‘I was fortunate enough to speak to an old-timer who had a hand in rigging the antenna,’ wrote a correspondent to the website Mysterious New Zealand. ‘One particularly high-gain array (the curtain type – looks like a giant spider web) they were installing began throwing riggers around by zapping them with RF energy. This was being picked up from the HF transmitter site at Hīmatangi 30-odd kilometres away. …Talk about free power eh.’
But what else was released? What paranoias and manias were conducted through the fields of static? What psychic voltage moved in the air? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? It can’t have been any good. The point of the US spy station was harm. What did it do to Tangimoana, population allegedly 290?
There was a story missing from Ron and Joan’s scrapbook. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, smiling. I said, ‘The vigilantes.’ He said, ‘Oh. Them. Well. A bad business.’ He’d stopped smiling. ‘Leave me out of it.’ He put on the kettle for a cup of tea in the spotless kitchen. The radio played the Elton John and Kiki Dee duet ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’.
She was in her garage in Tangimoana on Friday afternoon building a trailer. She looked like she knew what she was doing. She knew what she doing. ‘My background is building. I was with Fletchers. I did project management construction.’ She was 41, with bright sparkling eyes and short curly hair just beginning to grey, wearing work boots and an old pair of jeans loose around her slim hips, and her bare arms in her T-shirt were black with grease. She was the infamous Tracy Thomsen, up on charges of kidnapping and threatening to kill.
Tracy was with her husband Marcus, 37, an engineer and tractor driver up on the same charges. I interviewed them in the front yard and Tracy did most of the talking. Marcus bowed his head and seemed reluctant to be there.
Tracy said, ‘The whole thing stuffed us. Emotionally for me, I couldn’t handle it. Emotional fucking wreck.’
I said, ‘Did you go on medication?’
She said, ‘Nah, I went on alcohol – alcohol-induced comas sometimes. That’s the only way I knew how to cope with it and get to sleep so my mind wouldn’t be going all the time. I was a very angry, bitter person so I made it my mission to get that family out of town. Come hell or high water. And they ended up moving out of town. Yep. I thought, well, this isn’t going to be all in vain.’
I said, ‘How did you achieve that?’
She said, ‘They had all the windows in their house smashed in the middle of winter. They had no water. No vehicles – they had their motorbikes stolen from outside their house while they were in bed, and taken down the river and burned out. Just made sure their life here was hell. Yep.’
Her bitter little satisfaction didn’t seem to do her much good. ‘The whole thing blew my whole life apart,’ she said. ‘Lost my business. Police took away my liquor licence and firearms licence.’ Then she said in a quieter voice, ‘Me and Marcus split up for a few months.’ He’d returned only that day. Her face crumpled and she made a tremendous effort to fight back the tears. She lost the fight.
I turned to Marcus and said, ‘How does it sit with you that you now have a criminal record?’
He said, ‘Yeah, nah, it’s good. I’m not ashamed of what I done at all. It’s good to walk around and know that I done the right thing.’
‘What would you have changed?’
‘Not told anyone. I wouldn’t have told anyone and gone by myself so no one would have known.’
‘And done what?’
He laughed.
I said, ‘Beaten the shit out of him?’
‘Ahhh, yep. Probably. Yep.’
‘But you’d have been done for assault.’
‘No, because no one would of known. And no one would of been any the wiser.’
‘But he’d have probably reported it to the cops.’
‘Well,’ Marcus said, ‘he probably wouldn’t be here to report it.’
I really wasn’t sure whether ‘here’ meant Tangimoana or whether it meant alive. Marcus said, ‘If you were going to do it by yourself, then no one would know. If he’s just walking around in the middle of the night, and no one knows he’s there, and no one knows you’re there… But the way we did it was just… looking back at it, it was just stupid.’
A brief history of Tangimoana, part two:
Tracy and Marcus Thomsen, their close friend Kieran Grice, and two other men were arrested on September 2, 2007 for what they did that Sunday night in Tangimoana to 16-year-old Jonathan Blair. The police found him in a bruised and bloody mess, with his wrists and ankles bound by cable ties. The charges included kidnapping, assault, intent to injure, and threatening to kill. The accused were looking at prison. They pleaded not guilty. They said they acted on the advice of police when they restrained Blair.
Yes, they said, they wanted to run Blair out of town, because they believed he was the culprit behind a wave of petty crimes.
No, they said, they didn’t threaten that they were going to bury him in the forest.
Yes, they said, they used physical force to take him out of the house.
No, they said, they didn’t beat him up.
Their actions were reduced to one exciting word that looked so good on banner headlines: VIGILANTES.
The whole drama dragged through the courts for three years and three trials – two were declared mistrials – until some charges were dropped, Tracy, Marcus and Kieran pleaded guilty to other charges, and were each given sentences requiring them to perform community work.
It seemed like a light sentence, but they were adamant they shouldn’t have been up on anything in the first place. The court case had changed their lives for the worse. They felt victimised, sensationalised as ‘vigilantes’, and now they had to pay back crippling
