But there was one person missing that morning: the accused. The proper release forms hadn’t been filled out, and Wang remained in his cell. The jury weren’t aware that there had been two previous trials, nor could they be told that Wang had recently been sentenced to two years and nine months’ imprisonment for money-laundering and fraud.
Calls were made to the prison. The trial finally began after lunch. Wang stood in the dock, once again in his usual tunic — a collarless jacket, with a horizontal pinstripe, its cuffs unbuttoned to reveal a tartan lining. Was it all he owned? His shoes looked old. Wang, too, was worn; in the year since his last appearance in the High Court, his face had lost some of its vitality.
Justice Venning welcomed the jury. Crown prosecutor Kevin Glubb, a thin, stately individual with a throbbing voice, which he kept moist with furtive handfuls of Eclipse mints, gave his opening address. For the third time, a tragedy was told about two men who were chopped up and killed on a summer’s morning at one of the most amazing addresses in Auckland.
Police photographs of the crime scene show bright sunlight falling through the upstairs windows at 23 Stilwell Road, a grand old mansion with a glass elevator, an indoor spa pool, chickens out the back, and a trail of blood leading to the body of Zhuo ‘Michael’ Wu, 44, who collapsed and bled to death at the bottom of the stairs. His friend, Yishan ‘Tom’ Zhong, 53, had also tried to escape the slaughter. He made it outside. Drops of his blood led past a white fountain and down the front steps onto the driveway; he collapsed and bled to death in a clump of leaves.
‘Michael’, ‘Tom’, ‘Chris’ — the made-up names signal the otherness of Asian life in Auckland. The three men got to know each other through the Chinese community, conducted business in Mandarin and broken English, flew in and out of Beijing. Witnesses talked of yum char and karaoke; Michael Wu’s widow quoted an old saying: ‘You can get rid of the monk, but you still will not get rid of the temple.’
Wu and Zhong drove to Wang’s house on a Friday morning in January. It was 23 degrees, cloudless. They opened the front door and walked straight in. Did the two men — and this was the question which haunted three juries, and became the central riddle they tried to solve — step into the kitchen and grab a knife? Wang was in his bedroom. In a doorway at the top of the stairs in the house on the hill on Stilwell Road, there was a fight to the death.
Wang claimed self-defence. He said the two men had come to kill him. He gave a four-hour interview at the Avondale police station that afternoon — he had changed out of his blood-soaked pyjamas into a white police-issue suit — and demonstrated his miraculous escape. He was, he explained, expert at kung fu.
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In broad daylight, 23 Stilwell Road is a magnificent sight to behold, as big as the sky. From The New Zealand Herald’s homes section, when the mansion was put on the market in 2007: ‘You approach the house through an arbour draped with bougainvillea . . . The formal dining room . . . The elegant leadlighting . . . Breathtaking deck views stretching from Waterview, across to the Waitakeres and around to the Chelsea Sugar Refinery . . . A ladder pulls down to take you up to a secret door, which leads onto an even higher deck. Here the view widens to include Huia, Rangitoto, the city and Mt Eden.’
All of Stilwell Road has a gentle, soothing quality; the pulse slows, the struggle and narrowness of life is elsewhere. The trees are so pretty. There are the cedars and conifers planted in the 1930s by Reverend Thomas Joughlin, a Methodist minister who lived at 7 Stilwell Road. There are the wonderful palms, grown from seed in the 1970s by botanist Alan Esler, who lives at number 7 to this day.
Stilwell Road is within the ‘golden triangle’, property-sales blather for the three most expensive and desirable streets in Mt Albert. The other two streets are Sadgrove Terrace and Summit Drive. The swimming pools, the ornamental gardens, the grassy slopes of the volcano . . . Anne Duncan of Ray White Real Estate listed three recent sales on Stilwell Road. One went for $1.4 million, another for $1.66 million, and the highest for $2.45 million. ‘All,’ she said, ‘to nice families attending local schools.’
Schools in the immediate zone include Mt Albert Grammar, Marist College and Gladstone Primary, with its vital statistics of decile 8 and 61 per cent white.
The epicentre of this happy, well-educated colony of the rich is 23 Stilwell Road. More from the sales pitch in the Herald: ‘Hollywood glamour meets genteel colonialism . . . Park-like grounds, a colonnade entry, sculpted fountain . . .’
It was built in 1929 for a fantasist. The first owner was Maria Cossey, who passed herself off as the Princess Marie-Jeanne de Guise. She claimed direct ancestry with the royal House of Lorraine in France. The family line included Marie de Lorraine, queen of both France and Scotland, and mother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Maria of Mt Albert’s grandson is Andrew Hunter, who lives in France, and demands to be known as the Prince de Guise. The Baronage Press reports: ‘We have full particulars of Andrew Hunter’s ancestry, which show his claims to be a total fantasy . . . It is presumably his grandmother’s fantasies that he has adopted.’
Her faux palace in
