‘So everything was all calm inside, not a problem. The guys were sitting on him outside, and I just sat on the edge of the deck and waited for the police to come. He was yelling and screaming and crying, “Let me go, let me go. I promise I won’t do anything again.” And “Hey, just let me go and I’ll be good, we’ll have a few beers and we’ll go out fishing.” Fishing!
‘So this went on for three-quarters of an hour. Because he’s kicking and punching and the guys are trying to hold him down on the ground, Kieran came up with the idea of getting cable ties. He ran back home – I remember he had his moccasins on – to get some ties, and he came back and he ties his ankles together and his hands behind his back.
‘Two of the guys pick him up and put him in the middle of the driveway. Jonathan’s just sitting on his lonesome on the gravel driveway. He’s got a bit of blood on him and his shirt’s a bit mangled ’cos his nose hit the kitchen bench when Marcus struggled with him.
‘So the police turn up and the first thing they do, they come running straight over to him and yell out, “Who did this? Who did this?” And Kieran goes, “I did, sir. I did.” And the cops go straightaway, “Arrest him! Arrest him for kidnapping!” No questions, no nothing. Bang. Decision made. Done.’
How much of Tracy’s story was true? In court, crown lawyers said the family hiding Blair were terrified, and frantically called the cops out to the house to prevent the teenager being murdered. Tracy claimed they looked on blithely as the kid got hogtied and said, ‘Not a problem.’
The three trials, the policewoman in Feilding ‘covering her arse’, as Tracy put it, the expense, the enormous stress, the rancid coleslaw and mayo sandwiches for lunch in the court cells, Marcus leaving her… Just about the least of it was the taint of that exciting word ‘vigilante’. Was it even a taint? ‘Yeah, well if that’s what it takes when the police don’t do their job,’ said Tracy, ‘then whatever. Maybe there need to be a few more in little communities around New Zealand.’
In 2005 I reported on a peculiar drama in the West Coast town of Blackball, when a butcher and a sickly lunatic persuaded a convicted paedophile to pack up and leave. Graham Wootton had bought a house in town. The police told the school, the school told the parents. Pat Kennedy, 61, the town’s butcher, and his friend Geoff Strong knocked on Wootton’s door. They said, ‘You probably know a paedophile has moved into town. Are you that person?’
He would neither confirm nor deny. It wasn’t the most brilliant answer in the world. When they knocked on his door, they didn’t know if Wootton was the man they wanted. Five other families had recently moved into Blackball and fingers were pointed at every new face, but Wootton’s witless reply gave away his identity.
His visitors told him he wasn’t welcome. Wootton said, ‘Do you expect me to just pack up and leave?’ Yes, they said. So he did, that day, with his wife, a deaf mute. The couple had already left when a local man and sickness beneficiary Alan Gurden, 38, set up a vigil across the road from Wootton’s house to discourage him from returning.
Blackball, pop. 360, content to mind its own business, was suddenly the hub of vigilantes and vigils. While Gurden and friends camped outside Wootton’s house in tents, others brought scones, cakes and sausages, did the dishes, and provided firewood to burn in a 40-gallon drum. There was crazy talk of tailing the furniture truck when it came to empty Wootton’s house.
Possibly even less sanely, the town’s visiting vicar agreed to perform an exorcism on the house. The previous owner had been a woman described as a grumpy old bitch, who chopped down a stand of attractive oak trees. Before that there had been a woman who spent a lot of time in the pub to get away from her violent husband. Before that there was a man who topped himself. Maybe the exorcism wasn’t such a bad idea. The walls crawled with years of misery.
I arrived in Blackball on a Friday afternoon in late autumn. I walked down the main street until it was completely dark, as black as the coal that built the town. I turned along a side street and saw a couple sitting on deckchairs in their front yard. They had lit a small wood fire and there was a pot of something cooking on the logs. I stood and spied on them, hypnotised by the beautiful flames, and thought, They look like the luckiest people in the world.
This was almost certainly sentimental nonsense, but the town was so pretty, with its willows and rowanberries, its drowsy and delicious smell of burning coal from every chimney.
Not quite every chimney. Wootton’s house of misery already looked as sealed as a tomb. I snooped in the letterbox. There was an unopened letter from the Ministry of Justice. I snooped in the garage. There was a flyer on the floor advertising children’s karaoke. A woman and her two daughters, aged nine and eleven, offered to ‘host your party … we love to sing, and are available to hire for birthday parties or any special occasion’. I also found a sheet of paper containing a handwritten lyric Wootton had copied from the song ‘Honky Tonk Angels’. Second verse: ‘I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels / I might have known you’d never make a wife.’
A paedophile who played and sang country music, was married to a deaf mute, and bought a home in a small cold town before being slung out on his arse – his life had
