Andrew L. Urban
On this the 17th anniversary of the brutal murder of five members of the Lin family in Sydney’s Epping, we revisit what – after years of scrutiny – we* have determined to be the 2017 wrongful conviction of Robert Xie, loving uncle to two of the murdered. We lay out the evidence behind this claim in the book, FRAMED – How the Legal System Framed Robert Xie for the Lin Family Murders.
July 18 & 19, 2009 was a blood soaked weekend in Epping, a suburb in the north of Sydney. On the Friday evening, Robert, his wife Kathy (Lin), their young son (name suppressed), drove over to the grandparents in Merrylands for the traditional Friday night family dinner. Grandma was famous for her pork and sticky rice with red bean.
A little earlier, Henry Lin (potatoeyface) was online, chatting on Messenger Plus with his badminton coach Clare Cheuk (lil_anime). The 12 year old told his coach, “I have to go now, family dinner at grandma’s as usual.” Their chat closed down at 6.03pm on that Friday. They restarted a chat after the dinner at 10.23pm, until 10.46pm, and Henry then spent half an hour watching badminton on YouTube, before a final burst of chat from 10.52pm till 11.16pm. Henry would be found dead on Saturday morning. He was still in his day clothes.
Robert and Kathy were also on their computers after dinner until 2am, as computer logs showed, before they went to bed. Shortly after they got up on Saturday morning, the phone started ringing. Kathy’s brother Min ran the local newsagency and it was still closed at 9am. They lived in Beck Street, and Min, 45, and Lily Lin, 44, who with their daughter Brenda 15, boys Henry, 12, and Terry, 9, lived 200 metres away in Boundary Road. Henry would play badminton in the garage at Beck Street with the other children. Also living with the Lins was Lily’s sister Irene, 39.
Kathy and Robert got into their car, taking their son on a planned shopping trip via the Lin house to see why the delay, and drove the short distance to the Lin family home, where they found her brother’s family butchered, blood painting the rooms red. The five members of the family living there had been killed so brutally it took expert witnesses a couple of days to describe their injuries in court.
The family table on that Friday was incomplete: Brenda was in New Caledonia on a school excursion. It saved her life.
Also missing from the table were Lily and Irene, Min’s wife and her sister. It wasn’t unusual for Lily to be absent from the table; she had mysterious things to do, as well as Friday night tasks at the family newsagency in North Epping. She had a secret phone which the family knew about, but nobody knew the number. It was not found at the crime scene. Lily took the worst of the brutality, her face virtually obliterated.
As for Irene, she was helping Lily that evening. Absent from the family dinner, but back home by late evening in Boundary Road. The Crown could not establish the time of the murders, so it constructed a narrative that it “must have been” after 2am, when Lin and Robert turned off their computers.
After two years of a fruitless hunt for the killer/s, police turned to Robert, building a narrative that attempted to negate his alibi. They had to be inventive … and indeed, they invented a scenario in which Robert didn’t sleep through that night. The Crown alleged that he had sedated his wife he got out of bed and went over to the Lin house to murder the Lin family. The Crown had no evidence for this allegation. That’s the short version. The long version, as documented in my book, includes references to the four trials it took to reach a conviction and the many flaws in the Crown’s case. Not least is the absurd proposition in the Crown’s case that a loving uncle – according to the evidence – would brutally murder his two young nephews.
In our considered opinion, this is an unsolved mass murder, with an innocent man framed for it and condemned to life in prison.
Further reading: see the menu on the right of this page for several more stories on the Robert Xie case.
*I say ‘we’ because this was a collaborative investigation I undertook with the late Phillip Chapman and Peter Gill providing much useful assistance.