In 1993 three Perth-based prospectors, Clark Easterday and Len and Dean Ireland, were wrongfully convicted and sent to jail for fraud — found guilty by a WA jury of salting their tenements with gold.
It was commonly refered to as the Karpa Gold scam, in which the three had allegedly swindled investors out of AUS$6 million
It all started when the Irelands and Easterday thought they'd struck it rich, when test results from a remote tenement at Karpa Spring revealed a potentially massive $2 billion gold deposit. But eight weeks later the men were accused of staging one of the biggest stings ever ... and three years later, they were found guilty of fraud and jailed.
Much of the investigative work which finally got the case to the appeal courts was done by Perth engineer, Michael McGowan, who realised that the Crown's suggestion that Dean Ireland had salted the samples while panning them during test drilling just didn't fit the evidence, "They could not have salted the samples and the proposition that was put to the trial was totally false and could not have happened."
In 2003, McGowan went with Clark Easterday and Len and Dean Ireland to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Perth to hear the decision of three judges on whether there had been a miscarriage of justice in the case.
Inside, the unanimous decision was delivered in minutes and the judges found that the prosecution had been guilty of non-disclosure of evidence which led to the three serving time in prison. Each of the three judges declared their convictions should be quashed.
