Hawes and I spoke for about half an hour. I hiked to a low ridge, and sat down on the pine needles. I said in a low whisper, afraid that Levick or Lundy might overhear, ‘Have you considered the possibility that he’s innocent?’
Hawes said, ‘That would be an interesting intellectual exercise.’
Levick tried to get me interested in that intellectual exercise back in 2005. It was a kind of fishing trip: I was working at the Sunday Star-Times back then, and Levick was wanting a journalist to look into the material he’d gathered that raised questions about Lundy’s conviction. I demurred. I said it wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I forwarded the email to the incomparable Donna Chisholm, my esteemed colleague at the newspaper. She wrote a couple of stories. I gather it must have been her whom Lundy was referring to when he wrote to Levick from prison, ‘A pet reporter is a good idea. You seem to have found one.’ He hadn’t. Donna moved on to other subjects.
I eventually came on the scene long after I was needed: that summer, awaiting the retrial. I packed a lunch for my weekly outings to Kumeu, and spent most of those long, hot days inside a small room off the garage. Levick had filled the shelves with massive amounts of paperwork from his diligent and genuinely awesome investigation into the Lundy case. I opened up manila folders marked PAINT and PETROL and TIME OF DEATH, took notes (‘M and C buy $29.95 chickwheat-shade lampshade at Lighting Direct, last time sees her alive . . . $83.40 room fee Foreshore Motor Lodge, hooker $140’), and slowly began to make some sense of the formless narrative told by Levick’s documents. I suppose I was getting embedded. I daresay I was forming sympathies. The journalist and the murder accused, hanging out on Levick’s porch in the afternoon shade, another time driving down the road to an ice-cream shop. A child dropped her ice cream, and cried. There was a prickly pear in flower. The three of us spooned creamy goodness into our faces as we relaxed outside the store in gorgeous sunshine.
‘How’s yours?’ Lundy said.
‘Delicious,’ I said.
We sat in silence. It didn’t seem like a good idea to discuss the case in public. Blood splatter, autopsies, whores — so much of the whole saga was garish, explicit. So much of it was banal, domestic. The setting was a kind of quintessence of boring New Zealand life; the family were overweight and cheerful, very popular, very social, into Scouts and Girl Guides and Pippins, messy, guzzlers of junk, normal, living in a weatherboard house with green trim. A 43-year-old kitchen sink and tap salesman in Palmerston North kisses his wife goodbye one morning and drives to Petone, near Wellington, to see clients. He stays overnight in a motel, eats a roast-chicken dinner from Pak’nSave, polishes off most of a bottle of rum, and calls an escort from The Quarry Inn to his room just before midnight. They have sex. She leaves. These were the undisputed facts, and Lundy’s version of events — it was just a routine business trip; even the assignation with a hooker was part of his routine — sounded entirely plausible. But the police inquiry, Operation Winter, formed a mosaic of evidence pulled from all sorts of places — McDonald’s, Texas — and some of it sounded kind of plausible. Lundy drove from Petone and killed them with a tool from his garage (police argued that paint flakes in Christine’s hair matched the paint he used to mark his tools), then drove back to the motel. A man from Texas who practised a novel form of forensic science claimed that a stain on the sleeve of Lundy’s shirt was brain tissue. Goes to motive: the wine venture was about to collapse, and he needed the life insurance pay-out. Goes to character: his behaviour was thought of as really fishy.
3
Why do some cases fascinate, why do others fail to engage? What stories do they tell us about ourselves? Very often they offer a commentary on the range of our hatred. It’s rare that we remember the names of victims. It’s as though our sympathies can’t match the depth of the loathing we reserve for a criminal élite whose names we never forget. Rewa, Dixon, Weatherston . . . The crux of the Lundy saga — its special appeal, the thing that gave it an enduring power and resonance — was his perceived role as a shocking phoney. He was scorned as a fake, and much of it came down to his display of grief at Christine and Amber’s funeral. He wailed, he heaved great sobs, he had to be held upright. A slow-motion clip of Lundy howling at the funeral featured in the opening credits of long-running TV satire Eating Media Lunch. In the catalogue of grave sins, Lundy’s exhibition that day was held in only slightly less odium than the murders.
He had lost his wife and child. They had been brutally murdered. ‘How is a man,’ he asked at his trial, ‘supposed to grieve?’ It was a good question. Had he committed some other affront? Was there a resentment that he had transgressed the New Zealand code of remaining taciturn or
