The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  And then there were the familiar faces of my brethren in the media, most of whom thought Lundy was as guilty as sin, and the officers of the court, and Lundy himself — sometimes I thought of him as the volunteer in some kind of experiment, as though he had been chosen at random to test the memory and knowledge of intimates, acquaintances, strangers and experts. The trial was a character study. It was an examination of how well we can know someone and the traces they leave behind. The trial was also a test of the efficiency and efficacy of itself; the workings of a trial sometimes assume a greater importance than the point of it. The guilty and the innocent share the same reply when they’re accused of something: ‘Prove it!’ The burden of proof provides the context of a trial. It can be a very heavy burden, and it can lead to a robust and lengthy discussion about issues which have no basis in reality. That way lies madness — and, inevitably, the founding document of the nightmare that swirls behind all false accusations.

  One day when I was at Kumeu, Geoff Levick said to me, ‘Have you ever read a book called The Trial?’ I had, but it was a long time ago; and so I bought a copy of Kafka’s great novel at Unity Books on the way to court one morning, and sometimes even read it in the courtroom. I imagined Levick opening up the book, and relishing its famous opening line: ‘Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.’ Crazy, of course, to treat the book only as a parallel to Lundy’s case. It’s a work of art, and its fantastical world was created by Kafka in response to his own crises — a heartbreak, a harsh judgment. In his introduction to his English translation of The Trial, Idris Parry writes of Kafka being summoned to face his accusers: ‘He remained silent as the words crossed over him like a knife passed from hand to hand.’ But that, too, was Lundy’s role in the trial. He stood there mute for the six weeks as one witness after another read him like a text, and claimed to interpret examples of wickedness. ‘My innocence,’ Josef K. broods, ‘doesn’t simplify the matter. What matters are the many subtleties in which the court gets lost. But in the end it produces great guilt from some point where orginally there was nothing at all.’

  K. is never described in The Trial, but you imagine him as looking similar to Kafka — someone thin and haunted, bony, pale, a serious figure inside a tight black suit, intense. At least no one accused Lundy of looking like that. Still, it was strange to see him that first day in court in his blue blazer and long pants. He had shambled around in shorts and T-shirts that summer in Kumeu. Now he looked like a professional, and he swung his black briefcase with purpose. The goatee made him look either like an academic, or 1970s whistler Roger Whittaker. ‘You did murder,’ announced the court clerk, ‘Christine Marie Lundy.’ Her widower stood in the dock, with his hands behind his back; he wore his wedding ring. ‘You did murder,’ the clerk also said, ‘Amber Grace Lundy.’ He answered each charge with the only words he spoke in the entire trial, the two words that meant the most: ‘Not guilty.’

  The voyage began. Justice Simon France, plump and cheerful, his silver hairdo as high and glistening as anything sported by Little Richard, welcomed the jury. ‘There is a rhythm to a trial,’ he said. But almost immediately he was out of step, and played a shocker when he tripped over his own tongue. He meant to say, ‘The prosecution will try to prove Mr Lundy is guilty.’ Instead, he misspoke, and referred to ‘Mr Guilty’.

  It would be a long trial, he advised, and might even continue past Easter. Much would be said and much would seem strange. ‘Things unfold. There is more to come. Be patient.’

  And then: ‘You may or may not know this is a retrial. Do not concern yourself with the first trial, or why we are here again.’ You could see the sense in that, but in essence he was asking everyone to pretend the first trial had never happened. He ventured further into make-believe in a note given to the media. ‘I am loathe to create a fiction by ordering there be no reference to a retrial. However . . .’ Yes, loathsome as it was, he wished to create a fiction. After a bit of hand-wringing, the note declared it was a request, not a formal order, and as such it was roundly ignored.

  He introduced the lawyers, and invited them to proceed wih their opening addresses. Philip Morgan QC, a tall, remote, saturnine individual from Hamilton, with a widow’s peak and downturned mouth, led for the Crown. He was assisted by Ben Vanderkolk of Palmerston North, who had prosecuted the first trial. He was slim, affable, handsome, beautifully tailored, and only rarely questioned a witness. In fact, he idled for much of the following six weeks. His relationship with Morgan seemed distant. They seldom shared each other’s company during breaks; on the rare occasion that they did, they walked in silence. I said to Vanderkolk one day, ‘Are you ever going to, you know, do anything in court?’ He had a lovely smile, revealing small, even teeth, and joked, ‘I’ve got battered prosecutor’s syndrome.’

  Experienced court watchers said that Morgan’s trial work in Hamilton was outstanding. In Wellington, though, he was merely nasal and slow on his feet, and his opening address was strangely hesitant. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have good material. ‘The accused,’ he said, ‘had his wife’s brain on his shirt.’ But it was as though he were describing a minor traffic incident. Where was the force, the necessary disgust? And if there was something apologetic in his tone, then it was revealed in Morgan’s narrative of events on the night of 29/30 August 2000, when he made public for the first time that the police had completely and radically changed their mind about when Christine and Amber were killed. They had abandoned the 7pm theory. They had moved on. They now put it in the small hours of 30 August, when Lundy drove under cloak of darkness from Petone to Palmerston and performed the vile deed with a ‘heavy, sharp object’.

  Morgan went through the main points. Lundy was sick of his wife. Look at the savagery of the attack: ‘You may think the ferocity was carried out by someone with hostility, to put it mildlly, against her.’ Lundy used one of his tools as the weapon. The break-in and burglary were staged. A bracelet was found on the front seat of his car; it had fallen out of the jewellery box. He did it for the insurance. He was wearing Christine’s brain: ‘You will be completely satisfied it was central nervous system tissue from brain or spinal cord.’ All of which had been previously stated, more elegantly, by Vanderkolk at the first trial. But Morgan announced that he had something new. He paused. The media looked up, their paws poised above their laptops. An old man in the public gallery gently dozed. The eyes of the insane judge in the portrait gallery seemed to widen, and bulge. Morgan folded his arms. Then he thrust his hands in his pockets, where they could hide from view. He looked down. He said Lundy had confessed to the murders to an inmate: ‘He will tell you of their conversation.’ A jailhouse snitch! Incredible — as in not credible, a pathetic joke. But there it was. A jailhouse snitch, one of the great stock characters from criminal justice, in the flesh. Were things that desperate?

  Ross Burns spoke for the defence. He was a hirsute and distinguished man in his late fifties, and a roguish smile was never far from his lips. His face was surprisingly firm, as though it had been offered a lift. He had such a beautiful voice. It was the voice of a sensualist; it was redolant of strawberries and cream on a summer’s evening. But he tended to mutter, and lose his place. It didn’t seem as though he’d given his opening address much thought or rehearsal. Like Morgan, he played down his address. He went through the main points. Lundy was wrongfully convicted in 2002. He loved his wife. His finances were solvent. The stain on his shirt may not be human, and why was it that there was no blood splatter on his glasses, watch, shoes, or anywhere in his car? And then he, too, announced that he had something new. Evidence gathered in 2014 showed that DNA of two unknown men had been found beneath Christine’s and Amber’s fingernails.

  I remember sitting in court when Burns made that revelation, and thinking: God almighty. Was it possible that Lundy actually was innocent, that Christine and Amber were killed by brute or brutes unknown? A new horro
r came to mind — two men, two strangers, two monsters, who broke into their home and went at Christine and Amber in the middle of the night. Burns added that the paint flakes found at the crime scene suggested a second weapon.

  But the findings about the mysterious DNA beneath their fingernails was only ever referred to during the trial in passing, as a minor detail, nothing to really concern anyone.

  ‘It was not possible,’ Burns concluded, ‘that Mark Lundy committed these crimes.’ He sat down. Justice France thanked him, and dismissed the jury. It was 1.05pm. ‘A short day,’ he said with a smile. The first witness would be called the next morning. According to the witness list, it would be the man who had discovered the bodies.

  2

  She is forever seven years old, always that lovely, silly age — Amber Lundy never grew up, only ever knew life as a child, someone happy, someone adored. ‘Amber,’ a woman said on day two of the trial, when asked about her parents, Mark and Christine Lundy, ‘was the light of their life.’

  She was killed, horribly, at least swiftly. Her body was discovered in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom. She got out of her own bed because she had heard her mother being killed. She can’t have seen very much. It was dark. But she likely saw who was standing by the side of Christine Lundy’s bed. A monster, covered in blood, a weapon in his hands. She turned. He followed.

  Did she know him? Yes, said the Crown, it was her father. Yes, agreed the defence, Amber knew him. They were family. It was her Uncle Glenn.

  Glenn Weggery appeared as the first witness called by the prosecution, and in cross-examination was accused of killing Christine and Amber. It was astonishing to watch. I’d never seen anyone in a court other than the defendant accused of murder. There ought to be a law against it. It was brutal and it gave notice that Lundy’s defence team, led by David Hislop QC, was going to be rather more rigorous and vigorous than the team at his first trial.

  I spoke with Hislop during the wait for a verdict. I said, ‘Did the police warn Weggery you were going to do that?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He was taken by surprise. That was a completely planned assault.’ He laughed, hard, when he arrived at that last word. Hislop wasn’t what you’d call a passive individual. He had an intelligent, sarcastic face. A tall man in his fifties, thin of hair, losing the war on plump, he was funny, likeable, and perhaps arrogant, now and then ill-tempered. His law offices were in London. It took a while for the flat vowels of New Zealand to return to his expatriate mouth; in those first couple of weeks in Wellington, he presented himself as some old duffer from the Old Bailey. We talked more about his treatment of Weggery. He said, ‘We had to demonstrate that the first investigation was approached with tunnel vision. So he [Weggery] was only an example of someone we didn’t think was properly investigated.’

  Before his cross-examination, Weggery had told Morgan about driving over to Christine’s house in the morning. He’d phoned first, but she didn’t pick up. She’d promised to calculate his GST return. The curtains were closed. The sliding door at the back was open. He called out, ‘Hello?’ He entered the hallway, and saw Amber on the floor. He phoned for the police. The 111 call was played; Weggery sounded very calm. He felt for Amber’s pulse. He said in court, ‘Her head was cracked open and blood was everywhere.’

  Morgan asked, ‘What did you see?’

  Weggery said, ‘Brains.’

  Amber was in the doorway of the bedroom. He looked into the room, and saw Christine.

  I’d asked Levick one day about the responsibilities he felt as someone campaigning for Lundy’s release. It was something that bothered me as a journalist looking into the case; I felt the pressure to act responsibly, and not recklessly, out of respect for Christine and Amber’s family. They had suffered enough. Levick talked about a responsibility to the truth. He was impersonal about it. The facts were all that mattered. But that same impersonality had trampled over Weggery, the man who had discovered the mutilated bodies of his sister and niece. He later became convinced Lundy was their killer. Weggery and Levick once exchanged unpleasantries in the letters pages of the Manawatu Standard. Weggery wrote, ‘Mr Geoff Levick, or should that be simply Levick, as he has never met or spoken to either myself or any member of my family, suggests I have “not spent a minute reviewing anything nor read a single document” . . . As for the insinuation that I know nothing, believe me I wish I didn’t know what I do. That is that I have to look at photos to remind myself what my sister and niece even looked like, as without them all I remember is as they appeared in the crime scene photos.’

  Weggery was a solidly built, tough-faced customer. He wore his hair in a crewcut, and could be seen during the trial down the road on Molesworth Street enjoying a Guinness for lunch. He was a truck driver. At the time of the killings, he flatted with a lesbian solo mother. Hislop said to him, ‘Do you remember being interviewed for three hours or more by the police? Do you remember the police suggesting you knew Amber was dead before you called 111, and that’s why you didn’t check to see she was alive, because you had killed her?’

  Weggery: ‘They incorrectly suggested that.’

  Hislop kept at it, and later introduced something else.

  ‘Were you ever alone with Amber?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ever babysit her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there a particular reason why you weren’t allowed to babysit Amber?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Hislop then implied Weggery had form as a child abuser, and referred to an alleged incident with a 10-year-old girl. Weggery angrily said that was false. (The court later heard that the allegation was made when Weggery was about 12.) Hislop said, ‘Would you describe Amber as big for her age?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘About the size of a 10-year-old, wouldn’t you agree?’

  Hislop moved on to the outrageous punchline of his vile implication — that Weggery killed Christine because she’d found out he’d been doing something to Amber. ‘Your sister was asleep when you struck her, wasn’t she?’

  ‘No, I did not, and I’m not going to sit here and be accused of it!’

  But that’s exactly what he had to do. He sat there and was accused of it, over and over. Justice France instructed Weggery, ‘If Mr Hislop suggests you have done something unlawful, feel free to ask me if you need to answer it. You are entitled not to give an answer.’

  Weggery took him up on it.

  Hislop: ‘I suggest you were the one who hit Amber on the head.’

  Weggery: ‘I don’t want to answer that.’

  The rest of the time he straight-out denied Hislop’s accusations, with rage and scorn, nailing shut the end of his sentences with an angry, over-pronounced consonant: ‘No, I did not-ah . . . No, that didn’t happen-ah . . . I know nothing about that-ah.’ The latter denial was in reply to Hislop’s revelation that two spots of blood were found at Weggery’s house. The DNA of one spot had an 83 per cent match with Christine; the other had an 88 per cent match with Amber.

  Hislop also questioned a fresh scratch on Weggery’s nose at the time of the killings, and requested that the jury see a police photograph taken of Weggery. It was magnified 200 per cent and put on a flat-screen in the courtroom. Weggery’s large, implacable face stared out, and the scratch looked very red, very livid. He said it was from scratching a pimple.

  ‘It must have been a big pimple?’

  ‘Have you never had one?’

  Hislop seemed lost in thought for a moment, as though he were trying to remember whether he ever had a big pimple on his nose. Then he said, ‘You changed your mind, didn’t you, and told the police a cat scratched you?’

  ‘It could have been either.’

  Hislop pointed at the screen, at Weggery’s giant face with the large red scratch on his snoot. He said, ‘It looks fresh, do you agree?’

  ‘At 200 per cent magnification, anything would look fresh.’

  Hislop’s ac
cusation was that the scratch on his nose was caused by Christine as she tried to fend off her younger brother in the seconds before she was annihilated. It felt shocking to hear it the first time Hislop said it, and it felt no less shocking as the cross-examination wore on. On and on it went and, throughout, Hislop’s manner suggested he was merely passing the time of day. Now and then he roared at Weggery, but he kept it to a minimum. He also asked about blood found on one of Weggery’s towels; he’d cut himself shaving, Weggery said. ‘That was careless, wasn’t it?’ said Hislop, not quite smiling.

  After accusing the Crown’s first witness of double murder and insinuating sexual abuse, you wondered what he was going to do for an encore, but he merely suggested to the next witnesses — two St John ambulance officers — that they accidentally tampered with the crime scene, galumphing here and there, transferring blood and brain tissue from one place to another like a couple of fools who should be taken out and shot.

  His job done, Hislop handed over to Burns for the remaining cross-examination of Crown witnesses that day. There wasn’t much to challenge. Friends of the Lundy family talked about a loving household, busy, active, normal.

  The nice middle-aged woman who said Amber was the light of her parents’ lives was only on the witness stand for about 10 minutes. She used to live on the same street as the Lundy family. Her son was in Amber’s class, and her daughter was in Pippins with Amber.

  She entered the courtroom with a young woman, who sat by herself in the public gallery: her daughter. She stood up when her mother walked back through the court after giving evidence. She touched her arm, briefly, and they left together. She had long, straight hair, and wore a summery dress. She looked about 22 or 23.