The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  I never really knew what I was doing with any of these people. Freedom was at stake for Lundy and Wang. Something else was at stake for Rickards and Nicholas, something vital and important: belief. I was just passing through.

  I’ve worked the past 15 or 20 years in journalism as a kind of writer at large, rarely assigned to anything, mostly just choosing stories that seem interesting. When at a loss, I’ll walk into a courtroom. I always feel at home the second I take my seat. I wait for the misery, the ambiguities, the accumulation of minor details.

  ‘Crime does pay, for the media at least,’ announces the nobody from Te Ara, in its section on crime writing. ‘Editors, journalists, television and radio producers know that there is an appetite for morbid, horrific and macabre news stories . . . The media’s crime coverage is highly selective . . . The most heinous or bizarre murders get the most media coverage. For example, a stabbing will receive little media attention compared to a man who kills his family.’

  Fair call. No one else from the media bothered to attend the stabbing trial that spring afternoon. It was a slow day. I recognised one of the clerks in another courtroom. She said, ‘I’ve had a woman accused of killing her husband.’

  I could have gone there, but I felt an important point was about to be reached in the case of the Maori guy who stuck a knife between the second and third ribs of an Asian guy, and killed him. The pathologist took the jury through his postmortem. The victim’s chin, he said, had an ‘irregular tearing’. He said it was consistent with falling face-first on the driveway. In the public gallery, the dead man’s widow fainted.

  Court was adjourned. An ambulance was called. ‘Crime news . . . lacks complexity’ according to Te Ara. In fact, it deals with the most complex subject in life. The subject was addressed quite directly by the pathologist when court was resumed, and he described the deceased. ‘51 years of age. 74 kilos in weight, and 169 centimetres in length.’ A life reduced to statistics, the image of flesh on a slab: slowly, profoundly, we were being told what it’s like to be dead.

  Chapter 1

  Mark Lundy: Operation Summer

  . . . the high authorities we serve would not order such an arrest without gathering exact information about the reasons for the arrest and about the person to be arrested. There’s no room for mistake.

  — The Trial, Franz Kafka

  1

  It was a curious summer. Once a week I’d visit Geoff Levick at his beautiful rural property west of Auckland in Kumeu, with its dark pond and its plum trees, and sometimes we’d sit on the back porch with his house guest, Mark Lundy. There was an apple orchard next door, and a line of pines straight ahead, above a narrow creek. I went for a wander one day and surprised a pheasant. A harrier circled the orchard on the afternoon I first met Lundy.

  ‘Hawk,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  We sat in silence. There was another attempt at New Zealand small talk — cricket, the weather, Winston. He was under instructions from his legal team not to discuss his impending trial for the murder of his wife and child, but after five minutes that was pretty much all we ever talked about. Everyone else was doing it; for the better part of 15 years, the subject had formed part of the national conversation. The killings were so awful, so brutal. Christine Lundy was hacked to death in her bed. Amber Lundy, seven years old, had her head cracked open with the same weapon, which has never been found. The murders were conducted in their Palmerston North home at an unknown time of night, by person or persons unknown or by someone they knew and loved. You could walk a long day’s march before you found anyone who thought it wasn’t Lundy — the fat man who fucked whores, who murdered his own family for an insurance cheque, who staged it to look like a burglary gone wrong, who was found guilty and should never have been let out on appeal to stand retrial. Levick and Lundy were quite likely the only two people in a very wide radius who maintained his innocence. They occupied a kind of parallel universe in that sunny, idyllic corner of farmland and vineyard.

  Lundy was a big man, slow, pale, very angry, very bitter. He almost looked gaunt. He was 43 at the time of the murders, fat and soft-skinned, with a lousy fringe. Fifteen years later, he’d lost a lot of weight and most of his hair. There was a peculiar goatee. He was assertive, verbose, nervous. We had a beer or two. Levick preferred a balanced diet of instant coffee and cigarettes. I liked Lundy, not overly; I liked Levick, a lot. The two of them were in such intense cahoots — they were fighting to clear Lundy’s name, to beat the murder charges in court — but they made an odd pair. Levick was small, with startling blue eyes set in a red face, and his conversation revealed a brilliant, nimble intellect. Lundy lumbered in gait and mind. It was difficult to imagine them meeting in any circumstances other than their shared obsession with proving Lundy’s innocence.

  I said, ‘Do you two actually have anything in common?’

  Lundy spoke first. He said, ‘Nothing.’

  He helped out around the place. The next time I visited, he was up on a ladder, peering into a water tank. It didn’t have much water in it. The ground was hard, and turned brown by the end of January. The creek nearly went dry. The surrounding countryside was parched and the roads were empty. I loved heading out that way, past the prime minister’s Helensville electoral office with the big picture of Key’s gormless face, past the strawberry fields and the roadside stalls — watermelons $4.99, six cobs of corn $5. It was horsey and fruity. A new dementia unit was due to open. There was the famous sign with its berserk apostrophes advertising YUCCA’S BROMELIAD’S ORCHID’S SUCCULENT’S. There were the famous wine estates of Nobilo and Soljans. They were very pretty on the eye. Also, though, they mocked Lundy’s own hapless schemes to create a vineyard on prime land in the Hawke’s Bay. His dream came to nothing. Police regarded the venture as evidence in his prosecution; it went to motive — he needed money, fast. ‘There’s another way of looking at that,’ Geoff said, that first afternoon on the porch. He had two packets of Winfield Green beside the ashtray. He whittled them down while he explained that the wine venture contained the answer to the riddle: if not Lundy, then who killed Christine and Amber? It involved root stock, a frightened woman who called the police, an outstanding debt . . . Geoff liked to re-enact conversations, and he started to shout when he took on the role of his prime suspect. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Lundy said. A man was driving a tractor in the orchard. Levick padded into the house to put on the jug for more coffee.

  I said to Lundy, ‘Who do you think did it?’

  He said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think too much about that. I just want to know why. Why would you kill them? They were my life. In a way, they still are. It’s all I think about. They’re with God, waiting for me. I know I’ll see them in Heaven.’

  He wept. Levick had come back with his mug of coffee. He said, ‘You all right, Mark?’

  Lundy said to me, half in wonder, ‘I’ve talked to two other journalists, Mike White and Jared Savage. They didn’t make me cry. You do.’ The other half felt like rage.

  2

  These were his halcyon days. He was a free man, at large and on bail, not exactly happy, often tense, but hopeful that his retrial would get him the right result — not guilty, at last, of the murders of Christine and Amber on 30 August 2000. He was found guilty at his first trial in 2002. He successfully appealed to the Privy Council — thanks in large part to the incredible efforts of Levick, who didn’t know him and simply took an interest — and his conviction was thrown out in 2013. He bail conditions allowed him to travel to Kumeu, and he’d also driven to the cemetery in Palmerston North to visit the graves of his wife and daughter.

  I said, ‘Were you nervous someone would see you there?’

  He said, ‘Oh, shit yes. Terrified.’

  He’d sat and talked to them, he said. ‘My girls.’

  I imagined him sitting there, asserting his right to grieve. The text on the headstone was in his words. It was like a touching tribute to himself. It read: FORE
VER LOVED BY HUSBAND AND FATHER MARK. And underneath, from the terrible song: UNFORGETTABLE. THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE. Palmerston North writer Peter Hawes, who attended the first trial and filed an extraordinary report to the Manawatu Standard, mentioned the headstone when we spoke on the phone. He hated the thing. ‘Not only do they get hacked to death,’ he said, ‘they get lumbered with banality.’

  We spoke on a day when I happened to be visiting Levick and Lundy. I took the call in the trees by the creek, and talked in a low voice. It felt like an abuse of hospitality to talk with Hawes. He was in possession of one of the most original minds in New Zealand literature, but he echoed what everyone else thought when he said, ‘I know full well he is absolutely guilty.’ He had studied Lundy in court, tried to examine his pathology. He failed. He said, ‘I couldn’t get at him. I couldn’t find the gap in his brain. I couldn’t find why he did it.’

  And then he said, ‘Amber’s death was an act of love.’

  I said, ‘What?’

  Hawes said, ‘A kid can’t live after seeing that. He killed her to save her.’

  From his story in the Standard: ‘I sank my brain into the doings of this crime — it affected me greatly. My wife was afeard of me, she hid axes and tomahawks and feared for my sanity as I tried to descend to Lundy’s. Because he did these murders, of that, dear reader, have no doubt. He waddled into that bedroom dressed in freezing work overalls with mask and perhaps a snorkel. Then he set about her. He took away her face in 17 blows, in order to expunge her from the memory of his and the human race. His daughter, alarmed by the affray, then rushed into the room and in a gush of sheer parental love, Mark Lundy chased her down the hall and, in three jagged blows, sent all memories of what she had seen to heaven.’

  Hawes and I spoke for about half an hour. I hiked to a low ridge, and sat down on the pine needles. I said in a low whisper, afraid that Levick or Lundy might overhear, ‘Have you considered the possibility that he’s innocent?’

  Hawes said, ‘That would be an interesting intellectual exercise.’

  Levick tried to get me interested in that intellectual exercise back in 2005. It was a kind of fishing trip: I was working at the Sunday Star-Times back then, and Levick was wanting a journalist to look into the material he’d gathered that raised questions about Lundy’s conviction. I demurred. I said it wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I forwarded the email to the incomparable Donna Chisholm, my esteemed colleague at the newspaper. She wrote a couple of stories. I gather it must have been her whom Lundy was referring to when he wrote to Levick from prison, ‘A pet reporter is a good idea. You seem to have found one.’ He hadn’t. Donna moved on to other subjects.

  I eventually came on the scene long after I was needed: that summer, awaiting the retrial. I packed a lunch for my weekly outings to Kumeu, and spent most of those long, hot days inside a small room off the garage. Levick had filled the shelves with massive amounts of paperwork from his diligent and genuinely awesome investigation into the Lundy case. I opened up manila folders marked PAINT and PETROL and TIME OF DEATH, took notes (‘M and C buy $29.95 chickwheat-shade lampshade at Lighting Direct, last time sees her alive . . . $83.40 room fee Foreshore Motor Lodge, hooker $140’), and slowly began to make some sense of the formless narrative told by Levick’s documents. I suppose I was getting embedded. I daresay I was forming sympathies. The journalist and the murder accused, hanging out on Levick’s porch in the afternoon shade, another time driving down the road to an ice-cream shop. A child dropped her ice cream, and cried. There was a prickly pear in flower. The three of us spooned creamy goodness into our faces as we relaxed outside the store in gorgeous sunshine.

  ‘How’s yours?’ Lundy said.

  ‘Delicious,’ I said.

  We sat in silence. It didn’t seem like a good idea to discuss the case in public. Blood splatter, autopsies, whores — so much of the whole saga was garish, explicit. So much of it was banal, domestic. The setting was a kind of quintessence of boring New Zealand life; the family were overweight and cheerful, very popular, very social, into Scouts and Girl Guides and Pippins, messy, guzzlers of junk, normal, living in a weatherboard house with green trim. A 43-year-old kitchen sink and tap salesman in Palmerston North kisses his wife goodbye one morning and drives to Petone, near Wellington, to see clients. He stays overnight in a motel, eats a roast-chicken dinner from Pak’nSave, polishes off most of a bottle of rum, and calls an escort from The Quarry Inn to his room just before midnight. They have sex. She leaves. These were the undisputed facts, and Lundy’s version of events — it was just a routine business trip; even the assignation with a hooker was part of his routine — sounded entirely plausible. But the police inquiry, Operation Winter, formed a mosaic of evidence pulled from all sorts of places — McDonald’s, Texas — and some of it sounded kind of plausible. Lundy drove from Petone and killed them with a tool from his garage (police argued that paint flakes in Christine’s hair matched the paint he used to mark his tools), then drove back to the motel. A man from Texas who practised a novel form of forensic science claimed that a stain on the sleeve of Lundy’s shirt was brain tissue. Goes to motive: the wine venture was about to collapse, and he needed the life insurance pay-out. Goes to character: his behaviour was thought of as really fishy.

  3

  Why do some cases fascinate, why do others fail to engage? What stories do they tell us about ourselves? Very often they offer a commentary on the range of our hatred. It’s rare that we remember the names of victims. It’s as though our sympathies can’t match the depth of the loathing we reserve for a criminal élite whose names we never forget. Rewa, Dixon, Weatherston . . . The crux of the Lundy saga — its special appeal, the thing that gave it an enduring power and resonance — was his perceived role as a shocking phoney. He was scorned as a fake, and much of it came down to his display of grief at Christine and Amber’s funeral. He wailed, he heaved great sobs, he had to be held upright. A slow-motion clip of Lundy howling at the funeral featured in the opening credits of long-running TV satire Eating Media Lunch. In the catalogue of grave sins, Lundy’s exhibition that day was held in only slightly less odium than the murders.

  He had lost his wife and child. They had been brutally murdered. ‘How is a man,’ he asked at his trial, ‘supposed to grieve?’ It was a good question. Had he committed some other affront? Was there a resentment that he had transgressed the New Zealand code of remaining taciturn or at least laconic at all times? Open displays of grief are permissible at a tangi. Not at a funeral in sensible and provincial Palmerston North, not collapsing, losing it. ‘The funeral, for me, was something of a disaster,’ Lundy wrote in a letter to Levick from Manawatu Prison in 2005. ‘I had co-ordinated & organised everything, the extra seating, the extra sound system for outside, the order of proceedings, pallbearers, eulogies, songs, hymns, the whole works. At 12.45 I arrived at the back of the church, [his sister] Caryl driving me, and I couldn’t get out of the car. I totally lost it. I have vague recollections of seeing people but that’s all. My next memory of consequence was . . . around the corner at the Rose & Crown. In the bar were at least 200 family and friends from all over the country. I was told later that I was grabbing everybody and hugging them, not shaking hands. I was babbling out something like, “I’m missing out of Christine and Amber hugs, so I need to get them from somewhere.” I am told that I was hugging strangers, who were there just as sticky beaks, and refusing all handshakes. I have no recollection of all this. When I saw the 6pm news I was both shocked & embarrassed at what I saw.’

  There were other reports of Lundy’s behaviour — said in court, and in the media — that received a lot less attention. After the murders, he told police he was having thoughts of suicide, and wanting to drive his car at speed into a wall. That’s an acceptable exhibition of grief, isn’t it? This hardly counts as forensic credibility, but a psychiatric assessment of Lundy was made by James S. Howard III, an American forensic psychiatrist based in Southland, ‘as determined from New Zealand
newspapers’. Howard wrote, ‘He stated he would curl up in a ball for hours. He became sullen and withdrawn. He kept away from the house, neighbourhood, and papers. That does not fit a profile of a killer of this type . . . There is nothing which leads me to believe anything other than that Mark Lundy did not kill them.’ Howard’s ‘assessment’ was made during the six-month police search for the killer. He concluded: ‘Let us hope Mark Lundy will not be the scapegoat in this unresolved police matter.’ Police arrested Lundy in February 2001. Howard’s report was never referred to again.

  Howard had the psychiatric expertise, but had never laid eyes on Lundy. In contrast, there was memorable evidence given by someone who knew Lundy, and who offered his version of that hopeless but popular science known as body language. Detective Allan Wells appeared as a witness for the prosecution. He had known Lundy for 20 years, and described himself as a ‘friend’.

  Crown prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk: ‘You have come along to this Court about what Mark Lundy was like at the funeral, as if that has got something to do with his guilt or innocence?’

  Wells: ‘Yes.’

  He was asked to describe Lundy’s behaviour at the funeral. He said, ‘He had both his arms over the support people as if they were carrying his weight for him, and he farewelled Christine and Amber in the hearses. They drive off, and he walked around the corner of the church. I noticed he seemed to come to grips with himself pretty quickly . . . It was a totally different mannerism.’

  Meaning, Lundy dropped the act when he thought no one was looking. The evidence was considered revealing, and played to the widespread feeling that Lundy was acting a role. Wells further described that Lundy lifted his shoulders and stood upright. Geoff Levick asked Lundy about the episode in a letter. He replied, ‘I have no idea what he [Wells] was on about. If I did in fact change my posture though, I would not be too surprised. I am an extremely emotional person and my family and friends were soothing me somewhat. I was constantly putting on a brave face and disappearing so as to totally lose it when I had to. It is quite possible that I did in fact lift my shoulders so as to bluff the many in the house so they would leave me alone to grieve in my own way. (Shit, I’m actually losing it even now recalling those times. Told you I am an emotional idiot.)’