What was that about? It felt like the funeral all over again. It felt like another journey into the bullshit science of body language. Did the way Lundy behave in court, and in the police interview, somehow reveal something about his guilt? The film of Kelly’s interview took a sudden and alarming turn when he said to Lundy, ‘I’m going to have to show you some photographs.’
‘I didn’t want this,’ Lundy complained.
Kelly said, ‘The day has come.’ He opened up a folder and took out a photograph from the crime scene. ‘That is Christine.’
Lundy turned away in horror, and cried out: ‘No!’
‘Christine has got severe head injuries to her arms and head area. There’s blood everywhere.’
Lundy slid his chair across the floor to get away from the pictures, and said, ‘Oh yuck.’
‘Oh yuck’ didn’t quite cover it. ‘Oh yuck’ didn’t really measure up to the graphic slaughter of his wife. ‘Oh yuck.’ Who says ‘Oh yuck’?
‘The blows have gone across the head, Mark,’ said Kelly.
‘Oh God. I hate you now, I really do,’ said Lundy — and his response once again seemed significant to some jurors.
Kelly got up and awkwardly rubbed Lundy’s shoulders. It was a strange piece of male bonding. He said, ‘Mark, the thing about this is that Amber would have been killed with the same instrument.’
‘Oh God, you’re not going to show me that, too, are you?’
Lundy talked in whimpers. He turned his head away from the pictures. He was in some distress. But when Kelly asked him questions about other subjects — the bracelet found in his car, his tools — Lundy reverted to making casual conversation. It was as though he couldn’t maintain his grief and horror. It came and went. Lundy recoiled, groaned loudly, made strangled kinds of screams. He covered his face. He bowed his head. Was it horror, or a lame attempt to mime the response expected of an innocent man?
Kelly showed him a picture of Amber lying dead in the doorway to his bedroom, and said, ‘If you look back at the photograph of her brains, they went everywhere, up the wall, up the bed, across the dresser, up the curtain, every-bloody-where but right there, and the reason why they didn’t go there, Mark, is cos that’s where you were standing.’
‘No,’ Lundy sobbed.
‘Don’t even think about lying to me, do not think about lying to me.’
‘I am not lying.’
‘You are.’
‘I was not in Palmerston North!’
‘I’ll show you something else, and you’re going to have to look at this because this is how it works. That is a picture of your beautiful daughter. That’s a picture of your beautiful daughter in the doorway with her head cut. That there is a close-up of it. Don’t make faces, because I’m saying you did this. And you hit her that hard, that’s her skull.’
‘I didn’t, Steve, I did not, I was not in Palmerston North, I was in Wellington, I did not kill my wife and daughter. Please, cover those up — please?’
‘Mark, why would I cover them up? You did it, for God’s sake.’
‘I bloody well didn’t.’
It was the funeral all over again . . . He showed too much grief, he didn’t show enough. He wailed and whimpered, a hung-over fatty confronted with appalling photographs, pleading, crying, then talking matter-of-factly about bracelets and such. It looked bad. Or was it just footage of a man in shock? It had absolutely nothing to do with the murders, it didn’t place him at the crime, it offered nothing in the way of evidence, it didn’t point to motive, to opportunity, to anything that suggested that he killed his wife and daughter. But was it what the jury wanted to see; was it what they needed to convict?
The mood in the courtroom changed completely after that. Hislop looked like he’d seen a ghost. I found him pacing outside on the pavement, his head bowed. I said, ‘With respect, you’re fucked.’
He gave one of his barking laughs, and said, ‘Well.’
I said, ‘No. You’re fucked.’
He said, ‘Fuck off. Okay?’ He stomped off, his head still bowed.
The end was nigh. Mike White from North & South read it that way, too; he was shocked. Mike, to his vast professional credit, was largely responsible for everyone coming to this room in Wellington to hear six weeks of evidence. His investigative story on the murders challenged the Crown case against Lundy with sufficient power to attract not just Hislop but also some of the world’s leading forensic scientists to the cause. It had led to the first conviction being quashed. His own views on Lundy’s guilt or innocence provided a model of rational thinking which I tried to follow. He said, ‘All I can do is approach it from the angle the judge instructed the jury to: can you be sure he did it? If not, then you’ve got to acquit because there’s not sufficient evidence, and thinking it’s possible, or even likely he did it, isn’t good enough. Does the evidence show he did it for sure? I’ve never been able to get to that point, personally.’
The police started to look more relaxed. Ben Vanderkolk sat with one of his sons, who worked up the road at The Backbencher pub, and put his arm around his shoulders. I was glad Geoff Levick had decided against coming to Wellington for the verdict. I had emailed him on the weekend, and he’d replied, ‘No, I’ve decided not to come down as I will be
