It came with him as Dixon, 36, wide-hipped, 5’ 8”, pale and flabby, clutching at the waistband of his baggy green shorts, was led into the dock; it disappeared with him as he ducked his head, and hid from view of the jury, when the court was played an excruciating 111 emergency call made on the night of 22 January 2003.
The date marked Dixon’s long day’s journey into night. It began when he took to his lover Renee Gunbie and ex-lover Simonne Butler with the Samurai sword as they sat, terrified, at the kitchen table in a house in Pipiroa on the Hauraki Plains. It was another intolerable New Zealand summer. Mosquitoes roamed the banks of the nearby Piako River. Heat rose in waves above the long, flat, melting roads. Crime scene photos showed two bottles of Lion Red and a packet of Round Wine biscuits on the dining table; on the floor, there was blood in the cat bowl, and shoeprints in blood. There was also a clump of black hair. He had tried to scalp Gunbie. The two women were left to bleed to death. They were lucky to live. That attack — perhaps the most original in modern New Zealand criminal history; so much about Dixon has to be measured in superlatives — was distilled in court as two counts of attempted murder, and two counts of intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Almost incidentally, he was also charged with murder. James Te Aute, 25, was shot and killed in a carpark behind a Caltex service station in Highland Park, near Pakuranga in Auckland. He had driven there in his wife’s Ford Telstar. The couple had been together for 11 years, and had three children. Her brother, Jackson Lemalu, said in court that Te Aute was his best friend: ‘The only person I could talk to about things.’
He was with Te Aute on the night of the murder. They had met that morning, ‘mucking about in his garage, fixing his car’, then they had driven to Manurewa, to Mt Wellington, to Pakuranga. Two friends joined them; one was looking after ‘a mate’s little boy’, who he thought was aged nine or 10. The boy was still with them when they parked behind the Caltex in Highland Park. It was sometime after midnight. A stolen Caltex card had been used to fill up with gas; the licence plates on the Ford Telstar had been switched; and Te Aute had bought and smoked methamphetamine, or P.
Stoned at midnight at the Caltex with a little boy in the back seat — it was a cameo of urban Maori youth, a portrait of Auckland life. The only thing to do in the circumstances was get wasted.
Dixon just happened to come along. He hated Maori, Asians, Pacific Islanders. He was white trash, a car thief by trade; the car he parked was stolen that evening from Hamilton. He sat in darkness, grinding his teeth in the methamphetamine reflex. Te Aute was about to die. Dixon had decided it on a whim. The two P freaks — both married men, both fathers — were ships in the night.
Dixon’s defence lawyer, Barry Hart, to Lemalu: ‘It’s fair to say that James was addicted to P and loved it, isn’t it?’
Lemalu: ‘Yes.’
‘He’d go looking to score, and pick you up, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much was he going through? What sort of quantities?’
‘Small amounts.’
‘Enough to get fried on. Correct?’
‘Yes.’
Te Aute went to a house that night to buy P. Lemalu waited in the car.
Hart: ‘When he got back in the car, you could tell he was flying, is that correct?’
Lemalu: ‘Yes.’
‘Wide awake and pumped up. Is that fair to say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it fair to say you were hanging out to have some P?’
‘Yes.’
Lemalu told the court that a car had pulled up beside them in the carpark behind the Caltex. The driver gave them the finger.
‘We thought we might have known him. We wanted to know what his problem was, so we got out of the car. Before we even approached him, I noticed him raise his arm, and just the way he raised his arm made me react, so I hit the ground.’
He heard shots. The car drove off. Lemalu saw his brother-in-law lying on the ground. ‘I went to see if he was all right. I lifted him up, and noticed he had all these holes in him.’
He dialled 111. The tape was played in court. It went on and on, loud and panicked and screaming: ‘My mate’s been shot! He’s been shot, man! Come on!’
Operator: ‘How many times has he been shot?’
Lemalu: ‘One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .’
‘Four times in total?’
‘Nah. More than that.’
He sat in the witness box with his head in his hands, gulping, as the call went on and on; Te Aute’s wife fled the courtroom in tears; and Dixon’s incredible haircut descended, and sunk from view.
2
Dixon’s sword was inside a glass case on the floor at the front of Courtroom 6. I wanted a closer look. At a lunch break one day, the court crier obliged by balancing the exhibit on top of the witness stand. The weapon was very slender, with a straight blade snapped in two at the tip. Its black handle
