Framed for murder? "That place on the corner - it's haunted," a local journalist declares to me in deadly earnest as we mount the steps to police headquarters in Lima. He's pointing at Casa Matusita, a decaying mustard-coloured building perched on the corner opposite, abandoned for more than 60 years after a grisly family murder in the sprawling first-floor apartment. Having just arrived in the Peruvian capital, it's a reminder of just how deep superstition runs in this country of 30 million. It also prepares me for the eccentric office of Peru's top detective, General César Cortijo, decorated with stuffed parrots, model Spanish galleons and figurines of King Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The lead story on the TV news today is footage of what purports to be a ghost wandering a suburban median strip, but the general appears reluctant to discuss a more material event - the death of a 45-year-old doorman at the Mallorca, a beachside high-rise apartment complex. General Cortijo, along with Peruvian prosecutors, claim Lino Rodriguez Vilchez was brutally bashed and then hurled from a 16th-floor window by six drunken young Australians, enraged at being told to turn down the volume on their party music. The police believed we were not telling the whole story - that we knew stuff we were not sharing. It's a bizarre case, with no eyewitnesses - or rather, none belonging to this earthly realm. The brother and sister of the victim, who have agitated for the police investigation to be expanded after an initial conclusion of suicide, claim there is an eyewitness - the dead doorman who, by appearing to them in their dreams, has revealed the truth. General Cortijo, too, is adamant, declaring this an open-and-shut case. The technical issues show and the file attests to a fist fight and first-degree murder ... either he fell out the window or was thrown out. The neighbours asked the doorman to intervene [to get the Australians to lower the music] and several witnesses heard the fight. The Peru six ... (clockwise from back left) Tom Hanlon, Harrison Geier, Andrew Pilat, Jessica Vo, Hugh Hanlon and Samuel Smith. Photo: Mike Baker & Ellis Parrinder It's a case that has captured the imagination of Peruvians, drawn headlines in Australia, and is continuing to give six young Aussies, who are now back home, many sleepless nights. This will be especially true over the next few days because a no-show by them in a Lima courtroom on Tuesday, August 20, could spark a request by the Peruvian authorities to invoke the extradition treaty between Peru and Australia. The Peruvians are demanding that the six backpackers return to Lima to face a court process similar to an Australian committal hearing, in which a judge decides whether the case should be sent to trial before a higher court. The judge has rejected an application on behalf of the Australians that they be allowed to testify by video relay from Australia. General Cortijo is in no doubt that the six young Australians are guilty, and should return to Peru. He refers me to Agent Wilfredo Nuñez Barrenechea, who spearheaded much of the investigation into the death of the doorman. But Nuñez Barrenechea is evasive to say the least, standing me up for several meetings before I'm finally able to acquire a copy of his 20-page report. And it's when I leaf through its pages that I realise why the Lima cops do not want to talk to Good Weekend: there are just so many holes in the investigation, so many unanswered questions, about the mysterious death of the troubled doorman on January 19, 2012. Lino Rodriguez Vilchez fell to his death ... Photo: Fernando Yovera The fall The two groups of Aussies clicked from the moment their paths crossed in Argentina. They hooked up again in La Paz, capital of Bolivia, where they saw in the New Year hopping from one backpackers' hostel party to the next. They met up again at Cusco, before embarking on a four-day hike along the Inca Trail to the ruins at Machu Picchu. It was December 2011 when they all set off on their big adventure. The first group comprised students Andrew Pilat and Samuel Smith, then 21 and both from Sydney, and their mate Harrison Geier, 22, from Wagga, studying journalism in Sydney. The second trio were from Geelong: 23-year-olds Hugh Hanlon, a steel fabricator, his then girlfriend Jessica Vo, a hospitality manager, and Hugh's brother Tom, 22, a civil engineering student. Vo's trip was a gift from Hugh to celebrate her remarkable recovery from ovarian cancer. "Hugh surprised me with it - it was the most amazing present," Vo told Sydney newspaper The Sun-Herald. "They are good guys," Tom Hanlon says of the NSW trio. I was doing civil engineering at the time - so was Andrew Pilat. We both played AFL. Pilat agrees, saying, "Travelling, you meet a whole bunch of people, but these were the only ones we really got on with." ... from the beachside Mallorca apartment complex in Lima. Photo: Fernando Yovera After the rigours of hiking the Inca ruins, they decided to splurge in Lima, booking into an upmarket apartment complex on the Miraflores beachfront, Lima's tourist playground. On arriving in the capital on the morning of January 19, they piled into two taxis for the ride to the coast, where they met Maria Elena Sarmiento Camino de Bedoya, the letting agent for the US-based apartment owner. Built about 10 years ago, the two Mallorca apartment towers, with their curved beige balconies, rise to 19 storeys. None of the six remembers being formally introduced to the doorman, Rodriguez Vilchez, a short, stocky man dressed in navy trousers and a light-blue shirt, but some recall him stowing their bags in the elevator, gesturing with his hands because he didn't speak English. The letting agent then dropped Hugh Hanlon, Jessica Vo and Andrew Pilat at a supermarket a few kilometres away. In mourning ... Rodriguez Vilchez's mother Rosalinda and brother, Wimber. The others, meanwhile, soaked up the comforts of the split-level apartment, with its three upstairs bedrooms and expansive balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It boasted all the mod cons, including an iPhone port, which was soon belting out an assortment of Tom Hanlon's playlist, from Silverchair to Moby. "I had a massive shower and the three of us took a load off," recalls Tom Hanlon. It was blue-sky summer - a nice day. The shoppers returned between 1.30pm and 2pm, bearing snacks and drinks. The plan had been for a quick, light lunch before going out to explore the city, but the high-altitude Inca Trail hike and the 20-hour bus ride to Lima had caught up with them, so they decided to stay in for the rest of the day. They had something to eat, but, as Tom Hanlon explains, lunch was borderline unAustralian: "We didn't have a drink; the beers they bought were warm off the supermarket shelf." Alcohol and the time of day are vital elements of this story. These young people are accused of drunken murder at about 3.30pm, but by their timeline it had already gone 2pm and alcohol had not passed their lips. At about 3pm, Hugh Hanlon and Harrison Geier were dispatched to the lobby, where they used sign language and the Spanish word for beer - cerveza - to quiz the doorman on where they might shop locally. Suspicious mind ... Wimber believes his brother was murdered. Rodriguez Vilchez pointed; they grinned and then went back up to apartment 1501. They reported to the other four that supplies were close at hand and all six then set out on foot for a shop that they understood to be a block away. As they traipsed through the lobby, the doorman closed the door behind them. They weren't to know it, but it would be the last time they would see Lino Rodriguez Vilchez alive. "We still didn't know his name, but Lino opened the door as we left," Hugh Hanlon says. We wouldn't have been gone for more than 30 minutes. Tom Hanlon recalls their return, laden with groceries and beer. Unaware of the building management's rule that the doorman must not leave his post, he says: "It didn't occur to us that there was nobody on the door. But Lino wasn't there. We walked in, thinking nothing of his absence. Calm before the storm ... (from left) Jessica Vo, Andrew Pilat, Sam Smith, Hugh Hanlon and Harrison Geier trek the Inca Trail prior to their troubles in Lima. Photo: Tom Hanlon Back in the apartment, all six were moving about on the lower level, unpacking the groceries in the kitchen for a big "cook-up" that evening and putting the drinks in a bar in the lounge, which is why Tom Hanlon says he can't be precise about who was where. Hugh and I were in the kitchen, putting away the groceries, when I heard a 'slap' sound. Hugh and I gave each other a 'Did you hear that?' look. Brother Hugh adds, "I was standing close to the window - it wasn't open. Tom nodded to me that he'd heard it. It was someone yelling - 'Aaaaggghhhh ...' " Sam Smith recalls a "faint yell" and Harrison Geier a "noise." Of the others, Andrew Pilat was not sure if he had heard anything at all and Jessica Vo had heard nothing. "I jumped up on the kitchen bench, on my knees, opened the window and stuck my head out," Hugh Hanlon continues. He was looking into a void around which the apartments in the Mallorca complex are wrapped. At just over four metres wide, the void serves as a light well for the apartment kitchens not facing the ocean. Hugh Hanlon was not alone - windows had been thrown open and heads were hanging out, looking up and down. But mostly down, at a crumpled form he registered as a dead body without realising it was the remains of Lino Rodriguez Vilchez. The body was sprawled on the exit ramp from the Mallorca's basement parking lot - face up in a pool of blood, lying on its right side, arms half spread and legs bent. "Now all of us were in the kitchen," Hugh recalls. One by one we got up on the bench to look down. It was very distressing - I had never seen a dead body before. It was horrifying, sickening ... We all went to the front balcony, looking out to sea and trying to forget about it. The police This account is all lies, lies, lies, insist the Lima police. By their reconstruction, when the Australians claimed they were out shopping, they "apparently" were in the apartment, drinking alcohol and listening to very loud music, thus "presumably" inconveniencing others in the Mallorca tower, prompting complaints and causing the doorman to be sent up to apartment 1501 to quieten them down. The police version claims the doorman "presumably" knocked and the Australians "probably" threw him an Australian $10 note, hoping he'd just go away. Rodriguez Vilchez persisted, however, leading to an argument during which the young men "apparently" pulled him into the apartment and beat him savagely before dragging him up a set of narrow stairs into a small, closet-like room from which they hurled him into the void. They then fled the country, further indication of their guilt. "It has been established that they are the authors of the crime against life, body and health [of] the deceased Lino Rodriguez Vilchez," the detectives' report concluded. Perhaps the only element of the case not in dispute is that the doorman fell through the void that cuts vertically through the centre of the Mallorca tower. There are three options here: he was pushed (murder), he jumped (suicide) or he slipped accidental death. The challenge for the trans-national legal team now working to clear the Australians is this: if they are to make the murder charge go away, they must go some way towards proving that neither suicide nor accidental death has been adequately investigated by the police. Rodriguez Vilchez had significant gambling debts and was under pressure from his lenders, a plausible reason for suicide, or he could have simply fallen to his death while undertaking repairs near any of the openings into the void. The Australians' families refuse to disclose the considerable legal tab they have run up to date. But they have a legal adviser in Australia, Melbourne lawyer David Grace, QC, and at the coal face in Lima, the nattily dressed Augusto Jesus Loli Carrillo heads the team. Working with him is an English-speaking partner, Gonzalo Del Rio Labarthe, and a Peruvian forensic anthropologist, Jose Pablo Baraybar. "This is a homicide based on presumption," says Loli Carrillo. The police have failed to explore any of several alternate scenarios for the doorman's death. Several statements show that people in the building told the police of his gambling problem, but the police did not investigate. He apologises for the Peruvian legal system. Our justice system is not the best, but in this case it seems that all the worst elements of the system have collided - a corrupt and inept police force botches the investigation and we have a judge who understands there is a lack of evidence, but he's under media pressure, so he starts the process in a case that should never have existed. The family We're in the Surquillo neighbourhood of Lima, a no-go zone for tourists known locally as Chicago Chico ("Little Chicago"). The father and mother of the dead man, 77-year-old Felipe and the 60-something Rosalinda, sit with me one at a time, eulogising their dead son and nodding in agreement as another of their sons, Wimber, a 39-year-old butler who is studying law, articulates their wish "to reach into the hearts of your six countrymen, because they are the only ones who know what happened." They produce family snaps, a fleeting panorama of their son's life - in the uniform of the Peruvian Navy; with his 12-year-old daughter, celebrating the end of primary school; a carefree shot of him chomping on a toothpick as he steers a small fishing boat against a sunny sky. The parents recoil as the conversation turns to the manner of his death - "horrific," says the father. Both drift off, the mother back to her kitchen, telling me, "My bones ache with the pain of our loss," while the ailing father, off to see his doctor, calls sternly over his shoulder, "You must publish the truth." Wimber is deeply suspicious - the Australian government owns Good Weekend, doesn't it? He paces the dimly lit room, gesticulating as he shares the detail of dreams in which he says his dead brother appears to him and to their sister Marleny, 42. The first message they received, on the night of his death, was cryptic - in response to a question about where he died, the apparition told his sister: "Nine plus six," which the siblings took to mean level 15 at the Mallorca. Marleny also reported seeing her dead brother in a confined space; she interprets this as the closet-like room on the upper level of the apartment. Wimber also tells the story of a woman who leased apartment 1501 after the Australians left - and fled after she reported lights going on and off and voices in the night: "Lino won't leave that building until justice is done." This is fantastic fodder for the same local media peddling stories of ghosts and weeping Virgin Marys. Initially, the Peruvian press had reported on the first informal finding by the police - death by suicide. A woman in the building was quoted saying that the doorman had fallen from the roof. But now, after a wave of sensational headlines growing out of the family's public demands for punishment, the six backpackers were as good as guilty and were soon receiving abusive Facebook messages in Spanish. Wimber is convinced the Australians have blood on their hands. "Maybe not all of them," he says. But at the trial it will be revealed that three or four of them are guilty. When Wimber focuses on the more earthly aspects of his brother's death, he turns a pen this way and that in the air, tracing how his brother's body fell through the void. "I know exactly how my brother fell," he says. But I'm not telling, because I'll use the information to challenge the others at the trial. I'll not be tricked by the Australians' lawyers - they want to discredit me. He insists the Australians have been inconsistent in their accounts. At first they said they had not seen Lino and had not heard a scream. Then one of them, the shortest one, told the police he had heard a scream and had looked out the window to see the body on the ground. And in TV interviews back in Australia, Jessica Vo and the Hanlon boys are giving different versions of what they saw and heard. The investigation As afternoon turned into evening on January 19, the Australians had a string of visitors to their apartment. First the letting agent, Camino de Bedoya, who tearfully told them the dead man was the doorman who had let them in. Next came the police, led by Agent Gutierrez Urbano with a volunteer translator from apartment 1102, Edgardo Del Pino Zapata. The presence of Del Pino Zapata troubled the Australians, firstly because he left the cops out of the questioning and secondly because they had difficulty understanding his English. In a document prepared by their Australian lawyer, they said: "This resulted in confusion as to what he was asking ... For example, whether the question was, 'Did you hear anything?' or whether it was, 'Did you see anything?' And with the answer, 'We saw the body,' i.e., after the fall, as compared to, 'We saw the body fall' - which none of [us] had seen. A parade of officials passed through the Mallorca tower on the day of the fall: criminal investigators, a forensic biologist, a coroner, prosecutors. But no tests were carried out on the six Australians: for alcohol in their blood or for fragments of flesh or other organic material under their fingernails that might support the case they viciously bashed the doorman. "After the first lot came through, they'd knock, we'd let them in and they'd go straight upstairs - we were on the balcony," says Hugh Hanlon. Andrew Pilat remembers stacking their passports for the police to look at - and he thinks the passports were photographed. At about midday the following day, Agent Gutierrez Urbano returned with the volunteer translator Del Pino Zapata and another officer. "The translator again seemed to be asking his own questions and that was the point at which we understood we might be persons of interest - there was a change in the mood," Hugh Hanlon recalls. He said they believed we were not telling the whole story - that we knew stuff we were not sharing. Adds Tom Hanlon, "The cop pulled that Australian $10 note out of his pocket and put it in our faces as if he wanted us to hold it - they said it had been in the doorman's pocket." "We said it was nothing to do with us," says Hugh. But he was trying to make us touch it and he kept saying it was our money. But we had been out of Australia for about two months and when we left, all our Australian cash had been in $100 and $50 notes. "He said we'd have to go to the police station to make statements," Tom Hanlon concludes. It was time to call home. The Hanlons contacted their mother, Teresa, in Geelong, who told them "not to sign anything or let anyone into the apartment" before calling the consular hotline in Canberra. An alert was fired off to the Australian embassy in Lima, just blocks away from the Mallorca apartments on the beachfront. "One of my consular staff made enquiries with the police investigator," says ambassador John Woods when we meet in his office, 10 floors above the beachside hubbub. Twenty or 30 minutes later he had a call from the police telling him to inform the six that they were free to go. After they'd left the country, the police and Peruvian media took to accusing the Australians of fleeing the scene of the crime "to avoid being incriminated." Totally untrue, say the six. They insist they stuck to their prearranged plans for forward travel, some of them ignoring Teresa Hanlon's advice that they should leave Peru as soon as possible. Hugh and Tom Hanlon and Jessica Vo stayed for the two nights they had booked in the apartment, and when they moved on it was by bus to the north of Peru, for a few days of the surf, turquoise waters and dreamy beaches at Mancora, before another of the planned highlights of the trip - diving around the Galàpagos Islands. The Sydney party arrived home on February 28, 2012, followed by the Geelong trio four days later. The aftermath In March 2012, fully two full months after the doorman's fall, Agent Gutierrez Urbano was sacked from the case and transferred from his plum beat by the beach to the boondock fringes of Lima. The charge was that he had pocketed evidence - two American $20 notes and, vitally, that Australian $10 note, which he had removed from the doorman's pockets. The big deal the police have made of the Australian banknote ignores the fact that more than 35,000 Australians visit Peru every year, so it would hardly be surprising that a doorman on the Lima tourist strip might have Australian currency in his pocket. This was the time when, quite remarkably, Wimber, the dead doorman's brother, took it upon himself to search the desk vacated by Gutierrez Urbano at the local police station; in a bottom drawer he found his brother's shoes. A lot of forensic work was done in the apartment on the day Rodriguez Vilchez died. But it was not till March 22 that there was any official mention of a shoeprint found in the dust on the flat, horizontal face of the ledge at the base of a window in the small upstairs room of apartment 1501 - and that the print was a match for the doorman's shoes recovered from the cop shop. Lawyer Gonzalo Del Rio Labarthe is deeply suspicious of this development. Many cops went to level 15 on the day and if the shoeprint was found then, the police would have arrested our clients. Forensic anthropologist Jose Pablo Baraybar is also dubious. "Can they date it?" he asks, harking back to testimony that Rodriguez Vilchez had done odd jobs around the complex, including in apartment 1501. "[That shoeprint] could have been put there before, during or after the Australians had the apartment," Baraybar explains. The print is of the front of the sole of the shoe, pointing into the void - as though someone was standing on the ledge, facing into the void. Was it put there when someone was cleaning the windows? On the opposite wall of the void, starting at about level 5, there was a series of vertical drag marks that the police say were made as Rodriguez Vilchez's shoes scraped against the wall as he fell. "Physically impossible," says Baraybar. A body falling after it was launched from the opposite side of the void does not stick to the wall, sliding down like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - it'll bounce back off the wall. All the testimony by the doorman's brother and others is that he was pulled into the apartment, beaten up, immobilised and then thrown head-first out the window. There is not enough space in the closet for two or more people to swing an 85-kilogram body to throw it out - but even if they could have thrown it head-first, how do we explain the shoes hitting the far wall? The defence suspects that the beating-before-falling scenario is based on a misreading of the autopsy report by the police and by the doorman's brother. It tells of grotesque injuries occurring as the doorman crashed against the walls of the void and a steel handrail on the car park stairs. These wounds are assumed by the police to have been inflicted in an initial brawl with the Australians, but the autopsy report doesn't support this. "It's more likely that the doorman fell from somewhere else - and it was suicide," insists Baraybar. Attempting to buttress this argument, Baraybar, Del Rio Labarthe and a team of photographers accompanied by Good Weekend make a night-time visit to the Mallorca on July 25 to examine under ultraviolet light the walls and flat surfaces in a window space on a service staircase between levels 15 and 16. Focusing on a series of fingerprints on the lower horizontal surface of the opening, the forensic anthropologist argues that it was more plausible that Rodriguez Vilchez had used a small ladder to haul himself onto the window ledge. The fingerprints, he says, are in keeping with the doorman manoeuvring himself through the space feet-first, then leaving the prints as he clutched the ledge before releasing himself to fall feet first through the void. "I'm not betting all my money on this hypothesis," Baraybar concedes, packing away his kit. But these prints are the only ones of their kind at the top of the building and the scuffmarks on the walls of the void must be tested. Likewise, the shoeprint on the flat part of the window ledge does not support the murder scenario, says Del Rio Labarthe. "If a victim is pushing his feet against the window to prevent them throwing him out, wouldn't he be pressing the soles of his shoes on a vertical surface?" he asks. Meanwhile, Australian ambassador John Woods baulks at the mention of the six being extradited to Peru. "It's possible," he says, "but it's a long way down the track ... and if it comes to a formal request, it will be subjected to a long and thorough review process in Australia." A prominent Lima lawyer congratulates the six on their good sense in not returning to Peru - "Come back here and they'll be sent for a ride on the Midnight Express," he says, invoking the title of the Billy Hayes book and film on the horrors of incarceration in a Turkish jail. In the meantime, apartment 1501 at the Mallorca is still being offered for short-term rent, the new doorman only deigning to mention its dark history as guests check out. Oh, and the apartment is also for sale - for a cool $US1 million.