Hart said, ‘We’ll get to that day later.’
In March 2002, she bought a home on the Hauraki Plains. She had plans to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, and run a naturopathy clinic. Meanwhile, Dixon was phoning her 20 times a day, saying that people were trying to kill him. He heard voices in his head. He continued his habit of pacing, ‘up and down, back and forth, his arms flailing’. Their relationship — ‘tumultuous, a horrible dysfunctional cycle’ — came to an end, but in June that year, Dixon ‘sleazed his way back into my bed’. She got pregnant, and had an abortion in September.
Her evidence got to that day, on Tuesday, 21 January 2003.
She described the attack. Hart asked her to slow down so that the court stenographer could catch up. She told how Dixon asked her into the dining room. He locked the door behind her and ordered her to sit down at the table. Renee Gunbie was already there. She was bleeding from a cut in her neck. Dixon started screaming, accusing them both of being ‘in with’ the police, ‘working against him’, that they had to die, that they were ‘sacrifices’.
She said, ‘His god had told him we were going to die. The New World Order was taking over. He went on about Allah for a little bit. He was screaming, and bouncing about, just crazy and psycho and horrible. I’d always been able to calm him down in the past, but he just wasn’t responding to me.’
Hart: ‘And then?’
Butler: ‘And then we were all screaming.’
Paramedics estimated that Gunbie was five to ten minutes from death when they arrived. She was handless, scalped, and her throat was slit. Butler’s left hand was reattached in a marathon 27-hour surgery. Both women were taken to Middlemore Hospital; a few days after the attack, flowers were sent to their rooms. Gunbie received tiger lilies and gerberas. There was a note. It read: With love. Sorry. Tony.
In cross-examination, Butler talked more about the attack. She said: ‘I don’t know who he went for first. I think he went back and forth between us.’ And then she came up with the most evocative line of the entire trial: ‘There was just so much screaming and blood and silver.’
The language students were given a powerful lesson in how plain English can seem so cryptic, so loaded with meaning.
Hart asked her about the week leading up to the attack. She remembered she had gone to the Big Day Out concert in Auckland. Jane’s Addiction was the headline act. On the following Saturday, she visited Dixon’s ex-wife.
‘I don’t remember Sunday and Monday. And then Tuesday . . .’ She sighed, and said in a flat voice: ‘Tuesday was Tuesday.’
4
You don’t have to be the world’s leading authority on the hallucinogenic stimulant ketamine to be called as an expert psychiatric witness in a trial about a killer under the influence of another mind-blowing chemical, but it probably helps. Dr Karl Jansen was a tall shrink. He loomed at a height of about 6’ 6”. He wore boots, jeans, a tan leather jacket. He had worked at the Glastonbury rock festival in England as an on-site psychiatrist. At Otago University, he studied the use and consequences of magic mushrooms. His work on Ecstasy was admired. His interest in ketamine partly derived from personal experience: it was given to him as an anaesthetic after a motorbike accident, and it brought on a NDE — a near-death experience. He told an interviewer, ‘I had the full effect. Tunnels of high speed, the light, God, life review, out-of-body, the lot.’ He published numerous papers on how the ketamine experience mimics the NDE in terms of brain functioning and blockage of neurotransmitters.
Jansen, a New Zealander practising psychiatry in London, was a defence witness at Dixon’s trial. His essential position was that Dixon was mentally ill at the time of the killings, and also that his illness predated his use of P. The drug, Jansen said, aggravated Dixon’s symptoms, which he listed as ‘impulsive . . . explosive . . . paranoid . . . narcissistic . . . psychotic’.
He spoke at great length about everything. He said everything in the same calm, measured voice. His accent was a kind of masterpiece of fastidious Englishness. He stroked the sound of each syllable; he was careful never to pronounce the first ‘h’ in the word ‘methamphetamine’. The jury surely hated him.
Jansen went too far. It was one thing for his fussy enunciation and polysyllabic replies to make everyone listening feel as they, too, were experiencing a NDE. That made him merely unlikeable. But he walked gaily into the zone of looking completely ridiculous on the day that he speculated that Dixon’s bulging, staring eyes at the opening of the trial might have been a symptom of a thyroid condition — that’s ‘thyroid’ with a silent h.
Over and over, prosecutor Simon Moore put it to him that Dixon was faking a mental illness. The word he used was ‘malingering’.
Moore: ‘Do you accept evidence of malingering, doctor?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. Malingering is present. But it is entirely possible to malinger, and act the madman, and also to have a core of paranoid illness behind that. And once you say he’s not ill, he’s pretending, you’re also saying he doesn’t need any treatment. If you’re wrong, that’s a huge responsibility. There is so much evidence that he is not of sound mind.’
Moore: ‘He said before the trial that he thought of turning up in a nightgown, or would claim he was the son of God. Another psychiatrist has told us that Mr Dixon was too crazy to be genuine. Do you accept that?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. He has clearly manufactured some of his symptoms. But Mr Dixon is what was once known as a psychopath, and is now called a dissocial or
