The Scene of the Crime

at roughly 7.15pm. Although Christine and Amber never missed an episode of Shortland Street, which began at 7pm, and although Amber didn’t go to bed until about 8pm, police advanced the notion, in all seriousness, that the reason they were in bed was because Lundy had persuaded Christine to undress and wait for Big Daddy in bed at 7pm so they could have sex. The two had spoken on the phone at 5.30pm. The Crown prosecutor said at trial: ‘Why was she naked? The eight-minute call is the key.’ And so Lundy headed home, although it meant he had to drive all the way from Petone, and then return to the motel where he had booked a room for the night — oh, and although, also, the Lundys’ Hewlett Packard home computer was manually turned off at 10.52pm. Police got around that last one when its computer ‘expert’ Maarten Kleintjes said it was possible that Lundy had cleverly manipulated the clock. Most remarkably of all, according to police, Lundy managed to make the 300-kilometre round-trip in a ground-speed record of two hours and 59 minutes (the ‘Lundy Five Hundy’, as it was later immortalised), as well as find the time to chop his wife and daughter to death; fiddle with the computer; stage a break-in; run down the street in a wig and women’s clothes; dispose of said wig and women’s clothes, the weapon, Christine’s jewellery box, and his blood-splattered clothes — he drove like a maniac, killed them like a maniac. In Lundy’s final police interview, when he was arrested for the murders, Detective Inspector Steve Kelly crowed: ‘No doubt about it, Christine and Amber were murdered during the period you have no alibi . . . Caught you, buddy, absolutely caught you!’

The drive released him. Without it, Geoff Levick would never have taken an interest in the case; and without Levick, it’s doubtful Lundy would ever have had his conviction quashed by the Privy Council, and been set free to wander that beautiful property in Kumeu, where he once noted 24 different bird species in one day, including kookaburras. Lundy owed Levick his freedom. It was an incredible achievement. When Levick first sent me that email back in 2005, I dismissed him as a madman. Of all the cases to take on, he chose Lundy! The modern history of New Zealand policing was rotten with false arrests for murder; they framed Arthur Thomas, the cases against David Bain, David Tamihere, John Barlow, Scott Watson and Teina Pora were variously dubious or downright rubbish; but surely they got it right with Lundy? I assumed his guilt. He was gross, despicable; there was the matter of his wife’s brain on his shirt. He appealed the conviction. He came before the Court of Appeal in 2003. It didn’t go well. The judge said, ‘Amber must have died with the awful injuries to her mother as her last living memory. The trial judge did not give this aspect enough weight. He really only mentioned the involvement of Amber in passing. The murder requires denunciation and demonstration of society’s abhorrence at a very high level.’ The sentence was increased from 17 years to 20 years. When Lundy returned to prison that day in a state of shock, he walked past the cell of serial rapist Malcolm Rewa. At that time, Rewa laid claim to the second-longest sentence in New Zealand. He was given 22 years; another serial rapist, Joseph Thompson, had been sentenced to 25 years. Rewa called out to Lundy, as if it were a boast: ‘You’re still only the bronze medallist, Lundy . . .’

He was left to rot. Just about everyone loathed Lundy. Levick, too, thought much the same — until a story by Paula Oliver, in The New Zealand Herald on 10 January 2003, caught his eye.

The article was about an effort by some friends of Lundy, ‘a stoic few’, to reinvestigate the murders. I later met the closest friend, the most stoic. He had remained loyal to Lundy all those years, and it had cost him dearly. He suffered a nervous collapse and depression, he fled Palmerston North, he desperately wanted to ‘fly under the radar’, as he put it, and not have his name used in print. That seemed fair. He outlined the history of his campaign to free Lundy. He approached David Yallop, the author of Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Nothing came of it. Then he approached Bain’s belligerent advocate, Joe Karam, who advised him ‘to seek out media interest’. The subsequent Herald story in 2003 pointed to discrepancies and assorted weirdnesses in Lundy’s prosecution, including the matter of that manic drive. Levick had driven that same exact route many times. He did the maths. He didn’t think it was possible. In fact, he was convinced it wasn’t possible. It made him wonder about the entirety of the case against Lundy, and soon he began to adopt the mantra of all campaigners: ‘There’s something not quite right here.’

5

The weeks leading up to the 2015 retrial were increasingly tense. Lundy suffered terrible headaches every day. Levick seethed and stewed, although that was his usual manner. He had spent 10,000 hours of his life and around $100,000 of his money on the case, and it had turned him into an obsessive. I’d ask him a question and he’d give an answer that was epic in length and discursive in narrative and scornful in feeling — he’d come to hate the police. Levick always apologised for talking too long. He was exceptionally generous, and I never left the property without a great big bag of plums. When he talked about cricket, he would relax. He wouldn’t touch alcohol, but his red face told another story of past boozings. He muttered that it had something to do with a recent separation, and talked about his wife with longing. He had moved into a new house, and it felt empty and sad. The bathroom was stocked with two bars of Knights