At this time, there’s no satisfactory answer to the question of “who killed Corryn Rayney?” Her family deserve the truth, and so do those of us who live in Perth.
The state prosecution led a pretty weak case against Lloyd Rayney, and were rightly told off for it by Justice Brian Martin. A circumstantial case is necessary when no-one witnesses a crime. But it still has to meet high standards of evidence, and it should exclude any other theories of how the crime was committed.
Timeline and location
John Agius brought a case which did a good job of proving Corryn made it back to at least the driveway of her home in Como. The seed pods do a lot of work here, although the police nearly ruined that with dodgy evidence handling. But he didn’t prove that Lloyd must have killed her, and didn’t sufficiently rule out anyone else from doing it. There’s no forensic evidence to definitely connect Lloyd to Corryn or the gravesite.
I think the judge was right to point out the very tight and implausible timeline of the prosecution case too. Lloyd would have had to put one daughter to bed, kill his wife, hide her body and car, have a shower, welcome home his other daughter and invite her friends in for a cup of tea, wait for her to go to bed, drive out to Kings Park, bury a body, have engine trouble, walk back from Subiaco to Como, have a shower (I’ve dug Perth sand before and you’ll be completely grey by the end of it) and maybe time for a nap before waking up the next day to pretend he thought his wife had gone to work early. It’s not impossible, but it does sound more like one of Agatha Christie’s Poirot stories that work like clockwork than anything like the real crimes which actually happen in life.
And all this assumes she didn’t make it inside the house – the prosecution led some very unconvincing evidence that she had gone in. They wanted to claim that Corryn’s coat on the bed means she went inside. But it was an office jacket and she was found with a jacket on that was a better style for her bootscooting outfit. If she had gone inside, it just adds to the length of time needed for their version of events.
Physical evidence
For me, the car is very important to figuring out what happened. If it weren’t for the damage to the transmission making an oil trail to Kings Park, Corryn would not have been found for many years (if ever). The gravesite was hidden by leaves and scrub, in bushland a few metres away from a sandy track used mostly by joggers, which itself led off a little-used section of road. It wasn’t the kind of place people stopped for a picnic or to socialise, unlike many other parts of the park. The placecard discovered on the sandy track was found by people who were very unfortunately looking for clues to their son’s suicide not far away a few weeks earlier. They wouldn’t normally have been there. And if the gravesite hadn’t been found, the card would’ve just been a strange coincidence.
So where would the killer have put the car if it hadn’t broken down? It seems they were heading away from the Rayney home before the transmission problem became obvious, but that isn’t certain. You could leave it at the airport, or maybe the country rail station at East Perth. Or you could drive it into the ocean as was done with Julie Cutler’s car many years ago. You could take it back to the bootscooting venue, or leave it outside someone’s house if you wanted to incriminate them. Police did look at lawyers who lived in Kershaw Street who knew the Rayney’s. Or what about her work parking space? There are plenty of options.
No matter what was done with it, I believe the plan was to hide the fact that Corryn had been killed. If her car had been found somewhere plausible, you’d have a lot of options for investigation that wouldn’t have led to any result. Her disappearance would remain a mystery.
And this is one of the reasons why I don’t think this was a rapist who deliberately or accidentally killed Corryn. Why try to make a mystery when you could just walk away from the Rayney’s front yard without even leaving much DNA? Other reasons include that she was attacked from behind (damage to neck and head) but had no defensive wounds. I think this indicates a surprise, sudden attack rather than a struggle for compliance.
Although there was a bit of back and forth at trial about her jeans being opened, and her boots being taken off in the car, none of the men suggested what was my first assumption: that she was wearing tight jeans and cowboy boots because they looked good for bootscooting, and as soon as she hopped in the car she made herself more comfortable. Surely half the ladies at that class had done the same thing at least once!
The placecard got a lot of attention in the media but I don’t think it’s very useful. It came from a dinner Lloyd went to, driving his own car. In a family with two kids and two parents working full time, I really wouldn’t be surprised if something Lloyd put in a pocket had gotten dumped on a table and then caught up in whatever bit of paperwork were being piled up and shuffled around in briefcases and school bags and into a car. Or maybe I’m just more of a messy pack-rat than most people! The alternative is that it was in Lloyd’s car or pocket, and sometime between the 8th and the 14th he visited to look at the grave and create litter in Kings Park. I hope no-one wants to introduce his car to the timeline of the 7th August, I don’t think there’s room for it. But the card ends up in Kings Park whether Lloyd is guilty or not.
I feel the same way about the handkerchief found in the grave. It probably came from Corryn or Lloyd’s car, rather than being randomly in a patch of sand in Kings Park. But it doesn’t prove anything either way.
Motive and behaviour
I completely agree with Agius and the police that Lloyd had motive. Justice Martin said Lloyd had accepted that the divorce was going to happen and he would have to provide his financial information to Corryn. But I don’t really see that.
I’ve known plenty of passive people who make a small protest about something they don’t want to do, then seem to agree to it, only to drag their feet and delay the task as long as they possibly can. Sometimes they end up having to do the thing anyway. But just as often they get their own way because the other person gets tired of doing all the work, or eventually the task becomes irrelevant or worthless.
Corryn was willing to stay with Lloyd for the sake of the children if he would just be honest about money. But he passively resisted this, blowing past two deadlines she gave him. So she started putting things in motion for a divorce and he seemed to be willing to lose his marriage over it. On the 2nd August he finally gave some bank information to his lawyer, and agreed to meet Corryn on the 7th to discuss handing over the rest. To me, that just seems like another delaying tactic. If they’d had the meeting, he could easily have said he didn’t realise she wanted this or that, and let’s talk about custody instead.
Friends who were sympathetic to him kept giving him the same advice as his lawyer: show her your finances, move out, see if you can get alternate weeks custody of your daughters. He just really didn’t want to take that advice.
Justice Martin is a respected older white male with a lot of authority. I bet it’s been a long time since anyone tried to put him off with excuses when he asked for something reasonable. Women in particular get this treatment, which is why I think we need more diversity in our courts. People recognise sexism and racism more easily when they’ve experienced it personally first.
In addition to this, Corryn was threatening to ruin Lloyd’s chances of becoming Senior Counsel when he next applied for the job. Lloyd’s defense pointed out, and Justice Martin agreed, that she had no real say in who became Senior Counsel. But obviously she was well-regarded at the Supreme Court and her opinion would carry weight. And if she found any proof of impropriety (like secretly recording conversations?), that could get him enough raised eyebrows that someone else would turn out be a better fit for the job. I suppose lawyers and judges have to pretend that jobs are filled based on purely logical criteria, but personal situations play a big part and I think that affects motive here.
Lloyd also behaved strangely during the investigation – he lied a lot, plus got rid of some of his recordings of Corryn, which he shouldn’t have made in the first place. Most importantly, he refused to give statements to the police and encouraged his daughters to distrust them as well. Their evidence could have made the search for her killer much easier, and preventing it makes him look very suspicious.
But suspicion isn’t proof. All sorts of crappy people doing weird things haven’t committed murder. You have to do more than prove motive to put someone in jail for a crime.
An accomplice?
Since I don’t think a stranger killed Corryn, and I’m taking the police at their word that Corryn and Lloyd didn’t have any enemies, that leaves friends and loved ones. And none of them had the opportunity the way Lloyd did.
But this is where all the difficulties come in if you point at Lloyd. There’s only time for him to do this if he’s fast, decisive and physically strong. He’s a gambler who was known to play long odds, but I don’t think he’s strong enough. Moving a body and digging holes is hard work, while Lloyd is slim and didn’t have a gym habit at the time.
If we assume he had an accomplice though, a lot of the difficulties disappear. He doesn’t have to leave his sleeping daughters or do any hard work. He can call someone to let them know what time Corryn is coming home. That person can lie in wait for her with a weapon and a shovel (or maybe one is the other), make a surprise attack, put her in her car and then take as long as they need in Kings Park. The next morning Lloyd can proceed exactly as he did.
The catch is that damage to the transmission. If the car had been left somewhere that created a mystery, Lloyd could play the grieving husband who just wants closure but struggles on heroically. But whatever the car plan was, it hadn’t gone right. So now he’s got to worry about the possible evidence, and have everyone suspect him because of seed pods and gambling and not letting his daughters help police.
The police must have thought of this. I’m not a fan of the WA Police – see Andrew Mallard and their years-long harassment of a guy who turned out not to be the Claremont Serial Killer, plus one of the cops in this case was jailed on unrelated charges. But they seem to have investigated this possibility. They did question Johnny Montani, a client of Lloyd’s who’s a known career criminal. It doesn’t seem like they were very good at it, though. Allon Lacco and Ivan Eades were also looked at.
I wonder if that’s why it took them three years to arrest Lloyd. They were trying to find or prove an accomplice, and when they couldn’t they decided to just stick to Lloyd. If so, it’s pretty crappy to leave the lawyers with half a case.
It’s possible that Lloyd had a foolproof way of organising crime with a henchman and he was just too good for the cops to beat. It’s also possible I’m completely wrong about this and it was a stranger who killed Corryn. My idea is just as circumstantial as the state prosecutor’s, with even less evidence! I’m not 100% convinced I’m right, and if new evidence turns up someday I’d be happy to be wrong.
In 2015, the Police Commissioner ordered a cold case review of Corryn Rayney’s death. Not enough evidence was found to charge anyone. Perhaps Corryn will never see justice. But I hope one day the truth is revealed, for the sake of her family and loved ones.
Fingerprints 