Pair accused of murdering Will Swinbourne in Gold Coast car park to stand trial
Haedyn Patrick Zachary Rawson, 24, and Kai Reinhardt, 25, appeared at Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday, charged with one count each of murder.
Police allege the pair conspired to rob 21-year-old Will Swinbourne during a drug deal at Hope Island on March 11, 2024.
Mr Rawson is accused of stabbing Mr Swinbourne in the chest with a kitchen knife when he met him in a car park off Santa Barbara Road about 2pm.
Mr Reinhardt has not been accused of stabbing Mr Swinbourne, but is alleged to be party to the killing.
Mr Swinbourne died at the scene.
The confrontation sparked an extensive manhunt after Mr Rawson allegedly fled, with police setting up road checks around the affluent suburb.
Police said the co-accused and the alleged victim met at an electronic music festival at The Spit two days earlier.
Southport Magistrates Court heard statements from six witnesses, including Mr Reinhardt's then-partner Kelly Petry.
Ms Petry told the court she was drinking with the co-accused and another woman at a nearby tavern on the afternoon of the alleged murder, before Mr Rawson left.
She said Mr Rawson later returned to the tavern and she noticed "red marks" on his face.
She said his phone and glasses were missing.
Ms Petry said she became concerned but Mr Rawson said: "Don't worry about it".
After they left the tavern, Ms Petry said she contacted a lawyer before offering a statement to police.
She said she did not believe or did not recall whether she spoke to Mr Reinhardt about deleting information on his Snapchat after the alleged murder.
Ms Petry said police suggested she could be charged with accessory to murder when they arrived at her property to arrest Mr Reinhardt two days later.
No charges relating to Mr Swinbourne's death have been laid against Ms Petry.
Witness Norman George told the court he was in his car in a car park near the tavern and a medical centre at the time of the alleged murder.
He said he saw two men leave a car near him and then heard "harsh voices" before a "horrifying scream".
Mr George said he then saw one of the men running from the car park.
Another witness, Sharon Verity Hall, told the court she was parking next to two men when she noticed "tension" between them.
She said one man was "going backwards trying to get away" as the other moved towards him.
Ms Hall said she then reversed into another car park and got out of her car, before one of the men said, "No, no, no" while putting his hands up.
She described hearing a "thud" and saw one of the men with a "blue face" holding his chest.
Ms Hall said she screamed for help and yelled "somebody stop him" when the other man ran from the scene.
Mr Rawson was arrested and charged with murder that day, while Mr Reinhardt was charged two days later.
Magistrate Jane Bentley committed Mr Rawson and Mr Reinhardt to stand trial for murder.
Mr Rawson declined to speak or offer a plea.
Mr Reinhardt said he would plead not guilty but declined to offer a plea for the separate charge of armed robbery.
Neither Mr Reinhardt or Mr Rawson applied for bail.
The matter will be go to trial at Brisbane's Supreme Court at a date to be determined.
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ABC News
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- ABC News
How easy is it to trick the Australian Taxation Office?
Sam Hawley: How easy is it to trick the Australian Tax Office? Well, for fraudsters it's not hard at all and plenty have done it costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have never been recovered. Today, Angus Grigg on his Four Corners investigation into the biggest GST scam in history and how the ATO dropped the ball. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Angus, you've been hard at work looking into what's going on at the Australian Tax Office. And you've really been having a deep look into this huge GST scam. Now, this unfolded in no other than Mildura in north-west Victoria. So, take me there and tell me about local resident Sarah. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Mildura is a really beautiful town, an irrigation town on the Murray in North West Victoria. And this GST scam really took off in Mildura. And it really was circulating within a sort of population that you might say is low socioeconomic groups, people on welfare, people with addiction issues. And we went to interview one person called Sarah. She was going through quite a bit of financial hardship at the time. I think she'd separated from her partner who was facing pretty serious charges at the time as well. And she was short of money because she needed to have some dental work done. So one of her friends showed her how to use a business that had been registered and an ABN linked to GST to claim GST refunds fraudulently. 'Sarah': The people that I was associating with at that time, they had done it and told me how easy it was to get a large amount of money quickly. And I just thought at the time it was a good idea because I was in a bit of financial trouble. Angus Grigg: She pretended, if you like, to be a hairdresser, despite the fact that she had no hairdressing qualifications. She'd never worked in a hairdresser, hadn't hired premises, had no equipment. And so she logged into her myGov account and first of all, claimed $15,000 and then did it a second time and got another $15,000. 'Sarah': I don't even really still understand how it went through. I was a single parent and then all of a sudden I'm a hairdresser that's getting this return put into my account with no other payments from clients or anything like that to balance it was needed. Like no proof. Angus Grigg: Now, bear in mind, the money went into the same account as her welfare payments and the money went within about 10 days without any verification, without any checks, without anyone from the tax office ringing and saying, what did you spend this money on? Do you have hairdressing qualifications? Have you hired premises? You know, she just absolutely couldn't believe how easy it was. 'Sarah': Yeah, I just couldn't believe it that it was just sitting there on my everyday access debit bank card. Angus Grigg: Now, the other thing to bear in mind, to receive a GST refund of $30,000, she would have needed to have capital expenditure or bought stock and other items for her hairdressing business of about $300,000. Now, surely a single mother living on welfare, getting family tax benefits, that should have been a red flag for the tax office. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. So Sarah, which is not her real name, just by the way, you've changed that for this story to keep her anonymous. She just tells the ATO she's a hairdresser and then the tax office falls for it. That's extraordinary. Angus Grigg: It is. And the fact that you don't need a receipt, you don't need any proof of the line of work you're in is extraordinary. And that's because the tax office basically fired most of the humans in the loop and started relying on algorithms or computers, if you like, to make these payments. They wanted to ensure the timely payment of GST refunds to businesses. But in doing that, they really opened the door up to fraud. Sam Hawley: Right. Sure. So the tax office wants to streamline things. But in the meantime, people like Sarah are all of a sudden dabbling in fraud. And as we've mentioned, she's not the only one. There's a lot of other people doing a very similar thing. Tell me about Linden Phillips. What was he up to? Angus Grigg: Linden Phillips, once again from Mildura, for us, he was like patient zero. It looks like he was the really one of the very, very early people in this scam. So what happens is that Linden Phillips gets out of jail in August 2021. And he already has a company registered. And so he reactivates his GST registration through his ABN and his MyGov account. And then within a couple of weeks of getting out of jail, he does what I'd sort of call a test run. And he claims $13,000 in GST refunds from the tax office. Once again, no documents, no receipts, no verification required. He gets that money within a couple of weeks and clearly then thinks, OK, I'm going to go for the big one. And so what he does is he lodges 46 backdated GST claims for an amount of $821,000 in GST. And the real kicker here is that for most of the period those GST claims are lodged, he's actually in jail. Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Angus Grigg: I know. He just couldn't make it up. Sam Hawley: What does he do with all that money? Angus Grigg: Well, of course, he spends it, right? Within a couple of weeks, the money's completely gone. He buys himself a second-hand Porsche. Somewhat endearingly, he buys his mother a house. But the really damning thing here is that the tax office notice it. Finally, someone, there's a human in the loop and they pick up the fact that, hey, maybe something's a bit wrong here. And so they ring him up and he says, oh yeah, no, it's all legitimate. I'll get my accountant to call you. The accountant never calls. They send him some emails. They write him some letters. He ignores them all. And the really damning thing here is the tax office does nothing for four months. And in that four month period, this scam absolutely explodes. So what we did is we went back and we deconstructed, if you like, the tax office's narrative. And the narrative was that this fraud took off on social media. The tax office noticed it. They cracked down really hard, really quickly, and they brought it under control. Now we sort about testing that idea. Sam Hawley: So the ATO says it did this great job. It cracked down on this fraud. But what actually happened? Because you actually had a look at that and discovered, in fact, the ATO didn't do much at all. Angus Grigg: No, exactly. So Linden Phillips does finally get caught, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the ATO. It all comes down to the smarts of a local detective in Mildura named Vanessa Power. Now, she is attending Phillips's house on a drugs and gun charge, and she searches his premises, his house, and she confiscates a phone. And using the sort of smarts that the ATO should be employing, she sees that on his phone there appears to be a pretty elaborate GST scam. And in fact, it looks as though that Linden Phillips had helped 60 other people perpetrate this scam. Linden Phillips is arrested. And then a few weeks later, the ATO finally launch what they call Operation Protego, which is to crack down on this GST scam. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. And at that point, of course, Sarah, who we spoke about earlier, she was also arrested back in December 2022. But the thing is, the money, it's sort of gone, right? 'Sarah': I can't pay it back. It's not even an option at the moment. Or it probably never will be. Sam Hawley: Is there any way the tax office can actually get these funds back? Angus Grigg: Well, this is the point, right? 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And that is the amount of money or taxes that the ATO has levied, if you like, but not collected. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The large percentage of the debts that were due were in fact owned by a very small number of taxpayers or they're related to a small number of taxpayer accounts. So you'd kind of think it's a small number of people you need to be chasing. Angus Grigg: And the point that Karen Payne was making is that if we collected all that tax, perhaps we would not have to pay as much tax, all of us, but also we'd have more money to spend on really basic things like schools, roads and hospitals. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The fact that it keeps rising is troubling. So it's fundamental, I think, that we've got good administration of the tax system because the integrity of the tax system is fundamentally important to all of us. It pays for all of the services that we benefit from. 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