Police investigating the high-profile murder of a Western Australian woman, Corryn Rayney, have failed to uncover any significant leads despite conducting a year-long new reinvestigation of the nine-year-old homicide.
The WA police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, ordered the case be reinvestigated last year, three years after Rayney’s husband, barrister Lloyd Rayney, was acquitted of her murder.
The original investigators were accused by trial judge Brian Martin of being myopic in their pursuit of Rayney, who was acquitted after a three-month judge-only trial. The supreme court of WA had ruled the case had become so notorious that he would not get a fair trial before a jury.
O’Callaghan said in May 2015 that he had ordered a review in part to restore public confidence in WA police, to allow the organisation to say “hand on heart, that we have done the best job possible and investigated every possible angle in this murder case”.
On Thursday O’Callaghan said the investigation had not produced sufficient evidence to charge anyone with the murder and the case remained unsolved.
“We deeply regret that despite all of our efforts we have not been able to find those much-needed answers [for] Mrs Rayney’s families,” he said.
“Despite the volume of work undertaken, it is an unfortunate reality of many cold case inquiries that the passage of time has taken its toll.”
Corryn Rayney, 44, was last seen leaving a boot-scooting class in the Perth suburb of Bentley on 7 August 2007. Her body was found buried in Kings Park eight days later. A postmortem examination found pollen from the park’s botanical gardens in her lungs, which indicated she “probably took her last breaths at Kings Park”.
After Rayney was acquitted, he and his defence team took part in a documentary which pointed to two other possible suspects which, it was suggested, police had overlooked.
O’Callaghan said the reinvestigation, overseen by assistant commissioner Gary Budge, involved 23 detectives, forensic experts and other investigators, including two senior homicide detectives lent by the New South Wales and Queensland police forces. They reviewed 4,000 exhibits in 420 archive boxes from the original investigation, and sent 850 of those exhibits for further analysis.
The investigation, called “operation delve”, also reviewed 5,000 previous investigative actions, undertook 1,130 new actions, reinvestigated 92 people and examined six primary and 61 secondary forensic scenes.
Fngerprint and DNA samples were taken from 300 people.
“Irrespective of the absence of any criminal charge, what I have been delivered is a properly conducted and thorough investigation,” O’Callaghan said.
“The officers have done their best and it is terribly disappointing we weren’t able to identify the person or persons responsible for Mrs Rayney’s murder and provide much-needed answers for her family.
“But not every police investigation ends with a prosecution and I am comfortable that operation delve has exhausted all current, available leads.”
O’Callaghan said the case would remain open, as a cold case with the special investigations team. It has also been referred to the coroner and will be subject to a coronial inquest.
He said none of the complaints against police handling of the investigation had been substantiated by the organisation’s internal affairs unit.
Lloyd Rayney, who wanted his wife’s murder to be reinvestigated independent of WA police, called for a coronial inquest in 2014.
He told the West Australian on Thursday that the result of the investigation was distressing and disappointing.
“I don’t know what they’ve done, I don’t know what they haven’t done, but all I can say is the result is extremely distressing to me and my family,” he said outside Perth magistrates court.
He did not know the investigation had concluded until after O’Callaghan’s press conference on Thursday, but had been contacted earlier that morning by someone from WA police offering an “update”.
Australian Associated Press contributed to this report
.jpg?w=600)
