By Elise Kinsella
Updated 19 Jul 2020, 12:54pm
Published 19 Jul 2020, 4:55am
It's not unusual for people to get lost in Victoria's remote and rugged High Country - but it is strange for them to remain missing. In the past 12 months, four people have disappeared within a 60-kilometre radius, leaving police and locals baffled.
It's what wasn't found in the search for Russell Hill and Carol Clay that stands out to Detective Inspector Andrew Stamper.
The veteran officer knows the pair's camping trip had initially gone to plan.
Russell picked Carol up from her house in Pakenham on the outskirts of Melbourne on March 19 and the pair headed east, bound for the remote Wonnangatta Valley.
Russell, 74, and Carol, 73, had given slightly different return dates to their families, a point Inspector Stamper puts down to Russell having a fairly flexible schedule.
It's also true that Russell's family, including his wife, thought he was camping alone.
Friends say since Russell's retirement two years ago, he's been known to head off on solo road trips.
It was only with his disappearance that those close to him learnt that Carol, a former Country Women's Association president, was on some of those getaways.
After their disappearance, police were asked if the pair, who have reportedly known each other for more than 20 years, could have run away together.
Detective Inspector Andrew Stamper is leading the investigation into the disappearance of Russell Hill and Carol Clay.
It's a prospect Inspector Stamper sees as "highly unlikely".
"I mean these were two people who were very close with their families, had good, independent, comfortable lives," he says.
"They are not in my view people who are just going to decide to run away and live off the grid somewhere."
Russell and Carol are among four people who have gone missing over the past 12 months within a 60-kilometre radius of each other as the crow flies.
The others are Niels Becker, who did not return from a hike near Mount Stirling in October, and Conrad Whitlock, who was last seen on Mount Buller last July.
The Wonnangatta Valley lies between Mt Buller and Mt Hotham in the Victorian High Country.
The Wonnangatta Valley lies in the dense bushland between the popular ski resorts of Mount Buller and Mount Hotham.
You can only access the valley with a 4WD and in winter the roads are completely closed.
On this trip, Russell drove into the valley on a rough 4WD path known as the Zeka Spur Track, a road he'd built decades earlier while working as a contract logger.
The valley is a place with a dark history.
Sometime in December 1917 or January 1918, the manager of the Wonnangatta cattle station, James Barclay, was shot dead.
James Barclay was the manager at the Wonnangatta Station, considered one of the most isolated homesteads in Victoria, when he was murdered.
The station cook John Banford was suspected of the murder, but in November of 1918 he was also found dead with a bullet lodged in his skull.
The murders have remained unsolved for the past century.
Wonnangatta Valley has become a sort of dark tourism attraction - a spot where campers can sit around a fire in the black of night and scare each other with ghost stories.
The trip to Wonnangatta Valley was Russell's third visit to the region in a month.
At the end of February, he and Carol had travelled through the High Country, stopping at a camping spot called Pikes Flat, about 60km from the Wonnangatta Valley.
Then on March 11, Russell told friends and family he was heading to camp alone on the King Billy Track between Wonnangatta and Mount Buller.
Russell's friend of almost 30 years, Robbie Ashlin, says it was on the King Billy Track about a year earlier that Russell and another mate had an encounter with a bushman who has been dubbed the Button Man.
He's a man who reportedly spends weeks camping alone in that remote country and gets his nickname from his habit of shaving down deer antlers to make buttons.
Robbie says Russell encountered a man who was "agitated" and "let them know he didn't want them to be camping there".
"They just called him the angry deer hunter because they didn't know him as anything else".
But others see this elusive bushman differently.
Roxanne had a holiday house in Mansfield, one of the nearest towns to the Wonnangatta Valley, and would run into the Button Man while shopping at the supermarket.
She describes a man in a torn duffle coat who was always friendly to her and her son and would chat to supermarket staff and locals on the main street.
"I just saw a guy who was down on his luck," she says.
She thought he simply looked like a man without a home.
Inspector Stamper says police have spoken to a number of people who live in or spend time in the bushland around the Wonnangatta Valley, including some with "concerning and anti-social habits".
But the detective says police have no suspects, and have not been able to connect anyone with the disappearance of Russell and Carol, or any of the other disappearances in the area.
Robbie Ashlin (centre) and Russell Hill (right) were in a radio club that would camp together.
Robbie Ashlin is the last person known to have spoken to Russell.
They were part of an amateur radio club that would chat on their radios each day at 6:00pm.
The group is made up of men who like camping, hunting and fishing: outdoors types who use the radio to communicate when they are out of phone reception.
On the night of March 20, while Russell and Carol were camping in the Wonnangatta Valley, Russell spoke to three or four club members including Robbie.
When Robbie didn't hear from Russell the next night, he wasn't worried.
"But when he was missing the second and the third night that is when I said to his wife, "It's time to go to the police.""
Russell Hill and Carol Clay's campsite was discovered burnt on March 21 and arson detectives have been unable to determine the cause.
When police got to Russell's camp they found the remains of a fire that had burnt so hot it had swallowed up his tent and left black stains down the side of his 4WD.
There was no trace of Russell or Carol.
Police have since narrowed their disappearance down to an 18-hour window between that radio call that ended at 6:30pm on March 20, and 2:00pm the next day, when other campers came upon the burnt campsite.
Police chemists have not been able to determine the cause of the fire, but Inspector Stamper says it is being treated as suspicious.
"The fire is a big part of what makes us concerned about this incident."
Russell's drone has become an object of intense interest to the police investigating his disappearance.
Most of Russell and Carol's belongings were found in Russell's distinctive 4WD.
The only things police couldn't account for were Russell's drone and his mobile phone.
Inspector Stamper says both items could have been destroyed beyond recognition in the fire, but it would have been out of character for Russell to leave expensive items in a tent.
Friends say Russell Hill never ventured too far from his campsite while out in the bush.
Russell's drone has become an object of intense interest to the police and an object of intense speculation for the public.
There are plenty of people in the High Country who will tell you Russell and Carol would be alive if not for that drone.
As Roxanne, the holiday-house owner in Mansfield puts it, there are lots of people worried that Russell accidentally saw something he wasn?t meant to while flying the drone overhead.
What she's referring to is a drug crop.
The theory might sound wild, but others in Victoria will remember the case of hiker Warren Meyer, who disappeared in the Yarra Ranges National Park in 2008.
Warren Meyer was 57 years old when he went missing during a hike near Healesville in 2008.
Police found a cannabis crop while searching for him, and later received a tip-off alleging he was murdered when he stumbled across a marijuana operation.
Could something similar have happened to Russell and Carol?
"We know the community has those concerns," Inspector Stamper says.
But he says police are not aware of any drug activity in the area, and the search effort - which involved rescuers on foot and horseback as well as helicopters and drones - had found no evidence of a drug crop.
The other issue that casts doubt on this theory is the drone itself.
Russell had an app on his phone for the drone, but had not uploaded any footage to his account from that Wonnangatta trip.
Another theory is that if Russell's drone went down in bushland, the pair might have got lost looking for it.
But police have not been able to find any flight path data from the trip.
While Inspector Stamper says that doesn't mean a flight didn't occur, it does mean if it did happen, it's a flight that has also left no digital trace.
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