Main Beach at Byron Bay can be a beguiling place, attracting buskers, backpackers and beautiful people from all over the world.
But in the local courthouse this week, a different picture emerged: that of the underbelly of drugs and homelessness that exist beneath Byron’s glamorously chilled reputation. A world in which 25-year-old traveller Jackson Stacker had inadvertently found himself.
A three-day coroner’s inquest into Stacker’s brutal death in 2021 heard how he had set off from Melbourne after nearly finishing an apprenticeship as an electrician, and spent a year and a half on an extended road trip up and down the east coast. He was driving a Toyota Hiace van, given to him by his late grandfather.
Stacker’s mother, Sandra MacFarlane, told the court that in the 12 months prior to his death, “Jackson gave me the impression that he was on a journey of finding himself and enjoying the alternative, non-materialistic lifestyle that he had long been aspiring to live”.
Mia Kieis told the coroner she met Stacker at Pemstock, a commune on the Daintree river, in north Queensland. “You aren’t allowed to bring anything from Coles or commercial supermarkets, no plastics, only locally sourced food,” she said.
She was instantly drawn to Stacker. “He was a very charismatic, energetic and friendly person. He had great humour.”
At that stage, Kieis said, Stacker knew that psychedelics and marijuana “weren’t agreeable for him, they put him on edge”. But the court would hear that drugs were prevalent during his later time in Byron.
Stranded in New South Wales
Stacker was on his way back to Queensland in July 2021, when the state’s borders closed, leaving him caught in northern NSW.
“He was pretty pissed,” his friend John Van Winegarden told the inquest. “He couldn’t do what he wanted to do. He wanted to go to a music festival in Queensland and to go to Cairns.”
Calan Whitehead, also known as Kilarney, said he had been sleeping rough in the sand dunes when he first met Stacker at the Main Beach car park, a place where drug deals were done. They would smoke weed together, Whitehead told the court, and listen to music.
“He was a really cool guy, really chilled, loved life. He had awesome taste in music, girls flocked to him.” The “stoner crew”, he told the inquest “were always around his van”.
Stacker was a “legend”, Whitehead said, because he let him sleep in the van. “[My bed] was on a bench seat in the front of the van with my legs sticking out the window.”
MacFarlane told the inquest she spoke to her son on 22 July 2021, the last day he was seen alive.
“Everything seemed fine,” she said. “He was always his usual self when we spoke.” Ten days later, when she called him about a parking fine and he didn’t respond, she started to get anxious. “I put some money in his bank account with the online reference of ‘Please call Mum!’”
Exposed to the elements
To Francis Stanek, an abandoned van in a rest stop meant one thing: “accommodation.” Stanek, who was travelling in his own van, told the inquest he had taken a destitute man, a “desperado” called Matty, to Stacker’s van, which he’d found parked at a rest stop at Sleepy Hollow, 40km north of Byron.
The keys were in the ignition, he said, and there was a smell of musty clothes. “It was a total mess, it looked like it had been tossed over,” he told the inquest.
Stanek told the court Matty went through the van and found a digital camera, which he sold for $50 to buy marijuana.
They didn’t find any drugs in the van, Stanek said, but they did find a driver licence and the car’s registration papers. “I started getting a gut feeling. Who would leave their driver’s licence there?”
That same day, on 23 August, a woman in Murwillumbah phoned Stacker’s father, Ian, whose number was on the van’s registration papers. She said she had been offered the van for sale.
Two days later police found Stacker’s body under a tree in a field, near where the van was parked.
Exposed to the elements for about a month, the remains were skeletal, and scattered. Stacker’s scalp and dreadlocks were 14 metres from the body, he was missing teeth, his boots were further away.
Lying face down, Stacker had been wearing his faux fur coat; a hunting knife had gone through his chest “up to the hilt”, forensic pathologist Prof Noel Woodford told the inquest.
Visiting the scene, Stacker’s mother later found one of his teeth under a leaf, the inquest heard. The case was reclassified as suspicious and teeth and three small finger bones were found during a police line search.
With Stacker’s body were two cigarette lighters, matches, a container of gear oil and duct tape, a beanie and a vape.
Stacker’s phone, to which he was “wedded”, has never been found. But it pinged in Grafton on 2 August, the inquest heard, “after what appears to be the most likely date of death”, Louise Beange, barrister assisting the family, told the court.
Self-inflicted or work of assailant?
The coroner heard two police officers linked to the early investigations were on extended sick leave and a third has left the force. None were available to comment.
The inquest heard that no DNA was taken from the vape or oil can; the rest stop was not initially searched and the people closely associated with Stacker were not questioned. Later DNA testing on the knife was “unsuccessful.”
Det Sgt Donna Tutt took over the case last year.
Asked by counsel assisting the coroner, Kirsten Edwards SC, if suicide was the “dominant theory at the start of the investigation”, Tutt said she “can’t comment” on what the officer in charge at that time “was thinking”.
In his report, Woodford stated that due to the decomposition of the body, and lack of soft tissue “it is not possible to say definitely if the knife wound was self-inflicted or by an assailant. A stab wound to the chest is equally consistent with homicide and suicide. I’ve seen in my professional career lots of episodes of or instances of self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest.”
But he told the court, “the knife was used with considerable force, it is not trivial force. Could these wounds have been inflicted by an assailant? The short answer based on the pathology is yes”.
The court heard the fact parts of Stacker’s body were separated was not necessarily evidence of foul play.
Edwards told the inquest that Woodford had indicated in his report that, “in a state of decomposition, very little force would be required to separate the skull from the other remains.” She noted that in his report he “had experience with a badger moving a mandible five metres away from remains”.
Decomposition, Woodford said, revolves “around softening of tissues, the ligaments, the muscles that hold the bone in place”. “That bone has the potential to be moved. Whether or not it is a carnivore or inadvertently knocked by a herbivore like a cow or a sheep I don’t have a view.”
There had been 33 cows in the paddock where Stacker died.
Whitehead told the inquest that in his last days Stacker had been “depressed and upset”. He had been to a “doof party” at Casino and taken LSD. “He was just staring into the fire. At five or six in the morning he was crying. He was really upset.”
On the last day he saw Stacker, Whitehead told the court, he had “let out this enormous scream throughout the car park” and thrown a bicycle down the rocks to the sea. “This little kid kept riding around … crashing into people’s cars and scratching them.”
He said Stacker was wiping away tears as he drove away from the car park for the last time.
Whitehead sent him a message “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”, and sent a video of a dancing skeleton, but made no further attempt to contact him. “I didn’t have a phone for a while, I didn’t have his number. I was drinking pretty heavily,” he told the court.
When Stacker’s remains arrived home, his mother sat and talked to him, writing a poem that she tearfully read out in court. After seeing footage of his life, the coroner Theresa O’Sullivan was moved to remark, “he was a beautiful boy”.
The inquest continues, with the coroner still accepting submissions.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
