The Scene of the Crime Read online

  Dedication

  To May Mackey

  Epigraph

  A law court has its own peculiar power of attraction, don’t you think?

  — Fräulein Bürstner, in Franz Kafka’s The Trial

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1 Mark Lundy: Operation summer

  2 That summer: Victor Wasmuth

  3 The bogan ninja: Antonie Dixon

  4 That spring: ‘Mr X’

  5 Falling down: Guy Hallwright

  6 The lair of the white worm: Derek King

  7 A naked male riding his bike: Timaru

  8 Mark Lundy: Killing Christine and Amber

  9 Mark Lundy: Sleeping

  10 Made in Australia: Rolf Harris

  11 Terra nullius: Brad Murdoch

  12 Sex and Chocolate: ‘Bones’

  13 The Rotorua Three: Clint Rickards

  14 The killings at Stilwell Road: Chris Wang

  15 Mark Lundy: The trial

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Steve Braunias

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Basically what happened is that a Maori guy stuck a knife between the second and third ribs of an Asian guy, and killed him. A forensic pathologist described the fatal wound when he appeared as a witness at the murder trial in the High Court of Auckland. I looked over at the defence lawyer’s desk and saw the photos taken of the victim at postmortem — the tremendous amount of blood on his chest, the mouth wide open in death.

  He got stabbed in his workshop. He died in his driveway. In court, it was getting on to four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in spring, and I was thinking about dinner. It was a boring murder trial, because all murder trials are boring; the court demands it, with its patient reconstructions and re-imaginings of a frantic, awful event. The windowless room, the serviettes neatly folded over the top of glass jugs of water on the lawyers’ desks . . . But there is something more intense than boredom at all murder trials: misery.

  You can always feel the misery of the families of the victim and the accused. It’s like a weight. It’s crushing. While the pathologist listed his findings at postmortem — the entry point of the knife was 1.9 centimetres; it had passed through skin, fatty tissue, muscle, and entered the aorta, causing 1.2 litres of blood to haemorrhage — I looked at the victim’s wife. It was as though she was hearing the bad news for the first time. It was as though she was dying. It was worse than that: she was re-imagining the frantic, awful event of her husband’s death.

  ‘A grumpy drug deal gone wrong,’ said a police detective with a shaved head and a pleasant face. I had taken him aside and asked what the trial was all about. The accused was claiming self-defence. The murder weapon was displayed on an exhibits table: a sharp kitchen knife, barely long enough to halve an orange.

  I closed my eyes. I was happy. Like five of the cases examined in this book, I chose the stabbing at random. They weren’t assignments; they weren’t news. I’d walked in off the street that Thursday afternoon in spring just to see if anything was happening at the High Court, just to re-experience the familiar misery. I needed to immerse myself in the slow, dingy reality of a trial because I had spent that morning reading about crime writing in Te Ara, the New Zealand online encyclopedia for children.

  The encyclopedia’s musings on crime and media had recently been published. The author was some nobody. ‘Crime news,’ Nobody wrote, ‘offers the media potent content as it is often negative, personal, visual, violent, emotional and lacks complexity.’ The rest of his commentary was just as pithy and just as pious, and it briefly made me want to wring Nobody’s neck, but you can go to prison for that. Worse, you first have to appear in court.

  *

  The possibility exists — a rough calculation here, a journalist’s tendency to exaggerate just about everything there — that I have spent an entire year of my life sitting in courtrooms. Strange to think of it as a block of 365 days. The passing of the seasons, summer to summer, while sealed inside a zone of other people’s horror — I remember excitedly approaching the wife of a policeman accused of rape, and telling her that my daughter had just been born. Dad will be home after court. I’ve been attracted to the peculiar power of trials for every year of her life.

  I’ve loved it and hated it, and I could seldom tear myself away. All reporting is the accumulation of minor details, and nothing is too minor in a courtroom devoted to a case of murder. There is such an obsessive quality to trials. There is no such thing as courtroom drama, and the idea that a trial is a kind of theatre is facile. It’s far more powerful than that. It’s a production of sorrow and paperwork, a clean realism usually conducted in a collegial manner, in dark-panelled rooms with set hours of business. The orderliness is almost a parody of the savage moments it seeks to understand. Inside, the black silk robes and the swearing on Bibles; outside, the dirty realism of New Zealand as it goes about its business, the everyday chaos of love, sex and money, for the most part settling into patterns of happiness or droll compromise, sometimes going too fast to stop and ending in violent death.

  A court is a chamber of questions. Who, when, why, what happened and exactly how — these are issues of psychology and the soul; they’re general to the human condition, with its infinite capacity to cause pain. The question that very often most interests me in court is: where. It’s impossible and pointless to try to put yourself in the mind of a killer, but the setting takes you to the scene of the crime, shows you something about New Zealand. It’s not the dark underbelly; it’s the dark surface, in plain sight, the road most travelled. There goes Mark Lundy, possibly, driving along the Petone foreshore in the middle of the night. There goes Louise Nicholas, possibly, being taken to a house in Rotorua’s gruesomely named Rutland Street. Other chapters in this book allow a guided tour of a beautiful Victorian mansion in Auckland, and walk the yellow brick road of that distant suburb of New Zealand, the Gold Coast.

  Sometimes I think it’s the setting and not the mystery that explains why our most famous murder, the Crewe killings, has such a hold on the public imagination. The rural New Zealandness of the 1970 double-killing offers a parable of the way we lived — the isolation, the hard work, the pioneer spirit. Jeanette and Harvey Crewe were killed in their farmhouse in obscure Pukekawa. It was Waikato hill country, submerged in dense fog. ‘The talk was of calvings and eczema spores, stock prices and rainfall,’ wrote Terry Bell in Bitter Hill, his 1972 book calling for Arthur Thomas’s release. No one heard the two gunshots. The bodies were mummified in bed linen, bound with pieces of galvanised wire from the farm, and removed in wheelbarrows. It was a murder case in which a cow served as an alibi. Thomas said that he couldn’t have been at the Crewe household because he was with a sick cow, Number 4, which he helped calve that night. The only shot he fired from his rifle that month was to destroy the animal. It took two months for the bodies to surface in the Waikato River; until then, police searched in limestone caves, and also considered the possibility that the Crewes were wandering ‘dazed’ somewhere in that lonely countryside.

  The only vivid detail in the very first case of murder tried in New Zealand — Joseph Burns was found guilty of murdering a couple and their daughter in Devonport, on 22 October 1841 — takes you to the scene of the crime. It was also the same exact spot where Burns was hanged. The courthouse on Queen Street was packed during his trial; a fortnight after his death sentence was passed down, Burns was unshackled in his cell, and escorted by armed guard to the Auckland wharf, and across to Devonport by boat. The scaffold was erected at the Devonport naval base, on the same spot where Burns had hacked the family to death,
and burned down their house. Dudley Dyne writes in Famous New Zealand Murders, ‘Near the tall scaffold . . . lay the coffin ready to receive the body of the prisoner. Burns sat down for a rest upon the coffin, a sight that moved the chaplain to tears.’

  Dead man resting, on his own coffin, on a Saturday morning on the gently lapping shores of pretty Devonport. Then he stood on the gallows trapdoor and had the rope placed around his neck. He asked the hangman to place the knot a little higher. The trapdoor fell. ‘Thus,’ penned a watching reporter from The New Zealander, ‘terminated the first European execution.’ I wonder whether the reporter came back for more. I would have.

  *

  The first time I stepped into a courtroom was in Greymouth. I was 23. I had joined the staff of the Greymouth Evening Star, and made court reporter. It was fascinating and baffling and terrifying, and I never really got used to it; I felt on edge, and didn’t know what to think. I was afraid of murderers and frightened of men who gave the bash — the most common cases were drink-driving, supply of marijuana, and giving the bash. Pat, a very fat man from The Christchurch Press, sat next to me in the press bench. He had seen it all; he sucked on barley sugars, slept, and was extremely helpful.

  Most of the time I worried about spelling people’s names right. But I also wondered what those days in court were telling me about life in Greymouth. There was a long trial involving two businessmen, one a former policeman, who drove a young guy off the road one dark night and beat him up. The young guy had been following the ex-cop for weeks and gathering information on him on behalf of a friend, whose wife was sleeping with the former detective. The other businessman pushed me against the wall one day during recess. ‘I don’t like you,’ he said. I didn’t say anything. He had his hand on my throat.

  Punks — ‘punk rockers’, as I solemnly described them in the paper — were always in brawls. They had come to the Coast from Christchurch for peace and quiet, or for the easy access to dope, cactus and datura. One day they started a brawl in court. The judge picked up the hem of his robes, and legged it from the courtroom. Police reinforcements grabbed at the marauding punks. A girl with spiky hair and laddered stockings, who was awaiting her charge of offensive language, crossed the crowded courtroom and gave me a note. She’d written her name and phone number. She lived in a cold house next to the cemetery.

  A man was fined $250 for assaulting a woman at the Golden Eagle, where I drank. Ken was an okay guy. I saw him the night before he hit her. The river had flooded, and poured into the bar. A guy rowed in through the front door on a canoe, and ordered a beer. The next night, Ken brought his dog in to the bar, and a drunk woman masturbated it. Ken knocked her out cold. His lawyer said: ‘My client was highly upset, and so was his dog.’

  Older, fatter, sucking on mints, I thought back to Greymouth when I recently sat in on a day in court at the Auckland District Court on downtown Albert Street. It was the familiar register of petty crime and bashing. A 24-year-old woman from China had shoplifted $43.84 of cosmetics from Farmers. There was something depressing about her address in Queen Street: apartment number 1002. Hairdresser, 21, caught entering a karaoke bar after it had closed. Sales rep, 38, fined $375 for smashing up a mountain bike after drunkenly pointing at a helicopter. Man, 30, hits partner in Takanini. Man, 50, hits ex-partner in Rosebank. Man, 47, hits partner in Grey Lynn — and also pleads guilty to hitting another woman that same evening . . .

  The dismal little stories, one after another, endless and shabby and mindless. It meant nothing and it revealed everything. It was New Zealand fucked up and out of it, dealt with promptly and efficiently by a court staff of six, a female judge of uncertain years with a private education accent, and lawyers in grey suits with missing threads at the cuffs. The bailiff pushed through the doors, calling for names. He would return and say, ‘No appearance, ma’am.’ There was only one spectator, a character whose daily rounds also include the Inter City bus depot, where he keeps a close scrutiny on any drivers who pull into Auckland later than scheduled.

  Woman, 41, pleads guilty to defrauding a taxi driver. She had been drinking all day in New Lynn; at 6.30pm, she caught a cab to Avondale. The fare was $13. She didn’t have any money. She swore at the driver, and then urinated on the front seat. The cleaning charge was $70. Convicted, and ordered to pay the driver $83. Stunned, she said from the dock: ‘What, the whole $83?’ She was on an invalid’s benefit. It was agreed she could pay back the sum at $10 a week.

  The town drunk arrived late in the afternoon. Dressed in walkshorts, socks, sandals and a polo shirt, he muttered aloud to himself at the back of the court, and rustled inside a plastic bag to fish out his wallet, which was empty. Finally, his case was called up. His barrister, chewing at a grimy strip of sticking plaster on the little finger of his right hand, apologised for his client failing to turn up earlier. ‘He has gastroenteritis, asthma and eczema problems. He was advised to remain in bed, which explains him not coming to court, ma’am.’ And then he added: ‘He has a nervous disposition. He can be a difficult character.’

  In boisterous spirits and with terrific cheer, the accused approached the dock, and hooted: ‘Hello, everybody!’ But the only people remaining in court were the staff. The one spectator had left, possibly to run his steely eye over the incoming coach from Coromandel. Never mind; the accused had another public announcement. ‘I’m an old boy from the old school!’

  His charge of assault was read out. He put on a very convincing display of shadow boxing in the dock. He said to the security guard: ‘You’ll make an All Black one day!’ The judge remanded him to another date. He told her: ‘You’re fantastic!’

  The bailiff walked around the courtroom and collected documents, straightened chairs. But the town drunk had one last message to broadcast. He turned as he left the court, and said: ‘I’ve been on TV. You didn’t know that, did you?’ His eyes truly sparkled, and his happy laugh was like a reminder that lawlessness can provide the one thing that formal, civilised life in New Zealand so often withholds: pleasure.

  *

  Much is made of the psychology and pathology that may or may not be laid bare of the accused in major trials. We feel we get to know something revealing and crucial about people defending serious charges, and reach our own judgment on their character. Who did it — the weird paperboy David Bain, or his weird father Robin Bain? Who do you think was more likely to snap? What did you make of Scott Watson, still claiming his innocence for the murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope? We watch, we inspect, we somehow divine their true nature.

  I think a great deal of this is dangerous nonsense. I think it did for Mark Lundy, and that the jury reached a verdict based partly on a stupid and vindictive reading of his body language.

  But the business of a trial is far less concerned with psychology than with an exercise in complicated physics. It’s a study of time and mass, meaning that it tries to put people back into a space they may have once occupied where something definitely bad happened. Witnesses and expert testimony are called on to confirm or dispute the equation. The effort and specificity are incredible, and essentially futile — no one can go back in time, no one can ever know the truth of an event.

  When in doubt, tell stories. Volumes of court transcripts are filled with fiction. Some of it’s intentional — the lying witness, the dishonest cop. Most of it’s confused, mistaken, guesswork, half-truths, or just lousy science and long bows. The sum of it is a demented, swirling kind of fiction; with their competing narratives of guilt and innocence, a trial is always going to take on the literary form of an unreliable memoir. I think that’s one of the main reasons why I like attending court. I like the way it tells stories. I like the ambiguities, the uncertainties.

  But trials end with a verdict, which becomes law, and regarded as fact. A strange phenomenon then immediately occurs in the media. Until the verdict, court reporting is typically cautious; it’s stenographic, recording what was said by who. After the verdict, all bets are off. Verdict equal
s law equals fact, and guilt becomes absolute guilt. Suddenly, you can say what the hell you like, because you know he did it. This bilge, after Lundy’s first trial in 2002: ‘He is a hefty, rubbery figure with a huge bulge in the middle, like the Michelin Man. When he walks, his palms face backwards instead of in towards his sides . . . His eyes swam behind thick lenses, like lazy fish in two small tanks . . . He was a keen watcher of crime documentaries on Sky and the Discovery Channel. He planned the crime carefully and contrived an alibi. The planning was cold-blooded.’

  Well — possibly. I doubt it. I don’t know. But I hate the certainty of it, and it was the only thing I promised Lundy when I met him before his second trial — that if he was found guilty a second time, I wouldn’t declare some sudden knowledge of his movements and motives when I came to write about it. It wasn’t because I particularly liked him. And I wouldn’t have felt all that bad about betraying him in print if I had come to think he was guilty and that the verdict was correct. The horror of the killings and the pity for Christine and Amber Lundy were more important than respecting a murderer’s feelings. But accepting his guilt is different from claiming an absolute knowledge of how he went about killing his wife and daughter. In any case, he didn’t pay much attention to my pledge. He thought he’d be acquitted.

  In law, Lundy is a murderer. In law, Clint Rickards, the former senior policeman accused of taking part in the gang-rape of Louise Nicholas, is innocent. He was acquitted in that trial, and another verdict of not guilty was delivered at a similar, subsequent trial. But it cost him his career, his reputation, his name; whereas Nicholas was referred to in a 2015 news story as a ‘rape victim’. In law, that’s false. But the certainties have moved on, and remain firmly on Nicholas’s side of the story.

  I drank beers with Lundy on a porch. I had a cup of tea with Rickards in a café frequented by the mentally ill. I smoked cigarettes with Nicholas in an adobe house. And then there was the time I met Chris Wang, accused of killing two men with a steak knife bought from the Made In Japan $2 shop on Queen Street. I went there and bought the same knife. The packaging reads: ‘Always hygienic since blade is stainless-steel. Achieves a professionally cut surface!’