In 2021, 25-year-old Jackson Stacker was found dead in a cow paddock near Byron Bay with a hunting knife in his chest and his skull separated 13 metres from his body.
The police believe the carefree man likely died by suicide.
But in an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday night, his grief stricken parents Sandey MacFarlane and Ian Stacker argue that conclusion doesn’t “make sense” and raise the possibility of something much more sinister.
“Nothing made sense. I spoke to him the last day he was alive and he was fine,” Sandey said.
“It just came across to us that there’s, there’s other possibilities of what could’ve happened here,” Ian said.
“We think that, perhaps he got involved with, at this doof, someone in the drug trade that had left some stuff in his van.
“You know, Jackson left that doof prematurely, um, and left behind a few people that he transported there.
“Just the way that his van was found. It was totally trashed. You know, like, it was like it had been strip searched.”
Ian and Sandey believe Jackson’s ransacked van suggests evidence of foul play.
The van was found at the Sleepy Hollow rest stop, 120 metres from where Jackson’s body was discovered.
Jackson had travelled to the idyllic Byron Bay in NSW from Melbourne, living out of a van and partying with friends.
In a message to Sandey, he said he was mingling with “beautiful” and “intelligent” people.
But his parents suspect something changed in the final month of his life and he may have been murdered.
“I think he was feeling used by certain people that were borrowing his van,” Sandey said.
Cousin Ishtar Kenny said she had heard of “things going on in Byron”.
“I’ve heard of different things going on in Byron in the last few years where all the young people have been very afraid because they’ve been
involved in something,” she said.
“They didn’t realise what it was and then they’ve been threatened or stuff like that. So I know it can happen in that area as well.”
Sandey and Ian believe Jackson may have run away from a confrontation and that is why he ended up in the paddock.
Jackson’s phone was never found in the initial investigation, but in a remarkable moment, 60 Minutes revealed its producer stumbled across a phone at the scene, within eyesight of where Jackson’s body was found, during their own investigation into the story.
It is not yet known to whom the phone belongs.
Jackson had a Samsung phone, his parents said, and a week after he died it rebooted 200km further south near Grafton.
For the next four days it connected with various cell towers, before returning to the Byron area where it stopped pinging on August 2.
In their investigation, the police found Jackson was suffering mood swings and displayed erratic behaviour.
Jackson also smoked marijuana and took LSD, which had affected the young man emotionally.
Jackson had also been hospitalised in the past, treated for drug fuelled psychosis after bad reactions to mind altering substances, 60 Minutes revealed.
Former homicide detective Gary Jubelin has evaluated the case and believes investigators did a thorough job looking into Jackson’s death.
“Having worked homicide as long as I did, it’s such a difficult area, there’s a lot of emotions attached to it,” he said.
“It’s not something that you can look at, uh, clinically and separate emotion. There is emotion involved.
“And looking at the steps that the police have taken during the course of this investigation, I think from a very early stage, they were looking at it as a potential homicide.”
A coroner’s findings into the manner and cause of Jackson’s death is expected in the coming weeks.