The Scene of the Crime

at that last word. Hislop wasn’t what you’d call a passive individual. He had an intelligent, sarcastic face. A tall man in his fifties, thin of hair, losing the war on plump, he was funny, likeable, and perhaps arrogant, now and then ill-tempered. His law offices were in London. It took a while for the flat vowels of New Zealand to return to his expatriate mouth; in those first couple of weeks in Wellington, he presented himself as some old duffer from the Old Bailey. We talked more about his treatment of Weggery. He said, ‘We had to demonstrate that the first investigation was approached with tunnel vision. So he [Weggery] was only an example of someone we didn’t think was properly investigated.’

Before his cross-examination, Weggery had told Morgan about driving over to Christine’s house in the morning. He’d phoned first, but she didn’t pick up. She’d promised to calculate his GST return. The curtains were closed. The sliding door at the back was open. He called out, ‘Hello?’ He entered the hallway, and saw Amber on the floor. He phoned for the police. The 111 call was played; Weggery sounded very calm. He felt for Amber’s pulse. He said in court, ‘Her head was cracked open and blood was everywhere.’

Morgan asked, ‘What did you see?’

Weggery said, ‘Brains.’

Amber was in the doorway of the bedroom. He looked into the room, and saw Christine.

I’d asked Levick one day about the responsibilities he felt as someone campaigning for Lundy’s release. It was something that bothered me as a journalist looking into the case; I felt the pressure to act responsibly, and not recklessly, out of respect for Christine and Amber’s family. They had suffered enough. Levick talked about a responsibility to the truth. He was impersonal about it. The facts were all that mattered. But that same impersonality had trampled over Weggery, the man who had discovered the mutilated bodies of his sister and niece. He later became convinced Lundy was their killer. Weggery and Levick once exchanged unpleasantries in the letters pages of the Manawatu Standard. Weggery wrote, ‘Mr Geoff Levick, or should that be simply Levick, as he has never met or spoken to either myself or any member of my family, suggests I have “not spent a minute reviewing anything nor read a single document” . . . As for the insinuation that I know nothing, believe me I wish I didn’t know what I do. That is that I have to look at photos to remind myself what my sister and niece even looked like, as without them all I remember is as they appeared in the crime scene photos.’

Weggery was a solidly built, tough-faced customer. He wore his hair in a crewcut, and could be seen during the trial down the road on Molesworth Street enjoying a Guinness for lunch. He was a truck driver. At the time of the killings, he flatted with a lesbian solo mother. Hislop said to him, ‘Do you remember being interviewed for three hours or more by the police? Do you remember the police suggesting you knew Amber was dead before you called 111, and that’s why you didn’t check to see she was alive, because you had killed her?’

Weggery: ‘They incorrectly suggested that.’

Hislop kept at it, and later introduced something else.

‘Were you ever alone with Amber?’

‘No.’

‘Did you ever babysit her?’

‘No.’

‘Was there a particular reason why you weren’t allowed to babysit Amber?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Hislop then implied Weggery had form as a child abuser, and referred to an alleged incident with a 10-year-old girl. Weggery angrily said that was false. (The court later heard that the allegation was made when Weggery was about 12.) Hislop said, ‘Would you describe Amber as big for her age?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘About the size of a 10-year-old, wouldn’t you agree?’

Hislop moved on to the outrageous punchline of his vile implication — that Weggery killed Christine because she’d found out he’d been doing something to Amber. ‘Your sister was asleep when you struck her, wasn’t she?’

‘No, I did not, and I’m not going to sit here and be accused of it!’

But that’s exactly what he had to do. He sat there and was accused of it, over and over. Justice France instructed Weggery, ‘If Mr Hislop suggests you have done something unlawful, feel free to ask me if you need to answer it. You are entitled not to give an answer.’

Weggery took him up on it.

Hislop: ‘I suggest you were the one who hit Amber on the head.’

Weggery: ‘I don’t want to answer that.’

The rest of the time he straight-out denied Hislop’s accusations, with rage and scorn, nailing shut the end of his sentences with an angry, over-pronounced consonant: ‘No, I did not-ah . . . No, that didn’t happen-ah . . . I know nothing about that-ah.’ The latter denial was in reply to Hislop’s revelation that two spots of blood were found at Weggery’s house. The DNA of one spot had an 83 per cent match with Christine; the other had an 88 per cent match with Amber.

Hislop also questioned a fresh scratch on Weggery’s nose at the time of the killings, and requested that the jury see a police photograph taken of Weggery. It was magnified 200 per cent and put on a flat-screen in the courtroom. Weggery’s large, implacable face stared out, and the scratch looked very red, very livid. He said it was from scratching a pimple.

‘It must have been a big pimple?’

‘Have you never had one?’

Hislop seemed lost in thought for a moment, as though he were trying to remember whether he ever had a big pimple on his nose. Then he said, ‘You changed your mind, didn’t you, and told the police a cat scratched you?’

‘It could have been either.’

Hislop pointed at the screen, at Weggery’s giant face with the large red scratch on his snoot. He said, ‘It looks fresh, do you agree?’

‘At 200 per cent magnification, anything would look fresh.’

Hislop’s accusation was that the scratch on his