More than three years after the gruesome, unexplained discovery of 25-year-old Jackson Stacker’s remains in a cow paddock near Australia’s Byron Bay, New South Wales State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan has officially referred the bizarre case to the state’s homicide squad for further investigation, after concluding her inquest could not definitively determine how the young man died.
Stacker, a Melbourne native who had relocated to the Northern Rivers region and was living nomadically in his van, was last seen alive on July 22, 2021. His heavily decomposed body was found nearly five weeks later, on August 25, 2021, in a rural paddock, presenting with macabre, unexplained details: a hunting-style knife embedded in his chest, and his skull separated from his torso, located 13 meters away from the rest of his remains. His van was discovered abandoned at a rest stop in Sleepy Hollow, roughly 120 meters from the scene of the discovery.
The coronial inquest, held at the NSW Coroner’s Court in Lidcombe, examined two core lines of inquiry: the cause of Stacker’s death, and whether the initial police investigation into the case contained critical inadequacies. Early in the probe, police had tentatively labeled the death a suicide, a classification that Stacker’s family has pushed back against aggressively for years.
During the inquest, O’Sullivan reviewed evidence including witness testimony, forensic reports, and details of Stacker’s life in the weeks before his disappearance. She confirmed that toxicological and contextual evidence showed Stacker’s drug use had risen sharply in the period leading up to his death, and that it was likely he was experiencing significant emotional distress or depression at the time. However, the coroner found no documented history of self-harm, and could not confirm that the young man died by suicide. Forensic testing also failed to resolve a key question: whether the knife found in Stacker’s chest was self-inflicted or placed there by another party. O’Sullivan also noted that there is no evidence to suggest any person intended to harm Stacker, who was described as well-liked by friends and acquaintances, and had never shared concerns for his safety with anyone close to him.
On the question of investigative inadequacy, the coroner ruled she could not find fault with the original probe’s conduct. Still, she identified one critical gap: there has never been sufficient explanation for the long delay in establishing a dedicated strike force to investigate the case. For this reason, she formally recommended that the NSW Homicide Squad take over the investigation to pursue unanswered lines of inquiry.
Stacker’s parents, Sandey MacFarlane and Ian Stacker, have long maintained that a more sinister explanation for their son’s death cannot be ruled out. In a 2024 interview with 60 Minutes, MacFarlane noted that nothing about the case aligned with what they knew of their son, adding that she had spoken to him the day he disappeared and he had appeared completely normal. Speaking to media after the coroner released her findings, MacFarlane said the family felt vindicated by the recommendation to pass the case to homicide detectives.
“Our position was if there is a door that is left open for us to continue to investigate, for us to now work with homicide [detectives], that would be our holy grail, even though notwithstanding, we don’t have our beloved son with us anymore,” MacFarlane told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Our focus is to ensure that the truth is fully examined and that no stone is left unturned and we now have Her Honour’s recommendation for that to be placed in the hands of the people that do just that. We will continue to search, whatever the outcome, for justice for Jackson.”