The evening air has cooled down Tahmoor. Rachael Taylor, Hammond's niece, sits in her front yard with her partner, Mitchell Briggs. Both are in their mid-20s. Briggs has Ned Kelly's gun inked on his arm. Taylor was Hammond's last remaining relative in Tahmoor. Everyone else left long ago.
Taylor says that a few years back, Hammond headed off to find his birth mother and father. "I think for him it was about accepting himself. [It] was something he was striving for, for a long time. He tried to track down his real mother also for the sake of verifying his indigenous status."
Hammond did find his mother and he did get his verification paperwork. His Aboriginality, Taylor says, played into the town's resentment, but in an unusual way.
An old Aboriginal woman lived in his home before he did. It was public housing set aside for indigenous people. When she died, and Hammond moved in, her family was furious. Hammond's skin is too light, the family seethed at everyone in town: "He's called himself Aboriginal and he's not!" Another reason for the people of Tahmoor to hate Scott Hammond.
Rachael Taylor loved her uncle, however, and checked up on him all the time. Since his murder, the police had left her in the lurch. "I just want someone to call me back, please," she says sadly. "I've left numerous messages, just asking. Especially around the time of his birthday."
The police did spend quite a few hours with Taylor right after the murder, though. They wanted information out of her, and in the course of this, she got information out of them.
The police told her that there was continuous brutal force to Scott Hammond's head with a blunt object. That the bashing was so severe his eye popped out and he lost part of his ear. That the injuries were to the back of his head, which meant he might not have seen it coming.
"It was someone he knew," Briggs says, scratching his Ned Kelly gun.
"He had that house monitored like Fort Knox," Taylor explains. "If you were let into his house, he trusted you. The police said there was no break and enter. It was someone who he knew and trusted, or someone who was already in the house."
"Do you have your suspicions?" I ask.
"I do."
Taylor gives me a name. "He has known my uncle for a long time; he was the last one who was seen walking out of the house."
A neighbour spotted this man leaving the house, at a time the police believe Hammond was dead. The neighbour asked the man where Hammond was. The man said he was inside doing the dishes. Scott Hammond was famous for living in filth. Doing the dishes didn't sound like a very Scotty thing.
The police thought that more than one person was involved. And that they had been let in via the back door, where, unlike the front entrance, there were no surveillance cameras.
"They found the dog, the red-nose pit bull, with a broken back," Briggs says.
The killer, or killers, had chucked the dog, still alive but immobilised, on Hammond's body. Briggs thinks they would have broken the dog's back before they got to Hammond to stop it from savaging them while trying to protect its master.
There were possible witnesses to the murder but they're of limited help. Briggs leads me to them - cockatoos in the garage. Explains Briggs, "They were in the house with him all the time, so there's some pretty crazy things they say, just anything, all schizo sayings.
"It's full sentences, because Scotty was diagnosed with schizophrenia, so he'd sit there by himself and rant and rave. Sometimes it's real creepy."
"Shut the f...in' door, you c...," is one of the bird's favourite refrains.
Back at my motel room, attached to the pub, I track down The Last Man To Leave The House on the internet. His profile picture shows him huddled up with blokes wearing outlaw motorcycle club tops. He is tucked up the back, so I can't see if he is wearing one himself.
The next morning I find a woman purporting to be the girlfriend of The Last Man To Leave The House. "Definitely was not him," she says, defending her man. "He loved Scott too much." She tells me her boyfriend met Hammond in jail long ago. Hammond was serving time for his part in the car crash that killed his girlfriend.
I ask her why her boyfriend was in jail. "I think the first time he cut someone's ear off," she says.
"But isn't someone who could cut someone's ear off," I say, "someone who could whack Scott?"
"He was doing it for somebody else, not for himself, " she tells me, convinced this was a comforting explanation. "I've never seen him angry."
"He's not going to cut off my ear for writing a story?" I ask.
"No, he's calmed down in his old age."
She says she passes by Hammond's old house most days. "He's still in there - there's no way he's not there. And he's an angry ghost, too."
Around the streets, I hear versions of one particular story. Hammond wanted to leave Tahmoor because he hated how people treated him. He was saving his money to buy land up north, somewhere tropical.
He lived off the proceeds of selling dope, but he never spent a cent of his pension. This he secured in a tin and he had accumulated tens of thousands of dollars. The tin was hidden somewhere in Tahmoor and no one knew where.
Some people told me that there wasn't an actual hidden treasure, but that it was a strong enough myth to motivate a murder. I was told that Hammond's lover at the time, a girl who worked at a local shop, was visited by people after the murder. They were convinced she knew where the treasure was buried. That it was under some house nearby. She has since left town.
"The story is for Good Weekend," I tell a muscular guy stacking his belongings in a truck, moving out of home.
"Yeah?" he says squinting. "Oh, you don't have any good weekends out here, mate, I can tell you."
A few locals have told me I should visit this man, to find out more about the murder. "And so ..." I say.
"I've got nothing to say, mate. He was my drug dealer. I used to score pot, that's it."
"Yeah, but it seems ..."
"Can't help you, mate," he snaps.
I drop my voice to a whisper. I tell him what people have told me. That he and another bloke helped The Last Man To Leave The House kill Hammond. The Last Man was already inside and had creaked open the back door and let them in.
"Yeah?" he says, very interested.
"That's one version I heard."
"They'll never know," he says.
"They'll never know?"
"No," he snaps. "And best you better get off my lawn before you piss me off even more now."
Not long after this encounter, I track down another bloke some thought could have been an accomplice to The Last Man. He was sitting under a tree by the railway line, equally unhappy to see me. "What makes you think I know anything?" he asks.
I tell him that people around town have pointed the finger at him.
He demands names. I say I didn't take their names.
"That's 100 per cent not the story, but yeah, whoever's spinning you that shit I'll f...in' go and kill them, mate."
Seemingly out of nowhere, a car drifts up and stops by the tree. "Stay out of the f...in' street, stay away," the man warns. He jumps into the car. It takes off, leaving me alone by the railway line.