We were here first. So much of the New Zealand way of life bristles in that remark. Wasmuth had emigrated from England. He had worked as a builder. His name was listed in census records in Christchurch in 1928, Onehunga in 1946, Waitakere in 1949, and Rodney in 1956. He was married and had two daughters, but the couple divorced. He remarried, to a woman with two children of her own. They separated, and Wasmuth was living alone by the summer of 1963. Newspaper photos taken of him in police handcuffs show a tall man with a superb physique, like a sprinter — his singlet and shorts reveal shapely legs and ankles, a narrow waist, lightly muscled arms. He looks tanned. He had lost the hair on top of his head, and his eyes are wild and staring.
Stories continue to be told about him by people at Bethells Beach. They said he was a recluse. They said he was a crack shot. They said he walked the road at night with a rifle under his oilskin coat. A man who bought the property two doors down said: ‘I heard he had a kid who was a mongol.’
*
Wasmuth was mad. ‘Grossly insane’, a psychiatrist told the court, in the unrestrained language of the time. His craziness rose with the temperatures that intolerable summer. There was an incident with tomatoes at Christmas. He complained that someone was stealing the fruit right off his plants, and accused Jim Berry’s wife, Kathleen, of knowing who was behind it. Seething, paranoid, alone, he sat at his kitchen table in his singlet and shorts and worked on a book — he was a murderer with a fancy prose style. When he appeared in court, he listed his occupation as ‘Novelist’. He was a published author, with several short stories appearing in magazines in Australia. His latest project was an epic poem.
I searched for people who might have known him, and called a woman in Northland. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m his daughter.’ We didn’t talk for long. ‘He had literary aspirations,’ she said, ‘but his poem was pretty much nonsense. It was like blank-verse poetry. There was an awful lot of it — pages and pages. It was impossible to make sense of it. He was an intelligent person; it had what you’d call classical references in it. He’d ask people for their opinion. But nobody could understand it. I’ve still got some somewhere. Haven’t looked at in years, and no desire to.’
A misunderstood genius? The only available document in Wasmuth’s oeuvre is his statement to the police. I was shown it in the lobby of an Auckland hotel where I met the late Bill Brien, a former detective who led the inquiry. He gave me a photocopy. The heavy typewriter keys had left ink over the pages; a round stamp from a police inkpad described a circle, like a stain from the bottom of a teacup. It was three pages long and it gave off a kind of crackle of lunacy and violence. You couldn’t make this stuff up because it was so artless. There was nothing contrived about it. It was dreamy, almost whimsical. It told a narrative of elisions. Important facts were missing. It skated over the events of the day, was more concerned with the suspicious behaviour of others. It began: ‘For some years I have been certain that I have been persecuted . . .’ It ended: ‘I have no regrets because I think that the whole thing may have been staged. Except for a pain in my arm, I feel in good health and mentally balanced.’
I visited May Mackey in her apartment in Parnell. She was 92, and claimed: ‘I’m fading out.’ In fact, she was agile and alert. She made a pot of tea, and put out a plate of custard squares. In 1963 she was married to Detective Inspector Wally Chalmers of the Auckland CIB. ‘He was a real Scotsman,’ said May. He was pipe major of the police pipe band, a big, barrel-chested man with a soft heart. During the war, when there was a shortage of staff, he worked shifts as a police cook in the Auckland barracks; after making arrests, it was his habit to climb the stairs to the fourth-floor kitchens and make a meal for himself and the arrested man. Days before he was called out to Bethells, he led a party to disarm a 22-year-old plasterer, who was holding a couple hostage in their home in Ellerslie.
May grew up in Dunedin. She was christened Hughina. May and Wally married late in life — she was 40, he was 44 — and adopted. ‘We put our names down, and they gave us Huia, our daughter. Then they rang again, and said. “We’ve got another one.” A baby boy, only 11 months old.’ They called him Wallace.
They lived in a police house on Forfar Road, Glendowie. I asked her about that summer’s day in 1963, and she said, ‘The children looked so beautiful that day. I had a pram to carry the two of them, and I thought I’d go for a walk to meet Wally. I phoned the station to find out which route he was coming home. They said, “Sorry, he’s not here.” He only went out when there was trouble. The next thing, I get a visit.’ Wally was 46.
They put her on tranquilisers. The funeral at St David’s Church in downtown Auckland was a vast public ceremony with thousands of people lining Khyber Pass Road, and a cortège that went for 5 kilometres. The police band piped the hearses the length of Khyber Pass. May didn’t remember much about it. ‘I was confused at the time. Grieving. Totally stunned over what had happened. So it’s not terribly clear.’
I phoned Valerie Bright in Paihia. In 1963 she was married to Detective Sergeant Neville Power. She said, ‘Nev was very studious. He always
