Western Australian police have opened a new investigation into the state’s most notorious murder of the past decade.
It has been eight years since Corryn Rayney, a supreme court registrar, was found dead in Kings Park in Perth, and three since her husband, barrister Lloyd Rayney, was found not guilty of her murder.
On Monday, just days after Lloyd Rayney was acquitted on charges of tapping Corryn’s phone in the weeks before her death, police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan announced he had authorised a cold case review to cast a “fresh pair of eyes” over the investigation.
The murder
Corryn Rayney, 44, was last seen leaving a boot-scooting class at Bentley Community Centre on 7 August 2007. Her body was found nine days later, on 15 August, buried head-first in Kings Park. At the 2012 murder trial, chief justice Wayne Martin concluded that Rayney had been attacked somewhere between that class and her home in Como, about 7km away, and that the attack had left her unconscious. Martin said pollen apparently from Kings Park found in Rayney’s lungs during the post-mortem examination indicated she “probably took her last breaths at Kings Park”.
Her husband, Lloyd Rayney, now 53, was charged with her murder in 2010.
Trial and appeal
Lloyd Rayney was prosecuted in a three-month-long judge-only trial after arguing that he would not get a fair trial in front of a West Australian jury. Because of the couple’s prominence in legal circles – Corryn worked as a supreme court registrar and Rayney had previously worked as a state prosecutor – the case was heard by former Northern Territory chief justice Brian Martin.
Martin found Rayney not guilty of both murder and manslaughter.
In an 11-page statement released alongside his lengthy judgment, Martin said the state’s case was “beset by improbabilities and uncertainties” and lacking in “crucial evidence”.
He dismissed the argument of Rayney’s legal team that police had conducted “a narrowly focused investigation which was biased against him”, but that dismissal was not a show of confidence in WA police.
“While there were instances of unacceptable conduct by some investigators ranging from inappropriate to reprehensible, there is no evidence that lines of inquiry were not properly investigated,” Martin said.
The case against Lloyd Rayney relied on circumstantial evidence and a tight timeline. Police alleged that he killed Corryn at their home after she returned from boot-scooting – about 9.45pm – but before their eldest daughter, Caitlyn, then 13, returned from a friend’s house between 10.40pm and 11pm. The couple’s youngest daughter, Sarah, then aged 10, was at home – she fell asleep some time between 9.30pm and 10pm.
The state argued that Rayney killed Corryn, hid her body at the side of the house and then moved her car in the hour or so before Caitlyn returned home. After Caitlyn fell asleep, at about midnight, the suggestion was that Rayney walked back to his wife’s car, drove it to the house, dragged her body on to the back seat and drove it to Kings Park, picking up a shovel on the way, the shovels at his house having been recently lent to a friend.
Martin said it appeared clear that whoever dumped Corryn’s body had used her car and scraped the underside of it on the bollards on Lovekin Drive when leaving Kings Park, ripping a hole in the transmission oil sump. The car leaked oil until the engine failed on Kershaw Street, where it was found abandoned a week later. Police later followed that oil trail to find the burial site.
In his judgment, Martin argued that Rayney, standing at 174cm high and then weighing 67kg, was in a “soft physical condition” from his sedentary legal career and history of back problems and would have had a “difficult task” moving 78kg Corryn.
Martin also reasoned it would be surprising for Rayney to drive Corryn’s car, which was noisy and revving because of the oil leak, down Kershaw Street, where a number of his legal acquaintances lived. It would have taken him 90 minutes to walk home from there. Rayney took his children to school the next morning and then appeared as counsel at a Corruption and Crime Commission hearing. Martin remarked that if Rayney had “engaged in the dreadful and exhausting course of behaviour which the state attributes to him, it is highly improbable that he would not have exhibited some sign, however slight, of the effects of the night’s arduous and traumatic events”.
Martin said that key evidence of the state’s case – a dinner place card bearing Lloyd Rayney’s name, found in Kings Park near the gravesite, and a large volume of evidence about marital issues, an extramarital affair and financial issues caused by Lloyd Rayney’s gambling addiction – while “apparently incriminating”, were not enough to prove guilt.
He also criticised police for failing to consider the possibility that the attack on Corryn, who was found in a ripped shirt and unzipped jeans, was sexually motivated.
The state appealed against the verdict in 2013, calling in the NSW director of public prosecutions to conduct the case in front of three interstate judges on the grounds that Martin had not properly considered the circumstantial evidence. The appeal was dismissed.
Other suspects
In August 2014, Channel Seven aired a documentary called The Lloyd Rayney Story, which was produced with Rayney’s cooperation and featured his first interview since being acquitted. It focused on two convicted sex offenders who had been identified by his defence team in the trial as possible suspects who had been overlooked by police.
The trial mentioned that the DNA from one of the men was found on a cigarette butt outside Rayney’s home. One of the men was also pulled over for a random breath test in a suburb near Como on the night Corryn Rayney is believed to have been murdered.
Robert Napper, a former British detective and member of Rayney’s defence team, told the documentary team that police who conducted the random breath test noted the man had injuries to his hands and sand in his car. He was arrested for traffic offences but not forensically tested.
Rayney used the documentary to call for a cold case review, saying there should be a renewed investigation but “not by the same investigators who stuffed this up”.
“It needs to be new blood, new people with sufficient experience to get it right,” he said in an interview for the documentary.
“The police had a chance to solve this crime and that was for everyone’s benefit and for the benefit of Corryn. They owed it to her to get it right. They owed it to my children.
“They owed it to everybody that knew and loved Corryn and they didn’t do it, and I find that really hard to forgive, all of the things that they should have done and didn’t do.”
The cold case review
WA police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan has appointed Gary Budge, one of his assistant commissioners, to head a case review. Budge will be given access to all police files relating to the original investigation and a recent review of the case. He will be able to call on a team of investigators, which is likely to include detectives from interstate. The only restriction O’Callaghan has placed on him is that they must not have been involved in the previous investigation. The case will be reopened with the help of an independent forensic expert, who is yet to be appointed. The investigation will not be based in a WA police building.
At a press conference on Monday, O’Callaghan said the cold case review should not be taken as a criticism of the previous investigation, and was at pains to point out that a WA Corruption and Crime Commission investigation found “no misconduct” with the earlier police work. However, he said a review was needed to restore public confidence in WA police.
“The main game here is to find out who killed Corryn Ryaney for her loved ones and her family. But part of the investigation is also about preserving public confidence in the way we go about our business and being able to say, hand on heart, that we have done the best job possible and investigated every possible angle in this murder case,” he said.
O’Callaghan said he was unable to announce the review until other criminal matters involving Rayney had been dealt with. Last week a district court judge found Rayney had no case to answer on charges of tapping Corryn’s phone in the weeks before her death. A multimillion dollar confidential defamation suit is ongoing.
Rayney and his chief legal counsel, David Edwardson QC, told reporters on Monday they were sceptical about the review, which would just be “police investigating police”.
The length and cost of the review is expected to be announced in a few weeks.
