I wasn’t much fun. I shut myself away inside the small room reading up on the case, and sometimes I wondered whether Levick’s magnificent effort was futile and wrong-headed. His Post-it notes read FFS, LIES, CRAP. In his mind, there was no room for doubt, or nuance; Lundy had been framed, the charges were bullshit, the police had lied and twisted the evidence. The clearest distillation of his investigation was in the folder marked GEOFF’S BOOK. He had written it for publication. No one could ever publish it. It was libellous and furious. The constant use of bold type, capital letters and exclamation marks were immediate signs of an obsessive at work, expressing himself in the typography and language of vitriol. ‘Chapter three: Bladder full. Chapter four: Exposed banana. Chapter six: What car? What woman? What wig?’ And yet much of it was completely accurate. Piece by piece, he took apart the 7pm question — Dance’s crazy evidence, the impossibility of the drive, the vacuity of Pang’s time-of-death theory, the absurdity of manipulating the clock on the computer. The book reads like a prophecy. On 26 January, two weeks before the retrial, the police told Lundy’s defence team that they had thrown out the time-of-death theory of 7pm — and with it, Margaret Dance and all the rest of their fanciful notions that cast Lundy as a cold-blooded killer and master criminal racing through the Manawatu flatlands in the early evening.
Levick had called his book ‘Meticulous, or Ridiculous?’. The police conceded that the latter option was the correct one when they finally admitted that they were wrong with their wretched 7pm theory. The scenario had changed in the new police inquiry, Operation Spring. They now put the time of death as sometime well after midnight, perhaps 3am. In essence, though, nothing had changed. It had simply been a case of wrong time, right man. Everything else remained in place. Lundy was the murderer. He did it for the insurance. He staged a break-in. And, most damningly — the one piece of evidence that put him at the scene of the crime, what it all came down to — the stain on his shirt was tissue from Christine’s brain.
‘Fucking Miller,’ Levick said. He meant Dr Rodney Miller, whom he loathed even more than anyone from the police. Miller was a specialist in diagnostic pathology, based in Dallas, Texas, who had tested Lundy’s shirt and identified the presence of brain tissue. It was a novel approach — Miller worked in the field of immunohistochemistry, or IHC, primarily in cancer research, and his tests had never previously been used in a forensic crime investigation. By chance, he had attended a pathology conference in Palmerston North in August 2000, just three days before the murders. He was a keynote speaker. His speech was titled, ‘Achieving reliability of immunostains’, and it addressed techniques of tissue transfer. This was exactly what the police needed during their investigation into Lundy. A scientist from Medlab in Palmerston North, who remembered Miller’s talk, wrote to him in January 2001: ‘I’ve got a curly one for you!!! We are involved in a homicide investigation in which a mother and daughter were slain using a tomahawk . . . The husband/father is the prime suspect. His shirt has 2 smears of nearly invisible material on it . . . One smear was dampened with water, and imprinted on a slide. It shows tissue fragments including intact blood vessels. We feel it is probably brain.’
Miller replied, ‘Wow! That is really a nasty case, and it would be great to nail the bad guy.’ And then: ‘Maybe we could use tissue transfer media to remove the cellular material from the shirt, and do immunostains on that.’
Head of the police inquiry, Detective Sergeant Ross Grantham, personally took the samples to Miller’s laboratory in Texas. He later claimed in an affidavit: ‘I was not shopping for an expert who could tell me that it was brain tissue.’ He wrote to Miller: ‘It is vitally important for our case to be able to positively identify the material as originating from Christine Lundy.’
Miller wrote an entertaining narrative, published on his laboratory website, about the testing. ‘The week before Detective Grantham came, I was rinsing off a fresh chicken to be used for dinner, and noticed spinal cord tissue protruding from its severed neck. I thought this presented an excellent opportunity to see whether we could use IHC to detect tissues smeared on shirts, so I smeared chicken spinal cord, kidney, and liver on portions of an old shirt . . . Little did the chicken know that she would be contributing greatly to putting a guilty man behind bars.’
Yes, if only chicken little could talk. Miller’s immunostains proved positive for chook tissue; likewise, his testing on Lundy’s shirt ‘showed unequivocal tissue on the areas of the stain’. He wrote: ‘This provided unequivocal evidence that Mark Lundy had brain tissue on his shirt, from an area that also contained Christine Lundy’s DNA. This was the critical piece of evidence that allowed an arrest to be made.’
Miller remarked near the end of his breezy crime yarn that Lundy was sentenced to 20 years without parole. ‘I think we all know that if he committed this crime in Texas, his punishment would be a bit different.’ Miller’s evidence would have sent Lundy to his death. There is a note of regret, a kind of sigh, in his ‘I think we all know . . .’
The police had found their smoking gun. The supposition was that Lundy wore overalls or something similar at the murders, but small traces (described at trial as ‘bigger than a speck of sand, smaller than a grain of rice’) of Christine’s brain somehow found their way
