Wang said he didn’t see Tom being stabbed, just heard him yell ‘Fuck!’, and run away. ‘I thought he was going to get a knife or a gun. I was worried about that.’
Earlier, when he talked about the two men coming to Stilwell Road and taking his furniture, he said, ‘Never they take shoes off inside the house. Final time they come into my house, it’s with the shoes.’
Why go on about the shoes? Was it really that important?
He said, ‘Of course! It my house. People come into my house never with the shoes. No one with the shoes come in. No, no, no. I got a new carpet. Nice house.’
10
To gaze upon 23 Stilwell Road is to see it as a big old luxury-liner, splendid and gleaming, a fantasy of wealth and success. Possible, too, to think of it sailing through a history of Auckland, taking onboard an essence of the city over successive generations. Built by a woman who invented herself as a royal in a young colony making itself up as it went along. Taken over by a bitter capitalist who helped build a nation. Passed into the hands of a gadfly who thrived on the city’s long-established sex district. Then, in about 2007, owned by new New Zealanders, an Asian couple (Michael Bassett chuckled when he recalled a neighbour who called Wang ‘chop suey’), who kept to themselves.
The house Mr and Mrs Wang bought for $2.3 million was sold by property developer Greer Stevenson. He’d carried out extensive renovations, and employed a neighbour, university student Chris Williams, to do odd jobs around the house. ‘Greer paid me really well and, like, bought me heaps of beer, which was awesome,’ Williams said.
He remembered an unusual indoor spa. ‘It had like a pole, and a mirrored ceiling . . . Greer took all that out.’
Williams worked over summer. ‘They’d put down a ready-lawn that grows through cardboard, and it has to be kept wet, so I stood out there for like three or four hours a day just watering . . . I also chopped heaps of trees down, and I painted the green fence all the way down the driveway. It’s quite a big fence.’ It was what Tom Zhong had rested against as he died.
After the murders, Wang left the house. The next occupants were a Tongan family. This time, the South Pacific had come onboard Stilwell Road.
Williams said, ‘The Rugby World Cup was on. They had this massive bamboo pole, and stuck it right at the top of the house with this huge Tongan flag. There were all these kids running around. There was rubbish outside everywhere, and skateboards and old BMX bikes kind of just like chucked in the garden and left there . . .’
Michael Bassett said, ‘When the mortgagee sale came up, well, you can imagine a potential buyer of a grand place like this turning up and finding a whole load of bloody Tongans wrapped up in blankets lying around the floor — not exactly being a come-on.
‘And they hadn’t cleaned the property up properly. The carpet by the front door had great big blood stains over it, and the wallpaper up the sides had splats of blood everywhere. Can you imagine it? It’s bizarre.’
Real estate agent Anne Duncan went through the house. ‘I was very disappointed at the presentation,’ she said. ‘It was still like it was at the bloody murder scene. On the front door there was still the fingerprinting dust, there was blood on the front doorstep.’
Police from Operation Otter visited the property and spoke to the tenants. They said their landlord was Chris Wang.
11
The jury took their seats in Courtroom 14 to announce their verdict on a cold Friday afternoon. The sky was already dark. They had been sent out the previous day at 10.40am. It had been a long wait — not just for this trial to end, but all three trials, the years of justice delayed.
Like all left-handed people, the side of Kevin Glubb’s palm was smudged with ink. He sat at a bare desk. Court staff and counsel had tidied up. The knives had been taken away.
12
The police hoped for a guilty verdict. I always enjoyed chatting with Detective Sergeant Joe Aumua, one of the first officers at the crime scene, who came to court every day. He was very dignified, quietly spoken. ‘He’s a dangerous man,’ he said of Wang.
He saw the bodies that day. ‘We believe that Chris just flew off the handle, that he snapped, and armed himself with a knife and, before there was any discussion, he attacked . . . It’s the most vicious attack I’ve ever seen.’
He credited Wang with having the presence of mind to immediately concoct a story to explain why two people had died of multiple stab wounds.
Wang was smart, but was he that smart? To be able to stage two knives and choreograph a fight to the death suggests a kind of criminal mastermind. Was he really able to think on his feet that quickly?
13
The families of the victims hoped for a guilty verdict. Aumua said, ‘They’ve invested all their trust and faith these past three years, not only in the police, but in our justice system.’
But were they mourning two unarmed men, or two men who had made the fatal mistake of choosing to fuck with the wrong guy?
On the day of the verdict, Michael Wu’s young widow, Maggie, played outside with their son. She held him in her arms as he reached out and touched a parking meter. He was round and small, fatherless.
14
Ruth Money of the Sensible Sentencing Trust hoped for a guilty verdict. We met at her small office upstairs in the Golf Warehouse. The stacked clubs and golf bags made it difficult to take her seriously, and
