Experienced court watchers said that Morgan’s trial work in Hamilton was outstanding. In Wellington, though, he was merely nasal and slow on his feet, and his opening address was strangely hesitant. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have good material. ‘The accused,’ he said, ‘had his wife’s brain on his shirt.’ But it was as though he were describing a minor traffic incident. Where was the force, the necessary disgust? And if there was something apologetic in his tone, then it was revealed in Morgan’s narrative of events on the night of 29/30 August 2000, when he made public for the first time that the police had completely and radically changed their mind about when Christine and Amber were killed. They had abandoned the 7pm theory. They had moved on. They now put it in the small hours of 30 August, when Lundy drove under cloak of darkness from Petone to Palmerston and performed the vile deed with a ‘heavy, sharp object’.
Morgan went through the main points. Lundy was sick of his wife. Look at the savagery of the attack: ‘You may think the ferocity was carried out by someone with hostility, to put it mildlly, against her.’ Lundy used one of his tools as the weapon. The break-in and burglary were staged. A bracelet was found on the front seat of his car; it had fallen out of the jewellery box. He did it for the insurance. He was wearing Christine’s brain: ‘You will be completely satisfied it was central nervous system tissue from brain or spinal cord.’ All of which had been previously stated, more elegantly, by Vanderkolk at the first trial. But Morgan announced that he had something new. He paused. The media looked up, their paws poised above their laptops. An old man in the public gallery gently dozed. The eyes of the insane judge in the portrait gallery seemed to widen, and bulge. Morgan folded his arms. Then he thrust his hands in his pockets, where they could hide from view. He looked down. He said Lundy had confessed to the murders to an inmate: ‘He will tell you of their conversation.’ A jailhouse snitch! Incredible — as in not credible, a pathetic joke. But there it was. A jailhouse snitch, one of the great stock characters from criminal justice, in the flesh. Were things that desperate?
Ross Burns spoke for the defence. He was a hirsute and distinguished man in his late fifties, and a roguish smile was never far from his lips. His face was surprisingly firm, as though it had been offered a lift. He had such a beautiful voice. It was the voice of a sensualist; it was redolant of strawberries and cream on a summer’s evening. But he tended to mutter, and lose his place. It didn’t seem as though he’d given his opening address much thought or rehearsal. Like Morgan, he played down his address. He went through the main points. Lundy was wrongfully convicted in 2002. He loved his wife. His finances were solvent. The stain on his shirt may not be human, and why was it that there was no blood splatter on his glasses, watch, shoes, or anywhere in his car? And then he, too, announced that he had something new. Evidence gathered in 2014 showed that DNA of two unknown men had been found beneath Christine’s and Amber’s fingernails.
I remember sitting in court when Burns made that revelation, and thinking: God almighty. Was it possible that Lundy actually was innocent, that Christine and Amber were killed by brute or brutes unknown? A new horror came to mind — two men, two strangers, two monsters, who broke into their home and went at Christine and Amber in the middle of the night. Burns added that the paint flakes found at the crime scene suggested a second weapon.
But the findings about the mysterious DNA beneath their fingernails was only ever referred to during the trial in passing, as a minor detail, nothing to really concern anyone.
‘It was not possible,’ Burns concluded, ‘that Mark Lundy committed these crimes.’ He sat down. Justice France thanked him, and dismissed the jury. It was 1.05pm. ‘A short day,’ he said with a smile. The first witness would be called the next morning. According to the witness list, it would be the man who had discovered the bodies.
2
She is forever seven years old, always that lovely, silly age — Amber Lundy never grew up, only ever knew life as a child, someone happy, someone adored. ‘Amber,’ a woman said on day two of the trial, when asked about her parents, Mark and Christine Lundy, ‘was the light of their life.’
She was killed, horribly, at least swiftly. Her body was discovered in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom. She got out of her own bed because she had heard her mother being killed. She can’t have seen very much. It was dark. But she likely saw who was standing by the side of Christine Lundy’s bed. A monster, covered in blood, a weapon in his hands. She turned. He followed.
Did she know him? Yes, said the Crown, it was her father. Yes, agreed the defence, Amber knew him. They were family. It was her Uncle Glenn.
Glenn Weggery appeared as the first witness called by the prosecution, and in cross-examination was accused of killing Christine and Amber. It was astonishing to watch. I’d never seen anyone in a court other than the defendant accused of murder. There ought to be a law against it. It was brutal and it gave notice that Lundy’s defence team, led by David Hislop QC, was going to be rather more rigorous and vigorous than the team at his first trial.
I spoke with Hislop during the wait for a verdict. I said, ‘Did the police warn Weggery you were going to do that?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He was taken by surprise. That was a completely planned assault.’ He laughed, hard, when he arrived
