Australian man Jackson Stacker was 25 when he died a particularly brutal death in 2021. He was reported missing by his family in August 2021 after they could not get in touch with him and his body was found not long after. He had a hunting knife in his chest and his death has been investigated to determine if this was suicide or murder.
Jackson’s background is especially important in this case, as is the timing of it. This happened in 2021 which was peak covid lockdown time in Australia.
Jackson had just finished an apprenticeship and had become qualified as an electrician. He had decided to go on an extended road trip, up and down the east coast of Australia. Jackson previously lived in Melbourne, Australia. He had two brothers and his parents had previously divorced.
Jackson embarked on the road trip in a Toyota Hiace van that had been given to him by his late grandfather.
His mother, Sandra MacFarlane, said 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”.
His father Ian said that Jackson “was going through a period in his life where he was seeking an alternative lifestyle. He didn’t want to live a mainstream life. He wanted to find a way to live off the land and not impact the environment.”
There has been a coronial inquest into Jackson’s death and a friend, Mia Kieis, spoke at that. She told the coroner how she had met Jackson at 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. “He was a very charismatic, energetic and friendly person. He had great humour.”
Mia spoke about Jackson’s drug use. She said that he knew that psychedelics and marijuana “weren’t agreeable for him, they put him on edge”.
Another friend, Calan Whitehead, known as Kilarney, said that he had met Jackson at a beach car park which was known as a place to buy drugs.
Kilarney said “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”.
Jackson was a “legend”, Kilarney 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.”
In July 2021, Jackson decided to head back into Queensland from New South Wales. The state’s borders closed very quickly due to the pandemic and Jackson got stuck in 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.”
Jackson found some work in Byron Bay but he struggled there. The rent was high and the homeless population is one of the largest in the country.
“He tried to find friend networks but, due to the transient nature of Byron, found himself … vulnerable” his father said.
Sandra last spoke to her son on July 22, 2021. This was the last day he was seen alive by anyone.
“Everything seemed fine,” she said. “He was always his usual self when we spoke.”
Ian said that Jackson “kind of indicated he was going off the grid”.
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!’”
In late August 2021, two men came across Jackson’s van, parked at a rest stop in Sleepy Hollow. That is around 40kms north of Byron Bay.
The men believed the van was abandoned. “It was a total mess, it looked like it had been tossed over,” one of the men, Francis, told the inquest.
The other man, 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, Francis 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?”
On August 23, 2021, a woman in Murwillumbah phoned Jackson’s father, Ian. His number was on the registration papers for the van and she told him she had been offered the van for sale.
The woman said the van was open, with the keys in the ignition, and smelled of rotting food.
“She was doing the honourable thing,” Sandra says, “and checking that it was in fact for sale.”
This worried Jackson’s family and the police started searching the area around where the van was found.
Two days later, his body was found under a tree in a paddock, near where the van had been parked. The paddock was said to be isolated and he would have had to climb over fences and wade through a creek to get there.
As he had been exposed to the elements for a month, the remains were skeletal. His scalp and dreadlocks were found around 14 metres or 45 feet away from the rest of his body. He was missing teeth from his skull and his boots were found further away from the body.
Jackson was found laying face down. He was 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.
In his report, Prof 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.”
He also said “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”.
Two cigarette lighters, matches, gear oil, duct tape, a beanie and a vape were found with the body.
An autopsy found the cause of Jackson’s death to be “unascertained”, since his remains had been exposed to the elements for some time.
Jackson’s mother would later visit the site where her son was found.She found one of his teeth under a leaf.
Police would first classify the case as a suspect suicide but they reclassified it later as suspicious. Teeth and three small finger bones were found during a later search of the area.
Jackson was said to be ‘wedded’ to his phone. It was never found. It did ping in the Grafton area on August 2. This is around 200 kms or 125 miles from where Jackson and his van were found. It is thought that Jackson was likely dead by this time.
Jackson’s family have always been adamant that his death involved foul play.
“It didn’t add up,” his father says. “There is nothing to suggest anything was out of the ordinary.”
“We got into his phone and his Gmail, we’ve got all of his apps, we got into everything,” Sandra said. Jackson had just renewed the registration on the van.
“There is nothing to suggest suicide,” she said.
“Somebody knows something. Somebody tried to sell his van, somebody took his digital equipment,” Sandra says.
“The autopsy report has posed more questions than answers. There are just so many loose ends and [investigation] doors to close.
“Jackson had so many options. It is clear by his digital accounts he was searching for jobs in both Melbourne and Cairns.
“If Jackson trod his own path, we will find a way to honour him, but if he is a victim of crime, we will find justice with the help of the wonderful Byron Bay community and police and will create a legacy for him so that other families don’t have to go through what has been a most tragic and heartbreaking experience.”
During the inquest that was held earlier this year, it was said that no DNA was taken from the vape or oil can. The rest stop was not initially searched and people that had been associated with Jackson were not initially questioned.
The knife in his chest was eventually taken for DNA testing and this was said to be ‘unsuccessful.’
Professor Woodford also spoke at the inquest. He spoke about the state of Jackson’s remains and how much force would be required to separate the remains. His report said “in a state of decomposition, very little force would be required to separate the skull from the other remains.” He also said that he “had experience with a badger moving a mandible five metres away from remains”.
Decomposition, Professor 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 were 33 cows in a paddock where Jackson died.
Jackson’s friend Kilarney also spoke at the inquest. He said that Jackson 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 Jackson, Kilarney 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 Jackson was wiping away tears as he drove away from the car park for the last time.
Kilarney 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.
Sandra and Ian have said that they believe Jackson may have gotten involved with the wrong people.
“We think that perhaps he got involved with someone in the drug trade that had left some stuff in his van,” Ian explained.
“Just the way that his van was found, it was totally trashed. It was like it had been strip searched.
“We think there’s been an altercation between him and these people. And I don’t know what the altercation was, or how it could possibly end up in him in a field with a knife in his chest.”
“Everything was so violent,” Sandra added, “like the van is not just messy, it’s destroyed.”
“I think the social media is an important thing, because there was a group that he was hanging around with the last couple of weeks of his life,” Ian said.
“And it shows in his Messenger that there’s constant communication between him and one or two other people. And the day that we believe that he died, that stops.
“It just stops totally … and no communication at all on social media from that day onwards until he was found.”
Sandra believes that Jackson may have been chased to the location where he was found.
“If he was in a panic, he wouldn’t like a confrontation and I think he was running,” she said.
“He had such a good life. There was nothing for him to struggle on about other than trying to find his own people in the world, his space, his life, where he fit,” Sandra said.
“He wanted to sort of turn his back on an industrialised crazy society he called the city. That’s really different to turning your back on wanting to live.”
“I feel like we’re going to find the truth, and I feel like he knows that we’re going to find the truth.”
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