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We are peering down a mineshaft with a device born of bush mechanics. It’s a GoPro in a bucket with two torches strapped on top.
It’s very MacGyver … but it works surprisingly well.
What we’re looking for in this abandoned shaft isn't gold…
Armed with a shovel, a drone, and the GoPro, Britney Keegans thinks she might be able to do what the police have failed to achieve for eight long years: to find her mum's remains.
Three people went prospecting in the West Australian outback. Only one came home. Now the family are taking the investigation into their own hands.
Back in March 2015, Britney's mum, Jennie Kehlet, went gold prospecting with her husband, Ray, and their friend, Graham Milne, about 700 kilometres north-east of Perth.
Of the three, only Graham came home.
Ray's body was found down a long-abandoned shaft not far from their camp.
Jennie has never been found.
A coroner later found Ray's death was a homicide and Britney thinks her mother may have met the same fate.
"There are so many unknowns and your imagination gets really messed up when you start thinking about their last moments," Britney says.
"Like if they were scared, if they knew what was going on."
This is something close to home for one of the reporters on this story — Ashleigh Davis.
Britney is Ashleigh's step-sister and Jennie was part of their big, blended family.
Ashleigh has decided to investigate what happened because it's been eight years and no-one has been charged over Ray or Jennie's deaths.
What happened to Ray and Jennie Kehlet remains an unanswered question — and their families worry that's partly because of how the original investigation played out.
Forensic experts have told Background Briefing a failure to treat the case as a potential homicide early on means evidence could have been overlooked.
"I have very strong feelings that [the investigation] was absolutely just a shambles from the beginning," Britney says.
"Any chance of any kind of evidence being found was corrupted or destroyed immediately with the lack of care, the lack of listening to the family when we were saying this isn't a normal missing persons case — there's more to this."
But the family has been given fresh hope.
An army veteran with experience in search and rescue has volunteered to undertake a thorough search of the area to look for clues that could take the case forward.
Together they've uncovered potential pieces of evidence they will submit to police.
And the government is now offering a substantial reward — one of the highest in the state's history — for information that could lead to a conviction.
Ray and Jennie disappear
Ray and Jennie were regular country people. They lived on a small farm in Beverley, about an hour and a half drive outside Perth.
The couple worked together at a mine up north, and did everything with their loyal rescue dog, Ella the Great Dane.
Friends and family describe them as "laminated together".
When Jennie and Ray set off in March 2015, they told family and friends they would be out of phone range for 10 days and not to worry if they weren't in touch.
"This whole trip was kind of secretive, it was all, you know, don't tell anyone where we're going because it's a secret, you know, big money is involved," Britney says.
"And so I hadn't really been told all that many details apart from Mum and Ray were going away on a camping trip and were super excited."
At first, they were camping with their friend Graham.
But he told an inquest in 2020 that he got frustrated with their dog chasing wildlife, and went off prospecting on his own.
He says he returned to camp 18-20 hours later, in the early hours of March 22.
Graham says he assumed Jennie and Ray were asleep, so he packed up his stuff without saying goodbye, and took off to Perth.
Five days later, the couple's dog Ella showed up dehydrated and hungry at a caravan park in Sandstone.
Council workers contacted the Kehlets' family, who reported them missing to police.
When police found the Kehlets' campsite, about 30 kilometres south of Sandstone, it seemed like they had left abruptly.
There were clothes on the line, cups of half-drunk tea, food left out to spoil. Both of their cars had the keys in the ignition and the windows were down.
Ray's car was a bit of a mess — there were clothes and cartons of cigarettes strewn around the back seat, even though Ray didn't smoke — Jennie did.
A wasp nest had formed inside the car.
Ray's two guns were found in his unlocked car — which his family says was strange as he was over the top about gun safety.
One rifle was found loaded and unsecured.
Police also found a hand-drawn map in Jennie's backpack.
The mineshaft where Ray's body was eventually found could be interpreted as the "first hole" marked on the map.
The Kehlets' quad bike was found about 500 metres from camp, off the path and partially hidden in bushes.
Despite the curious state of the camp, police initially treated the investigation as a missing persons' case and not a potential homicide.
But that never sat right with the family: Jennie and Ray were experienced campers, and Ray was famed for his uncanny sense of direction.
A massive land and air search was launched by emergency services.
But no trace of Jennie was found.
The narrative shifts
As time went by, police started to consider a more sinister explanation.
At a press conference held in October 2015, six months after the Kehlets disappearance, they announced they were now looking to rule out foul play.
In November, Graham Milne was taken into custody where he was interviewed by police for 12 hours.
He had been questioned several months earlier, but evidence had come to light which the police wanted to ask him about.
His home was also searched extensively.
The next day he was released without charge.
During his first interview, he told police he took a sealed road from the campsite home to Perth on the day it's believed Jennie and Ray died.
But his GPS data told a different story, locating him just off the remote gravel Paynes Find-Sandstone Road, a few hundred kilometres south of the campsite.
Confronted with this discrepancy, Graham told police he had lied in his original interview.
"Okay. I lied about the GPS," he told police in the subsequent statement, which was read in the Perth Coroner's Court.
"I'm a dickhead for trying to pull the wool over your eyes, so to speak.
"I was going to go back to camp and I don't know why — I don't know what I was thinking at the time, why I done it."
He told the Perth Coroner's Court he originally lied to police about this diversion "because it made me out to be an idiot … it was embarrassing".
When asked in court why he would turn up the Paynes Find to Sandstone Road, he said he had decided to "stick with" Ray and Jennie and was taking that road to return to their campsite.
But then after only driving back a short way, he changed his mind again, as he was due to go to work, so turned around and headed back to Perth.
A senior detective, Stephen Cleal, told the inquest that at one point Graham was the only "person of interest", but his request to lay charges was knocked back by prosecutors, who maintained there was not enough evidence.
Britney's journey
Eight years after her mum disappeared, Britney is revisiting the place where Graham says he last saw them.
Britney and her partner, Alex Struwig, have been driving up and down the Paynes Find-Sandstone Road, stopping anywhere someone might pull in to dispose of a body.
And the possibilities in this vast stretch of desert are endless.
There are caves and wells and over a hundred abandoned mine shafts from the gold rush days: ready-made graves.
Britney and Alex send their makeshift GoPro contraption into these places to see what they can find.
The pair go to the mineshaft where Ray's body was found, about 1.8-kilometres north of their campsite.
They lower their GoPro down.
The shaft is 12 metres deep and balloons out at the bottom.
Ray was found laying on his back, with his arms by his side, and away from the opening.
He had broad blunt force trauma across the left side of his face, neck, and back. Two fingers on his right hand were completely shattered and a small bone in his neck — the hyoid bone — was broken.
Three cigarette butts were seen by the mineshaft his body was retrieved from.
The butts were not collected or DNA tested by police for another month. But when the results came back, they showed Graham's DNA on one, and Jennie's on the other two.
Graham told the inquest he had never stopped outside this particular mineshaft or smoked a cigarette there with Jennie — but the coroner found it was "one inference that may reasonably be drawn".
Graham, Jennie and Ray's DNA was also detected on a water bottle found beside Ray's body at the bottom of the mineshaft. He said this could have been because they shared water bottles.
What lies in the dust
Britney's an aged care worker, and Alex sells cars.
Neither have any professional skills to search for Jennie's remains.
But there's someone who might be able to help.
A man named Rick, who thinks there might still be evidence up here eight years later.
His interest has given Britney hope for the first time in years.
"To know somebody's out here looking, when nobody else is, is really comforting," she says.
Rick, Britney and Alex meet at the southern end of the Paynes Find-Sandstone Road, where detective Stephen Cleal told the coronial inquest he thought Jennie's remains might lie.
"The investigation around that GPS point … that's an area that [Graham] Milne denied being at initially and on a road he said he didn't go down, so it was obviously of interest," he told the inquest.
Rick is a rugged, wiry guy with a knife and handheld GPS hanging from his utility belt.
His extensive set-up suggests he could live off-grid for weeks.
He says he spent more than 10 years in the army in "intelligence gathering and surveillance" and has volunteered with the Queensland SES.
He asks us not to use his surname because he's worried about retribution from the person responsible for the homicide.
There's a lot of weird stuff up this way.
There are piles of bones, bullets, hundred-year-old cans, an old stained shirt, and even a thruppence.
About 500 metres from the main road, Britney and Alex find something they want Rick's opinion on: a tarp with a sticky brown substance on it.
They think it could be blood.
"That's what it looks like," Rick says.
"It may not be sticky after the time frame we're looking at … it goes black and it does turn into a syrup."
After a closer inspection, he concludes it's probably tar, but adds it to the collection just in case.
Rick says he will hand some "items of interest" he's collected to police in Perth, but stresses he's only using his best judgement as to their significance.
"I'll just deliver them to my police point of contact and it's up to them how they deal with it," he says.
Rick's pretty excited about some of the other things he's found, but won't say what they are, in case broadcasting the details tips off the killer.
But Britney wonders why these items weren't bagged and tagged by police back in 2015.
The shotgun casing
Five days after the couple were reported missing, police bundled Jennie and Ray's belongings into their cars and asked the family to take them back to Perth.
Back in 2015, Brit was unpacking it back home when she found something strange: a shotgun shell.
So she called police.
"They said it was worthless, it was nothing," she says.
For years, Britney thought she'd chucked the shell in the bin.
But after digging around in a box full of her mum's belongings, she found the shell sitting there after all.
She's been wondering whether to present it to police once more.
Background Briefing asked WA Police why the shell wasn't taken as evidence back in 2015.
It said because the investigation was active and ongoing it did not wish to comment.
We asked if they wanted to see it now that it had been found, but they didn't respond.
But someone with inside knowledge of the investigation had a strong view.
The insider
Mark Reynolds is a towering man who speaks with an authoritative baritone of his three decades working for WA Police.
As he learned of the shotgun shell, his mouth fell open.
"They told her to throw it in the bin and it came out of the belongings packed up at the camp? I'm flabbergasted," Dr Reynolds says.
"That's the first I've heard of it, too, by the way."
Dr Reynolds wrote his PhD on blood pattern analysis and gave evidence at the coronial inquest about the blood patterns on Ray's boots.
He's now an independent consultant, but when the Kehlets went missing, he was a senior forensic science consultant and the manager of quality assurance for WA Police — "making sure whatever forensic work came out of the police was grounded on good science".
He says Britney should again try to hand the shotgun shell to police as it would "absolutely" still have value.
"And whoever told her to throw it in the bin needs to be retrained," he says.
"I don't know what to say. Unfortunately, another criticism of the handling of this by the WA police."
The report
Dr Reynolds says when he first reviewed the case in 2015, alarm bells were ringing.
An examination of Ray's boots suggested he stood in a pool of his own blood before being incapacitated.
This, plus the cigarette butts found, the state of the campsite, and Ella the dog wandering into town all pointed to something more than "missing people" to Dr Reynolds.
"The holos of it all becomes greater than the sum of its parts," he says.
"That's when I think experience and common sense comes into play, and it gets to the point where you've just got to say, 'Look, enough's enough'.
"'What do you need before you realise that this potentially is a double homicide?'"
But Dr Reynolds says his report in July 2015 asking for the investigation to be treated as a homicide "wasn't favourably received".
"Let me just say, culturally, within the police service, they don't like things going to paper because it becomes harder to deal with.
"Where the offence or where the incident occurred is out in the middle of nowhere.
"So, straightaway, anybody that's going to say, 'Hey … we think there's circumstances of criminality and we're going to call this for a homicide or a double homicide', they're going to spend a significant amount of money and there will be significant pressure … to be damn sure."
The outside forensics expert
Hayden Green served with WA Police for 40 years including as head of its statewide forensics division. He's now an adjunct associate professor at the University of Western Australia.
He had nothing to do with the Kehlet investigation, but reviewed the coronial inquest for Background Briefing so he could provide his expert opinion.
He questions why it wasn't treated as a suspected homicide from day one.
"You might understand a prospector by him or herself goes wandering into the bush … But when you get two people [who] go missing at the same time, that to me says that there is something more going on here," he says.
Dr Green says because the top of the mine shaft did not appear to have been treated as a crime scene until some time after Ray's body was found, things could have been missed.
But he also stressed it was important to remember this wasn't a typical crime scene, "where it's nice, enclosed and easily identifiable".
"This was an enormous crime scene and one where rightly, I think, the police said, 'Alright, first up, let's see if we can find someone alive in this, and if that means the crime scene gets messed up, then so be it'."
Police invested significant resources into the search, with scores of personnel in the heat and dust and more than 100 dangerous mineshafts to clear.
By October, police had reportedly completed one external and two internal reviews into their original search to make sure they didn't miss anything.
The WA Coroner, Ros Fogliani, noted the logistical difficulties of a large-scale air and land search in a remote location with no mobile reception or infrastructure.
She was satisfied the search areas were appropriately chosen.
"This does not mean that there are no bases for future searches," Ms Fogliani wrote.
"The matter ought to be kept open and under continued consideration by police."
The coroner also noted it was appropriate to initially treat Jennie and Ray's disappearance as a missing persons' case.
But Ray and Jennie's family members think it took too long for foul play to be seriously considered.
Background Briefing asked WA Police why it took so long to treat the case as a homicide, whether it was because of costs associated with the remote location, and if police procedures had changed since.
WA Police responded, "As the investigation is still open and being actively worked on, we are unable to provide any comment".
Two days later, the state government announced it would increase the reward for information about 64 unsolved cases — including Jennie and Rays'.
Because there are two people involved, their case offers one of the highest rewards: $2 million.
WA Police Commissioner, Col Blanch, fronted a press conference about the rewards. Background Briefing asked whether the Kehlet family were owed an apology.
"I could never understand what they are feeling, the grief that all of these victims' families go through," the commissioner said.
"These are tragedies in Western Australian history.
"The coroner did make recommendations — in the recommendations he made for police was to do a better land search with multiple forward commanders and that was the outcome of that coronial inquest.
"We always aim to improve our policing practices and I think over the years you've seen significant improvements in the way we do land searches, the way we investigate crime.
"Every detail that we apply to evidence over the years has always improved. My job as commissioner is to keep that improvement going."
But for Britney, those improvements are eight years too late.
She believes her mother's killer is still on the loose.
"It is kind of terrifying — like, has this happened before?
"Are there more people out there that have committed horrendous crimes and are just, you know, wandering around our communities?
"It's very scary."
She'd welcome a conviction, but most of all, she wants to bring her mum home.
"Justice would be excellent, but it doesn't really change anything in the end for me," Britney says.
"Just to have mum and lay her to rest where we scattered Ray's ashes would be really nice.
"That's all that's important now."
Credits
Reporters: Ashleigh Davis and Rebecca Trigger
Digital producer: Sam Nichols
Editor: Annika Blau
Executive producer: Fanou Filali