More on "Button Man" from Herald Sun:
"When one person disappears without trace in the wilderness, the odds are it is either suicide or accidental death, the sort that coroners call misadventure.
But when
several people vanish over a decade, four of them within nine months, rumour and speculation take over.
Up in the ridges and valleys of the Victorian Alps, where wild dogs howl and deer hunters roam, locals are talking about a loner who spends long periods in a remote bush camp.
The lone camper has become a person of interest because the growing gossip about him has reached police.
Early this month Missing Persons investigators made the long trip from Melbourne to Mansfield to have a chat with the oddball character whose behaviour has spooked hunters and hikers in the mountains.
Detectives talked at length with the man and emerged knowing some interesting facts about him — but absolutely nothing more about a string of missing people stretching back at least nine years and possibly more.
They know the person of interest has embraced an alternative lifestyle for many years but does not have any criminal record.
They know that despite his age (just over 70) he is as fit and strong as a much younger man, and is eccentric but intelligent.
They know that when he drives his old four-wheel-drive to “town” for supplies he drinks at a favourite Mansfield pub.
They know that he spends weeks at a time roaming the High Country from a base camp tucked in the bush near a remote weather station close to what locals call “The Crossroads” because three tracks converge there, providing access to other areas.
They know he likes to carve deer antlers he collects in the bush, a harmless hobby for a man skilled with sharp tools.
Finally, they know there is absolutely no evidence to connect him with the disappearances of bushwalker
Niels Becker near Mt Stirling late last October.
Nor with the disappearance of Conrad Whitlock near Mt Buller last winter. Nor with the fate of campers
Russell Hill and Caroline Clay, who vanished in the Wonnangatta Valley in late March.
Not to mention the controversial and highly-publicised disappearance of former prisons boss
David Prideaux from the Tomahawk Hut area in 2011.
There is, of course, nothing to suggest that those missing people met foul play, as it is extremely easy to become lost in the mountains and to die of exposure. Wild dogs and other scavengers soon make bodies disappear.
Because the antler carver spends so much time in the bush, it is obviously difficult for him to provide an alibi for the dates of any or all the disappearances.
This is a problem for the police, not for the carver, because in the eyes of the law he is an innocent person and, rightly, does not have to prove anything to anyone.
But the presumption of innocence does not stop tongues wagging.
Hunters say a deer stalker stumbled over the carver’s camp and reported seeing several homemade spears there. There is, of course, no law against making spears if they are not used to break any laws.
Other stories are harder to verify and, being second hand, have a whiff of urban myth. One hunter relays a story from a friend’s in-law at Mansfield.
The in-law, a keen photographer, went camping in the bush near the Crossroads a few summers ago. He slept in his small tent, his camera nearby. After going home, he inspected his photographs and, he claims, found one of himself lying asleep, taken at close range. Meaning whoever took it must have crept in and taken it as a “joke”.
It sounds like a tall story.
When the man appeared uninvited at one campfire in recent months, he made awkward conversation with the campers.
Which is why one police source said this week that while investigators have absolutely no reason to be suspicious of the carver, it’s hard not to be intrigued by him."
