The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  But his wife owned four houses in Auckland, including Stilwell Road. They were in her name. Police believed that she had all the money, that Wang was penniless.

  As the only one of the three men left alive after the killings at Stilwell Road, he told the same story he gave to police. Michael and Tom appeared at the top of the stairs. Michael attacked him with a knife. ‘I push the knife away. Because I learn kung fu a long time ago. No one know.’ He ran and grabbed his WILD WOLF. ‘I scared. In shock. I in my pyjama.’ There was a struggle. Michael was impaled on the knife. ‘He get two cuts. He [the pathologist] say 23 cuts. But the others just scratch. Real cuts, just two.’

  The maths is false. The postmortem carried out on Michael identified a stab wound above the hip which entered the peritoneal cavity, a stab wound to the back which cut the kidney, a stab wound through the rib cage, and a stab wound cutting the liver. Four ‘real cuts’.

  Wang said he didn’t see Tom being stabbed, just heard him yell ‘Fuck!’, and run away. ‘I thought he was going to get a knife or a gun. I was worried about that.’

  Earlier, when he talked about the two men coming to Stilwell Road and taking his furniture, he said, ‘Never they take shoes off inside the house. Final time they come into my house, it’s with the shoes.’

  Why go on about the shoes? Was it really that important?

  He said, ‘Of course! It my house. People come into my house never with the shoes. No one with the shoes come in. No, no, no. I got a new carpet. Nice house.’

  10

  To gaze upon 23 Stilwell Road is to see it as a big old luxury-liner, splendid and gleaming, a fantasy of wealth and success. Possible, too, to think of it sailing through a history of Auckland, taking onboard an essence of the city over successive generations. Built by a woman who invented herself as a royal in a young colony making itself up as it went along. Taken over by a bitter capitalist who helped build a nation. Passed into the hands of a gadfly who thrived on the city’s long-established sex district. Then, in about 2007, owned by new New Zealanders, an Asian couple (Michael Bassett chuckled when he recalled a neighbour who called Wang ‘chop suey’), who kept to themselves.

  The house Mr and Mrs Wang bought for $2.3 million was sold by property developer Greer Stevenson. He’d carried out extensive renovations, and employed a neighbour, university student Chris Williams, to do odd jobs around the house. ‘Greer paid me really well and, like, bought me heaps of beer, which was awesome,’ Williams said.

  He remembered an unusual indoor spa. ‘It had like a pole, and a mirrored ceiling . . . Greer took all that out.’

  Williams worked over summer. ‘They’d put down a ready-lawn that grows through cardboard, and it has to be kept wet, so I stood out there for like three or four hours a day just watering . . . I also chopped heaps of trees down, and I painted the green fence all the way down the driveway. It’s quite a big fence.’ It was what Tom Zhong had rested against as he died.

  After the murders, Wang left the house. The next occupants were a Tongan family. This time, the South Pacific had come onboard Stilwell Road.

  Williams said, ‘The Rugby World Cup was on. They had this massive bamboo pole, and stuck it right at the top of the house with this huge Tongan flag. There were all these kids running around. There was rubbish outside everywhere, and skateboards and old BMX bikes kind of just like chucked in the garden and left there . . .’

  Michael Bassett said, ‘When the mortgagee sale came up, well, you can imagine a potential buyer of a grand place like this turning up and finding a whole load of bloody Tongans wrapped up in blankets lying around the floor — not exactly being a come-on.

  ‘And they hadn’t cleaned the property up properly. The carpet by the front door had great big blood stains over it, and the wallpaper up the sides had splats of blood everywhere. Can you imagine it? It’s bizarre.’

  Real estate agent Anne Duncan went through the house. ‘I was very disappointed at the presentation,’ she said. ‘It was still like it was at the bloody murder scene. On the front door there was still the fingerprinting dust, there was blood on the front doorstep.’

  Police from Operation Otter visited the property and spoke to the tenants. They said their landlord was Chris Wang.

  11

  The jury took their seats in Courtroom 14 to announce their verdict on a cold Friday afternoon. The sky was already dark. They had been sent out the previous day at 10.40am. It had been a long wait — not just for this trial to end, but all three trials, the years of justice delayed.

  Like all left-handed people, the side of Kevin Glubb’s palm was smudged with ink. He sat at a bare desk. Court staff and counsel had tidied up. The knives had been taken away.

  12

  The police hoped for a guilty verdict. I always enjoyed chatting with Detective Sergeant Joe Aumua, one of the first officers at the crime scene, who came to court every day. He was very dignified, quietly spoken. ‘He’s a dangerous man,’ he said of Wang.

  He saw the bodies that day. ‘We believe that Chris just flew off the handle, that he snapped, and armed himself with a knife and, before there was any discussion, he attacked . . . It’s the most vicious attack I’ve ever seen.’

  He credited Wang with having the presence of mind to immediately concoct a story to explain why two people had died of multiple stab wounds.

  Wang was smart, but was he that smart? To be able to stage two knives and choreograph a fight to the death suggests a kind of criminal mastermind. Was he really able to think on his feet that quickly?

  13

  The families of the victims hoped for a guilty verdict. Aumua said, ‘They’ve invested all their trust and faith these past three years, not only in the police, but in our justice system.’

  But were they mourning two unarmed men, or two men who had made the fatal mistake of choosing to fuck with the wrong guy?

  On the day of the verdict, Michael Wu’s young widow, Maggie, played outside with their son. She held him in her arms as he reached out and touched a parking meter. He was round and small, fatherless.

  14

  Ruth Money of the Sensible Sentencing Trust hoped for a guilty verdict. We met at her small office upstairs in the Golf Warehouse. The stacked clubs and golf bags made it difficult to take her seriously, and so did her own flair for loose statements. She said, ‘We know Chris Wang walked around with a knife down the back of his pants.’

  I said, ‘How do you know that?’

  She said, ‘We were told. There was also talk he killed and skinned a sheep with a hunting knife . . . He’s a bad, bad man.’

  Ruth had dealt with a Chinese couple who had bought Michelle Wang’s two houses in St Lukes. They told the tenants to move out. ‘But then a big Samoan boy came out of the sleep-out and said, “Fuck off, these are my boss’s houses.”’ He said his boss was Chris Wang.

  Money visited, and said, ‘He had rented out every room in the house. There was a person sleeping on the floor in a bathroom where there was a toilet. The houses were just disgusting, absolutely filthy. You wouldn’t put animals in there.’

  She said, ‘Be careful. Watch yourself. He’ll have his little spies in court.’

  15

  Private investigator Phil Jones hoped for a guilty verdict. We met in a noisy bar on Auckland’s waterfront. He was easy to spot — a tall ex-cop with a severe haircut and a military bearing. Tom and Michael had hired his services during the time they were trying to serve trespass orders on Wang. He spoke with them on the morning they were killed. He said, ‘If they went into the house, that’s dumb. It wouldn’t have taken long for Chris to get inflamed and grab the knife and get into them.’

  He gave evidence in court about his stand-off with Wang a month before the killings. He went with Michael and Tom to the house on Stilwell Road. ‘It became very confrontational very quickly,’ he said. ‘Tom and Michael were baiting him. Chris had an evil, mad look in his eye and a horrible smile on his face. Michael was just laughing at him and th
ought it was all a bit of fun.’

  But then someone shouted that Wang had a knife, and Jones saw Wang reach behind his back. He yelled at Tom and Michael to run to their car.

  He said, ‘I keep myself reasonably fit, but there’s no way I would have fancied my chances with Chris. The difference is the fact if he’s got that mad adrenalin rush, you’re going to come off worse. His eyes were scary. I’ve dealt with scary people before; I’ve dealt with terrorists in the IRA. It’s where the eyes are going, if they’ve got relaxed eyes or if they’re very focused. His eyes were very focused. That’s when it’s scary.’

  Prosecution tried to play it out as a crucial episode, casting Wang as some kind of knife-wielding psycho. But it fell flat. No one actually saw the knife. Was it another instance of a knife that wasn’t there? You could form a sympathetic picture of Wang. There he was, at the house he used to live in with his wife, suddenly approached by three men — one of whom he claimed was sleeping with his wife — who told him that he had to leave the premises. They laughed at him, goaded him. He told them to clear off. He phoned Jones the next day to apologise for losing his temper . . . He sounds put upon, blameless.

  On 13 January, the day before the deaths, Michael rang Jones and said he was going to go back to Stilwell Road with Tom. Michelle Wang needed to get her rents. The banks were talking about mortgagee sales. Sutcliffe told the jury: ‘The pressure was building for action to be taken, the heat was on to do something . . . They had to resort to violence.’

  Jones tried to talk Michael out of returning to Stilwell Road. He said, ‘I’m almost a witness that helped Chris a bit. I’ve said I warned Michael not to go in, and he does.’

  He advised Michael to go to the Avondale police station and ask if they could go to the address with an officer. They spoke again on the phone on the morning of 14 January. ‘I told Michael, “Even if you go by yourselves, you get any sniff that Chris is there, even if he’s fine, ring 111 and tell them he’s aggro and violent and jumping up and down.” He obviously didn’t do that.’

  Tom’s daughter Jade dropped him off that morning at 8.30am; it was the last time she saw him. Michael was looking forward to a family holiday in the South Island. The two men went to the Avondale police station, but were told that an officer was unavailable. Michael and Tom were described as cheerful, relaxed. Glubb told the jury, ‘You do not go to all that trouble if your sole purpose is calculated violence. It makes absolutely no sense. Their only intent was to reinforce the trespass order.’

  Jones said, ‘Michael talked about protecting himself, taking a weapon. I said, “Listen, you can’t.”’

  Does he think the two men threatened Wang? ‘They could have. Yeah. Possibly.’

  Threatened to kill him? ‘Absolutely not. No way. There was no inkling of that whatsoever. In my view,’ he said, ‘he murdered a couple of innocent people.’

  16

  Chris Wang hoped for freedom to go about his business — collecting rent in cash, fishing for eels, buying ‘quality’ possessions. No one came to support him in court, despite Ruth Money’s predictions he’d have his ‘spies’. We nodded at each other when he came in to hear the verdict.

  Who was Wang? He had passed through danger, scatheless, on that summer’s morning in Mt Albert; sometimes, during the long days of his trial, I wondered whether there really was something supernatural about Wang, the way he had escaped death; but the Chinese demigod of Stilwell Road, nimble and ‘untouchable’, tensed when the jury arrived.

  17

  The forewoman wore a bright-red polka-dot top with a large white ribbon around her skirt. She said of the charge of the murder of Michael Wu: ‘Not guilty.’

  Wang closed his eyes and swayed.

  Not guilty, also, of manslaughter.

  She said of the charge of the murder of Tom Zhong: ‘Not guilty.’ But they found him guilty of his manslaughter.

  The families of the victims had gone pale with shock. They had to be helped out of the courtroom.

  Justice Venning thanked the jury, and told them they could leave. He waited until the door to the jury room closed behind them, and then he said, ‘Well.’ His smile was bemused.

  Kevin Glubb said, ‘Remarkable.’

  Tom Sutcliffe left to talk with his client.

  It was as though the verdicts were a wager each way. You can get rid of the monk, but you still will not get rid of the temple. The jury had accepted self-defence in the killing of Michael Wu, that there was a second knife, that Wang was just trying to save his life. But the implication was that they rejected Wang’s claim that Michael had accidentally stabbed Tom in the back. Their verdict identified Wang as the killer — but that he had lacked murderous intent when he had plunged the knife 13 centimetres into Tom’s back. How you lack murderous intent when you do that is very curious indeed.

  What really happened that morning on the house on the hill? The final answer — the legally binding one — was given by Justice Venning at sentencing in a cramped downstairs courtroom. It was the final reunion of the prosecution and defence teams, of the nice old gent from Victim Support, of the petite translator who sat at Wang’s side, of that small, blessed survivor, Chis Wang. He appeared in the familiar collarless tunic, the old tan shoes. Jurors from all three trials came, too.

  The judge got down to business. He said Michael Wu came to Stilwell Road with a knife. There it was, stated out loud, as fact — the second knife did exist, was taken upstairs in a home invasion. He said he did not accept that Tom Zhong had his back to him and was trying to run away when Wang killed him with the hunting knife. The fatal wound, he said, was most likely inflicted in the confusion of the violent struggle between the three men. ‘I accept you acted in self-defence,’ he told Wang, ‘but that you went too far.’

  It felt like a minor chastisement. He then set about the terms of sentencing. He said that he’d observed Wang throughout the trial, and didn’t see any evidence of remorse. He noted that Wang had offered to pay $30,000 to the families of the victims, but the offer was rejected. He sentenced him to four years. He should be out around about the time this book is published in late 2015.

  18

  Partly because there was blood everywhere, the house got snapped up at a mortgagee sale in November 2011 for $1,641,000 — an absolute bargain, $700,000 less than it fetched when the Wangs had bought it.

  There is the balcony from where Barrie Cardon plunged to his death; there are the grand front steps where Michael Wu and Tom Zhong walked towards their horrible, bloody end. But the great ship of 23 Stilwell Road has sailed into calm waters, taking onboard a good Catholic family, pillars of Auckland’s establishment. It was bought by Kevin Ryan. His father was the celebrated criminal defence lawyer, Kevin Ryan QC; his sister is Judge Claire Ryan. He and his wife, Bernadette, have five children.

  ‘Kevin’s done a lot of work on the house,’ observed former neighbour Michael Bassett. ‘He’s very proud of the renovations.’

  Chapter 15

  Mark Lundy: The trial

  There it was again, the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our destructive urges.

  — Helen Garner, This House of Grief

  1

  Too bad they challenged the guy who looked as though he was about to have a nervous breakdown unless someone gave him his medication, quick. Too bad they challenged the nice old duck who was plainly as deaf as A POST. Too bad they woke up the sleepy individual who came to court wearing his pyjamas, and challenged him. There were even stranger candidates among the 60 potential jurors who showed up at the Wellington High Court on a Monday morning in the summer of 2015, the day after the Waitangi holiday weekend, to see if they would be selected for duty in the trial of Mark Edward Lundy. Their names were pulled out of a green metal box. The nice old deaf duck had her name roared out twice before she got up, but she had barely risen to her feet before she was challenged, and excused. She might have made
a difference. Pyjama guy and the dude needing his meds might have made a difference to the verdict reached more than six weeks later by the chosen 12.

  I stood among the mob of 60 in a queue outside the courthouse that Monday morning. I thought they were freaks wanting to watch the trial from the public gallery, and that I’d better wait with them for the doors to open. Mike White from North & South magazine was inside the court and spotted me through the glass. He raced out and grabbed my arm. ‘They’re jurors,’ he whispered. ‘You can’t be seen anywhere near them.’ He dragged me inside. I walked into Courtroom 1 — Ewen McDonald wuz here, 2012 — for the first time. I liked it at once. It was a portrait gallery, the walls decorated with dark oil paintings of judges of old, who variously expressed states of calm, wisdom, despair, constipation, lasciviousness, prudence, vigour, severity, brutality, kindness and madness. The courtroom was windowless and white-ceilinged. It would be not so much my office for the next two months as my home. It was where I felt happy, where the sum of every moment was precious, where I ate, rested, slept. I liked being there and missed it when I was away at weekends, back in Auckland, with my family in my real home. The courthouse was opposite Parliament, with its smooth green lawn and its pohutukawa in crimson health. I had my routines on the way there (breakfast every morning of honeypuffs and toast with spreads served by Nigel at John’s Kitchen, on Lambton Quay) and in the evenings (Chinese at either the Redhill, Shanghai or Regal in the old opium end of town). Court hours, with their set tea breaks and lunch at 1pm, established another pattern.