Media Mandates

Video killed the radio star; no charges have been laid. Updates at 7. Over to you in the studio, Rick.

Ray never had any ambition to be famous . . .or, none that I am aware of. Infamous, neither. I am sure that if he was simply missing back then, in March 2015, and was promptly found, he would have been mortified to have cameras and reporters jostling for position to get his statement and broadcast it on the nightly news. 

"Ray Kehlet—country boy and avid outdoorsman—was found alive and well this afternoon after being lost in the Outback for seven days. Tonight at 6pm we will cross live to ask him how that was possible, and why his wife is still missing" could have been the headline.

The media interest in Ray and Jennie's disappearance has caused much angst over the years. It all started with the most nefarious April Fool’s joke of all time. I was working in South Korea, and had just finished my dinner of seventeen kilos of spicy barbecued ribs, washed down with three litres of soju, thus was busy rearranging furniture in our tiny Okpo-Dong apartment so that the route between bed and toilet was without trip-hazard, when my wife, Sally phoned from back home in Perth.

"Your Dad just called," she said. "Apparently Ray is missing somewhere up north. He needed to let us know, because it will likely be all over the news."

"The fek?" I slurred. 

“He doesn’t know too much else,” Sally continued, “no one seems to know much at all. Just that Ray and Jennie were prospecting up north, and have been reported missing. They’ve sent the SES up there to find them. All the news crews are ringing everyone for statements.”

Ray, missing? The thought was ludicrous.

The next morning, April 1, riding with my workmates to the shipyard with a soju-induced hangover, it seemed like it was all just a bad dream. I told my workmates about the call, and they too didn’t seem to register it in reality. Is your bro prone to going missing? No. Not at all. Why would the media be all over it? That was a good question. Yet, sure enough, arriving to work and firing up the interwebs, then started the constant barrage of articles about Ray and Jennie’s Outback Mystery.

Why would the media be all over it? I mean, fair enough now, now that we know that it is legitimately a murder mystery (without the mystery component thanks to the Coroner’s Findings); but, back then they were simply a middle-aged couple who had mysteriously vanished from their remote campsite, flagged missing when their dog, Ella found her way to the Sandstone Caravan Park.

It hardly sounds a pitch for prime news coverage, does it? Especially since their campsite was a full day’s drive from Perth. I cannot fathom one single chief editor from any media outlet signing off on that pitch: “Chief, all I need is a cameraman, a four wheel drive, a satellite dish, and your credit card.”

Chief: “How long will you be away for?”

Reporter: “A day. A week. Not sure. It’s the Outback, time works differently out there. Apparently.”

Chief: “And what will be the story?”

Reporter: “Middle-aged, happily married couple go missing in the Outback.”

Chief: “This is real hard-hitting journalism. Well done. Here, take my platinum amex.”

Is it just me, or does that sound completely bat-shit crazy? Yet, every single media outlet in the state jumped at it. Within a day of the missing persons report, at least four teams of reporters from the varied networks had made their way to Sandstone. Meanwhile, back in Perth, their respective colleagues were all working on obtaining stories from the families.

I was still in South Korea, getting ready to return home to Perth a couple of days later. Sally called: “A reporter from channel seven just parked on our front lawn!”

“What the hell do they want?”

“She wanted a statement from you. They were on our porch poking a camera into our front door!”

"The fek?" I slurred. “How the hell did they get our address?”

“No idea, it’s supposed to be silent. She left a card.”

“Throw it in the bin. I’ll see you Sundee.”

It had not occurred to me at all during those first few days that anything untoward could have happened to Ray and Jennie. Ray, missing was as logical as soju, good for you. For two days it seemed that at any moment someone would call with the appropriate update: “Ray and Jennie were found camped out under a tree near a pool of water. They are safe and well.”

That news never came, and then I hopped on a plane home. Alone with my thoughts and a bar-cart full of cognacs and whiskeys for twelve hours, different scenarios soon filled my mind. By the time I landed in Perth, the world outside matched the internals of my cranium—it had turned to chaos.

Smoking mind-gun — not all clouds have silver linings.

Let’s quickly get some statistics out of the way, because people generally hate math. For the record, I faaarking looove math. You cannot apply subjective opinion to math. Math speaks truth. Argue statistics all you like, math cares naught.

The statistics of missing persons in Australia unfortunately make our family story not at all uncommon. Each year, enough people to half-fill Optus Stadium are listed as missing persons. One-in-twenty of those then go on to be listed as long-term missing persons—three months or more. Many are never found.

So, if you are reading these posts believing that you are a passive observer, simply a true-crime fan, and something like this could “never happen to me”, you are wrong. What is less likely is that any particular missing person be reported in a prime news article, let alone become a constant source of headlines for months and years on end.

I've listened to hundreds of true crime podcasts over the last six years, initially as an attempt to desensitise myself... It did not help. In fact, doing so possibly made the anxiety worse. Perhaps the most frightening realisation I’ve had these past years is that there could easily be hundreds of Grumpy Gray Millers (name changed to protect the guilty) out there, freely roaming the streets, devoid of guilt or consequence.

It is a murderous jungle out there, if you didn’t already know. More Cold Cases than Dan Murphy's warehouse. There has never been a better time to murder someone. Fact. The chances of getting away with it make it worth looking at your “list” and striking off a few. Seriously. In the words of Gandhi or Mandela or whoever it was: Just do it.

Meanwhile, hundreds of families all over Australia have been turning to the podcast and blogging world for help in getting a media spotlight on their own mysteries and plights, having been ignored for years (and in some cases, decades) by mainstream sources.

I guess we were lucky in that regard…

A few years ago, I achieved a personal badge of honour. After providing opinions on several of 9 News Perth social media newsfeeds, their editorial team banned me from so much as even reacting to one of their stories, let alone commenting. To this day the ban remains. To achieve this badge, I had merely commented that the quality of 9 News reporting was “tantamount to a flaming bag of dog shit left on the front doorstep of the easily offended.” I maintain that parallel to be completely true.

Page 1, Google Image search: Kehlet

I arrived back in Perth on April 5, 2015. From that day, for the next fortnight, and what now feels like the past six years, my feet have never touched the ground in the way Earth presented itself those few days prior: stable, reliable, and predictable.

My mate, Gordo and I found ourselves in Sandstone a couple of days later. We were cop-blocked from the search area south of town, so were camped at the Sandstone caravan park, making our way to the pub in the evenings to listen in—incognito—to the banter from SES, DFES, Police, and every media reporter from Perth. Only the Police and the Publican knew that I was a family member. I could stand alongside any reporter in the room, and despite many people telling me over the years that Ray and I looked similar, not one of those geniuses ever twigged.

There was almost a festival atmosphere on the day human remains were found down a mineshaft. Entering the pub that evening, all the search crews were jubilantly saluting what a coincidence it was, that the shaft they had randomly chosen for the media publicity shoot that morning happened to contain a long-lost missing person.

Everyone in the pub cheered as the news crews delivered their live coverage from the street outside. The screens inside played the video taken that morning. The DFES guy had only just started his descent, with his mate keeping an eye from the top. The camera showed him look down the shaft, then do a double-take. His helmet light bouncing down, then up, back down again, before finally shining back into the camera and the eyes of his mate at top.

"Errr . . . Nine-Zero." he said, somewhat surprised himself.

"Nine-Zero?" asked his mate, in disbelief.

"Nine-Zero," he repeated. "Very decomposed."

They had all assumed it was separate to our missing persons, for that very reason—highly decomposed.

Everyone in the bar clinked cans together. A roar of “Cheers!” echoed through the Sandstone pub as they all laughed and shook heads at the rank probability of the scene playing out on the screens inside and footpath outside; a seemingly statistical impossibility. Another long-lost missing person, found.

Later that evening, after the crowds had thinned, Gordo returned from the bar with our thirteenth beer and a blood-drained face. "Wassup, Gordo?" I slurred.

"Dave!" he exclaimed, wild-eyed. "The bloody TRG are headed here! I just heard them talking about it inside. Do you know what that means?"

"No Gordo, I do not know what that means. What does that mean?"

"There's a fucking serial killer on the loose up here, Dave! Your bro and his wife are missing . . . they've just found another body . . . they’re sending the TRG to find a killer, Dave!"

It was a logical conclusion, delivered whilst inebriated. A potent mix.

"The fek?" said I.

We drank more beer, so that it would not hurt when we were murdered in our tents late in the night, which we were absolutely certain would happen.

It did not happen. We were not murdered that night. Something far, far worse came to light.

The following day was a blur as the town of Sandstone turned from orange to blue, with truck-tonnes of cops replacing SES volunteers. The journalists remained, of course. They could now positively smell the newspapers selling faster than cold beers in the front bar.

That second evening after the "very decomposed" body had been found, Gordo and I found the atmosphere much more sedate at the Sandstone Pub. Most of the SES were gone, and the police retired early to their rooms. There were just two tables occupied in the beer garden out back; Gordo and I on one, and a round table of every news reporter left standing. Their's was a cross-channel cacophonic cock-fest. Such were their superior powers of journalistic research, it still did not occur to them that I was a family member, despite the odds of who was now left in town. Their discussion continued loud and unabated.

“Extraordinary development, what.” said Darryl from PerthNow.

 “A relative goOoldmine!” exclaimed Dwayne from ABC.

Duncan of channel 7 fame had been lounging backward in his chair until then, manspreading the rest of them in alpha display. He leaned forward and clunked his beer on the table, taking control of the conversation. His words came slow and dramatic: “Nooow that the . . . search hasss deeeviated due to such exxxttrrraneous circummmstances . . . whaaat do you feeeel should be the . . . nnarrrrative of thisss storrry…”

The narrative of this story.

“Don’t do it, Dave.” said Gordo, having noted my hand clenched upside down around the neck of an empty bottle.

Since that first week in April 2015, my family have been undeserved although active, willing participants struggling for answers and closure, for over six years now, all the while ensuring we do not do or say anything to jeopardise the investigation. Meanwhile, the guileful media and their supercilious allies fed the machine; a constant reminder that thank fuck they found Ray that day, albeit by pure chance, because the alternate narrative that would no doubt have been spun would have tempted a name-change and permanently leaving the country.

Creating speculation, sensationalism. Creating anxiety, arrogance. Creating panic, ratings. This is the way of the media.

Here’s an alternative idea, why not speak the truth. Trust me, there is more than enough “the fek?” in this story that it will not require further sensationalism.

Hence, here we are. Thank you for reading.