The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  3

  A metaphor for the Crown case that first week seemed to present itself on a wall outside Courtroom 1. The strict policy that dictates that New Zealand courtrooms must only exhibit really terrible works of art was maintained at the Wellington High Court in the shape of two big painted oars fastened onto the walls on the ground floor. One was on top of the other, and one went one way and the other one went the other way. The artist was identified as someone called Denis O’Connor — possibly a joke, a sly reference to America’s Cup buffoon Dennis Conner — and the oar-inspiring caption blathered that his artwork ‘creates an embracing, calming quality’. My feeling was that the artwork created a mocking, not especially subtle commentary on the Crown case. It felt stuck up a faecal creek without a paddle; held fast, unmoving, oarless.

  The defence made the early running with Hislop’s ‘carefully planned assault’ on the seething Weggery, and then with his even less civil treatment of former police computer ‘expert’ Maarten Kleintjes. Outside, it was a hot, bright day; inside Courtroom 1, with its colour scheme of dark chocolate and creamy vanilla, Hislop hoped to make Kleintjes melt. He sort of did, but mostly he didn’t, and at the end of it you wondered what it had achieved, other than making the 2002 conviction look like an absolute disgrace.

  Back then, the Crown alleged that Lundy had fiendishly, and also rather brilliantly, managed to manipulate the clock on his home computer. They said he had killed his wife and daughter at about 7pm, but made it look as though the computer had shut down at 10.52pm, when he had an alibi. Kleintjes was very helpful with his support of that crackpot theory. He demonstrated how it could have been done, stated there had been ‘extensive manipulation of the time and date’. It created the impression that the cunning Lundy had rehearsed for the killing by fiddling with the computer on at least five occasions. The notion was rejected by the Privy Council, and formed one of the chief reasons why Lundy’s conviction was quashed. The theory was a nonsense. The clock showed 10.52pm as when the computer was closed down because that was when it happened. It’s also the last known time that Christine and Amber were alive.

  What, then, would Kleintjes say now? He had since retired from the police; a lanky Dutchman, he had the possibly charming habit of saying ‘d’ instead of ‘th’.

  Hislop: ‘You must have known that if the clock was accurate, Mark Lundy could not have carried out the murders?’

  Kleintjes: ‘Dat’s not for me to decide.’

  ‘No, no, no. I’m not asking you about any decisions. I’m asking about what you knew. You’re not telling me you didn’t know the consequences that would have on the investigation?’

  ‘Oh, I knew de consequences.’

  But he maintained that he never at any time actually stated that Lundy had manipulated the shut-down time on the computer. ‘I said it was possible to change it, but I didn’t say it happened. It was given as a possibility.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Hislop, ‘if the word “possibility” occurs in your conclusions in 2002.’ He leafed through a document. ‘There’s no reference to “possibilities” in here.’

  ‘Dere’s also nothing in dere dat says it actually happened.’

  ‘The prosecution said the computer clock was altered, and it was from your evidence.’

  ‘It’s not my evidence. I said it was possible to change it, but I didn’t say it happened.’

  ‘Sir, your evidence has changed.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t.’

  After a bit more related back and forth, Hislop asked, ‘Are you deliberately dancing on the end of a pin, or are you telling the truth?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ smiled Kleintjes, ‘you are getting so confused.’

  He danced on de end of his pin until Hislop had finished with him, and there was a spring in his lanky step as he left the witness stand. Court adjourned, and Hislop said as we left to enjoy the summer’s evening, ‘Would you buy a used car from that man?’

  4

  What would your family and friends and people who you work with do if your back was up against the wall? Who would remain loyal, who would turn against you? And what would you do in their shoes? Yes, yes, obviously it depends; the devil is in the variabilities; but it could be that those whom you depended on would be the first to desert you, and those whom you barely knew would give you a chance. There were glimpses of the life Mark Lundy no longer knows — blameless, employed, suburban, free, loved — during the opening fortnight of his trial, when people who used to know him made their way to the witness stand.

  Evidence presented in 2002 was also read out from Lundy’s father, Bill, and Christine’s mother, Helen, who had both since died. ‘Mark and Christine live for each other,’ said Bill. Helen also talked of a happy marriage. She was close to Christine; she visited every Wednesday for lunch. She wasn’t aware of any problems. The biggest issue confronting the Lundy household that week was choosing a lightshade for the spare room. ‘They lived,’ as prosecutor Morgan said, ‘in a modest little home in a blue-collar suburb.’ Life was about managing time — Pippins, scouting, guiding, dance lessons, seeing friends, work. The weekend before the killings, the Durhams had gone around for dinner. Lundy cooked a barbecue. The two families played cards until after midnight. In fact, the Lundys often hosted dinners, soirées, get-togethers; they led social, busy lives.

  But two friends talked about how worried Christine was about her husband’s vineyard plan. The interest, she told Karen Keenan, was $600 a day. Keenan told the court, ‘I said, “How the hell do you sleep at night?”’ Caroline Durham told the court, ‘I knew they were paying a lot of interest. I’m sure she wasn’t very happy with the financial burden . . . It wasn’t a pretty picture.’ Neither woman looked at Lundy. Their instinct in cross-examination was to give short, grudging replies; hatred for the person who they believed had killed Christine and Amber filled the courtroom.

  They were also the first signs that the prosecution’s case was getting somewhere. Their witness list was ordered, in part, to give their case a narrative shape; it was going to be a long story.

  I made myself comfortable in the public gallery. I had plenty of leg-room and occasional company. There was a pretty ex-criminologist, whose thesis was apposite: parents who kill their children. There was a woman named Mary from Epsom, in Auckland. She commuted to Wellington especially for the trial, and took a room at the YWCA during the week. The rest of the media sat squeezed in the exact same places at two long tables, behind the two rows of lawyers; on day four, Ben Vanderkolk finally broke his silence when he was given the task of questioning parking officers. For the defence, Julie-Anne Kincade brought the pleasing vowels of Belfast into the room. It almost enlivened the questioning of the parking officers.

  The jury elected their foreperson at the end of the first week. Slender, with long, straight, blonde hair, she wore expensive clothes, and smoked with her left hand, holding the cigarette out at arm’s length. An old courtroom saw has it that the juror who sits next to the foreperson is the one who really wanted the job. I could believe that at the Lundy trial. There was a pomposity to the Indian woman next to the forewoman; she looked as though she was used to taking charge. The faces of the jury had become familiar. There was the callow youth. There was the old boy with a limp. There were the two grey men in their fifties who came and went in a greyish fog. There was a small young woman in glasses, and a thin, worried woman of uncertain age. There was the dude with the shaved head who had the shrewd, ruthless features of someone who worked in advertising — worse, he looked like a hipster. There was the comical munter with the rubbery and really expressive face who wore talkative T-shirts. IF IT AIN’T BEAM, spoke one shirt, IT AIN’T BOURBON.

  More witnesses who knew the Lundys were called to the stand. Lundy was given a conspicuously warm smile by family friend Bronwyn Neal.

  Ross Burns asked, ‘Did you think Mark and Christine were very much in love?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

  ‘Very tender and a
ffectionate towards each other?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  ‘Argumentative, would you say?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And Amber? Was she the apple of Mark’s eye?’

  ‘Ridiculously so.’

  Milvia Hannah knew Lundy through work. He had come to her showroom in Mt Cook on the day the bodies were found. She said his behaviour was ‘odd’.

  Hislop said, ‘But when you spoke to police at the time, you said, “He was happy, smiley, like he always was.”’

  ‘I was a bit like a possum in the headlights,’ she explained.

  ‘It wasn’t until after he was arrested, wasn’t it, that you described his beheaviour that day as “odd”?’

  ‘Yes, but I thought it on the day.’ She ignored Lundy on her way out of the courtroom.

  Brent Potter knew Lundy as a sink salesman. He invited him for morning tea in his Lower Hutt joinery business on the day the bodies were found. He had an open, relaxed face, and looked like the archetypal good joker. When he left the courtroom, the two men gave each other the familiar New Zealand male greeting of raising their eyebrows at each other.

  ‘I bought a sink tap off of him that day,’ Potter remembered. ‘It was an impulse buy.’ He said Lundy and his staff sat down for smoko. ‘He was cheerful, the same as ever.’

  Smiling, laughing; a cup of tea in the smoko room; the buying of a tap . . . All while Christine and Amber lay dead in their home, blood all over the walls, ‘brains’ as Glenn Weggery said, with the ranchslider open and the curtains closed and the phone ringing, and Christine’s mother about to drive over to her daughter’s house for lunch.

  Maybe loyalty — and sympathy, and support — is like water. It finds its own level. If you deprive someone you know in a difficult situation of those qualities, you’re as likely to place it elsewhere, with someone else who deserves it.

  When Helen Weggery turned into the street, she was stopped by two police officers. Christine’s house was taped off.

  She said, ‘That’s my daughter’s house. What’s happened?’

  They wouldn’t give her a straight answer, but Helen said, ‘You may as well tell me.’

  One of the officers said, ‘There’s a body in the house.’

  Helen said, ‘What about Amber?’

  The officer said, ‘She’s dead, too.’

  5

  Auckland, I realised during the second week of the trial, should pack up and move to Wellington. Every single summer’s day was stunning and shimmering, cloudless and windless, and the Cook Strait ferry rolled along Wellington like a ball on a billiard table. At lunchtimes at the nearby waterfront, I would see jurors, lawyers, even Justice France, denuded from his black robes and scoffing an apple in the bright sunlight. The fabulous excitement and sense of national well-being stirred by the New Zealand team at the Cricket World Cup that summer added to the general happiness. Something like joy filtered inside Courtroom 1. There was an optimism that the trial might finish early, certainly before Easter. Things moved at great pace, and with the steady drip of evidence.

  Over half of the 144 witnesses were called in that opening fortnight. We heard about the discovery of the bodies, Lundy’s stay at the motel, the escort, morning tea, Kleintjes and his nonsense, and the ‘killing journey’ — Morgan’s tabloid expression for Lundy’s alleged drive to murder his family. Police Sergeant Danny Johanson talked of simulating the drive to and from Palmerston North. Johanson had done it six times, occasionally at great speed. That mythical journey — back then, police were in thrall to the notion of Lundy racing to and fro to commit the murders at 7pm — had become part of New Zealand motoring folklore. One day during the trial I took lunch with a barrister who told a possibly apocryphal story about Lundy’s lawyer at the 2002 trial, Mike Behrens, arriving late for a meeting, apologising, and saying: ‘I got here as quick as I could. I drove like a Lundy!’

  Across a crowded courtroom, Johanson looked a bit like Dan Carter. At closer range, his enormous face made him look like two Dan Carters. The oversized All Black simulacrum’s evidence about petrol use would assume particular importance towards the end of the trial.

  Most of week two was devoted to the root of the trial’s evil. The prosecution teased out their narrative that Lundy was under intolerable financial pressure, and regarded Christine’s $200,000 life insurance as the answer to his woes. Enter the beancounters. Lundy’s two accountants were asked about his ambitious wine venture. They described a flop. They talked of investors who never materialised, bridging finances that weren’t approved, and outstanding debts that had to be written off. Lundy made an unconditional offer (‘we tried to warn him’) of $2 million for two parcels of land in the Hawke’s Bay, where he would establish a vineyard. Lundy’s stake: around about precisely zero. He registered a prospectus to raise money. He reckoned an investor in Britain would go in for £500,000. Beancounter: ‘Nothing came of it.’

  Actually, something sort of came of it: the mystery investor appeared in court. She was given name suppression. She said how shocked she was to receive an email from Lundy setting out the terms of her generous investment.

  Morgan: ‘Did you have that sort of money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know anyone with that sort of money?’

  ‘No. And I still don’t.’

  She was a family friend of someone who knew Lundy. The man sent her the prospectus. She was thinking of maybe making an investment of £2000. She was so stunned by Lundy’s email, which breezily assumed she was good for half a million pounds, that she switched off the computer in horror.

  ‘I couldn’t even begin to respond to the email,’ she said. ‘It was so far out of my reality.’

  What was Lundy’s reality? Mike Porter, who had put together the land deal, shared his knowledge of Lundy’s apparently loaded investor. He’d told Lundy, on 28 August 2000, that he had two days to make good his $2 million offer, or the deal was off. ‘He said he needed more time. He had someone coming with the money. He said it was an English person. He was fairly vague . . .’

  One parcel of land was owned by Chris Morrison, from Havelock North, who advertised that he was a landowner from Havelock North with his excellent tan, his open-necked white shirt, his cowboy boots, and his insistence on chewing gum with his mouth open. He sat next to Porter in the public gallery. They made an interesting pair, whispering and snickering; Morrison, the lord of the manor, and Porter, the ex-con who got jailed for his part in bringing in illegal immigrants to New Zealand to pick fruit and harvest grapes, and paying them peanuts. Morrison told the court that the land he sold Lundy was worth $700,000, and had asked Lundy for a 10 per cent deposit. ‘He preferred zero.’ They agreed on $10,000.

  Lundy was supposed to pay the balance in February 2000. He missed that deadline, and the one after that. Morrison: ‘I thought I’d better call him myself rather than hear second-hand his various excuses. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. He said there was no problem, apart from the excess of investors — he had such a surplus of them that he’d have to scale them back . . .’

  He gave Lundy a final settlement date of 30 August. The bodies of Christine and Amber were found that morning.

  I half-expected a gasp when the court was told about that coincidence. Things were starting to look bad for Lundy. Quietly, steadily, the case against him had made considerable ground; it was as though Morgan’s prosecution was conducted in stealth. And yet there was nothing really new in any of it since the first trial. Once again, we heard the certain truth that Lundy was useless at trying to create some kind of vineyard empire; once again, we heard the argued claim that he wasn’t even very good at running his kitchen sink business.

  Lundy was in constant debt to sink wholesaler Robert McLachlan. ‘It never seemed to go below $100,000,’ said McLachlan. He rather reluctantly conceded that Lundy’s sales figures were excellent. He didn’t speak with anger about Lundy. It sounded more like disappointment. It sounded unforgiving and f
inal. ‘He came to stay in our Hamilton home for meals and good times,’ he said, with disbelief. The last time was a fortnight before the killings. McLachlan had held a seminar for all his sales reps; he’d brought in a clinical psychologist to conduct role-play with the cream of the North Island’s sellers of sinks crop. A shame the sink shrink wasn’t called to give evidence about his assessment of Lundy. It was the closest anyone with actual training ever got to inspecting his character. ‘You snapped, and . . . became mentally ill,’ said Justice Ellis, at his first trial. It was a baseless observation.

  McLachlan, who was effectively Lundy’s boss, said that he was concerned about the debt level of his man in Palmerston North. But his testimony also included revelations of vice and greed that were at once evil, loathsome and completely irrelevant to Lundy’s murder charges. It concerned a man who wanted a good deal on a sink. McLachlan — a decent, frail man who mentioned that he had suffered four strokes — sometimes forgot small details. But his memory was vivid about a call he received when he drove to Palmerston North shortly after Christine and Amber were killed.

  One of Lundy’s customers was phoning. He asked — in all seriousness — if the price of a sink would still stand in light of the deaths, or if he could now get a better deal.

  McLachlan searched for words. He said, ‘That’s the level of . . . how do I put it . . . ? That was human nature at its worst.’

  God almighty. The want of a sink is the root of all evil. Who was that guy? Are you out there, you sonofabitch?

  6

  Lundy was in sinks. His failed scheme to buy and develop a Hawke’s Bay vineyard suggested he should have stayed in sinks. Morgan sketched a portrait of Lundy as someone who had got in way over his head. He was facing insolvency and the threat of bankruptcy. To a murderer, life insurance is an income stream.

  Phillip Sunderland, who acted as Lundy’s solicitor, said he remembered meeting his former client to first discuss his plans to buy land in Hawke’s Bay to grow grapes.