The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  His worst character reference came from another ‘friend’, who went with Lundy and a few others on a fishing trip about six weeks after the murders. They had beers at the Ohingaiti Tavern. They had beers at the Oasis in Waiouru. They stayed at the Sportsmans Lodge in Turangi, and Lundy switched to spirits. ‘He said we had beer, and good company, and the only thing missing were whores.’

  Prosecutor: ‘Did he make any other remark about the whores?’

  ‘Just the fact that he rated himself and what his abilities were.’

  Lundy and the whores. It wasn’t a good look. His brother was horrified when he was told; he later came to believe that Lundy was guilty, and even changed his name to avoid association with the surname his brother had made so hated. Police questioned Lundy at length and with disgust about his use of escorts in Petone and on other trips; the interviews were played in court. He chose to give evidence at the first trial. It could not be said that he presented himself as a faithful husband, or a widower incapacitated by mourning.

  Prosecutor: ‘Do you have any guilt over hiring the escort on the night Christine and Amber died?’

  Lundy: ‘It sickens me to a certain degree.’

  ‘And yet on a subsequent business trip you could go back to the same motel with another prostitute?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘The same circumstances, the same sort of celebrations, alcohol, as you did on the night your wife and child died?’

  ‘I just said I did.’

  ‘You can do that, can you?’

  ‘I did do it.’

  All of which proves . . . what, exactly? None of these matters — that he’d grieved too much, grieved too little, grieved inappropriately — tied him to the crime. But all of these matters played to the suspicions that he was dreadfully, profoundly insincere. The lie was that he loved his wife; the truth was that he wanted shot of her, he had big dreams, he fancied himself as the prosperous owner of a vineyard, and Christine was holding him back. Hence, according to this folklore, the over-acting. It was as though he never knew how to be normal. It was as though he was intensely self-conscious. There was something about him which consistently played a false note. I was struck by these doubts, too, when I met him that summer. I wanted to warm to him — God almighty, what if he was an innocent man, who had experienced the trauma of losing his wife and daughter in violent, shocking circumstances and then was blamed for it, and banged up in jail? — but his manner didn’t make it easy. One afternoon we were standing around Levick’s bare and rather depressing kitchen, and the subject of wine came up. Lundy had been a wine buff, and belonged to a wine club in Palmerston North. I said I was more like his brother-in-law, Glenn Weggery, who used to tag along with Lundy to the wine club but brought his own beer. Lundy then launched into a long story about meeting a stranger at a scouting convention. There was a great variety of wine, and the bottles had been opened. The man said he fancied himself as an expert taster, and challenged Lundy to a blind-tasting duel. Lundy mimed going around the table, taking sips, and not only naming the label, but also its year and the exact vineyard. The challenger was left open-mouthed. He had met his match. He was in the presence of a master. It was a long and fairly boring speech, the monologue of a braggart; and when it finally ended, we stood in awkward silence until Levick changed the subject. All of which proved . . . what, exactly? So he was good at wine tasting. So he chose to tell a self-serving story. So why was it that it made me feel uncomfortable, that it had something to do with his guilt or innocence?

  4

  In between monologues and gelato ice creams, Lundy would disappear into his small room with the single bed at the end of the hallway to study another million words about his case and prepare notes and questions for his defence team. There was a lot of fresh scientific evidence and police disclosure coming through that summer, and the prosecution had prepared its list of 144 witnesses — which was fascinating as much for its absences as its inclusions. A number of crucial witnesses from the first trial would play no part in the retrial. I felt disappointed. In particular, I really wanted to see the amazing Margaret Dance on the stand. Reading the transcript of her evidence in the first trial was like reading the report of a séance. In that hot little room off Levick’s garage, with my salami sandwiches peeling in the sunlight and ants marching towards my chocolate biscuits, I marvelled at her lyrical imaginings; here, at last, in this den of blood-spatter findings and autopsy reports (‘The jaws were removed, cleaned and inspected’), there was something playful, something childish.

  Dance told the court that she saw someone matching Lundy’s description wearing a woman’s wig and running from the scene of the crime on the night of the murders. ‘My first impression was, “I wonder what she is running away from?” Then I saw it was a he, and [he] had a let-me-get-out-of-here-quickly sort of expression . . . I have a very photographic memory. I recall an impression of intensity on the person’s face, like he was wanting to get somewhere.’

  Later, after she heard news of the murders, and wanting to help police find the killer, she gave the matter a lot of thought, or, as she put it, ‘musing’. She was asked in cross-examination: ‘Can you explain this musing process?’

  ‘It’s just allowing things to run through my mind.’

  ‘Do you have any particular ability in this area?’

  ‘Occasionally, yes.’

  ‘Can you explain what that is?’

  ‘It’s usually called ESP . . . Whether it is accurate or not I have no idea.’

  ‘Are you saying this psychic ability may not be accurate?’

  ‘It’s been very accurate on occasion,’ she said.

  By ‘musing’, and ‘allowing things to run through my mind’, she wrote down the words HANDS DARK. This was helpful, because it narrowed down the police hunt for the killer to a man wearing a woman’s wig and with dark hands. She also wrote the words SKIP BIN TAWA. She explained, ‘I wondered where the bloodstained clothes had been put, and those were the words that I got.’

  Ludicrous. Dance belonged to a wider farce — the police theory that Christine and Amber were killed not long after 7pm. It required so many blatant fictions. Margaret Dance’s vision of Lundy fleeing from the murder scene at around that time was merely the most playful. The foundation myth for the time of death was courtesy of Dr James Pang, who conducted the autopsies. He claimed the absence of the smell of gastric juices in the stomach was proof that the digestion process hadn’t begun — meaning they were killed about an hour after they ordered their last supper, a McDonald’s meal, at 5.43pm. Pang’s time-of-death estimate created immense challenges. Police had to put Lundy at his home in Palmerston North at about 7pm.

  They rose to the challenge with flair and wit. Calls made to Lundy’s Motorola cellphone put him in Petone at 5.30pm, and again at 8.29pm; he didn’t have an alibi for the two hours and 59 minutes between the calls; ergo, or reductio ad absurdum, it gave him the time to make the return trip to Palmerston North, where he slaughtered his family at roughly 7.15pm. Although Christine and Amber never missed an episode of Shortland Street, which began at 7pm, and although Amber didn’t go to bed until about 8pm, police advanced the notion, in all seriousness, that the reason they were in bed was because Lundy had persuaded Christine to undress and wait for Big Daddy in bed at 7pm so they could have sex. The two had spoken on the phone at 5.30pm. The Crown prosecutor said at trial: ‘Why was she naked? The eight-minute call is the key.’ And so Lundy headed home, although it meant he had to drive all the way from Petone, and then return to the motel where he had booked a room for the night — oh, and although, also, the Lundys’ Hewlett Packard home computer was manually turned off at 10.52pm. Police got around that last one when its computer ‘expert’ Maarten Kleintjes said it was possible that Lundy had cleverly manipulated the clock. Most remarkably of all, according to police, Lundy managed to make the 300-kilometre round-trip in a ground-speed record of two hours and 59 minutes (the ‘Lundy Five Hundy’, as it was later
immortalised), as well as find the time to chop his wife and daughter to death; fiddle with the computer; stage a break-in; run down the street in a wig and women’s clothes; dispose of said wig and women’s clothes, the weapon, Christine’s jewellery box, and his blood-splattered clothes — he drove like a maniac, killed them like a maniac. In Lundy’s final police interview, when he was arrested for the murders, Detective Inspector Steve Kelly crowed: ‘No doubt about it, Christine and Amber were murdered during the period you have no alibi . . . Caught you, buddy, absolutely caught you!’

  The drive released him. Without it, Geoff Levick would never have taken an interest in the case; and without Levick, it’s doubtful Lundy would ever have had his conviction quashed by the Privy Council, and been set free to wander that beautiful property in Kumeu, where he once noted 24 different bird species in one day, including kookaburras. Lundy owed Levick his freedom. It was an incredible achievement. When Levick first sent me that email back in 2005, I dismissed him as a madman. Of all the cases to take on, he chose Lundy! The modern history of New Zealand policing was rotten with false arrests for murder; they framed Arthur Thomas, the cases against David Bain, David Tamihere, John Barlow, Scott Watson and Teina Pora were variously dubious or downright rubbish; but surely they got it right with Lundy? I assumed his guilt. He was gross, despicable; there was the matter of his wife’s brain on his shirt. He appealed the conviction. He came before the Court of Appeal in 2003. It didn’t go well. The judge said, ‘Amber must have died with the awful injuries to her mother as her last living memory. The trial judge did not give this aspect enough weight. He really only mentioned the involvement of Amber in passing. The murder requires denunciation and demonstration of society’s abhorrence at a very high level.’ The sentence was increased from 17 years to 20 years. When Lundy returned to prison that day in a state of shock, he walked past the cell of serial rapist Malcolm Rewa. At that time, Rewa laid claim to the second-longest sentence in New Zealand. He was given 22 years; another serial rapist, Joseph Thompson, had been sentenced to 25 years. Rewa called out to Lundy, as if it were a boast: ‘You’re still only the bronze medallist, Lundy . . .’

  He was left to rot. Just about everyone loathed Lundy. Levick, too, thought much the same — until a story by Paula Oliver, in The New Zealand Herald on 10 January 2003, caught his eye.

  The article was about an effort by some friends of Lundy, ‘a stoic few’, to reinvestigate the murders. I later met the closest friend, the most stoic. He had remained loyal to Lundy all those years, and it had cost him dearly. He suffered a nervous collapse and depression, he fled Palmerston North, he desperately wanted to ‘fly under the radar’, as he put it, and not have his name used in print. That seemed fair. He outlined the history of his campaign to free Lundy. He approached David Yallop, the author of Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Nothing came of it. Then he approached Bain’s belligerent advocate, Joe Karam, who advised him ‘to seek out media interest’. The subsequent Herald story in 2003 pointed to discrepancies and assorted weirdnesses in Lundy’s prosecution, including the matter of that manic drive. Levick had driven that same exact route many times. He did the maths. He didn’t think it was possible. In fact, he was convinced it wasn’t possible. It made him wonder about the entirety of the case against Lundy, and soon he began to adopt the mantra of all campaigners: ‘There’s something not quite right here.’

  5

  The weeks leading up to the 2015 retrial were increasingly tense. Lundy suffered terrible headaches every day. Levick seethed and stewed, although that was his usual manner. He had spent 10,000 hours of his life and around $100,000 of his money on the case, and it had turned him into an obsessive. I’d ask him a question and he’d give an answer that was epic in length and discursive in narrative and scornful in feeling — he’d come to hate the police. Levick always apologised for talking too long. He was exceptionally generous, and I never left the property without a great big bag of plums. When he talked about cricket, he would relax. He wouldn’t touch alcohol, but his red face told another story of past boozings. He muttered that it had something to do with a recent separation, and talked about his wife with longing. He had moved into a new house, and it felt empty and sad. The bathroom was stocked with two bars of Knights Castile soap and little else; the walls were bare except for a photo of a racehorse he used to own. Levick and Lundy moved like old bachelors through the house; separated and widowed, they were joyless, certainly determined, intensely serious, lonely.

  I wasn’t much fun. I shut myself away inside the small room reading up on the case, and sometimes I wondered whether Levick’s magnificent effort was futile and wrong-headed. His Post-it notes read FFS, LIES, CRAP. In his mind, there was no room for doubt, or nuance; Lundy had been framed, the charges were bullshit, the police had lied and twisted the evidence. The clearest distillation of his investigation was in the folder marked GEOFF’S BOOK. He had written it for publication. No one could ever publish it. It was libellous and furious. The constant use of bold type, capital letters and exclamation marks were immediate signs of an obsessive at work, expressing himself in the typography and language of vitriol. ‘Chapter three: Bladder full. Chapter four: Exposed banana. Chapter six: What car? What woman? What wig?’ And yet much of it was completely accurate. Piece by piece, he took apart the 7pm question — Dance’s crazy evidence, the impossibility of the drive, the vacuity of Pang’s time-of-death theory, the absurdity of manipulating the clock on the computer. The book reads like a prophecy. On 26 January, two weeks before the retrial, the police told Lundy’s defence team that they had thrown out the time-of-death theory of 7pm — and with it, Margaret Dance and all the rest of their fanciful notions that cast Lundy as a cold-blooded killer and master criminal racing through the Manawatu flatlands in the early evening.

  Levick had called his book ‘Meticulous, or Ridiculous?’. The police conceded that the latter option was the correct one when they finally admitted that they were wrong with their wretched 7pm theory. The scenario had changed in the new police inquiry, Operation Spring. They now put the time of death as sometime well after midnight, perhaps 3am. In essence, though, nothing had changed. It had simply been a case of wrong time, right man. Everything else remained in place. Lundy was the murderer. He did it for the insurance. He staged a break-in. And, most damningly — the one piece of evidence that put him at the scene of the crime, what it all came down to — the stain on his shirt was tissue from Christine’s brain.

  ‘Fucking Miller,’ Levick said. He meant Dr Rodney Miller, whom he loathed even more than anyone from the police. Miller was a specialist in diagnostic pathology, based in Dallas, Texas, who had tested Lundy’s shirt and identified the presence of brain tissue. It was a novel approach — Miller worked in the field of immunohistochemistry, or IHC, primarily in cancer research, and his tests had never previously been used in a forensic crime investigation. By chance, he had attended a pathology conference in Palmerston North in August 2000, just three days before the murders. He was a keynote speaker. His speech was titled, ‘Achieving reliability of immunostains’, and it addressed techniques of tissue transfer. This was exactly what the police needed during their investigation into Lundy. A scientist from Medlab in Palmerston North, who remembered Miller’s talk, wrote to him in January 2001: ‘I’ve got a curly one for you!!! We are involved in a homicide investigation in which a mother and daughter were slain using a tomahawk . . . The husband/father is the prime suspect. His shirt has 2 smears of nearly invisible material on it . . . One smear was dampened with water, and imprinted on a slide. It shows tissue fragments including intact blood vessels. We feel it is probably brain.’

  Miller replied, ‘Wow! That is really a nasty case, and it would be great to nail the bad guy.’ And then: ‘Maybe we could use tissue transfer media to remove the cellular material from the shirt, and do immunostains on that.’

  Head of the police inquiry, Detective Sergeant Ross Grantham, personally took the samples to Miller’s laboratory in Te
xas. He later claimed in an affidavit: ‘I was not shopping for an expert who could tell me that it was brain tissue.’ He wrote to Miller: ‘It is vitally important for our case to be able to positively identify the material as originating from Christine Lundy.’

  Miller wrote an entertaining narrative, published on his laboratory website, about the testing. ‘The week before Detective Grantham came, I was rinsing off a fresh chicken to be used for dinner, and noticed spinal cord tissue protruding from its severed neck. I thought this presented an excellent opportunity to see whether we could use IHC to detect tissues smeared on shirts, so I smeared chicken spinal cord, kidney, and liver on portions of an old shirt . . . Little did the chicken know that she would be contributing greatly to putting a guilty man behind bars.’

  Yes, if only chicken little could talk. Miller’s immunostains proved positive for chook tissue; likewise, his testing on Lundy’s shirt ‘showed unequivocal tissue on the areas of the stain’. He wrote: ‘This provided unequivocal evidence that Mark Lundy had brain tissue on his shirt, from an area that also contained Christine Lundy’s DNA. This was the critical piece of evidence that allowed an arrest to be made.’