The verdict was on a Wednesday. Justice France summed up on Monday. It drew a crowd, with every seat taken in the public gallery. People were excited to be there, to witness the end of a truly horrible saga in New Zealand history. Mary from Epsom was there, and Anne from Woburn was there, and they were joined by Nathan from Plimmerton, who had a court-watching speciality — he only appeared during the wait for the verdict. He loved the tension, the uncertainty. He loved the verdict most of all, its power on a room. He was in Courtroom 1 when Ewen McDonald was found not guilty of the murder of Scott Guy, and he said he’d never forget that moment. He worked as a gardener; he was strong, with big hands, and there was a sensitivity to him. He was separated from the mother of his children. He said to me that Monday, after the judge had given his summing up, that he was in a new relationship, and things were going as well as could be expected. A radio journalist came over and made a long speech about his history of failed relationships. It was a very long history. I escaped outside, where tui sang in the flax bush. Glenn Weggery was there, standing with detectives from Palmerston North; they weren’t happy. Things looked bad for the prosecution. After the jubilation of Morgan’s exhilarating closing defence, their mood had been brought crashing down by Justice France’s summing up.
France was most famous as the judge who had ordered journalist Laura McQuillan off the media bench during the Ewen McDonald trial for wearing an apparently distracting pair of gold lamé sequinned ‘disco pants’. He was a stickler for a dress code during the Lundy trial, too; no man could sit before him without a tie. He presided over the court with good grace and unflagging attention to detail. He ruled it with a silver bouffant. But his greatest contribution was his summing up, when he established himself as the most brilliant jurist at the trial. He’d spoken for nearly three hours. He maintained his flair for the malapropism, the flat-out blunder. He referred to Hislop as a character by the name of ‘Mr Wislop’, claimed that Lundy’s first trial was in 2003 (it was 2002), and called the accused ‘Mr Lundry’. Dirty Lundry, or clean Lundry? The remainder of France’s address was a masterclass, a model of clear and nuanced thinking. It was balanced and judicious, as you’d expect. But it was also an instruction to ignore much of what the Crown had put forward, and to acquit.
He told the jury to reject Morgan’s hard-boiled term ‘the killing journey’. That had no place in court, he said. The prosecution kept returning to the bracelet found in Lundy’s car, saying that it had fallen out of the jewellery box which he had taken from the crime scene. France dismissed it as an unproven nonsense. On the matter of no one in the scientific community coming forward to back Dr Sijen’s critical evidence that the stain contained human RNA, he said: ‘Sijen stands alone.’ The best he could say in support of the tests: ‘If you accept that it is human brain, then the Crown’s case is considerably strengthened . . . Mrs Lundy’s brain tissue is obviously a very significant thing.’
He ticked off Hislop’s ‘three impossible things’ that ruled out Lundy being the killer. France was in support of Lewis Carroll. ‘One can’t believe impossible things,’ says Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. ‘If you accept he did not have enough petrol to make the trip,’ France said of the defence’s first impossibility, ‘you must acquit.’
And then he trashed the motive. The Crown said that Lundy did it for the oldest cliché in homicide — an insurance cheque. They examined the accounts of his sink business, and declared that it was on the verge of collapse. Lundy was in serious debt. Really? France told the jury: ‘You may be drawn to the view that the business wasn’t hopeless, wasn’t great, but they had no real reason to think they wouldn’t at least stay the same and maybe get better quite soon. I think it fair if I say to those of you who haven’t had business experience that owing money to people, and being owed by others, is not unusual for small businesses. It is to be noted equally the Lundys were owed money.’ As for the insurance pay-out, France said, ‘It’s important to remember the change in insurance was nothing to do with him. The $200,000 had been in place for a while; the idea of increasing it came from the broker, not Mr Lundy. He knew it would not go up until it was all settled and that had not been done yet, so why kill her now?’
He gave Kleintjes a bad review. He gave Pang a bad review. He gave his worst review to dear old X, the jailhouse snitch, the comedian with his thick neck bursting out of his tightly buttoned shirt. ‘You saw him in the witness box. I don’t know — maybe in one sense he seemed to you in his own way an engaging witness,’ he said of the wretch. ‘But you should think about things such as the likelihood of Mr Lundy admitting this to a relative stranger, and the error the witness seemingly made about Mr Lundy waiting for an appeal. You also heard of his past offending and how others have called him manipulative. These are matters to weigh in the mix.’ He smiled sweetly, and said: ‘Great care is needed.’
The evidence of Detective Inspector Kelly, too, caused him to make comments on ‘misleading witnesses’. Kelly
