7
‘Oh,’ said Mary from Epsom, ‘you missed a good week last week!’ We ran into each other on a Sunday night at Auckland domestic airport. We were both headed for Wellington to attend the trial. I was going there because it was my livelihood; she was commuting because she couldn’t bear to miss a second. ‘I just find the whole thing,’ she said, ‘so deeply moving.’
I had skipped the trial for a week. Every day I longed to be in the courtroom. The thing I most wished I’d seen was the police video taken at the crime scene. I wanted to look inside the house where Christine and Amber were killed.
It felt strange to be away from court; strange, too, to return, to once again sup on honeypuffs and filter coffee at John’s Kitchen, to study the progress of the brand-new paving at the Cenotaph war memorial beside Parliament, to look around the familiar faces in court. There was Lundy, his intellectual gravitas perhaps undermined by his habit of sitting with his mouth open like a door left ajar. There was Glenn Weggery, sitting in the back row of the public gallery, an intense, sardonic presence. There was Justice France, who had trimmed a metre or two off the top of his bouffant. There was Ben Vanderkolk, whose magnificent tan seemed less varnished. He’d looked Greek the last time I’d seen him, maybe Syrian. Now he looked like a guy from Palmerston North. There was Ross Burns, snug in his buttoned waistcoat, staring deeply into the screen-saver on his laptop: the blue waters of the swimming pool at his new home in Tauranga. There was Radio New Zealand reporter Sharon Lundy, whose excellent online reports were always asterixed with the note she was not related to the accused ‘for avoidance of doubt’.
The subject of the morning was paint flakes. As entertainment it was about as exciting as watching paint flakes dry, but as information it was crucial to the police case. At the first trial, the jury were told that nine orange and nine light-blue flakes of paint found in Christine’s hair and at the crime scene were ‘indistinguishable’ from the paint Lundy had used to mark his tools. The exact match — based on colour, and chemical composition — meant he had surely used one of his tools as the murder weapon. But the colour-matching was made by eye only, and there’s a broad range of about 80 varieties of that paint shade. The colour was not ‘indistinguishable’. The ESR’s tests revealed that the paint in Lundy’s garage and the chips found in Christine’s hair were both alkyds, meaning they were both enamels diluted with turpentine. Meaning . . . nothing much, because that’s an extremely broad category of paint. The chemical composition was not ‘indistinguishable’. In 2015, the paint evidence was rather less emphatic. The theory that the flakes matched the paint on Lundy’s tools ‘could not be excluded’ as a possibility. As for the source of dark-blue paint flakes found at the crime scene, that remained a mystery. Did they come off a second weapon? Levick speculates that there were two tools — a jemmy bar, and the murder weapon — taken to the house that night by two men.
When I returned to court that Monday morning, ESR forensic scientist Bjorn Sutherland was giving evidence about the possible movement of the paint flakes. He had been on the witness stand for four days — Bjorn again — and the final hours of his epic appearance concerned the subject of whether there might have been an innocent explanation for the flakes in Christine’s hair.
Hislop, in cross-examination: ‘Can you discount the possibility she may have had paint fragments in her hair beforehand?’ He suggested — painted, you could say — a scenario where Christine had picked up one of the tools when she was mucking about in the garage, got paint flakes on her hands, and transferred them by running her hands through her hair. Sutherland said he could not discount the possibility, but in his opinion the transfer of the paint flakes found in her cracked skull required a ‘vigorous activity’.
Gillian Leak, a stout, rather humourless blood-splatter expert from Kent in England, was called to give evidence. It was startling to hear that one of the cases she’d worked on was that of the Yorkshire Ripper. She talked about the likelihood of contamination at the Lundy crime scene. In her considered opinion, it was highly likely that blood and brain tissue was accidentally transferred by officers and other people handling the bodies. She drew a kind of diagram, with arrows. Christine’s brain tissue transfers to Glenn Weggery when he discovers the bodies. The tissue follows him to the back seat of a police car. The tissue transfers to police officer Brent Amas, who inspects Lundy’s car — where it arrives at its final, incriminating destination, as a stain on Lundy’s polo shirt.
If that was a long bow, she had another quiver to deliver. It concerned the likely movements of paint. Leak had written a report based on a theory. It actually only came to her the previous week when she was sitting in court and saw photos of Lundy’s tools in his garage. Leak appeared as a defence witness. In cross-examination, Morgan said to her, ‘You write a report based on something you heard in this court. Is this how it works? That’s how you
