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.

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