A "devious" physics professor, a vengeful ex-boyfriend, a prominent businesswoman "playing Miss Marple", and a Crown prosecutor prepared to bend the rules.
Those are just some of the things that led to Gordon Wood being wrongly convicted of the murder of his girlfriend Caroline Byrne, his barrister says.
Ms Byrne's body was found at the bottom of a cliff at The Gap, in Watsons Bay, in June 1995.
Prosecutors accused Mr Wood of throwing Ms Byrne off the cliff, and a jury found him guilty of her murder after a high-profile trial in 2008.
He spent three years in jail before he was acquitted by the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2012.
Mr Wood is now suing the state of NSW for malicious prosecution.
Mr Wood's barrister Bruce McClintock, SC, told the NSW Supreme Court on Monday that the police investigation was flawed.
"Some might say when one analyses it, it was actually ridiculous," Mr McClintock said.
He said a central part of the Crown case was the evidence of Associate Professor Rod Cross and a photograph of The Gap, purported to be taken in 1996.
The jury at the trial saw the photograph, which showed bushes against the safety rail at the clifftop, and were told Mr Wood chose that spot because he could get a four metre run-up, and be obscured from sight.
But, Mr McClintock said, the aerial photograph was actually taken in 2003, a fact an investigator was aware of at the trial.
Associate Professor Cross, who gave physics-based evidence about the trajectory of Ms Byrne's fall, only had expertise in plasma physics, or the behaviour of gases at high temperatures, Mr McClintock said.
"It's deviousness of the highest order ... about Professor Cross.
"Professor Cross had a motive to see my client convicted. During the course of the trial ... he was writing a book, which was ultimately published by the University of NSW Press under the title Evidence For Murder: How Physics Convicted a Killer.
"It wouldn't have been much of a book, or its sales wouldn't have been particularly great, if its title had been ... something like 'How Dodgy Data Failed To Convict an Innocent Man'.
"It really is breathtaking ... that this man could ever have been put on as some form of expert."
Mr McClintock said Mr Wood was "singularly unlucky" that Ms Byrne had an ex-boyfriend, Andrew Blanchette, who was a police officer and who "unquestionably hated [Mr Wood]".
Mr Blanchette was a "thoroughly dishonest man", who directed Ms Byrne's former employer, deportment coach June Dally-Watkins to go to The Gap.
"He persuaded Ms Dally-Watkins to play Miss Marple and run around The Gap, taking photographs, and showing people," Mr McClintock said, referring to the fictional detective in Agatha Christie's crime novels.
Mr McClintock said he would be heavily relying on the Court of Criminal Appeal's "serious" findings about Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, QC, including that he made submissions to the jury without any evidence.
"[There was] a prosecutor who, to put it mildly, was prepared to bend the rules," Mr McClintock said.
Mr Wood is in court, sitting behind his barrister, closely following proceedings.
The hearing continues before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton.
