I said, ‘How do you know that?’
She said, ‘We were told. There was also talk he killed and skinned a sheep with a hunting knife . . . He’s a bad, bad man.’
Ruth had dealt with a Chinese couple who had bought Michelle Wang’s two houses in St Lukes. They told the tenants to move out. ‘But then a big Samoan boy came out of the sleep-out and said, “Fuck off, these are my boss’s houses.”’ He said his boss was Chris Wang.
Money visited, and said, ‘He had rented out every room in the house. There was a person sleeping on the floor in a bathroom where there was a toilet. The houses were just disgusting, absolutely filthy. You wouldn’t put animals in there.’
She said, ‘Be careful. Watch yourself. He’ll have his little spies in court.’
15
Private investigator Phil Jones hoped for a guilty verdict. We met in a noisy bar on Auckland’s waterfront. He was easy to spot — a tall ex-cop with a severe haircut and a military bearing. Tom and Michael had hired his services during the time they were trying to serve trespass orders on Wang. He spoke with them on the morning they were killed. He said, ‘If they went into the house, that’s dumb. It wouldn’t have taken long for Chris to get inflamed and grab the knife and get into them.’
He gave evidence in court about his stand-off with Wang a month before the killings. He went with Michael and Tom to the house on Stilwell Road. ‘It became very confrontational very quickly,’ he said. ‘Tom and Michael were baiting him. Chris had an evil, mad look in his eye and a horrible smile on his face. Michael was just laughing at him and thought it was all a bit of fun.’
But then someone shouted that Wang had a knife, and Jones saw Wang reach behind his back. He yelled at Tom and Michael to run to their car.
He said, ‘I keep myself reasonably fit, but there’s no way I would have fancied my chances with Chris. The difference is the fact if he’s got that mad adrenalin rush, you’re going to come off worse. His eyes were scary. I’ve dealt with scary people before; I’ve dealt with terrorists in the IRA. It’s where the eyes are going, if they’ve got relaxed eyes or if they’re very focused. His eyes were very focused. That’s when it’s scary.’
Prosecution tried to play it out as a crucial episode, casting Wang as some kind of knife-wielding psycho. But it fell flat. No one actually saw the knife. Was it another instance of a knife that wasn’t there? You could form a sympathetic picture of Wang. There he was, at the house he used to live in with his wife, suddenly approached by three men — one of whom he claimed was sleeping with his wife — who told him that he had to leave the premises. They laughed at him, goaded him. He told them to clear off. He phoned Jones the next day to apologise for losing his temper . . . He sounds put upon, blameless.
On 13 January, the day before the deaths, Michael rang Jones and said he was going to go back to Stilwell Road with Tom. Michelle Wang needed to get her rents. The banks were talking about mortgagee sales. Sutcliffe told the jury: ‘The pressure was building for action to be taken, the heat was on to do something . . . They had to resort to violence.’
Jones tried to talk Michael out of returning to Stilwell Road. He said, ‘I’m almost a witness that helped Chris a bit. I’ve said I warned Michael not to go in, and he does.’
He advised Michael to go to the Avondale police station and ask if they could go to the address with an officer. They spoke again on the phone on the morning of 14 January. ‘I told Michael, “Even if you go by yourselves, you get any sniff that Chris is there, even if he’s fine, ring 111 and tell them he’s aggro and violent and jumping up and down.” He obviously didn’t do that.’
Tom’s daughter Jade dropped him off that morning at 8.30am; it was the last time she saw him. Michael was looking forward to a family holiday in the South Island. The two men went to the Avondale police station, but were told that an officer was unavailable. Michael and Tom were described as cheerful, relaxed. Glubb told the jury, ‘You do not go to all that trouble if your sole purpose is calculated violence. It makes absolutely no sense. Their only intent was to reinforce the trespass order.’
Jones said, ‘Michael talked about protecting himself, taking a weapon. I said, “Listen, you can’t.”’
Does he think the two men threatened Wang? ‘They could have. Yeah. Possibly.’
Threatened to kill him? ‘Absolutely not. No way. There was no inkling of that whatsoever. In my view,’ he said, ‘he murdered a couple of innocent people.’
16
Chris Wang hoped for freedom to go about his business — collecting rent in cash, fishing for eels, buying ‘quality’ possessions. No one came to support him in court, despite Ruth Money’s predictions he’d have his ‘spies’. We nodded at each other when he came in to hear the verdict.
Who was Wang? He had passed through danger, scatheless, on that summer’s morning in Mt Albert; sometimes, during the long days of his trial, I wondered whether there really was something supernatural about Wang, the way he had escaped death; but the Chinese demigod of Stilwell Road, nimble and ‘untouchable’, tensed when the jury arrived.
17
The forewoman wore a bright-red polka-dot top with a large white ribbon around her skirt. She said of the charge of the murder of Michael Wu: ‘Not guilty.’
Wang closed his eyes and swayed.
Not guilty, also, of manslaughter.
She said of
