While he talked, I thought about how he and Nicholas actually had a lot in common. Rickards wanted to make things better for people; so did Nicholas. Rickards as a defence lawyer and Nicholas in her various roles were both concerned with matters of justice, with standing up for the vulnerable. They were of the same generation, the same background — both left school early, both came from working-class families in the same North Island catchment. They were both fighters who stood their ground, were staunch, resolute.
Rickards’ manuscript, and the book by Nicholas and Kitchin, were both artless tirades. Rickards writes about his feelings after the second trial, and why he wanted to get his side of the story across: ‘Like a dog kicked into submission, I had become pliant, begun to lose my bite. But as I cogitated on the hell I had been through, I realised that getting angry wasn’t the way to get even. Only the truth would put the magic salve over that festering sore.’ Nicholas writes about her feelings after the second trial, and why she wanted to get her side of the story across: ‘I needed the New Zealand public to stop taking as gospel what they were reading in the newspapers or hearing on TV.’ Mission accomplished: the New Zealand public now believe the gospel according to Nicholas.
The three men were found not guilty, but almost no one regards them as innocent. ‘Punishment comes in all forms,’ Nicholas said with terrific piousness to a women’s magazine in 2014, ‘and they’re judged every day.’ Schollum reportedly had cancer. Shipton had gone ga-ga. Clint Rickards finished his hot chocolate at the café in Te Atatu, and the waitress asked whether he wanted something else. He ordered green tea.
Chapter 14
The killings at Stilwell Road: Chris Wang
Music and food, and also I saw somebody is riding the horse.
— Chinese witness describing a party given by Chis Wang on his rural property
1
The first person I ever met who had been accused of butchering two people with a blade was Cheng Qi ‘Chris’ Wang, a small, lithe fellow with a shrewd face and thinning hair. I had an appointment. I went around to his house. It was gated. An old Chinese lady was pottering about in the front garden. I called out to her: ‘Hello! Is Chris home?’
She said, ‘What you want?’
I yelled, ‘I’m here to see Chris!’
She said, ‘No English!’
She fled indoors. I hung around on the pavement and Wang eventually drove up and invited me inside. He had a kind of manservant who poured cups of tea. We sat at either end of a very long dining table in a dark kitchen with small windows. When the sun went behind a cloud, I could barely see him. He was 53 then, and the last time I saw him he had just turned 56. It had been a curious three years, and it ended when a jury in the Auckland High Court reached a curious verdict in his double-murder trial. He was accused of stabbing two men to death on a summer’s morning in the expensive Auckland suburb of Mt Albert. It was his third trial. The first was abandoned very late in the piece. The jury was already down to 11 — a juror realised she had been treated by the police doctor who gave evidence, and had to be excused — when the prosecution called its last witness, a cheerful pathologist from Vermont.
He was asked, ‘Did you identify a large number of stab wounds?’
‘Yes,’ smiled the American.
‘Did they in fact total 23?’
‘Yes.’
He went on to explain that to accurately measure the length of a wound, you press the edges of the skin together; skin has tremendous elasticity. The jury stared at him, and bent their heads to study a death booklet — images from the autopsy, pale bodies on a white sheet. One of the two dead men had his eyes open. An afternoon tea break was called. Suddenly, the jury was reduced to 10 — an ambulance shrieked to the side entrance of the High Court, and a juror was taken to hospital for emergency surgery on a ruptured bowel.
Court resumed for the judge to announce that it was all over. Wang was free to go. As he made his way past the press bench, I handed him my card — with both hands, something I’d seen in Japan, and thought might convey to Wang, who was born in China, that I was a polite and respectful fellow. He took the card, and bowed. He phoned the next day and I went over for a memorable afternoon.
The second trial went the whole way. And then it got nowhere: the jury was unable to deliver a verdict. They had signalled to the judge that they were ‘very close’ to reaching a majority verdict of 11–1, but couldn’t go any further. It was assumed there were two obstinate jurors. Had they prevented a verdict of guilty? Family of the victims wept bitter tears.
The third trial was held a year later, over three weeks in the middle of winter. It was a kind of re-enactment: the same evidence, most of the same witnesses. It was in a different courtroom, upstairs in Courtroom 14, with views of the museum through the window. Three weeks of rain, and storms; on the opening day of the trial, a bottle of Landscape merlot had been smashed on the front steps, and broken glass lay among wet leaves.
Jury selection, held downstairs next to the criminal office with its soft toys and All Black flags, resulted in a woman foreperson. She wore confident
