lockdown when he returned from his ill-fated wilderness journey.

‘When I left there, the whole world fell apart. Yes. That was on Sunday,” he told police.

‘I had spoken to her on Saturday and she told me, ‘Greg, the whole country is going into lockdown, this is absolute pandemonium,’ and I said, ‘I could tell something was going on, because of all the cars just driving all sides.”

Lynn told police his wife was more concerned about getting basic supplies during the Covid lockdown than about what he had been up to in the bush.

“And she said, ‘You can’t buy toilet paper, you can’t buy cleaning supplies because the stores are just empty,'” Lynn said.

“When I arrived, she took me to the fridge, and she had a Covid plan there that she got out of the newspaper, and she spent the afternoon telling me what I had missed this past week when the world was shut down – the world fell apart.

“So that’s how that day was spent; she didn’t ask anything about my trip.’

Unbeknownst to Mrs Lynn, her husband had just disposed of two bodies after claiming he had become involved in a deadly scuffle with Mr Hill.

Lynn’s interview report was shown to the jury over two days this week.

It ended with Lynn stating that the campers had died due to a tragic accident.

‘I am innocent of murder. I didn’t behave well, I made some bad decisions. But of murder, as I understand it, I am innocent,” he told investigators after being formally charged with two murders.

Lynn had also taken this rifle with her on the deadly camping trip to the mountains

The 12-gauge shotgun Lynn says Mr. Hill stole from him and accidentally killed Carol Clay

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 that year, Lynn said he set the bodies on fire using skills he learned while working abroad.

“The 90 percent water of the human body was all gone, and the fire was largely self-sustaining, which I was quite shocked by,” he said.

“I’ve been to India and Nepal many times, I’ve been to the temples there, they have the crematoria, and I’ve seen them cremate people right before my eyes.”

Unlike those crematoria, which Lynn claimed used two tons of wood, he only had to use about 20 kg and two liters of kerosene to burn 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 of it there was – I had to poke around a little bit towards the end to find it bringing it all together,” Lynn said.

“And I added a few sticks along the way, but there was… there was nothing at the end. Nothing larger than 20 millimeters in length.”

Detectives would not place tracking devices in Lynn’s vehicle until weeks later.

The process continues.