‘There’d been a heavy summer shower that afternoon. It was sticky and steamy. You know what Auckland’s like up in the hills.’
*
Poor Jim Berry’s death has been recorded almost as an aside to the shootings of the two policemen. He was a casualty of madness and isolation and summer; his death was a private affair. The deaths of Chalmers and Power were public. It shocked the nation, and led directly to the formation of the Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) in 1964. Wasmuth’s massacre was a pivotal moment in New Zealand policing history.
‘It changed the whole of the history of the police insofar as firearms are concerned,’ as Bill Brien put it, in a letter he sent to me before we met at an Auckland hotel to talk about the killings, and where he gave me Wasmuth’s crazed statement. Brien was in charge of the police inquiry, and subsequently wrote a report calling for the AOS to be established.
One of the New Zealand ways of death in public life is to fashion a plaque on a great big rock. Two great big rocks are dedicated to the two policemen at Te Atatu’s Neville Power Park, named in 1965. There was no reference to Wally Chalmers until volunteer park ranger Christine Julian took action. She said, ‘I thought it was fitting that the two men who died together should be memorialised together.’
She chose Wally’s rock from the quarry at Bethells. ‘I thought that the rock should come from the place where he died. I went to the quarry, and the manager was about to drive me in and look at thousands of rocks, when I saw a particular rock leaning against his hut. I said, “That’s the one.” It has a certain presence to it.’
The inscriptions on the rocks for Neville Power and Wally Chalmers read: KILLED ON DUTY. The massive slabs face the blue, smoky hills of the Waitakere Ranges, towards Bethells.
*
What do you do when lives are broken and shattered? What kind of shape do you make when you reassemble the pieces?
Wasmuth stayed broken. He was all sharp edges, scattered. He was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. ‘I was 17 at the time of the killings,’ his daughter said. ‘I went to see him in prison. He was joking about it, saying it was a lot of bother over nothing. “It’ll all go away soon,” he said.’
They locked him up in Auckland’s Oakley Hospital and more or less threw away the key. A psych nurse who knew him said, ‘He was in the right place. He was a nutter. He was quite well-spoken, but he talked shit the whole time.’
His daughter visited. ‘You could talk to him like a normal person, but then he’d start raving and saying things that were totally unrealistic.’ He told her they let him out at night. Like the nurse, she said he refused to take medication.
He was in the M3 ward, or Male Three, which housed patients with severe psychiatric disorders. When Oakley closed in 1992, Wasmuth and the others were cuffed and taken by bus to the Lake Alice asylum in Whanganui; when that closed in 1999, he returned to Auckland, by aircraft, to the Mason Clinic (‘Improving Lives through Responsive Forensic Services’).
Another psych nurse, who knew him at Mason, said Wasmuth could do one-armed push-ups well into his eighties — that splendid physique, the sprinter’s body. He was eventually released to a rest home with a secure unit in New Lynn, and then to a similar facility in Red Beach, on the Whangaparaoa coast, to be near his younger brother.
‘He never gave up on my father,’ said Wasmuth’s daughter. ‘He was allowed to take him home and for outings. He was very loyal.’
The daughter of a lunatic and a killer; the daughter of a man who sold plums at the gate, tried to write, caused immense suffering, and died at the age of 95. ‘He was a difficult person,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t very warm. I couldn’t say I loved him at all.’
John Porteous, who watched the drama from his home at Bethells when he was 13, said that Father Cronin visited Wasmuth at Oakley Hospital. ‘He was concerned for the man. He was the perpetrator of the act, but Father looked past that and looked at the man himself, and his relationship with his Creator.’
Someone else tried to visit Wasmuth: May Mackey, Wally Chalmers’ widow.
In her small apartment in Parnell, over the tea and custard squares, she said, ‘Right from the beginning I wanted to see Wasmuth, to talk to him. I had always that yen to see him, because I never had anything against him, none at all. I felt he might have needed something. It was my attitude to people. That’s why for 30 years I’ve visited people in prisons.
‘Lake Alice closed down and they moved them to Mason Clinic. I was in there visiting, and heard about Wasmuth. I asked permission to see him. But they wouldn’t let me. They said it would not be in his best interests. And that was that.’ She said this during my visit in 2012.
I went to see May again in 2015, a few days after she turned 95. She wore slacks and a cardigan. ‘My right arm is feeling sorry for my left arm,’ she said. It could only hold things with difficulty, and she couldn’t play the piano in her sitting room. But she was in great cheer, and walked out to the street to greet me. May was always out and about at the Parnell shops; earlier that week, she said,
