‘Truthfully? Absolute shit. Honestly, I am an absolute wreck.’
‘Can I ask how you’ve been sleeping?’
‘Badly. Last night I ended up watching cricket and fell asleep on the couch. Sometime after three I got up and went to bed. It took probably about three-quarters of an hour to an hour to get to sleep and I slept for about an hour. Then just lay in bed.’
‘Mate, do you want a drink of water or coffee?’
‘Yeah, water if you could.’
Kelly asked Lundy about his movements in Petone on the night of the murders. He said he had dinner in his motel room, and then drove across the road to read a book. His favourite author was Wilbur Smith: ‘I’ve read all except one of his books.’ When it got too dark, he went back to the room and polished off most of a 1.125-litre bottle of rum mixed with Diet Coke. He was celebrating the launch of a new kitchen product. ‘It’s going to be extremely profitable.’ He talked about phoning the escort.
‘Where do you use an escort, just in Wellington?’
‘No, I’ve used one in Napier and New Plymouth. I’d estimate a couple of times in each place in the last five years.’ He stayed at the Marineland Motel and the Snowgoose Lodge in Napier, and the Carrington and Braemar in New Plymouth.
‘The other thing, Mark. Sometime back, your cleaner found something similar to a girlie magazine under the bed.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know anything about that?’
‘Christine actually was reading articles in them.’
‘Wasn’t yours?’
‘Not mine. I wouldn’t want to waste my money to be honest.’
‘Well, having said that, what about the pornography that was in your briefcase in your car?’
‘That was given to me.’
‘By who?’
‘I can’t even remember now. It’s actually been there for a couple of years. I forgot it was in there . . .’
Not a word of that particular exchange rings true. It sounds more like he was caught red-handed with porn, and airily tried to pin it on his dead wife and someone whose name escaped him. The stick mags and the escorts were probably deeply shaming, but what do they prove? Kelly moved on. The two men talked about the home computer, the ranchslider, Amber’s bedtimes, a bracelet found in Lundy’s car, the insurance money. You could see Kelly gently ferreting around for evidence, but it was a sympathetic interview. Lundy liked Kelly; he said later that he saw him as a friend.
‘Mark, it’s a bit over two weeks since your wife and daughter were murdered,’ Kelly said towards the end of the interview. ‘You’ve done a lot of thinking and we’ve done a lot of investigating. It’s not often I do this, but I’m going to ask you, what’s your theory on it?’
‘I haven’t got one. I have absolutely no bloody idea. The only thing I can think of is, maybe it was a burglary gone wrong . . . I don’t know. Who the hell could kill — who could take a life, but kill a beautiful little girl especially, it’s . . .’ He said he’d tried to imagine what happened. The best he could hope happened, he said, was that ‘neither of them saw each other die and they died quickly. That’s getting me through.’ He put his head in his hands. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring when he went back to the house.
And then he asked Kelly, ‘Have you guys had any luck, any suspects?’
‘There’s a lot of suspects, Mark.’
‘Oh, is there?’
‘You can take it as a personal thing from me, Mark, whoever murdered your wife and daughter will be caught.’
‘Cool.’
‘There’s absolutely no way they won’t be caught. We will catch them.’
‘Excellent.’
14
The second interview was filmed on 23 February 2001, six months after the murders, and the day Lundy was placed under arrest and charged with the murders. Kelly escorted him to Manawatu Prison. He said at the first trial, ‘While waiting for the large electronic gate to open, I said, “Mark, I and many other people are very disappointed.”’ Lundy’s response was not recorded.
The interview room seemed smaller, and was filmed at a strange, oblique angle. The only props were the same — a table and two chairs. The clock had gone. As for the wardrobe department, Kelly was once again in white shirt and tie, while Lundy opted for baggy shorts and a vast yellow T-shirt. It was just after 9am and he was hung-over. He mentioned a drinking session the previous night; the last guest left in a taxi at 1.30am. ‘I’ll get an early night tonight,’ he said.
Again, they talked about the home computer (‘I can do the basics’), the ranchslider, Amber’s bedtimes, a bracelet found in Lundy’s car, the insurance money. It was a three-hour interview and the first half of it was innocuous in tone, although it’s obvious that Kelly, in part, was pursuing the crackpot theory of the 7pm time of death. There was a detailed inventory of Lundy’s car: popcorn, $1.55 in coins, four metal plumbing bolts, Sellotape, a wire coat-hanger, Pepsi, a pie wrapper. Lundy confirmed his travel bag contained a pair of brown socks, green Rio underwear, and a striped XXL polo shirt — the shirt which had been taken to Texas earlier that month for Miller’s historic tests.
Kelly introduced a subtle change of tone to the interview when he told Lundy that a witness — Margaret Dance, the musing psychic — had seen him near his house at about 7.15pm on the night of the murders. ‘You never went
