The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  The house loomed white and wonderful, gleaming in the sun. Inside, Michael Wu’s body lay face-down at the foot of the stairs. His white iPhone was nearby. He’d made his last call as he staggered down the stairs, dying. The number he called belonged to Zhong. It went unanswered. Zhong had already staggered down the stairs; his phone probably rang when he was outside, dying. Was it a call for help?

  The hipster’s groovy ESR film delved into the basement, went up the stairs, looked over the balcony. And throughout, one thing jarred, kept intruding on the guided tour of a beautiful old house with lovely wood panelling and delicate leadlight: a sense of cheapness. It was there in the plastic clotheshorses in the front room and the upstairs lounge. It was there in the full-length mirror merely propped up against a wall in the hallway. It was also there in the absences. There wasn’t anything on the walls. There was a glass cabinet, and the only thing in it was a chamber pot. There was a bedroom with a cot, empty bags of potato chips, a flat-screen TV on top of a sideboard. There were cardboard boxes in the hallway. There were wet towels flopped over the bath. It was as though the occupants were passing through; it looked like a hotel which had seen better days.

  Auckland businessman Dermot Nottingham discussed property investments with Wang, and visited him at Stilwell Road numerous times. He said Wang claimed to own several properties, and a $2-million duck farm.

  He said, ‘There was always an undercurrent with Chris that he needed money. He was driving around in a small car, which was quite strange, because most affluent Chinese show off their wealth. The grass wasn’t kept; it had different layers of grass in the various gardens. It gave me the feeling there was something wrong financially.

  ‘I’d go around and it wasn’t unusual for Chris to be out in his kitchen, because when you live like a pauper, you live in the kitchen. There were hardly any furnishings in the house. The kitchen didn’t have a table and chairs in it. It was a large kitchen, and it was a kitchen you’d normally dine in. He did have large knives in the kitchen, very large knives, like cleavers. I put that down to him owning duck farms and maybe taking a couple of ducks home and killing them . . .’

  It took a full day in court to screen the ESR silent movie. The auteur’s cameras moved around Wang’s bedroom, showed a telescope on the balcony, $5.50 in change and a knife sheath on a round table. In the next-door lounge, there were two knives in a pool of blood on the carpet, one pointing left, one pointing right.

  The knives were the trial’s two most significant objects. They contained the meaning to what happened, were at the centre of everything. They were displayed in court on a low table beneath the witness stand. They had remained so sharp that Justice Venning fussed for two days about whether to allow the jury to handle them. The risk of a bad cut was high. ‘Not on my watch,’ he fretted, before settling on the use of a protective tape.

  Crown prosecutor Kevin Glubb picked one up with his long fingers and waved it in the air. It caught the light, and there was a flash of silver in the courtroom. It was the hunting knife that belonged to Wang. ‘It’s a very beautiful knife,’ Wang had said in his police interview.

  It was a heavy weapon, with a ridged blade, and an image of a baying wolf on it — it was referred to in court exhibits as WILD WOLF KNIFE. A fingerprint expert, a heavy black man from Durban, said the last person to hold the knife was Chris Wang. Wang kept it in a bedroom drawer. It was plunged with such force into Zhong’s back that it broke through two ribs and pierced his right lung. It killed him; he coughed blood on the stairwell walls, and died curled up against a fence, frothing at the mouth.

  But all eyes at the trial were fixed on the other knife — a Galaxy knife with a stainless-steel blade. In essence, the trial was about the mystery of the second knife. A tenant at Stilwell Road had bought it for $3 at the Made In Japan bargain shop on Queen Street. (The knife was actually made in China.) It was kept in the kitchen at Stilwell Road. The night before the killings, it was used in the kitchen to slice a pizza.

  ‘How did it get upstairs?’ Glubb asked, turning to the jury. His answer was vague. Somehow, he said, it was placed next to the hunting knife. Its presence was staged.

  ‘How did it get upstairs?’ Wang’s lawyer, Tom Sutcliffe, asked the jury. ‘Who put it there, and why?’ Sutcliffe, an earnest, thoughtful Mormon from Hamilton, supplied an exact answer. ‘Michael brought it. He upped the ante. They had visited before. They knew where the kitchen was. This was a premeditated plan to locate and confront him.’

  With the knife came Wang’s plea of self-defence. He told police that the two men came at him with the knife, and he did everything he could to protect himself. His actions included scampering into his bedroom and unsheathing his own knife, the WILD WOLF. The three men rolled on the floor. Wang told police that Michael Wu got hold of the hunting knife, but he managed to turn it around, and point it at his attacker. Tom Zhong, he said, pressed Wu onto the knife — in effect impaling his own friend, and causing the fatal wounds. Then, Wang said, he grabbed Zhong and used him as a human shield; as far as he could tell, in the confusion and tumult, Wu stabbed his own friend in the back.

  ‘Ridiculous . . . Bizarre . . . Outlandish,’ Glubb told the jury. ‘If we’re to believe this, it’s not just one of the most ineffectual attacks ever mounted, it was suicidal.’ He said that Wang simply went at Wu, and then stabbed Zhong in the back, while he was trying to run away.

  Sutcliffe told the jury: ‘Chris Wang believed he was going to die. He used every ounce of his physical strength and mental will to survive.’

  The fatal struggle had lasted three or four minutes. Wang walked down the stairs and called 111. The despatcher wanted to know where he lived. The call was played in court.

  Wang screeched, ‘People want come and kill me!’

  She said, ‘Can you stop talking when I’m talking? I need your address, mate.’

  He shouted, ‘Ambah-lance! Hurry up!’

  ‘Tell me,’ sighed the despatcher, ‘your address.’

  4

  Barrie Cardon lived at 23 Stilwell Road until his mysterious death in 2005, when he fell off the upstairs balcony. He was a happy, lively property developer who owned a row of buildings at the sex-trade end of Karangahape Road. His tenants ran massage parlours and strip clubs. Cardon collected their rents in cash.

  ‘I was married at Stilwell Road,’ said his daughter Deena. ‘I got into my bridal dress, came down the front steps and hopped in the Mustang — we had Mustangs for the wedding cars. Dad collected Mustangs. He loved classic cars in general, but he had five Mustangs.’

  She said the house was run-down when her father bought it from Sir David Henry’s widow. ‘I remember a huge renovation going on. He gutted it completely and put in the flash kitchen and the wonderful stairs out the front. Dad just absolutely loved his garden, and he was quite obsessive about his roses. There was a massive garden — most of the property was manicured garden beds, just little circular garden beds.

  ‘And there were servants’ quarters! Dad made it into the spa room. It had a tongue-and-groove ceiling like an upturned boat’s hull. It had the Axminster carpet as well, and mirrors . . . It was just beautiful, the spa room.

  ‘He absolutely loved the house. There was no expense spared when he did things to it. He was excited when, for example, the carpet he selected was the same as in Westminster Abbey. It’s got a really intricate design woven into it.’

  Her memories of the house were of its charm and elegance, and the enjoyment it gave her father. But it ended in tragedy.

  In about 2002, her father began to develop Alzheimer’s. ‘He went downhill very quickly, and we realised he was going to need live-in care.’ He’d already hired a Tongan woman to live at the address as his housekeeper. ‘Funnily enough, she used to be his tenant many years ago. They bumped into each other at the shops one day. He wasn’t sick at the time, but he realised that he was getting older and was looking at getting someone to look after the house. It was becoming too much f
or him.’

  The woman had worked at the mental-health unit at Carrington. With the onset of his Alzheimer’s, it was decided that she would become his caregiver.

  Deena: ‘And then Dad fell off the balcony onto the concrete pavement down below. I use the word “fell” loosely. Nothing was ever proven. Nobody knows for a fact what happened that night because he was found in the early hours of the morning.’

  His caregiver discovered him. ‘She was sleeping in the bed with him at the time. Apparently, she heard his cries for help.’

  He died in hospital about eight weeks later. The day of the funeral, she said, legal papers were filed which excluded his family from the house. The caregiver claimed matrimonial property rights, and asserted that she had been in a relationship with Cardon.

  ‘My sister and I were excluded from the home for 18 months. We weren’t even allowed to take a photo or a T-shirt or anything that belonged to Dad. By the time we finally got in, most of his stuff was gone. We did get photos and stuff, but as far as his furniture, his clothing, all his personal belongings were pretty much gone.’

  Her father, she said, was an extraordinary man. ‘Definitely eccentric. He walked around in a singlet and shorts and bare feet 24 hours a day, summer or winter. You’d see a guy you’d think was homeless step out of a Mustang — that was Dad to a T. Extremely generous, caring, would often take people into the home that might be going through a rough patch and help them get on their feet.’

  The last time she saw 23 Stilwell was on the TV news on the night of the murders. ‘The way it was portrayed was like “A house marred with tragedy.” It instantly took us back to what happened with Dad. He would’ve been horrified to know what had happened in his beautiful house.’

  5

  In his police interview on the afternoon of the killings, Wang drew stick figures to illustrate what happened at the house that morning. He gave them names. His spoken English came and went; his written English was hit and miss. Next to his drawing of Michael Wu, he wrote, Maccl. He identified another figure: Gall. He meant ‘girl’ — Soo Jin Ahn, a young Korean woman who had met Wang that week, and was a witness to the killings.

  A tall, slender woman with black nail polish, she appeared in court as a prosecution witness. She described a kind of summer romance. It lasted less than a week. Wang took her to a restaurant on a Tuesday night, and she stayed the night at Stilwell Road. He made porridge in the morning and brought it to her in bed. They met again on Thursday night. They ate pizza in his downstairs kitchen. She sliced it with the Galaxy knife.

  Wang went night-fishing in Waiwera with friends. She went to bed. He came back at about 4.30am. She woke at 7am, had a shower, and read the paper in the lounge. Wang woke up, and she opened the balcony doors. ‘It’s my habit,’ she told the court. ‘When I get up I want to bring fresh air in.’

  The gorgeous summer morning, the curtains of the balcony moving in a light breeze. Ahn was barefoot, and wore a pink tracksuit. She sat on a couch and opened her laptop.

  Glubb asked her, ‘While you were sitting there, what happened?’

  She said, ‘I felt some indication of human being so I lift my head.’

  Michael Wu and Tom Zhong were at the top of the stairs.

  They asked for Wang. She went into the bedroom, and said to him, ‘You have visitors.’

  6

  Michael Wu was a friendly, laid-back kind of guy. He’d married a pretty young nurse, who gave birth to their son in 2010. He spoke good English, unlike Tom Zhong. Tom had worked for 30 years in China as a pharmacist, restaurant manager and prison guard, and had qualified for a pension. He took his family to live in Auckland. Like Michael, he became friends with Chris Wang.

  Michael and Tom went into business with Wang and got burnt. Both said they’d lent Wang money — $125,000 from Michael, $30,000 from Tom — and he hadn’t paid it back.

  Their frustrations led them to Wang’s ex-wife, Michelle. All three had grievances. The question on their lips was: what do you do with a problem called Chris? She told them that Wang had taken over her four properties in Auckland — 75 College Road in Northcote, 55 and 57 Morningside Drive in St Lukes, and the Stilwell Road mansion — and ordered the tenants to pay rent to him, in cash. Her mortgage payments fell behind. She was under increasing pressure from the banks. In an effort to hold off on mortgagee sales, she engaged Michael to act as her representative. He travelled to see her at her home town in China to discuss a plan of action.

  Michael and Tom met with a lawyer, David Snedden, who prepared trespass notices against Wang, and documents authorising them to divert rents back to Michelle’s account. The two men went to Stilwell Road that Friday morning to advise the other tenants that their rent had to be paid to Michelle.

  They took documents. Police photos show the papers where the men left them: in the back seat of their car. Why didn’t they take them to the house? Why did they simply walk in the door and traipse up the stairs? ‘Whether they knocked,’ Glubb told the jury, ‘we will never know.’

  What had they discussed when they met at Tom’s house the previous night? Or did they decide on a course of action that morning in the car? Sutcliffe reminded the jury that the documents were left in the car, and said, ‘They weren’t going there to serve papers. There was something else going on here.’

  It was a compelling argument. The prosecution felt that the hung jury in the second trial prevented a conviction. But were the two obstinate jurors the only ones, in fact, who voted for a murder verdict? Had they prevented Wang from hearing the sweet words ‘Not guilty’?

  7

  Wang’s lover, Soo Jin, was the prosecution’s star witness. According to her evidence, the fight broke out seconds after she stepped back out onto the balcony. Glubb took this as evidence that Wang simply exploded, saw red, snapped, grabbed his WILD WOLF knife and went berserk.

  But her evidence also played in Wang’s favour. She said that when Wang saw the two men, one of them silently gestured to him by raising his arm and beckoning him to come closer with his index finger. She told the court, ‘I thought the visitors were upset or angry. The reason was because Asian people do not call people like that.’

  No one calls people like that unless they want a fight. ‘Upset, angry’; were they armed?

  8

  Detective Sergeant Joe Aumua said, ‘During our inquiries, we kept hearing from the Chinese community that they thought this guy Chris Wang was untouchable. And to some extent, he was.’

  It may be regarded as incredible that Wang had only ever been held in custody for six weeks after his arrest on two charges of murder. His former lawyer, David Jones, successfully applied for Wang to be released on bail. The police appealed, wanted him kept banged up until he came to trial, but got nowhere.

  When the first trial was abandoned, the man accused of butchering two people with a hunting knife left the court with my business card, and went home. I called around the next day.

  9

  Chris Wang said grandly, ‘I live good quality.’ We met at his own house on Salisbury Road in St Lukes. ‘Here, you can see.’ He waved his hand in a broad gesture, taking in the oak table, the faux Victorian chairs, the pompous grandfather clock. They looked very expensive. ‘Of course! I never live poor quality. I always live very nice quality.’

  He was vain, trim, small, muscled, fit, shrill, and very courteous. A handsome man, with a kind of regal bearing. His hair was cut short. He had a nice smile. He talked a lot. He was likeable, a good host, quite charming. He stayed on the move; there wasn’t anything languid about him. It was hard not to stare at his hands.

  We drank green tea, and sat at his kitchen table. An old lady who didn’t speak a word of English watered a pot plant. The clock bonged. It was a dark house, dimly lit — bizarrely, Wang was arrested four months after the killings, accused of stealing $164.96 of light switches from Bunnings in Mt Roskill. No doubt they were quality switches.

  Wang talked about arriving in New Zealand
from Shanghai with only $50 in his pocket. ‘I do everything. Mow lawn, cut the tree, do the painting, the plumbing, the carpentry. Then I bought a house for $10,000 in Beach Haven and sell it for $150,000. I think I’m very clever! I think, “Oh, I’m rich!” New Zealand give me everything.’

  He loved it here, he said. Fishing, and hunting, and bush walks. ‘But very bad memories here. I will probably move back to China.’

  First, though, there was the matter of his criminal trial for double-murder. Was he worried that he’d be found guilty? He said, ‘Worried? Why you think I worried? I tell the truth. The evidence tells the truth.’

  The story he told about the killings on Stilwell Road began with his claim that Michael Wu and Tom Zhong had threatened him for months, demanding repayments, and blithely walking in and taking his furniture.

  ‘I say to Michael, “I can get your money back, but give me a bit of time.” I scared. I want to keep him away. He play rugby. He very strong. He say, “Chris, you start from nothing to now you have plenty. I can make you nothing again.”

  ‘They just come into my home, my gate all broken, it happen all the time. Yes, they take furniture! Of course! All the time! Michael take one container — all the nice furniture. Beautiful, much better than that!’ He waved a hand again at the somber grandfather clock. ‘I always get nice furniture. The best. I pay millions of dollar. Michael take and say, “Oh, got anything else?” And reach out and grab things. Just like that!’

  He told another story. He said he came home one day and found Tom having sex with his wife in the movie room. ‘I was quite angry with that. At that time Tom was quite good friends with me. I tell Tom, “We never ever be friends. You just out.” I angry with my wife. I say, “You are so bad! Why you do that?” She think she divorce me, she get the lot. She have no money! Poor! She from very poor family. I pay everything. We meet in China. At that time she so nice to me. So nice! Even I put my shoes on, I never need to — she will kneel down and do it. Just like that . . .’