Robecca Gilham had not told her three young daughters that their father was on the cusp of winning his appeal against murder. Yesterday, she walked out of the NSW Supreme Court with her husband, toasted his freedom with a glass of champagne and drove off to tell the girls that their dad was home.
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The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Jeffrey Gilham's conviction for the brutal stabbing murder of his parents, Stephen and Helen, in the family's Woronora home in August 1993, providing an incredible twist in a saga that has continued for 18 years.
''We are of a unanimous point of view that the appeal will succeed, at least to the extent of quashing the conviction and ordering a new trial,'' Justice Peter McClellan told the court.
The judges ordered a retrial but, crucially, told the court they may still decide that Mr Gilham should be acquitted completely. The clear doubts they expressed during the past three days about the validity of allowing a man who has already been tried twice for murder to face a third trial suggest an acquittal is a strong possibility.
As the 41-year-old walked from the NSW Supreme Court, hand in hand with his wife, it was hard to contemplate that he would ever be forced to return to jail. He was greeted like a returning hero, with a group of at least 40 supporters bursting into spontaneous cheers and applause.
''Thank you to the people who have supported us, stood by us and done an enormous amount of hard work to get to where we are today,'' Mrs Gilham said. ''We never would have got there without them.''
The extended family, friends and neighbours who make up the Jeff Needs Justice group are far more than a cheer squad. From the moment he was convicted on November 28, 2008, they banded together and began the task of assembling his appeal. Led by Jill Gatland, a tax lawyer who met Mrs Gilham at their mother's group, they sifted through reams of evidence and transcripts, discovering the crucial flaws in the prosecution case that ultimately led to yesterday's decision.
''It was a tireless physical review of all the material against Jeff,'' Ms Gatland said.
It was during this search that Jeff Needs Justice began to question a key piece of evidence which was used by the prosecution to disprove Mr Gilham's claim that it was his brother, Christopher, and not he who was responsible for the killings.
Christopher Gilham was killed on the same morning as his parents, stabbed to death downstairs from the living room where his parents' burned bodies were found. In 1995 Jeffrey pleaded guilty to manslaughter over Christopher's death but said it was a response to what his brother had done.
The prosecution's case had always been that Christopher was already dead when the fire was lit and so could not be responsible. This was based on evidence that the level of carbon monoxide in Christopher's blood from the fire was only 6 per cent and so he must have died before the fire started.
Ms Gatland and her team tracked down the acclaimed US toxicologist David Penney who said that, far from being dead at the time the fire was lit, Christopher and his parents were almost certainly alive. So crucial was this evidence to the prosecution case when it collapsed during the appeal this week that Justice Peter Garling was moved to ask whether it was ''now right to say that the facts are closer to the appellant's case than what the Crown put to the trial?'' Jeffrey Gilham's supporters also found flaws in the prosecution's claim that strong similarities between the clusters of stab wounds on Christopher and those inflicted on his parents suggested Jeffrey was responsible for both killings.
During the appeal it emerged that it is virtually impossible to attribute a certain ''style'' of stabbing to any one individual
As the research gathered momentum and word spread, Jeff Needs Justice had a miraculous find, a former teacher's aide at the school where Christopher Gilham had been working as a trainee teacher.
For 17 years, Denise Armstrong had been stewing over the fact that one day Christopher had said within her earshot that ''the only way to cover up all the evidence is with fire''. While this might have been said in the context of a module of science that Christopher was teaching, it was, in Justice McClellan's words, ''at the very least a remarkable coincidence''.
As the evidence for Jeffrey Gilham's case mounted this week, the appeal judges began to discuss not whether the appeal would succeed or fail, but whether there were even any grounds for a retrial.
But when they fast-tracked their decision on a retrial to yesterday morning, even the staunchest Gilham supporters were surprised.
''We never thought this would happen so quickly ... we thought if there was a result by April we'd be happy,'' Mr Gilham's aunt Claire Jarrett said.
