When Helen Weggery turned into the street, she was stopped by two police officers. Christine’s house was taped off.
She said, ‘That’s my daughter’s house. What’s happened?’
They wouldn’t give her a straight answer, but Helen said, ‘You may as well tell me.’
One of the officers said, ‘There’s a body in the house.’
Helen said, ‘What about Amber?’
The officer said, ‘She’s dead, too.’
5
Auckland, I realised during the second week of the trial, should pack up and move to Wellington. Every single summer’s day was stunning and shimmering, cloudless and windless, and the Cook Strait ferry rolled along Wellington like a ball on a billiard table. At lunchtimes at the nearby waterfront, I would see jurors, lawyers, even Justice France, denuded from his black robes and scoffing an apple in the bright sunlight. The fabulous excitement and sense of national well-being stirred by the New Zealand team at the Cricket World Cup that summer added to the general happiness. Something like joy filtered inside Courtroom 1. There was an optimism that the trial might finish early, certainly before Easter. Things moved at great pace, and with the steady drip of evidence.
Over half of the 144 witnesses were called in that opening fortnight. We heard about the discovery of the bodies, Lundy’s stay at the motel, the escort, morning tea, Kleintjes and his nonsense, and the ‘killing journey’ — Morgan’s tabloid expression for Lundy’s alleged drive to murder his family. Police Sergeant Danny Johanson talked of simulating the drive to and from Palmerston North. Johanson had done it six times, occasionally at great speed. That mythical journey — back then, police were in thrall to the notion of Lundy racing to and fro to commit the murders at 7pm — had become part of New Zealand motoring folklore. One day during the trial I took lunch with a barrister who told a possibly apocryphal story about Lundy’s lawyer at the 2002 trial, Mike Behrens, arriving late for a meeting, apologising, and saying: ‘I got here as quick as I could. I drove like a Lundy!’
Across a crowded courtroom, Johanson looked a bit like Dan Carter. At closer range, his enormous face made him look like two Dan Carters. The oversized All Black simulacrum’s evidence about petrol use would assume particular importance towards the end of the trial.
Most of week two was devoted to the root of the trial’s evil. The prosecution teased out their narrative that Lundy was under intolerable financial pressure, and regarded Christine’s $200,000 life insurance as the answer to his woes. Enter the beancounters. Lundy’s two accountants were asked about his ambitious wine venture. They described a flop. They talked of investors who never materialised, bridging finances that weren’t approved, and outstanding debts that had to be written off. Lundy made an unconditional offer (‘we tried to warn him’) of $2 million for two parcels of land in the Hawke’s Bay, where he would establish a vineyard. Lundy’s stake: around about precisely zero. He registered a prospectus to raise money. He reckoned an investor in Britain would go in for £500,000. Beancounter: ‘Nothing came of it.’
Actually, something sort of came of it: the mystery investor appeared in court. She was given name suppression. She said how shocked she was to receive an email from Lundy setting out the terms of her generous investment.
Morgan: ‘Did you have that sort of money?’
‘No.’
‘Did you know anyone with that sort of money?’
‘No. And I still don’t.’
She was a family friend of someone who knew Lundy. The man sent her the prospectus. She was thinking of maybe making an investment of £2000. She was so stunned by Lundy’s email, which breezily assumed she was good for half a million pounds, that she switched off the computer in horror.
‘I couldn’t even begin to respond to the email,’ she said. ‘It was so far out of my reality.’
What was Lundy’s reality? Mike Porter, who had put together the land deal, shared his knowledge of Lundy’s apparently loaded investor. He’d told Lundy, on 28 August 2000, that he had two days to make good his $2 million offer, or the deal was off. ‘He said he needed more time. He had someone coming with the money. He said it was an English person. He was fairly vague . . .’
One parcel of land was owned by Chris Morrison, from Havelock North, who advertised that he was a landowner from Havelock North with his excellent tan, his open-necked white shirt, his cowboy boots, and his insistence on chewing gum with his mouth open. He sat next to Porter in the public gallery. They made an interesting pair, whispering and snickering; Morrison, the lord of the manor, and Porter, the ex-con who got jailed for his part in bringing in illegal immigrants to New Zealand to pick fruit and harvest grapes, and paying them peanuts. Morrison told the court that the land he sold Lundy was worth $700,000, and had asked Lundy for a 10 per cent deposit. ‘He preferred zero.’ They agreed on $10,000.
Lundy was supposed to pay the balance in February 2000. He missed that deadline, and the one after that. Morrison: ‘I thought I’d better call him myself rather than hear second-hand his various excuses. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. He said there was no problem, apart from the excess of investors — he had such a surplus of them that he’d have to scale them back . . .’
He gave Lundy a final settlement date of 30 August. The bodies of Christine and Amber were found that morning.
I half-expected a gasp when the court was told about that coincidence. Things were starting to look bad for Lundy. Quietly, steadily, the case against him had made considerable ground; it was as though Morgan’s prosecution was conducted in stealth. And yet there was nothing
