The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  ‘He never gave up on my father,’ said Wasmuth’s daughter. ‘He was allowed to take him home and for outings. He was very loyal.’

  The daughter of a lunatic and a killer; the daughter of a man who sold plums at the gate, tried to write, caused immense suffering, and died at the age of 95. ‘He was a difficult person,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t very warm. I couldn’t say I loved him at all.’

  John Porteous, who watched the drama from his home at Bethells when he was 13, said that Father Cronin visited Wasmuth at Oakley Hospital. ‘He was concerned for the man. He was the perpetrator of the act, but Father looked past that and looked at the man himself, and his relationship with his Creator.’

  Someone else tried to visit Wasmuth: May Mackey, Wally Chalmers’ widow.

  In her small apartment in Parnell, over the tea and custard squares, she said, ‘Right from the beginning I wanted to see Wasmuth, to talk to him. I had always that yen to see him, because I never had anything against him, none at all. I felt he might have needed something. It was my attitude to people. That’s why for 30 years I’ve visited people in prisons.

  ‘Lake Alice closed down and they moved them to Mason Clinic. I was in there visiting, and heard about Wasmuth. I asked permission to see him. But they wouldn’t let me. They said it would not be in his best interests. And that was that.’ She said this during my visit in 2012.

  I went to see May again in 2015, a few days after she turned 95. She wore slacks and a cardigan. ‘My right arm is feeling sorry for my left arm,’ she said. It could only hold things with difficulty, and she couldn’t play the piano in her sitting room. But she was in great cheer, and walked out to the street to greet me. May was always out and about at the Parnell shops; earlier that week, she said, she was walking up Parnell Road when Teina Pora jumped out of a café to embrace her. Pora had only recently been released from prison for a wrongful conviction of murder. She remembered him on his first day in prison. ‘A little person holding his grey blanket, being led to his cell.’ They became friends in the last 10 years of his imprisonment.

  She again brought out the custard squares and the teapot with its coat. May was a good listener, with a very keen memory for detail. The complete lack of dementia and her good physical health meant that the only thing that made her eligible for a rest home were her 95 years. She preferred her freedom. She was a little old lady but there was such a strength and calmness about her, and something else, something just as striking — it was as though she’d changed race, and had become Maori. She looked Maori. She spoke Maori place names with flair. Once a week, she said, she made herself a boil-up — pork bones, with spinach. She was a kuia, wise and ancient.

  As Hughina Garnett, she was raised in Dunedin, and took a job in a clothing factory. She told the story of her conversion to Christ in a beautifully sensitive profile by Anglican Church media officer Lloyd Ashton in the church magazine Anglican Taonga. She was riding to work one day in 1937 with a friend. They spotted a booklet on the footpath. It was called ‘The Reason Why’. May’s friend read the Christian tract aloud as they cycled along. Then and there, May told Ashton, she had a kind of an epiphany; the word she used was ‘convicted’.

  She studied as a missionary with the Bible Training Institute, and prepared for mission work in somewhere like Africa or Asia. But she holidayed with the Northland whanau of a fellow student, Emma Kake. It was a profound experience. May told Ashton, ‘I thought, “I’m not looking overseas. I’m not moving out of Maori-land.”’

  She met Wally Chalmers when she worked as the matron of the Shelley Beach Maori Girls Hostel in Ponsonby. Wasmuth’s killing left her a widow for five years. She remarried, to Dave Mackey, of Tainui. In 1982, she started visiting inmates at Mt Eden Prison. She said in the magazine, ‘You sit with them and you just ask, “So where do you come from?” And when they tell you, you say, “Oh. I know your relations.” And you just mention some names. This is the Maori world. It’s all whanau stuff.’

  I asked her more about her visits. They had ended with the death of her friend Ben Dickson, who drove her to prison. But she stayed in touch with the prisoners by phone, and had passed on a list of 10 particular prisoners to a new visitor. She said, ‘I showed him the list. “These are special people,” I told him. They were Willie Bell. Malcolm Rewa. And others, including a man called Jeremy. He sent me a card on my birthday this week. He said to me one day, “If you’d met me 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have come near me.”

  ‘And that’s all I know about why he’s in prison. I never ask about their crimes. Or if they did it. Willie said to me, “No one’s done what I’ve done.” People hate his insides. He hates himself. But I just sit with them, and we talk. Not about God, or religion; just talk. The only message I have is the message of redemption.’

  From Wasmuth, through to contemporary monsters such as serial rapist Rewa, and Bell, who bashed three people to death in an RSA in 2001 — May’s life these past 50 years was a kind of brief history of violence in New Zealand, in Maori-land. She was so serene.

  Chapter 3

  The bogan ninja: Antonie Dixon

  There was no hair on his head — none to speak of at least — nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head looked like a mildewed skull.

  — Ishmael’s first encounter with Queequeg in Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

  1

  Dixon was mad. He was every kind of crazy, a bogan ninja, bringing down the blade of a Samurai sword in a flash of silver once, twice, then three, four, five, six, seven, eight times in a partially successful attempt to sever the hands of two screaming women on an early summer’s evening near Thames, killing a stranger with a gun later that night in Auckland and inviting suicide by cop, all the while smoking awesome amounts of P and opening his mind to exciting possibilities of chaos. He was disturbed, disordered, mentally diseased. In diagnostic terms, he was fucked in the head. There was only one question of interest at his lurid and depressing seven-week trial at the High Court of Auckland in 2005: was he mad, or bad? But the answer was obvious. He was both. He was so nasty, resolutely vicious and absolutely remorseless, but he should never have been found guilty of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, and eight other relatively benign charges. The jury rejected his insanity defence. He got a life sentence. It was a death sentence. He needed a straitjacket, or whatever psychiatric restraints — ECT, a lobotomy — that were available in mental health units. He was sent to prison, and his doom. He killed himself in his cell. Antonie Ronnie Dixon was 40.

  The state — the police, and Crown prosecution — jeered at Dixon, and said that he was a sane person pretending to be mad. The paradox is that he was a mad person pretending to be mad. When he made his first sensational appearance on the opening day of his trial, he was like a master satirist. He was a parody of a lunatic.

  Queequeg’s queer ‘scalp-knot’ and blotchy pate remained the most incredible haircut in New Zealand history — if we accept the widely held theory that Melville’s tattooed Polynesian was Maori — until Dixon was shown into Courtroom 6 that Monday morning in February at the High Court. All eyes were on his eyes, which he rolled in his head, bulged, widened, zigged this way in their sockets, and then zagged that way. But the haircut was even more amazing. It looked as though he had borrowed it from a small boy. Bowl-cut a few inches above his ears and all the way around, it rested on the very top of his shaved head like a light nest. So light that at times it almost seemed to hover above his head — it was a haircut which wanted out, but was doomed to follow him around.

  It came with him as Dixon, 36, wide-hipped, 5’ 8”, pale and flabby, clutching at the waistband of his baggy green shorts, was led into the dock; it disappeared with him as he ducked his head, and hid from view of the jury, when the court was played an excruciating 111 emergency call made on the night of 22 January 2003.

  The date marked Dixon’s long day’s journey into night. It began when he took to his lover Renee Gunbie and ex-lo
ver Simonne Butler with the Samurai sword as they sat, terrified, at the kitchen table in a house in Pipiroa on the Hauraki Plains. It was another intolerable New Zealand summer. Mosquitoes roamed the banks of the nearby Piako River. Heat rose in waves above the long, flat, melting roads. Crime scene photos showed two bottles of Lion Red and a packet of Round Wine biscuits on the dining table; on the floor, there was blood in the cat bowl, and shoeprints in blood. There was also a clump of black hair. He had tried to scalp Gunbie. The two women were left to bleed to death. They were lucky to live. That attack — perhaps the most original in modern New Zealand criminal history; so much about Dixon has to be measured in superlatives — was distilled in court as two counts of attempted murder, and two counts of intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

  Almost incidentally, he was also charged with murder. James Te Aute, 25, was shot and killed in a carpark behind a Caltex service station in Highland Park, near Pakuranga in Auckland. He had driven there in his wife’s Ford Telstar. The couple had been together for 11 years, and had three children. Her brother, Jackson Lemalu, said in court that Te Aute was his best friend: ‘The only person I could talk to about things.’

  He was with Te Aute on the night of the murder. They had met that morning, ‘mucking about in his garage, fixing his car’, then they had driven to Manurewa, to Mt Wellington, to Pakuranga. Two friends joined them; one was looking after ‘a mate’s little boy’, who he thought was aged nine or 10. The boy was still with them when they parked behind the Caltex in Highland Park. It was sometime after midnight. A stolen Caltex card had been used to fill up with gas; the licence plates on the Ford Telstar had been switched; and Te Aute had bought and smoked methamphetamine, or P.

  Stoned at midnight at the Caltex with a little boy in the back seat — it was a cameo of urban Maori youth, a portrait of Auckland life. The only thing to do in the circumstances was get wasted.

  Dixon just happened to come along. He hated Maori, Asians, Pacific Islanders. He was white trash, a car thief by trade; the car he parked was stolen that evening from Hamilton. He sat in darkness, grinding his teeth in the methamphetamine reflex. Te Aute was about to die. Dixon had decided it on a whim. The two P freaks — both married men, both fathers — were ships in the night.

  Dixon’s defence lawyer, Barry Hart, to Lemalu: ‘It’s fair to say that James was addicted to P and loved it, isn’t it?’

  Lemalu: ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’d go looking to score, and pick you up, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much was he going through? What sort of quantities?’

  ‘Small amounts.’

  ‘Enough to get fried on. Correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Te Aute went to a house that night to buy P. Lemalu waited in the car.

  Hart: ‘When he got back in the car, you could tell he was flying, is that correct?’

  Lemalu: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wide awake and pumped up. Is that fair to say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it fair to say you were hanging out to have some P?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lemalu told the court that a car had pulled up beside them in the carpark behind the Caltex. The driver gave them the finger.

  ‘We thought we might have known him. We wanted to know what his problem was, so we got out of the car. Before we even approached him, I noticed him raise his arm, and just the way he raised his arm made me react, so I hit the ground.’

  He heard shots. The car drove off. Lemalu saw his brother-in-law lying on the ground. ‘I went to see if he was all right. I lifted him up, and noticed he had all these holes in him.’

  He dialled 111. The tape was played in court. It went on and on, loud and panicked and screaming: ‘My mate’s been shot! He’s been shot, man! Come on!’

  Operator: ‘How many times has he been shot?’

  Lemalu: ‘One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .’

  ‘Four times in total?’

  ‘Nah. More than that.’

  He sat in the witness box with his head in his hands, gulping, as the call went on and on; Te Aute’s wife fled the courtroom in tears; and Dixon’s incredible haircut descended, and sunk from view.

  2

  Dixon’s sword was inside a glass case on the floor at the front of Courtroom 6. I wanted a closer look. At a lunch break one day, the court crier obliged by balancing the exhibit on top of the witness stand. The weapon was very slender, with a straight blade snapped in two at the tip. Its black handle was long enough to be gripped by both hands. The blade was smeared with swirls and drips of dry brownish flakes.

  I said: ‘Is that rust?’

  ‘No,’ said the crier, a young fellow with delicate sideburns, ‘that would be blood.’

  And then he brought out a gun. This other exhibit was the murder weapon. In court, senior constable and dog-handler David Templeton had remarked, ‘It’s a strange-looking gun.’ Short-barrelled, with a 10-round magazine and a Beamshot scope and laser, assembled with parts from about four different guns, it looked as light as a handbag. Dixon’s sleek little accessory weighed in at just 2.04 kilograms.

  After he shot Te Aute, Dixon led police cars on a chase through Manukau. It was cat and mouse; the distinct possibility is that he was really enjoying himself. He would accelerate, then put on the brakes at speed. He would drive on the wrong side of the road. He would turn off his lights and hide in darkness, then suddenly come up behind the cops, then beside them, and then open fire. One round hit the side of a police car. Another just missed an officer who couldn’t move — he was wearing body armour so heavy and bulky that it trapped him in the passenger seat.

  The chase ended when Dixon pulled into a cul de sac in East Tamaki, and broke into a house. He held the homeowner hostage. The siege lasted overnight. Dixon came outside and surrendered just after dawn.

  Detective Constable Craig White was called as a witness. He said he sat next to Dixon in a police car after reading him his rights.

  Crown co-prosecutor Richard Marchant asked, ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘A variety of things,’ replied White. He consulted his notes, and read out this variety.

  What the fuck are you cunts looking at? I’ll cut you up as well.

  What’s it like being in a car with a murderer?

  If I had a better fucking gun, you cunts would be dead.

  I cut those sluts up real good.

  Detective Constable Michael Hayward was also called to the witness stand. He had spoken with Dixon for about an hour on the day of his arrest. Again, Dixon addressed a variety of subjects.

  Do you want me to bite your fucking nose off?

  Fucking sword broke. I want a refund.

  You fucking cocksuckers. You and your fucking meth programmes.

  I’m going to the big house. I’ll fuck those cunts up as well.

  Another voice was heard in Courtroom 6 while Hayward read from the thoughts of Dixon. It was Dixon himself. He set up a low muttering from the dock. It was strange to hear him actually speak; here was the man whose script was being read out by police officers to the court, but now Dixon himself was talking. In a high, quiet voice, he said: ‘Conspiracy. It’s a fucking conspiracy.’

  And then he was quiet again.

  Detective Sergeant Peter Jones was the seventieth and final witness in the prosecution’s case. Jones said he had sat with Dixon and Hayward at the police station. ‘I asked the accused, “Where is the sword now?” He said he didn’t know, but then he asked if it was still in her head.’

  3

  One day a row of tanned young people with strange accents waited outside Courtroom 6. They turned out to be advanced students of English from a language school. Andre, their tutor, said he immigrated to New Zealand from Cape Town. ‘A courtroom is a good place to hear English being spoken,’ he said.

  He had chosen a good day to expose these new New Zealanders to the formal and informal use of English. Simonne Butler was called to g
ive evidence. She spoke very fast. She was exact, fluent. She used interesting words, such as ‘infiltrate’, ‘appease’, ‘calibre’, and ‘flailing’; and slang, too, like ‘sleazed’ and ‘chopped up’.

  She was an attractive woman, almost vivacious, despite the setting and the circumstances. She sat in court with the cuffs of her jacket rolled up. They exposed her scarred and mutilated hands. She was the star witness — for the defence. It seemed bizarre that Dixon’s victim had been called by defence lawyer Barry Hart, and not Crown prosecutor Simon Moore. Well, she was hardly going to say it was all a misunderstanding. Hart’s intent was that she would strengthen his argument that Dixon was insane.

  She said she met Dixon in late 1997. She was a telesales rep. He told her he was a mechanic. Hart asked her, ‘Was there anything about him that was a little bit different?’

  She said, ‘Yeah, there was. He would just talk and talk and talk, and you couldn’t shut him up. He’d go on about all manner of things. Probably the most hyperactive person I’ve ever met. Yeah. What was the question?’

  ‘Did you notice anything a little different about him?’

  ‘Very full-on. Very excitable, and a show-off.’

  ‘And then the two of you became emotionally connected?’

  ‘Yeah. He was just charming, and funny, and kind, and . . . yeah. I sort of fell in love.’

  One day in early 1998, she noticed there was an extra razor and toothbrush in her bathroom. He’d moved in. He remained charming, and funny, and kind, but also insane.

  ‘He had quite large mood swings, from being so happy and ridiculous to being agitated, and pacing, and wailing. He constantly thought he was being followed by police. He’d go on and on about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and how he was one of the 144,000 Chosen Ones. Oh, first of all he told me he was the Devil, but that was back when I thought he was an idiot.’