‘Where do you use an escort, just in Wellington?’
‘No, I’ve used one in Napier and New Plymouth. I’d estimate a couple of times in each place in the last five years.’ He stayed at the Marineland Motel and the Snowgoose Lodge in Napier, and the Carrington and Braemar in New Plymouth.
‘The other thing, Mark. Sometime back, your cleaner found something similar to a girlie magazine under the bed.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know anything about that?’
‘Christine actually was reading articles in them.’
‘Wasn’t yours?’
‘Not mine. I wouldn’t want to waste my money to be honest.’
‘Well, having said that, what about the pornography that was in your briefcase in your car?’
‘That was given to me.’
‘By who?’
‘I can’t even remember now. It’s actually been there for a couple of years. I forgot it was in there . . .’
Not a word of that particular exchange rings true. It sounds more like he was caught red-handed with porn, and airily tried to pin it on his dead wife and someone whose name escaped him. The stick mags and the escorts were probably deeply shaming, but what do they prove? Kelly moved on. The two men talked about the home computer, the ranchslider, Amber’s bedtimes, a bracelet found in Lundy’s car, the insurance money. You could see Kelly gently ferreting around for evidence, but it was a sympathetic interview. Lundy liked Kelly; he said later that he saw him as a friend.
‘Mark, it’s a bit over two weeks since your wife and daughter were murdered,’ Kelly said towards the end of the interview. ‘You’ve done a lot of thinking and we’ve done a lot of investigating. It’s not often I do this, but I’m going to ask you, what’s your theory on it?’
‘I haven’t got one. I have absolutely no bloody idea. The only thing I can think of is, maybe it was a burglary gone wrong . . . I don’t know. Who the hell could kill — who could take a life, but kill a beautiful little girl especially, it’s . . .’ He said he’d tried to imagine what happened. The best he could hope happened, he said, was that ‘neither of them saw each other die and they died quickly. That’s getting me through.’ He put his head in his hands. He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring when he went back to the house.
And then he asked Kelly, ‘Have you guys had any luck, any suspects?’
‘There’s a lot of suspects, Mark.’
‘Oh, is there?’
‘You can take it as a personal thing from me, Mark, whoever murdered your wife and daughter will be caught.’
‘Cool.’
‘There’s absolutely no way they won’t be caught. We will catch them.’
‘Excellent.’
14
The second interview was filmed on 23 February 2001, six months after the murders, and the day Lundy was placed under arrest and charged with the murders. Kelly escorted him to Manawatu Prison. He said at the first trial, ‘While waiting for the large electronic gate to open, I said, “Mark, I and many other people are very disappointed.”’ Lundy’s response was not recorded.
The interview room seemed smaller, and was filmed at a strange, oblique angle. The only props were the same — a table and two chairs. The clock had gone. As for the wardrobe department, Kelly was once again in white shirt and tie, while Lundy opted for baggy shorts and a vast yellow T-shirt. It was just after 9am and he was hung-over. He mentioned a drinking session the previous night; the last guest left in a taxi at 1.30am. ‘I’ll get an early night tonight,’ he said.
Again, they talked about the home computer (‘I can do the basics’), the ranchslider, Amber’s bedtimes, a bracelet found in Lundy’s car, the insurance money. It was a three-hour interview and the first half of it was innocuous in tone, although it’s obvious that Kelly, in part, was pursuing the crackpot theory of the 7pm time of death. There was a detailed inventory of Lundy’s car: popcorn, $1.55 in coins, four metal plumbing bolts, Sellotape, a wire coat-hanger, Pepsi, a pie wrapper. Lundy confirmed his travel bag contained a pair of brown socks, green Rio underwear, and a striped XXL polo shirt — the shirt which had been taken to Texas earlier that month for Miller’s historic tests.
Kelly introduced a subtle change of tone to the interview when he told Lundy that a witness — Margaret Dance, the musing psychic — had seen him near his house at about 7.15pm on the night of the murders. ‘You never went back to your home address that night?’
‘Definitely not.’
Kelly asked about Lundy’s debts in the wine venture, and whether Christine was concerned. Lundy said they were both concerned. Kelly asked if they argued, and Lundy replied that they hadn’t.
‘I’m trying to solve the murder involving Christine and your daughter, Amber.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Be truthful with me.’
‘I am.’
‘I think perhaps you had argued about it.’
Lundy replied they hadn’t. The interview had picked up pace. Kelly said Lundy didn’t have an alibi between 5.30pm and 8.30pm on the night of the murders. ‘There’s a big window there,’ he said. Lundy said he was in Petone. Kelly then asked about Lundy’s marriage, and said it didn’t appear as though he and Christine were very close. They didn’t sit together at the wine club evenings. Kelly then said Lundy’s behaviour since their deaths ‘has not portrayed a loving, caring relationship’. The interview had arrived at a tipping point.
‘You think,’ Lundy said, ‘that I’ve killed them.’
‘All right, that’s what I’m thinking. You murdered your wife and daughter. How do you feel about me saying that, Mark?’
‘Bloody terrible, to be honest. Like, I’m bloody lost for words. It’s got to be the most heinous, heinous thought that I could come up with. It’s— I have told so many people, right, that I really like you, and said, “Steve, he’s a really good top bloke, he’s really neat”, until now.’
‘I’m doing my job.’
‘I know you are, I know you are.’
‘Let me say something. You’re dealing with a team of detectives that have worked well in excess of 20,000 hours trying to find who killed your wife and daughter. That equates to one man working for 10 years, a quarter of his working life, and we’re not finished.’
‘Yeah.’
‘In order for me to explain to you what happened there,’ said Kelly, arriving at the moment of truth in his interview, at its central drama, its leap of faith, ‘I’m going to have to show you some photographs.’
‘I didn’t want this,’ said Lundy, with a kind of whimper.
Kelly said, ‘The day has come.’ He opened up a folder and took out a photograph from the crime scene. ‘That is Christine.’
Lundy’s response to the appalling photographs Kelly showed him of the massacre were to prove crucial the following week. It was the things he said and the things he didn’t, and the way he behaved and the way he didn’t. The film brought the viewer into that small room, with its askew camera angle, its bare walls, its heaving fatty in yellow — it had something to do with his guilt or innocence.
It finished with Lundy’s arrest, off-camera. The interview had lasted three hours. Towards the end, Kelly sang a kind of aria, with Lundy as his prompt.
‘I can fully understand why you think I did it, I really can,’ said Lundy.
‘Mark, I don’t think you did it, I know you did it. I’m telling you I know you murdered your wife and daughter. I don’t think it, I damn well know it. And I have conclusive, absolutely irrefutable evidence that you did it. You will not get out of this, Mark. You murdered both of them.’
‘I did not murder them. I was not there.’
‘That is a load of bollocks, mate. Absolute bullshit. If you want to know what we’ve been doing for six months, we have been working on you. For six months, from day one, the number-one suspect on my spreadsheet is you. Now that’s the way it’s been for all those man-hours, all of those going to work at six in the morning and wo
rking till nine at night, seven days a bloody week, with cops thinking that you killed your wife and daughter.’
‘I didn’t. I was not in Palmerston.’ Lundy’s whinings that the lacuna in the whole story was himself — that he wasn’t in Palmerston North, that he was whoring in Petone — failed to impress Kelly.
‘You are a liar. That there is the evidence.’ He showed Lundy the images of stains on the polo shirt. It’s possible that one of the pictures was the same one I carried with me in Wellington — that purple outline a shape like the North Island, stained purple with hematoxylin and eosin dyes, its cell nuclei and nerve fibres revealing the apparent presence of Christine’s brain. Lundy peered at it, baffled. Kelly said, ‘This is the fragments in the shirt. This is what they look like close up. This is the conclusion, that either brain or deep spinal cord is present on your shirt. Caught you, buddy, absolutely caught you. You deny it till the cows come home, mate.’
The interview came to a halt at 10 past 12. Lundy called his lawyer, Mike Behrens. Hung-over, busted, a blob in yellow, he was taken to the gates of Manawatu Prison (‘I and many others are disappointed in you’) in long, flat Camp Road, just past the Linton army camp. Somewhere nearby flowed the Manawatu River. The gates opened. There endeth Lundy’s freedom for the next 13 years.
15
The trial had now fast approached its own moment of truth. What were the jury thinking? Had they already made up their minds? It was time for Morgan and Hislop to stand and deliver their closing addresses. Morgan delivered: the guy deserved a standing ovation. Perhaps not from Lundy, whom he smote with cold fury for two days, but when it was over the first person to rush to his side with unseemly haste and thrust out his hand in congratulations was defence lawyer Ross Burns. ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said, when I invited him into my parlour in the courtroom during our wait for the verdict. ‘It was a tour de force. I went from feeling very confident about an acquittal, to thinking, “Oh, shit. This is now on a knife edge.”’
Morgan dressed like he bought his suits from Hallensteins, and his only hint of flamboyance was the silver streak of his widow’s peak. He was quite charmless, but his manner in closing was direct and compelling. He made a very, very good case. He told powerful stories. He spoke loudly, unhesitatingly, seriously. It was interesting to compare his speech to Vanderkolk’s closing address in 2002; much of the material was the same, but where Vanderkolk’s speech impressed with its elegant, thoughtful sentences, Morgan preferred hard-boiled prose.
‘This is not a killing by a random burglar. All of the evidence indicates it’s an inside job. This is a person who went there with a purpose. This purpose was to kill Christine Lundy. He set about killing her with a vengeance. He chops at her face. Multiple times. He even misses two or three times and strikes the headboard because of the frenzy of the attack. All the blows are focused on her face. He was trying to obliterate her face. This was committed by someone who wanted to wipe Christine Lundy off the face of the Earth. He strikes her so hard that he drives the weapon 5 centimetres into her skull.’
Not a comma in sight, none of the effete scaffolding of colons and such. Physically, too, Morgan was a model of containment. He kept his hands to himself, didn’t indulge in any miming of the dreadful attack. He stood straight and maintained steady eye contact. ‘And what threat was Amber to anyone? Was she really going to recognise a random burglar in the dark? She was seven for heaven’s sake.’
Yes, said Hislop, Morgan was right. The killings weren’t rational. ‘There are violent and deranged people in the world. Deranged psychotic attacks — it happens. Sadly, it happens.’ A monster did it. ‘He bashes out Christine’s brain. He turns, and there’s Amber. She’s standing between the killer and his exit. She was in the way. Bang, she’s dead.’
Hislop’s address was half as long as Morgan’s. He kept it simple, and numerical. He called it ‘the three impossible things’. He said it was impossible for Lundy to be the killer because he simply didn’t have enough petrol in his car, and because he couldn’t have been in Palmerston North at the most likely time of death. Impossibility one: Lundy simply didn’t have enough petrol. Police Sergeant Danny Johanson — the giant who looked like a couple of Dan Carters — made the return trip from Petone to Palmerston North six times during the first police investigation. His test drives showed that to be able to make the extra trip, Lundy would have needed 85 litres of petrol when he last filled up his Ford Fairmont. But the tank’s capacity was only 68 litres. Hislop: ‘It dispels the myth of the secret journey.’ Impossibility two: Christine and Amber’s last supper was from McDonald’s, at about 6pm. It takes about six hours for the stomach to empty. They couldn’t have been killed much after midnight because the postmortem showed that their stomachs were full. But the earliest Lundy could have got to his home was about 2.30am — he’d been tied up until just before 1am, boring a prostitute in his motel room with talk of his kitchen sink business. Hislop: ‘It makes it impossible he was in Palmerston North killing his family.’ Impossibility three was that a neighbour testified that he’d seen the sliding door wide open at around 11pm on the night of the murders. The murderer was inside the house, waiting in darkness, to strike. Hislop: ‘We know Mr Lundy was in Petone then, don’t we? You remember the escort.’
Well, Morgan said, the neighbour’s testimony was sketchy at best, and Christine and Amber must have eaten later than 6pm — there was a banana peel in the kitchen, and maybe they reheated the remains of the Happy Meal later that night. As for the car, police evidence suggested that about 300 kilometres were ‘missing’ on the speedo during Lundy’s recent travels — and could only be accounted for because Lundy had made his 297-kilometre ‘killing journey’.
The drive was made in stealth and began in secrecy. Lundy parked on the street to make a quiet getaway. Morgan scorned Lundy’s claim that he’d parked there after driving across the street earlier that night to read his Robert Ludlum thiller (‘The silhouetted figure in the doorway rushed into the dark, windowless room’, etc.) under a streetlight. Morgan: ‘Why would you do such a thing? It’s winter! It’s twilight at 6.20pm! And why drive across the street? Why not just walk? Does it have the ring of truth?’
Yes, certainly, said Hislop. ‘Any of us who stay in motels regularly know that after a while you’ve just got to get out of the room. But why would you sit outside and read your book in winter? Wouldn’t you get in your car, park up, and read?’
The public gallery was full, due in part to a delegation from Vanderkolk’s law offices in Palmerston North. He’d given them the day off to attend the trial, and to watch their boss, a splendid and regal figure in his pinstriped flannels, idle away the hours while inspecting his fingernails. In fact, he wasn’t the best-dressed man in court any more. That distinction now belonged to the most unlikely candidate — the juror who had spent the first few weeks in jandals, shorts, and the T-shirt that stated IF IT AIN’T BEAM, IT AIN’T BOURBON. Suddenly, the face-pulling munter showed up in polished shoes, and a suit and tie. The radical makeover became the central mystery in court. Had someone said something? Was he trying to score? He scrubbed up well. He looked like the most powerful man in the room, like he owned it. Justice France and everyone else were his tenants.
Morgan and Hislop gave competing arguments about the bracelet found in the car, Lundy’s finances, the police investigation — and, of course, the shirt. The shirt, the shirt. Lundy’s short-sleeved XXL polo tent — pinned like some vast moth in its exhibit case — should take its place alongside David Bain’s jersey and Ewen McDonald’s dive boots in a kind of fashion parade in the history of New Zealand murder. Morgan delivered perhaps the best of his pithy hard-boiled zingers: ‘No husband should have his wife’s brain on her shirt.’ Hislop didn’t say too much about the stupid shirt. He briefly raised the possibility of contamination, accidental or otherwise (‘Did something happen to it in Miller’s lab?’), and made a few noises about the stain possibly being food — it got there from cooking n
eck chops or sausages, or from Lundy slobbering on a pie. He said he wasn’t much fussed about the stain. He affected an air of nonchalance. This was the best he could come up with, and it was kind of lame: ‘If it was impossible for Mark Lundy to be in Palmerston North at the time of the murders, then whatever had got on the shirt, whatever it is, got there in a way consistent with his innocence.’
Hislop’s manner in closing was gentle, self-effacing. He wore a pale tie and a pale shirt. He was rumpled in his silks, and presented himself as a pleasant coot and figure of quiet reason. He fluttered over the science, and alighted on the fact that there was no blood or tissue found on Lundy’s shoes, his glasses, his rings, or in his car. That didn’t make sense, he said. Nor did the Crown’s assertion that the mysterious weapon was one of Lundy’s tools. ‘What tool do they say he used? A hammer? A chisel? A screwdriver? We waited, and waited, and waited. No answer was ever forthcoming. The silence was deafening.’ At least two of his impossibilities introduced significant reasonable doubt. He made a very good case. He got the last word. ‘The only safe verdict,’ he said, ‘is not guilty.’ It lacked the impact of Morgan’s final sentence: ‘The killer is the accused.’
The processing of a man’s fate had come to an end. The trial had reached its point of no return. No more fine talk from lawyers, no more evidence from witnesses, nothing left to give except for Justice France to sum up on the Monday morning, and direct the jury to leave Courtroom 1 and decide. Every minute of their deliberations would be a familiar agony — been there, suffered that — for the man accused for a second time of killing his wife and child. I saw Lundy outside court later that afternoon. The autumn light lay tenderly on the row of pohutukawa trees across the road. He was talking with his sister, Caryl, and looked in good spirits.
The Scene of the Crime Page 29
