They lived in Alma Street, Te Atatu South. I asked her about that summer’s day in 1963, and she said, ‘I was feeding my six-month-old daughter and 18-month-old son their breakfast. Nev pecked me on the cheek and said, “See you later.” I was at a friend’s house that afternoon when Nev’s parents came around. They said, “You need to sit down.” It was a weird feeling. I thought it might be a vicious joke on someone’s part.’ Neville was 25.
Valerie didn’t remember much of the funeral, either. She was in a haze of sedatives and grief. Her husband’s brothers — listed in the paper the next day as Constable OW Power of Ohakune, Constable BW Power of Te Kuiti, and police cadet KW Power of Trentham — carried the coffin. Valerie said, ‘When the casket was lowered into the ground, I felt I was going to go down with it.’
Life back at Alma Street was an agony. ‘My son, Ross, stood at the window and waited for his dad to come home. “Daddy come home. Daddy come home.” He did it for ages. It tore me apart.’
She sold the house the following year. ‘I couldn’t get away quickly enough.’ I asked her about her husband’s killer, and she said, ‘I hated Wasmuth. Hated him. His picture is imprinted in my mind. I can see him now.’
I was to visit May Mackey twice, in 2012 and again in 2015. I liked her so much; there was such a kindness to her, and she always spoke from the heart. She had arthritis, and one arm was bad. I poured the heavy teapot, and followed her orders to cover it with a ‘coat’, as she put it, to keep the pot warm. We sat next to each other on a narrow couch. She laughed easily, and wasn’t sentimental; she was more practical and honest than that.
She said about Wally’s murder, ‘Well, it’s history now. But it’s always heavily there. That was my life. Wally and I were soulmates. That’s how it always was with us. I was left alone with two young children, and a totally broken heart.’
May spoke in a very clear voice. She said: ‘My Christian faith helped me through.’ It gave her strength, and purpose, and led her towards Wasmuth.
*
I went out west to Bethells on a beautiful day in late summer. The main road leads up and over hills to black sand and a dramatic surf. It was swampy and scruffy, with pukeko rampaging in the scrub, and the rusted shells of cars dumped in land no good for farming, no good for anything much.
There was Wasmuth’s bach at the top of the rise. There were fruit trees down the back; Wasmuth’s daughter remembers visiting and seeing plums for sale at the front gate. But now the front gate was decorated with barbed wire and held by two padlocks; there had once been a letterbox in the middle of it, and it looked like a wild animal had clawed it out.
I talked to neighbours. People said the man who now lived at the bach Wasmuth built was a recluse. They said he’d cut off his phone. They said he was strange. One neighbour claimed two people lived there: ‘We call them the Weird Brothers.’
The kennels next door were overgrown with gorse — it really was Gorselands. Terangimarie Blake and her two children lived in the homestead once riddled with bullets. She grew lettuces in a wheelbarrow, and gave an articulate speech about why she preferred to be called queer and not lesbian. She was very beautiful.
Nehe Reuben lived on the other side of the bach. He opened the door fast and hard; all of a sudden, there was a Maori man standing there with a full moko. He was very pleasant. When he moved in five years ago, he said, the house was haunted. It was the year Wasmuth died. ‘The birds weren’t singing. My son was getting visitors at night. The ex, too. They were fucken levitating, mate. I got the Maori ghostbusters in and all that shit. The birds sing now.’
You could see the bach through bushes on the side of the road. It was small and dark, with the roof at a 15-degree angle. Two tea towels dried on a line tied across the verandah. It was from there that Wasmuth started shooting. Out of the blue, he fired his .303 Enfield rifle on a complete stranger, Harry Petit, who had come to collect his dog from Gorselands. Petit was shot in the arm at the doorway of Jim Berry’s house. Wasmuth continued shooting. Kathleen Berry and Neil Falconer, a 16-year-old who worked at the kennels, crawled on their stomachs into the house as bullets hit the fridge. They phoned the police. Wasmuth went inside his bach, and came back out to empty his teapot.
Petit was dragged to safety. Wasmuth shouted, ‘Get some Elastoplast, that’ll fix it.’
The dogs barking in boarding kennels. Jim Berry stepped onto the road to see where the shooting was coming from, and was shot in the heart. He was 37.
His wife told the police, ‘My husband collapsed in the middle of the road. I ran back to him but he never spoke to me.’
Wasmuth said in his statement, ‘Berry made a perfect target of himself. I aimed, fired and he fell to the ground.’
Wasmuth made a pot of tea. Then: ‘Shortly afterwards a man came up to my bach. I do not know who he was, and [he] asked me where there was a phone as a man was dead on the road. I told him there was a phone at the Reynolds’ place. I had no
