I will readily recommend that the file is reinvestigated if I find that that is necessary.
Could you please provide me with a phone number I can contact you on to discuss this matter.
Regards
Greg Murton
Detective Senior Sergeant
I was ecstatic. This was it: the break I’d been desperately hoping for. Like I was going to just email him back my phone number and wait any longer! It was over two years since Phil’s death — there was no way I was waiting a second longer than I needed to. I grabbed the phone and called.
Detective Senior Sergeant Greg Murton had a genuine, honest voice and showed concern the job wasn’t done properly to start with. We talked, and that afternoon I emailed him some more information:
Hi Greg
After talking to you today I feel sense of relief now that this matter is in your hands. I’ve spent the last nearly 2 years being treated like the nut case sister who was wasting their time. I’ve spent nearly 2 years trying to find the needle in the haystack in this case costing me so much time and money and in some cases my sanity … I’ll attach a letter I started last Thursday to [another senior detective] with my concerns in this case and will add my other concerns below …
What about the other neighbour seeing her hang out washing at 5am?
What about her talking to neighbour, work staff etc about killing Phil?
The affair with Barry: Why was his car registered to Helen’s address when he purchased it for cash in February, around which time he had $10,000 in his bank account that he couldn’t explain where it had come from to his girlfriend (was it from the stolen money from her work, were they plotting things back then)?
The Friday before Phil’s death Helen pretending she was home all day to Phil after they had had an argument that continued when he arrived home with Ben.
Helen had time off work the Thursday or Wed before Phil’s death to get her hair done, she returned without it done saying Phil had cancelled the appointment on her and had met to talk with her (that is so not a Phil thing and his work log that day would prove he hadn’t). Her computer internet records — why weren’t these checked out? I rang or emailed the police and told them they needed to check if she’d been on the computer that night and what she’d been looking at and previous to that night.
The laptop she told the neighbour she gave it to a computer repair guy for parts as it was stuffed — neighbour says the laptop was good and she was bullshitting.
Why was my family never questioned?
Helen initially told my parents, my brother and my friend Andrea in 3 separate ph calls that the police woke her when they knocked on her door to tell her they had found Phil dead in his truck!
Helen told the family Phil had been diagnosed with narcolepsy after his trip to hospital in mid-April. She even told Phil’s ex-partner that my mum had this (all bullshit).
If Adam says about Phenergan in Panadol tabs in mid-April and he was admitted to hospital in mid-April? [This referred to Adam’s evidence that he had seen Helen grinding up Phenergan tablets and putting the powder into Panadol capsules, presumably to administer to Phil.]
We heard a story that Phil had been admitted to hospital for an overdose years earlier???? We heard that the person who took him to hospital made a statement Helen had poisoned him? But Phil denied it and said he did it????
As the pathologist is unable to say how Phenergan levels lower in a body over time and what the rate is if a living sample would be similar to a dead test I am willing to be a guinea pig and do the test with 4 25mg Phenergan tablets and have hourly blood tests to monitor its levels. If this will help determine how many tabs were in his system, calculating it back to pre-10.30 as I know he was dead at 10.30pm when she sent the text message from his ph.
Why didn’t they check if Helen bought the drugs under Milner as last name, or her son or her boyfriend?
Helen swears in court she is allergic to bees that’s why she carries Phenergan — is she??? Her mother has no knowledge of this! And 10mg of Phenergan would do jack to helping someone allergic to bees as an interim to getting her to help.
Did the police find her Phenergan or not? Need to re-ask Haydon Syncock [the officer who had attended Phil’s death] that one.
Will leave it there for now, will send more as I think of it and go thru things more. Welcome to my nightmare. Thank you again for taking this out of the too-hard basket and giving it another look.
Regards
Lee-Anne Cartier
I also attached the letter I had started the day after I received the inquest results to another senior detective, who I had been told would be the appropriate person to raise my concerns with. In it, I had included the following questions:
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Why did the police so quickly accept a fake text message that was totally staged for their benefit as proof of suicide? The policeman who was there told me she had to turn on her phone to get her friend’s number because she had recently shifted. The woman whose number she was accessing (Wilma) has lived in the same house for years.
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The night Phil was found, the coroner’s head office in Wellington was emailed through their website by Phil’s ex Karen X, advising that she believed his death wasn’t suicide and that they needed to test for insulin in his system. She also rang the Christchurch coroner’s assistant the next day with the same information. There is no evidence this was tested for. What became of this email?
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The police had Helen’s Vodafone mobile in their hands and traced the text from Phil’s Vodafone mobile to it, but did not realise until it was too late that they didn’t have the number for it. I am sure this phone’s record would have shown the texts her son claimed she sent him, plus that she was having an affair with Barry X. Why was Barry never interviewed? He’s a weak guy and I’m sure he would have cracked if he knew anything.
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Why did the police only get copies of two of the text messages from Phil’s phone? Would it have been better to get all that were available on the off-chance there was important evidence in them?
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Why did the police never seize the laptop or computer or check what internet sites had been accessed from the family home?
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Why did the neighbour’s statement that the bedroom light was on at 4.20 a.m. not count as anything, considering Phil was too dead when the police arrived to have been alive then?
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Why was Helen’s immediate boss never questioned?
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Why did the police fail to note the time the phone message was left by Helen?
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Why has Helen not been given a lie detector test?
WITH GREG NOW GOING IN to bat for Philip and our family, I felt no need to finish this letter or send it. We were back in the game, and on the path to bring Helen to justice for my brother’s death.
After the apparent lethargy of the initial investigation team, Greg was the total opposite, and so motivated he emailed several times in that first week. Two days after our first contact he had already been out to Helen’s old workplace to speak to staff and chase down Helen’s work computer.
In one of our early conversations I spoke of the policeman, Haydon Syncock, who went to the house the day Phil died and my conversation with him. Greg informed me that Haydon had just completed his detective training and was part of the investigation team, after he made his statement regarding that day. I was so happy he was on the case: he had been the O/C Body (officer in charge of the body), so he took care of Phil that day and had accompanied him to autopsy. Now he was completing Phil’s story with justice. Thank you, Haydon.
When Greg asked me if we had any paperwork or something else which might have Phil’s fingerprints on it, I rang and suggested he look in the autopsy file — like ‘hello?’ — but was shocked to find that fingerprinting and DNA testing at autopsy is very rare. Other than someone who knows the victim saying ‘yes, that’s s
o-and-so’ there is really no evidence to prove that the deceased is really who they have been identified as. Unless visual identification isn’t possible, it’s the next of kin’s word that it’s that person.
ON 8 JUNE I GAVE the Public Trust a call to see where things were at and they said they had an updated death certificate showing the coroner’s findings, and would send me a copy. When I opened the document it contained a scanned, certified copy of Phil’s death certificate. The copy had been certified by Helen’s lawyer Graham Coumbe on 1 June but had been issued on 24 May. Helen was in such a rush to claim the life insurance policy that the certificate had been issued only six days after the inquest results were released. The Public Trust told me Coumbe had promised to send them the inquest results when they came through but hadn’t.
I headed to work and called Greg, asking him in his official capacity to contact AXA and let them know the police had reopened the case as a murder investigation, with Helen the only suspect. When I spoke to Greg again he confirmed he had spoken with AXA, who had said that Helen had only sent in the inquest’s certificate of findings — which said the cause was ‘In the circumstances as set out in [the coroner’s] written Reserved Findings dated 12 May 2010’ — so they had asked for the full findings. By not sending AXA the written reserved findings or the Public Trust the coroner’s findings, I feel that Helen was trying to pull a swiftie to get her hands on the insurance money.
Greg and his team, named Operation Checketts after the street where Helen and Phil had been living in Halswell, worked away behind the scenes gathering information and evidence, but it wasn’t until 30 June that Helen became aware the police had reopened the investigation into Phil’s death when they knocked on her door with a search warrant. Apparently she wasn’t happy and said it was all my doing.
Well, she was partially right. I had had some input in the police’s decision to reopen the case, but the crux of it was she had committed murder. Without that act there would be no death to investigate.
Thirteen
The Media
Greg was wonderful, maintaining contact, asking questions and keeping me up to date on the team’s progress. I chose to go to New Zealand to make my second statement to police: that way I would have the chance to look Greg and the team in the eye and know they were doing the job and not just playing me.
I flew to New Zealand on Tuesday, 12 July after dropping the girls to school that morning for their Year 5 camp. Lance had recently shifted down to the Gold Coast and into our home, and Danieka and baby Dakotah were down staying, so would look after the girls when they got back from camp.
I arrived in Christchurch on a midnight flight. Andrea picked me up and we went to another friend’s place for drinks and to crash. We drunk vodka-laced bubbly and only got an hour or two’s sleep.
Sunday producer Chris Cooke had a cab pick me up fairly early. I was feeling a bit ordinary; I couldn’t even look at the croissants Shannon had put out for breakfast. The driver stopped at the petrol station for me on the way to the hotel room they had booked to film the interview and I stocked up on water, energy drink and chocolate to get through it.
Journalist John Hudson interviewed me for Sunday, asking questions about how I felt the police had failed in their initial investigation.
THE DAY AFTER I ARRIVED, I went into Christchurch South Police Station and met Greg Murton. This meeting gave me the assurance that Greg was 100 per cent genuine, that he was going to leave no stone unturned and that he would close this case. I also met Detective Sergeant Earle Borrell, who was second in charge of the case, and Detective Constable James Moyle, who was in charge of the file (O/C File) and all evidence pertaining to it. As I had brought items over for the investigation, James took these and gave me a police evidence receipt.
Before my interview I had stayed the night at Greta Valley, North Canterbury at Karen’s new place. She had shifted in with her partner Wayne after the big earthquake, around the time that Ben came to stay in Australia with me. It was a long drive back into town, knowing the grilling that was ahead of me at the police interview.
When I entered Christchurch South Police Station to make my second statement, I asked for Earle. He was off getting a coffee so I sat looking out the window, waiting to spot him returning. When I heard the automatic entrance door open, I looked quickly and saw it was just an elderly couple, so I turned back to the window.
But then the woman spoke. I froze in shock and looked quickly to double-check: it was Helen and Barry. I glanced out the corner of my eye and listened. Helen was asking for Greg Murton and complaining about a printer she had refused to accept when it had been returned by courier, as the courier wouldn’t accept her opening the box to check it before she signed for it. I couldn’t believe it: of all the times for her and Barry to walk into the police station!
A man who had come through a security door approached me and said my name. I hushed him and nodded towards the couple at the desk, quietly saying, ‘That’s her, that’s her.’ He took me out the back to the interview room, which I had previously been in when I first came to see the police nearly two years earlier. The room had a floor-to-ceiling window facing the hallway, with a blind that was fully open. The man who had brought me there introduced himself as Detective John Borlase, then went and had a quick look for himself, as he hadn’t come in contact with Helen to this point of the investigation.
I had settled from my shock and we had started my interview when I heard the door from the reception area open and heard voices. It was Greg, Earle, Helen and Barry! What the hell? You’d think I was the one who had committed a crime and the police were trying to intimidate me! John jumped up and pulled the blind down as Helen and Barry settled onto seats facing me in the room across the hallway. After this second incident it took a little more time and a lot of choice words to lower the heart rate!
When we stopped for a lunch break that day, I popped to a café across the road and texted Greg. He didn’t know what I was on about: he thought I was completely out the back in the video interview room, and was very apologetic about what had happened. He had never realised I was there and hadn’t noticed any sign of Helen or Barry realising it either.
John was an older fella, with a kind personality and excellent at his job. He was very thorough in his interviewing and he pushed hard at times but that’s what you’d expect from someone in that position and I respected him for it. He even had me in tears on a couple of occasions over the two days of the interview.
That night I stayed in a motel in town, as the day had been very tiring and driving out to Greta Valley and back in the morning was too much to contemplate. Chris Cooke took me for dinner, to see what he could get out of me about my police interview. I just told him about the shock of Helen and Barry both being there.
The girls had both come home sick from camp and had spent the time since recovering. Lacau texted me, complaining that she had just cleaned up the kitchen then Lance had made something and left a mess, and said Rajon wasn’t well. I directed her to the thermometer. Then she said:
Remind me again why you’re in New Zealand?
I replied
You know why I’m here.
She told me Rajon’s temperature and I told her to give her a Nurofen, then continued with
I’ve just spent all day at the police station being interviewed and I have to go back again tomorrow to finish it. Then I have to go to the lawyers the next day.
Lacau profoundly replied:
Why couldn’t she have done the right thing and just paid for a divorce.
How do you answer something like that from an 11-year-old? She was playing mum to her sister and housemaid to her brother, while questioning the morality of a murderer. She was wise beyond her years. I just wanted to cuddle her and keep my girls innocent of this mess but neither was possible. I cried, lying there thinking about the day and the day to come, not sure if it was the stress of it all or the really uncomfortable bed that kept me from sleeping.
ONCE I WAS BACK IN Australia, the police began to feel that the Sunday programme was acting inappropriately with an ongoing investigation in process. They had been able to keep the investigation on the down-low for over three months, but Chris Cooke was busy doing his own investigation for his programme and risked compromising the police investigation, so Greg felt it was time to put it out there, and issued a press release:
29 August 2011
Police launch investigation into 2009 death
Christchurch Police have advised that a homicide investigation is being conducted into the death of Christchurch man Philip James NISBET, 47, in May 2009.
Detective Senior Sergeant Greg Murton says the investigation was launched in May this year, following a Coroner’s hearing into the death.
The death was initially investigated by Police, before being referred to the Coroner.
A coronial inquest was held last November. In May the Coroner found that there was insufficient evidence to reach the threshold required to bring a finding of suicide.
Detective Senior Sergeant Murton says a team of detectives is working on the investigation, which is building on several months of enquiries conducted by Police at the time of the man’s death.
No further comment will be made by Police at this time. Any developments in the case will be advised by media release.
AT 5.35 P.M. ON 18 SEPTEMBER I was getting dinner ready when I heard a Facebook message come through on my phone. It was from my Aunty Lois, saying I was on the Sunday programme! I immediately called Karen, to get her to watch it.
I then noticed a text I had missed on my phone from Chris Cooke 15 minutes before Sunday aired, telling me they were screening the programme that night. I was so not impressed and knew the police wouldn’t be either. I rang Earle — he was watching it and not a happy camper.
Black Widow, The: How One Woman Got Justice for Her Murdered Brother Page 11
