The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  Zealand: “Australians, I feel, have a much stronger sense of themselves, but it comes out very loudly, almost aggressively, as though they want people not to miss them. New Zealanders have a defiant streak but may not mind if others pass them by. It’s a quieter, more taciturn, even laconic sense of self.” I was probably thinking of Lawrence when I wrote that.

  He was in many ways my ideal New Zealander, the one who most embodied a quality I was coming to admire and love in its people. I called this quality, courage of self. I don’t know how else to describe it. It meant he was nobody’s patsy. It meant when the hand of orthodoxy bore down and whispered in his ear, “Do this, or your career will suffer”, he wasn’t afraid to reply, “Up you”. But now in his hesitancy, his reluctance as I saw it to go the distance to help a client, I felt Lawrence was betraying himself, his profession and, by extension, his country. I felt let down.

  Of course I am older now—I was twenty-eight when I wrote that letter to my brother in England—and have revised some of my opinions, especially those about myself. Still, I like to think that I have retained my optimism about the human race and some of my idealism. To use an old naval expression, if I couldn’t put a jump in the wooden leg of someone like Lawrence, where was I?

  I put down the phone after I had spoken to Lawrence, dejected. I turned to Lisbeth. “What’s the matter?” she said. I told her. She listened. Then she laughed.

  Lisbeth claims that when I got in that night with my discovery of the report card, before I rang Lawrence, I was cock-a-hoop. Her words. She said now, laughing, that my pride was hurt. But it wasn’t that—it was more a feeling I had of certainty, of moral clarity. It wasn’t pride or self-righteousness or the conceit that comes from having a hunch confirmed after finding a piece of ruled-up card in a manila folder, it was simply the awareness and the knowledge that I had done the right thing. It felt good.

  Next day I double-checked. I transferred the contents of the report card from my PAC Mate to the desktop in my study and with Lisbeth’s help broke it down subject by subject and year by year, translating the crisses and crosses to make it more accessible. To Lisbeth, I have to say, the card didn’t mean much; it might have been a tablet in cuneiform script. She said it reminded her of a laundry list. But to me, as the computer and I talked it through, it became a series of pictures and anecdotes describing how Huey was responding to life at different levels of development from the ages of five to sixteen (at sixteen or seventeen he had left school and against the wishes of the father gone out to work). If a story was to be told of him in court, here it all was. These were his attributes. The card was his symbol.

  The trial was still two weeks away.

  It was some days before I got over my grievance. Lisbeth and I had a terrible row.

  “It’s not like you to bear a grudge,” she said. “You’re not a lawyer. Just let Lawrence get on with it. If he doesn’t want to find this man, he must have a reason.” Bloody right, I said. “The wrong reason.” “Some people,” she said, “have to play things by the book. Don’t keep trying to help him.” “But he needs help,” I said. “He doesn’t. You’ll only disable him. Remember what happened that time you had your prostate done.” (Funny how women always get at you below the belt. I remembered. I was in hospital. I was walking down the ward to use the telephone before I had the operation and everyone began calling out trying to guide me. “Left a little…” “Watch out for the chair!” “OK mate, straight ahead…” When I got back to my own little corner, I found I was shaking and wet with perspiration, I was exhausted. I thought to myself, It’s these offers of help which really disable you.) “Anyway,” Lisbeth said, “you’ve done your bit. Now let him get on with it.”

  I forget if it was then, or later, that the row started. I flared up. Lisbeth got upset and went into the bedroom. She accused me of being childish and petty. Also judgmental. She said I had an overweening sense of entitlement, was being possessive, arrogant, ungrateful, obsessional, and then when I contradicted her—this was the cruel bit, even though I knew what was coming—she reminded me of how I behaved on our honeymoon. How I’d taken her to Italy, to Siena, and the first thing I did after we unpacked at the hotel—I had noticed a hoarding advertising an exhibition driving in from the airport—was go off to an exhibition of medieval torture instruments.

  “Well, why not?” I shouted. “You went shopping, I went to an exhibition.”

  “Typical!” She burst out crying and slammed the bedroom door.

  Then I went out, slamming the front door. When I came back into the house she swore at me in Yiddish. How interesting, I thought. She’s never done that before. I said to her, “What language is that?” It wasn’t German and it didn’t sound like Hungarian. “What does it mean?” I said. She said, “How am I supposed to know? I don’t speak Yiddish.”

  I was intrigued. Next day I asked Lisbeth to repeat what she had said and wrote down the Yiddish words in my head, memorising them phonetically. Then I rang her friend Miriam who has some Yiddish. “Oy vay,” Miriam said, and told me what it meant in English. “It says, ‘May a red beet grow out of your belly button, and may you pee borsht.’” I said I thought that was delightful. So did Miriam. We talked for a bit before ringing off. She said, “Are you quite sure Lisbeth doesn’t speak Yiddish?” Positive, I said. “She speaks Hungarian and German as you know, French, Spanish, bit of Hebrew perhaps, biblical Hebrew. But she’s never been to Israel or Russia and claims she doesn’t know a word of Yiddish.”

  “It’s like those secret inscriptions they found in the Sinai Desert,” Miriam said, after a pause. “It’s buried memory.”

  SEVENTEEN

  IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me that Lawrence might be having sleepless nights. If he was, he didn’t let on. I was not to know that when I had blithely said to him, “Find the man”, I was in danger of putting the whole case in jeopardy.

  Unknown to me, Lawrence had not dismissed my suggestion out of hand but had got in touch with the family. The father, asked where the man Glen was to be found, could not—either could not or would not—help. He was, according to Lawrence, racked with guilt. He was angry at the revelation that his son had been abused and quite unable to comprehend the situation. He blamed himself for everything that had happened. Nor could the mother help. However, she promised she would speak to other members of the family. A few days later Lawrence got an answer: the man was alive and living in Warkworth, north of Auckland.

  It was then that Lawrence made his decision. He made a formal complaint to the Crown, saying he had reason to believe the man Glen had sexually assaulted his client in a caravan fourteen years earlier; he asked the Crown prosecutor to instruct the police to find and interview the man.

  I was both relieved and worried when Lawrence told me this. But this is madness, going to the police, was my first thought. He’s mad. I said as much to Lawrence.

  “I had no option,” Lawrence replied. “I have to play by the rules.”

  “And have the police done anything?” I said. We were talking on the phone.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard.”

  “I know it was my suggestion but what happens,” I said, “if they find this man and he denies it? Even if he admits it—”

  “If he admits it,” Lawrence said, “I’ll subpoena him.”

  “Oh yes?” I said. “Whose witness will he be?”

  “Good question,” Lawrence said. And he laughed.

  “You astonish me,” I said.

  “Let’s wait,” he said, “and see what happens.”

  We were then less than a fortnight away from the start of the trial. Ten days, to be precise.

  I said to Lisbeth, “Lawrence has blown it.” I put the phone down and told her what he had done.

  “How can he be so naive!”

  “You should be grateful,” Lisbeth said. “I hope you remembered to apologise.”

  “Apologise. What for?”

  “First you call him a milksop for disagreei
ng with you, now you write him off for taking you at your word.”

  “You don’t know the police,” I muttered.

  “What do you mean? If Lawrence has laid a formal complaint, they have to follow it up. Don’t they? They have to find this man.”

  “Ha, ha. Supposing they do, what happens then? I can think of half a dozen possibilities, none of which will be in our favour.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying ‘our’. This isn’t your case. It’s Lawrence’s. You’re only a witness.”

  “Can you think of a single reason why the Crown would want to help the defence in a case like this? I can’t. To cap it all, Lawrence thinks it’s funny. Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers let him go…And that’s what will happen.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Lawrence. I said to him, ‘Lawrence, you astonish me.’ And he laughed. Imagine. Having thrown caution to the winds, he now toddles along to the police and says, ‘Please sir. Can you help me catch the nigger?’ Then he laughs about it. I think he’s lost his marbles.”

  “Charlie Boy, sit down,” Lisbeth said. “Please sit down.” (I knew what was coming. She only calls me Charlie Boy when she’s about to pull rank.)

  “Charlie, listen to me. One: You are not allowed to say nigger in this country. Even if he is one which he isn’t. Two: You may think Lawrence is taking this lightly but I am willing to bet that he is worried sick. How long is it since he lodged the complaint? A week?…All right, five days. And you say the police can find someone in twenty-four hours if they want to. So? So the police are being slow. You have to live with that. Three: Lawrence knows the risk. You forget that I worked for a barrister for a time before I met you. A good barrister never asks a question unless he knows the answer, or can make a pretty good stab at it. You know that. You used to admire Lawrence. You once said he had such a powerful intellect he could analyse the pitfalls in an argument before you had finished enunciating what the problem was. So don’t think,” she said, “he hasn’t calculated the risk involved. Another thing you’re forgetting—”

  “Permission to speak?” I put up my hand and waved it. A mistake. I dislodged a clay pot on top of my desk. It fell with a crash.

  “I haven’t finished,” she said, ignoring the broken pot. “You forget that Lawrence is a New Zealander. He didn’t grow up in a thieves’ kitchen on the London docks like you did. He’s a polite New Zealand boy with a standing in the profession and he has to play by the rules. He’s either being very stupid, according to you, or he’s being very smart. I think he’s being smart.”

  *

  There was another problem I had not appreciated. The dilemma Lawrence faced, not knowing how the Crown or the police would react, was one thing, but a far greater anxiety was upon him—the question of buried memory. It affected the very fabric of our case.

  In the 1980s about the time Huey was sent away to stay with the man Glen I remember reading about a number of scandals in Britain and the United States focussing on the neglect of children. Cases were reported in the Scottish Highlands, the Orkney Islands and the Midlands. According to a paediatrician at one centre in the north Midlands, more than two hundred children were said to be “at risk” of abuse. In America, horrifying tales emerged about the ritual abuse of children and were featured in magazines, books and on television. Actresses discovered in therapy that they had been molested in their cradles; nursing journals printed articles about how to spot repressed memories; psychological associations and police departments organised seminars on ritual abuse. Experts were divided on the issue. The terms “abuse” and “repressed memory” became lightning rods, sparking debate among health professionals and others involved. As the debate spread, new accounts began to emerge. Whenever I opened a newspaper, there seemed to be a fresh epidemic of abuse or neglect based on the stories of children remembering acts of indecency from their buried past. Public inquiries were held. Gradually it became apparent that in many instances the so-called epidemics were fraudulent, a result of mass hysteria based on ignorance and fear, as with witch-hunts in the Middle Ages, and that as often as not the incidents reported had their origins in the parts played by misguided helpers who had encouraged—encouraged, cajoled, threatened, bribed—the children to fabricate their stories. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the Christchurch civic creche scandal which came to a head in New Zealand just as Huey’s case was unfolding.

  The Christchurch case had begun with an enigmatic comment from a four-year-old boy. The child’s mother did nothing at first, then one day she laid a complaint. Police were called in. Other parents were encouraged to lay complaints. Allegations of strange sexual practices at the creche began to emerge. By the time the young man at the centre of the allegations, a flamboyant but caring child-protection worker named Peter Ellis, was brought to trial, the initial complaint had mushroomed in the public mind to a cloud of rampant sexual abuse and a clandestine child pornography ring of traumatic proportions had been “unmasked” in which some three hundred children were said to be involved. In the space of a few months, as it seemed, a popular city creche was transformed into a den of iniquity; and when a judge sentenced Peter Ellis to a long term of imprisonment there was a measure of public relief that—to quote a Member of Parliament—“a monster and a pervert” had been put away and “a five-year reign of terror” by Ellis and some of his co-workers was at an end.

  Watching from the sidelines, I was bemused. At first the weight of evidence seemed incontestable. The children said they had been molested and everyone involved, parents, police, municipal and government servants, therapists, social workers, a jury of nine women and three men, and an experienced judge, believed them.

  “The jury heard the children,” the judge declared. “They believed the children and I agree with that assessment.”

  At that stage our own case for a retrial was about to go before the Court of Appeal. I remember saying to Lisbeth, or perhaps she said it to me: “You know, there’s something troubling about this creche business. Either the creche is bad or the whole justice system in this country is sick.” The irony was, however, that the Ellis case appeared to be working in Huey’s favour.

  Clearly in Christchurch a great cruelty had been perpetrated. But against whom? Clearly something was wrong. Yet it was secret and unstated.

  Others were obviously uneasy, for immediately after Peter Ellis was sentenced the public mood began to shift. To the average person, what lay behind the accusations was a mystery, although in my own mind—I knew something of the way children could be manipulated in play activities to reveal memories: “memories” that included weird ceremonies involving rape, incest, witches, ghosts, scorpions and even infanticide and cannibalism—I was beginning to work out in my mind who the culprits might be. In retrospect the tide of public opinion must have turned quickly. Concerned citizens wrote to the government. Appeals were launched up and down the country, there were calls for an inquiry. Even the media, which had conspired to create an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, began to develop a conscience and turn its attention away from the scapegoat, Ellis, and towards the children. As relief turned to scepticism and the mood intensified, it became obvious to many of us that as in Britain, as in America, the evidence of the children was tainted.

  “Mummy”—I remember a line jumping out at me from one of the published reports—“Mummy, I have been doing some more remembering about the creche.”

  I didn’t say anything to Lawrence, although calls for an inquiry into the Christchurch case were already mounting as our own case was coming to court. The sense of outrage that followed the Ellis verdict must have been obvious to Lawrence, as to every lawyer in the country. Was it true that the children’s statements had been obtained by pressure and manipulation? If so, if the statements that had condemned Peter Ellis were false, what effect might this have on a jury asked to believe in the truth of Huey’s story?

  For a giddy moment, after I discover
ed the school report card, I had thought our case unassailable. Now I began to wonder.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE TRIAL OF Hugh Thomas Fraser Dunstan, that is Huey’s second trial, began on a Tuesday. The setting was once again the high court in Cornford. The date was 14 March 1995. Was it 14th? I remember thinking as I left the hotel and walked down to the courthouse on the opening day, I hope it’s not the Ides of March—and not being able to recall which day of the month it was that the soothsayer called out his warning to Caesar on his way to the Senate-house in Rome.

  There had been both good and bad news in the previous week. Lisbeth and I had been away in the South Island for a short break at Hanmer Springs. On the Thursday or Friday after we returned to Wellington, Lawrence phoned me in a state of some excitement to say the police had found Huey’s abuser.

  “Sparrow rang me and said he had some news. They’ve got him, Ches,” Lawrence said. “And,” he added, “he’s admitted it.”

  “Can you subpoena him?” I said.

  “I don’t know yet. The man’s in custody up north.”

  “That means he’s their witness, doesn’t it? If the police have him.”

  “Sparrow only rang me yesterday. They’ve interviewed him on video and I’ve asked for a copy of the interview to be sent down.

  “I’m trying,” Lawrence said.

  He told me the man’s other name was Constable. Glen Constable. How appropriate, I thought. Apparently the police had charged him in a Northland court with an offence which had nothing to do with Huey’s case. It didn’t look particularly ominous or sinister from our point of view, but nor did it appear open and shut. It seemed to me that the police, having traced and found the man quite quickly, as I gathered—in fact two weeks earlier—had delayed until the last possible moment before advising Lawrence. Yet I could tell from Lawrence’s voice that he was elated.