Moore: ‘Mr Dixon has said that God is a triangle. In prison, he claimed he saw a ghost called Sid. The problem, doctor, is that there are some areas which quite clearly are a nonsense and a fabrication. Do you accept that?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. But this is a complex man in a complex case. Mr Dixon has said things to me like, “I’ve been fucked by 50 men.” I thought this was unlikely. But there is evidence he has been abused. It may have been the case. Terrible things have happened to Mr Dixon.’
Dixon grew up among outpatients from Carrington Psychiatric Hospital in a boarding house on Vermont Street in Ponsonby. His mother, a devout but unstable Jehovah’s Witness, tied him to the clothesline. He was ordered to bark like a dog. The lunatics sexually abused him. As an adult, he made a good living as a car thief, but was constantly in and out of prison. By 2002, further out of his mind on P, he raved that cop cars were following him everywhere he went, that 747 aircraft trained cameras on him on their flight path over the deserted Hauraki Plains, that secret cameras were likewise trained on him by courier vans and taxis — the kayakers on the brown Piako River were also maintaining covert surveillance. One day, he cut open his leg with a penknife because he wanted to dig out a tracking device.
Barry Hart asked the jury, ‘What more do we have to prove that the accused had a disease of the mind?’ Jansen and another psychiatrist called by the defence gave their expert opinion that Dixon had a disease of the mind, and was mentally ill. Two psychiatrists called by the prosecution gave their expert opinion that Dixon maybe had a few problems, but was as sound as a bell. Farce was never going to be far away in a dichotomy as clear as that, and it duly arrived when co-prosecutor Richard Marchant meant to ask psychiatrist Dr David Chaplow, ‘Is it your opinion that Dixon is suffering from a disease of the mind?’ But what he actually asked was, ‘Is it your opinion that Dixon is suffering from an opinion of the mind?’
Farce is brief. Tragedy lasts. Backstage, outside the court, Jansen was funny and charming company; it’s always exciting to chat with a genius. Inside the court, I loathed him. Dr Jansen, his credentials bringing in another superlative to the trial — world’s greatest living authority on a horse tranquiliser — was the hipster quack and exasperating, long-winded bore who looked as though Dixon had pulled the wool over his eyes. I thought: he couldn’t tell Dixon was playing him for a fool.
But Jansen was right. He told the court, ‘Mr Dixon may yet end his life. I think the risk is high.’
5
One of the remarkable aspects of the Dixon trial was the quality of the lead counsel. Crown prosecutor Simon Moore and defence lead Barry Hart were then in their pomp. Yet more superlatives: they were the best in their field, or the most in-demand — Moore took on all of the big cases, Hart likewise. Courtroom 6 was oftentimes a match of wits between the two bastions. In fact, they were friends. They both belonged to the same hunt club. There was a warmth to their little off-the-record exchanges in court. A kind of nostalgic glow rests over their work on the trial. The well-fed, beautifully spoken Moore, a King’s College old boy and one-time Northern Club president, ended up a High Court judge; Hart, small and thin-lipped with a shock of white hair, his gauche manner and Kiwi vowels plainly not to the manor born, was later struck off after he was found guilty of professional misconduct and ‘gross overcharging’. He was also made bankrupt, with debts of over $30 million.
Hart was a cold man. He had a black belt in karate, was brisk, unsmiling, vain. But I interviewed him a few years before the Dixon trial, and remember sitting with him in the dark one evening in his chambers while he wept, talking about his mother. ‘In the last two years of her life, she actually had both legs cut off. And . . . It . . . She . . . It was really hard for her, being wheeled around and not being active. Yet she became the champion of her rest home.’
At the Dixon trial in 2005, supping from the trough of legal aid (‘I’m not exactly crying poverty,’ he said to me), his name in enormous letters on the side of his chambers in expensive Herne Bay, a familiar, scary sight in the High Court, Hart was at his undazzling best. No one ever accused him of eloquence or intellectual flair. He did rave and he did rant. He shouted, a lot. ‘There stands an innocent man!’, etc. His closing address at the Dixon trial was the longest of his career. It was a shocking mess. Much of it seemed extempore, improvised, off the cuff; Hart lost the thread, found another one, went around in circles, and once lost his footing and nearly fell face-first into the lectern.
His best form of defence was always attack. He had a superb eye for advantages. Hart lodged an appeal after the 2003 trial — and was successful in having the conviction quashed. He argued that Justice Judith Potter failed to correctly address issues of insanity, and that she should have directed the jury to consider an alternative charge of manslaughter. He won a second trial, in 2008. It was a replica of the first, right down to the verdict: guilty.
Dixon committed suicide the night before sentencing. The inquest into his death heard that he strangled himself with a piece of cloth torn from something called an ‘anti-suicide blanket’. He had been returned to the cell just hours before from a ‘tie-down’ room, where his hands and legs were restrained to prevent self-harm. He
