When 17-year old Cayleb Hough went missing, his frantic father had police set up a press conference in a desperate attempt to make contact with him.
‘I have a belief that Cayleb is out there; I believe he needs some help,” Steven Hough told reporters.
‘We’re really worried about you mate. You’re not in any trouble with the police, you haven’t done anything wrong.’
Cayleb Hough was just 17 when he went missing in 2016 before Christmas. He made the mistake of hanging around with a drug-crazed loser who would bash him to death while high
Cayleb Hough’s father Steven was an imposing figure inside Melbourne court rooms. His anger for his son’s killer was understandable by everyone within the court’s walls
Thomas Kelson had supposedly been Cayleb’s mate. He was high on drugs when he turned on his friend and bashed him to death
It was January 2016 and the desperate father was clinging to the hope that his precious boy was still alive.
Cayleb was from Chelsea Heights – 30kms southeast of Melbourne – a keen sportsman who loved cricket, footy, indoor netball and rugby.
He was about to start a pre-apprenticeship in building.
He had no reason to vanish.
It was just five days before Christmas when he was last seen in a blue Ford Falcon XR6 sedan leaving a party at a house in The Crescent at Highett in Melbourne’s south-east.
That car was found in a Crown Casino car park on January 16 that year.
It was a car that was known to Cayleb and would eventually lead police to unraveling the shocking and senseless truth behind the teenager’s disappearance.
Cayleb’s distraught family printed and distributed thousands of missing poster flyers across Melbourne and volunteers gathered every few days to search the streets by car and by foot for him.
In March that year, in an act of sheer chance, Cayleb’s body was found by a student in a Bacchus Marsh mine shaft.
A Melbourne University student had stumbled across the badly-decomposed body while researching an assignment deep in the 14,250 hectare Lerderderg State Park, to the west of Melbourne.
The teenager’s remains were still in the clothes he was last seen in, including Nike shoes and Kobe Bryant basketball socks.
The discovery totally gutted his mother Melanie Danaher and would infuriate his father.
Friends and family searched high and low for Cayleb Hough. He had no reason to go missing. It was sheer chance that his body was ever found
Mr Hough made a direct appeal to his son’s killer to ‘do the right thing’.
‘I’m calling on that person, the owner of the car, to come forward and provide the information,’ he said at the time.
‘That person, and anyone else who has information, owes it to Cayleb and to our friends and community, who have supported us so much in our efforts to find him, to do the right thing.’
Mr Hough was in court when two men charged over his son’s murder made their way into a packed Melbourne Magistrates’ Court just months later.
He pointed at one of the men and shouted: ‘You slimy coward. Every dog gets his day … you better hope you have protection in there.’
Mr Hough branded the men ‘cowards’ and was escorted from the courtroom by security.
One of those men would later roll over on his co-accused and accept a charge of aiding Cayleb’s killer in dumping his body down the shaft.
The man, who cannot be named due to a court-imposed gag order, was sentenced in 2017 to a community corrections order with time already served.
During his pre-sentence plea at the Supreme Court in Melbourne, a group of men were told to leave and never return after attacking the offender with a barrage of abuse.
‘F**king dog,’ one yelled. ‘Good night buddy,’ another shouted.
Cayleb’s father seethed as graphic details of how his son died were aired in court.
He had been murdered by his own mate Thomas Kelson.
Prosecutor Mark Rochford, QC described the events leading up to Cayleb’s savage murder as bizarre.
‘This is one of the most bizarre things I’ve come across,’ he said.
He told the court Cayleb was attacked after telling Kelson, 28, he had been forced by bikies to kill his father.
But Mr Kelson’s father was alive and well.
A police investigator holds a piece a fabric alongside SES workers during the search for clues into the suspected murder of Cayleb Hough near Bacchus Marsh in 2016
Cayleb Hough had been a popular teenager who had recently left home and was making his way in the world. He got hooked up with a bad crowd and it ended in tragedy
Police believe the men were off their faces on drugs.
The pair had attended a friend’s home at Collingwood, smoking ice and ‘speaking in riddles’ as they become more drug-affected.
Kelson became concerned about the disappearance of his father, incorrectly believing Cayleb had something to do with it.
He began striking Cayleb, giving him a blood nose and cutting his arm with a kitchen knife while ‘ranting and raving’.
Cayleb’s decision to make ‘entirely false revelations’ about Kelson’s father, including that he’d been raped and shot, would cost him his life.
He bound the teen with duct tape, binding his hands and placing some over his mouth, bundling him up in the rear seat of his car.
Kelson then drove in convoy with the other man to an abandoned mine shaft in the forest near Bacchus Marsh.
On the way, Cayleb kicked the back of Kelson’s head, causing him to go ‘ballistic’.
Kelson put the knuckledusters on his hand and smashed Cayleb’s face in.
He then dragged the boy’s body from his car, dumping him in the mine shaft and telling him he was ‘a dog’.
Kelson later drove to Sydney and escaped to Argentina before deciding to return home.
Cayleb Hough’s killers tried to conceal their dirty crime. But they soon turned on each other and justice was eventually served
He was arrested at the airport at his arrival back in Australia in January 2016.
An autopsy was unable to determine Cayleb’s cause of death because his body had become ‘largely skeletonised’.
In August 2018, Kelson was sentenced to 24 years in jail with a non-parole period of 19 years.
As he was removed from the docks at the Supreme Court of Victoria, Cayleb’s family screamed ‘you crumb’ and ‘you filthy scum’ at the killer.
In sentencing, Justice Andrew Tinney condemned the ‘violent and protracted assault’ of Cayleb’s death at the hands of someone who had been a friend.
‘You murdered a 17-year-old boy over who you were able to exercise control in the last hours of his life,’ Justice Tinney said.
‘His death was an absolute tragedy.’