Spotlight: Deaths of Ray and Jennie Kehlet leave an outback mystery with two burning questions

Graham Milne must be the luckiest man alive. With an emphasis on the word ‘alive’.

Because his two workmates and camping companions are both dead. I’ve purposefully avoided using the word ‘friends’ as there is some conjecture as to the exact status of their collective relationship.

But in this story — one of the most significant outback mysteries of recent times — words have become very important.

Having had the dubious pleasure of meeting Graham on two separate occasions over the past 10 years, I know that he is a man who chooses to use them sparingly.

But when he does try to verbally elucidate, in official settings, he tends to have a slight problem recollecting which descriptive he’s used before and in which order.

It’s a memory issue that may be beyond a clinical diagnosis but most certainly could do with some analysis by experts in blue uniforms and peaked hats.

Let me explain further.

Ten years ago, Graham convinced Ray and Jennie Kehlet to go prospecting at a potential gold-yielding site he had scoped out near Sandstone, about 750 kilometres north-east of Perth.

They made the eight-hour trip in separate four-wheel drives loaded with all their gear and multiple quad bikes, rendezvousing in Wubin and arriving on a Thursday afternoon.

The way Graham tells it, by the early hours of Sunday morning, he’d had enough and decided to make the lonely drive back home.

It was around 2am and apparently, without waking anyone up, he packed his rig and motored into the blackness and that is where the mystery begins and ends because Graham is the only one of the trio who made it home.

Seventeen days later Ray Kehlet’s body was accidentally discovered — by a police rescue team conducting a media demonstration — at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft about a 1.5km away from their campsite.

To this day, his wife Jennie has never been found, although a WA Coroner has ruled that she is dead.

Now, if you believe Graham’s story, when he left they were sleeping peacefully and there was absolutely no sign of any trouble or hint of a potentially fatal problem.

He would become the lone survivor of a terrible tragedy that somehow claimed two lives for reasons unknown.

And if he hadn’t left when he did? Well, goodness knows how lucky he was to escape the aforementioned tragedy caused by who knows who. But someone — or some people — are clearly still out there, somewhere.

The trouble is, which of Graham’s version should we believe?

Our investigation has uncovered some contradictions in his recollections that would make a seasoned politician blush.

And if we look at his re-telling chronologically, it’s extremely difficult to reconcile.

For example, in the immediate months following the tragedy, Mr Milne made a decision to be interviewed on national television and give his version of events.

This is an excerpt from Seven’s Sunday Night program when Milne’s memory was supposedly crystal clear, in response to a question about Ray Kehlet’s gun, which was found when police arrived at the campsite.

Q; Is there any way you can explain the loaded gun on the back seat of his vehicle?

Milne: I don’t know about his weapons at all. I don’t know whether, I know he carried it when we’re on the quads, but as for those habits, he’s pretty safety conscious. But I don’t know whether it was just a momentary thing that he hasn’t unloaded. I don’t know.

So, Graham Milne simply didn’t know anything about Ray using his gun. And then he doubled down on not knowing anything about seeing anyone else out in the bush while they were camping.

Q: And were there other people around the camp at all? Did you see anyone else or . . .

Milne: No, I didn’t.

That’s fairly definite isn’t it? “No, I didn’t”. In fact, you can’t get much more certain.

But, incredibly those three words morphed into an entirely different story some six years later when the lone survivor was asked to take the stand at the coronial inquest.

Before Coroner Ros Fogilani, Mr Milne changed his mind and remembered not one but two people around the camp, with a clarity that included the make of a motor vehicle.

He told counsel assisting; “We were up on top of the hill. A white, I assume it was a Prado came in. Two guys were in it. They got out. They were looking around. Next thing we heard, there was — I assume it was a low-powered rifle. Because it didn’t sound like a high-velocity weapon.”

So, from seeing nobody, there is now two mysterious men in a Prado. And that’s not where the new detail stopped. Milne then produced a new memory of Ray twice firing his rifle.

He told the inquest: “Ray wanted to set — crack a shot off. Just to let them know on the other side of the hill that there’s someone else in the immediate area. So, I went further off . . . down the track, got my packet of cigarettes out, put it in a tree, went back, told him to take a crack at that. First shot he missed and the second shot, it went straight through dead centre”.

So, what happened to not knowing anything about Ray using his weapon, but simply carrying it on his quad bike?

Milne’s change of story was a stunning turnaround. Even by the wildest neurological analysis at the world’s best brain clinic, it’s one for the ages. To say it should have been examined and challenged more strongly at the inquest is also an understatement of gargantuan proportions.

For Ray and Jennie’s family it’s never too late for the right people to ask the right questions, and let’s hope that happens in the near future.

Last weekend was Ray and Jennie’s birthday. They were a day apart on June 21 and 22, and always celebrated together.

Hopefully one day they can be together again when Jennie is finally brought home. When that happens, for the sake of justice, the cold-blooded killer or killers will be held accountable.

As the sole survivor, Graham Milne is very lucky indeed.

* Watch the 7News Spotlight ‘Mystery Survivor’ special on 7 and 7plus on Sunday night at 8.45pm.