Tracy spoke to a policewoman in nearby Feilding. ‘I says, “Are we just supposed to sit around and wait for him to burn something down before you’ll come out and do anything?”
‘She says, “Have you got an idea where he is?”
‘I says, “Yes.”
‘She says, “Well, if you can get a group of people together and detain him, and then give us a call, we’ll come straight out.”
‘I says, “How are we supposed to detain him?”
‘And she says, “You can use reasonable force.”
‘I says, “Well, what’s reasonable force?”
‘She says, “You’re not allowed to beat him up. If you beat him up, we’ll know.”
‘I says, “All right, expect a phone call soon then.”
‘So we went around there. I said, “You guys go around the edge and I’ll go to the door.” I thought me being smaller, being female, I might be able to keep him calm. Ha! Good intentions.
‘I went to the door and knocked. It was a sliding door. I stepped back and the guy who owned the house pulled back the curtain. I told them we’d come to restrain Jonathan until the cops arrived, and he says, “Jonathan, it’s for you.”
‘He comes to the door and grunts, “Yeah?” I tell him we’ve come to restrain him for the cops. He looks around sideways and sees the guys.
‘I says, “You’re not getting away this time.” He steps back and I grab him, put one hand on his shoulder and the other on his arm. I put my head down and I’m holding on for dear life. I didn’t know what else to do so I just held on to him. I get dragged inside the house and yell out to Marcus for help. Marcus comes in and grabs him, puts his arm behind his back, picks him up in a bear hug, carries him outside and throws him off the deck on to the grass.’
Marcus entered the narrative. ‘Yeah, nah, we fell off the end of the deck. I couldn’t see. It was dark.’
Tracy continued, ‘The other guys came around and held him down too. I was still inside the house and they says, “Why are you doing this?” I says, “He’s threatened to burn down the shop. We just want the police to come and get him.” I says, “Call the police.” They says, “Don’t worry about that, we’re gonna call the police straightaway.”
‘So everything was all calm inside, not a problem. The guys were sitting on him outside, and I just sat on the edge of the deck and waited for the police to come. He was yelling and screaming and crying, “Let me go, let me go. I promise I won’t do anything again.” And “Hey, just let me go and I’ll be good, we’ll have a few beers and we’ll go out fishing.” Fishing!
‘So this went on for three-quarters of an hour. Because he’s kicking and punching and the guys are trying to hold him down on the ground, Kieran came up with the idea of getting cable ties. He ran back home – I remember he had his moccasins on – to get some ties, and he came back and he ties his ankles together and his hands behind his back.
‘Two of the guys pick him up and put him in the middle of the driveway. Jonathan’s just sitting on his lonesome on the gravel driveway. He’s got a bit of blood on him and his shirt’s a bit mangled ’cos his nose hit the kitchen bench when Marcus struggled with him.
‘So the police turn up and the first thing they do, they come running straight over to him and yell out, “Who did this? Who did this?” And Kieran goes, “I did, sir. I did.” And the cops go straightaway, “Arrest him! Arrest him for kidnapping!” No questions, no nothing. Bang. Decision made. Done.’
How much of Tracy’s story was true? In court, crown lawyers said the family hiding Blair were terrified, and frantically called the cops out to the house to prevent the teenager being murdered. Tracy claimed they looked on blithely as the kid got hogtied and said, ‘Not a problem.’
The three trials, the policewoman in Feilding ‘covering her arse’, as Tracy put it, the expense, the enormous stress, the rancid coleslaw and mayo sandwiches for lunch in the court cells, Marcus leaving her… Just about the least of it was the taint of that exciting word ‘vigilante’. Was it even a taint? ‘Yeah, well if that’s what it takes when the police don’t do their job,’ said Tracy, ‘then whatever. Maybe there need to be a few more in little communities around New Zealand.’
In 2005 I reported on a peculiar drama in the West Coast town of Blackball, when a butcher and a sickly lunatic persuaded a convicted paedophile to pack up and leave. Graham Wootton had bought a house in town. The police told the school, the school told the parents. Pat Kennedy, 61, the town’s butcher, and his friend Geoff Strong knocked on Wootton’s door. They said, ‘You probably know a paedophile has moved into town. Are you that person?’
He would neither confirm nor deny. It wasn’t the most brilliant answer in the world. When they knocked on his door, they didn’t know if Wootton was the man they wanted. Five other families had recently moved into Blackball and fingers were pointed at every new face, but Wootton’s witless reply gave away his identity.
His visitors told him he wasn’t welcome. Wootton said, ‘Do you expect me to just pack up and leave?’ Yes, they said. So he did, that day, with his wife, a deaf mute. The couple had already left when a local man and sickness beneficiary Alan Gurden, 38, set up a vigil across the road from Wootton’s house to discourage him from returning.
Blackball, pop. 360, content to mind its own business, was suddenly the hub of vigilantes and vigils. While Gurden and friends camped outside Wootton’s house in tents, others brought scones, cakes and sausages, did the dishes, and provided firewood to burn in a 40-gallon drum. There was crazy talk of tailing the furniture truck when it came to empty Wootton’s house.
Possibly even less sanely, the town’s visiting vicar agreed to perform an exorcism on the house. The previous owner had been a woman described as a grumpy old bitch, who chopped down a stand of attractive oak trees. Before that there had been a woman who spent a lot of time in the pub to get away from her violent husband. Before that there was a man who topped himself. Maybe the exorcism wasn’t such a bad idea. The walls crawled with years of misery.
I arrived in Blackball on a Friday afternoon in late autumn. I walked down the main street until it was completely dark, as black as the coal that built the town. I turned along a side street and saw a couple sitting on deckchairs in their front yard. They had lit a small wood fire and there was a pot of something cooking on the logs. I stood and spied on them, hypnotised by the beautiful flames, and thought, They look like the luckiest people in the world.
This was almost certainly sentimental nonsense, but the town was so pretty, with its willows and rowanberries, its drowsy and delicious smell of burning coal from every chimney.
Not quite every chimney. Wootton’s house of misery already looked as sealed as a tomb. I snooped in the letterbox. There was an unopened letter from the Ministry of Justice. I snooped in the garage. There was a flyer on the floor advertising children’s karaoke. A woman and her two daughters, aged nine and eleven, offered to ‘host your party … we love to sing, and are available to hire for birthday parties or any special occasion’. I also found a sheet of paper containing a handwritten lyric Wootton had copied from the song ‘Honky Tonk Angels’. Second verse: ‘I didn’t know God made honky tonk angels / I might have known you’d never make a wife.’
A paedophile who played and sang country music, was married to a deaf mute, and bought a home in a small cold town before being slung out on his arse – his life had turned into a country music dirge.
Mist covered the hills, and trailed Grey River, Blackwater Creek and Moonlight Creek. The willows wore red, the oaks yellow. Above the men’s toilet in the pub there was a sign that read HOG SWAMP and a poster advertising local boxer Eric Briggs, ‘the West Coast Tattooed Man’, who ran a lawnmowing business. I was shown what sphagnum moss looks like by a guy who wandered into swamps and harvested the stuff with a pitchfork.
There were lovely elms, and thick flax bushes, and wide clumps of bamboo growing out of the marshy soil. Everything was coated by the thin
black smoke and delicious aroma of burning coal – famously, Blackball is the birthplace of the Labour Party, which took place following the 1908 coal miners’ strike. Trucks from nearby Roa Mine trundled through town, carrying bags of coal dust bound for Japan.
Wootton lived in Blackball for three weeks until his abrupt eviction. He walked into Gina Howton’s general store one day with his wife. Gina asked what had brought them to Blackball. He said he had heard the shop was for sale. ‘You heard wrong,’ said Gina, but he was very insistent. She said, ‘How would you run a store with a deaf wife?’ He said, ‘Oh, but she’s very clever.’ He said he was a hairdresser. ‘He was clean-cut,’ Gina said, ‘looked like he had money. And his wife presented well. She had extremely alert eyes.’
Our conversation was interrupted when two customers walked in. It was half past three in the afternoon and they were in happy drunken spirits. ‘I feel like a rum and raisin ice cream between beers,’ said one of the men, who flaunted a mullet.
Around the corner, vigil organiser Alan Gurden was at his house bus, packing up to leave. He said he needed to get away for a week. That was a good idea. I wished the townspeople had got rid of him instead of Wootton. He was in bad health, physically and mentally; his hands shook, he was on the verge of tears, he couldn’t think straight.
He said he suffered from 1080 poisoning. He suffered from something. He was on an invalid’s benefit, got migraines and couldn’t remember dates. He had painted deranged sentences on his house bus: DEAD CARCASSES FLOATING IN THE WATER! and THEY LIE AND LIE AND LAUGH WHILE YOU DIE! The angry ravings dated from his protest against 1080 drops. ‘I issued a challenge to Helen Clark and Grey District Council. I said they were terrorist saboteurs.’
We sat underneath a cabbage tree while his black pig, Rainbow, snuffled in its pen. In helping to get rid of the paedophile from Blackball and hold the government and the Corrections Department to account, his motives were pure, he said. ‘They’re from moral correctness. It’s a personal crusade.’
And then he said, ‘How many criminal convictions do you think I have? I’ll tell you – none. There was one time when I was spoken to by the police. My wife and I nearly split up in… This is where my brain lets me down. We were living in a house in a valley with no power, the water was frozen solid in the tank, we had to get water from the creek, and we had an argument. She was very stressed. She phoned the police and said her husband tried to take away her son. So there was that one time.’
There were mutterings in the pub on Friday night about ‘hippie bigots’. I liked that term but it missed the essential point about Gurden: he was nuts.
I ran into Geoff Strong at the pub. ‘This is our town,’ he said. ‘This is where we live. This is our castle.’ He had fond memories of a group of locals in the mid 1980s who called themselves the Blackball Pipe Band. A dozen or so ‘transient punk people’ had moved into town ‘so the Pipe Band got bits of pipe and went through them like a dose of salts. All the punks fucked off’.
I got away from Strong and relaxed over a beer with Mike O’Donnell, 37, a former Greymouth punk known as Rotten. In case he forgets his nickname, it’s tattooed on his chest. Rotten was an easy-going guy. ‘Blackball has its moments,’ he said. ‘We’ve just had the Easter fair.’
The annual pub crawl was coming up. Participants would don gloves and kneepads, and crawl across the road between Blackball’s three pubs. Various games and tests of character were planned; previous challenges had included a seven a.m. dip in the town pool, coal-shovelling competitions, and a game where you drank a pint of beer, ate a bowl of dry Weet-Bix, then blew up a balloon until it burst.
The fun and games, the beautiful colours of autumn, the photos of Michael Joseph Savage behind the bar, the black-faced sheep dozing in backyards, the abandoned glasshouses covered in blackberry and rowanberry, the thick mist and the still air and the quiet days and nights – it must be a lovely place to live. The house where a paedophile hairdresser and country singer lived with his deaf mute wife went on the market for $145,000.
Blackball and Tangimoana: both were out west, isolated, bogan, gothic. So was Pātea in Taranaki, where another saga of summary justice played out in 2010. What happened in Pātea was even more elemental than Tangimoana: its central narrative was the pursuit of food.
Two fisheries officers drove to the banks of the Pātea River and seized illegal fishing nets. They told the Hāwera District Court that Pātea man Darryl Hutton – whom they identified as six foot four, with a large build and a full beard – yelled at them and said, ‘If you try to take the nets, you’re fucking dead.’ He also advised the officers, ‘This is my town, my river. We do what we want. You can take the law and fuck off.’
He made a gun sign with his hands, pointed to both officers, and said, ‘Kapow, kapow, kapow.’ He also said, ‘If you ever come back here again you’re dead, you won’t be leaving here alive.’
The officers then happened to notice six other men beginning to walk towards them in a line. One wore a balaclava and had a pit bull straining on the end of a chain. They also noticed that Hutton had a wooden club tucked down the back of his gumboot.
Another detail that caught their attention was that people had gathered outside every surrounding house. The people stood there and watched. No one called the police.
Meanwhile, the officers’ car was stuck in the mud.
One of the officers said, ‘I thought if we made it home in an ambulance we’d be doing pretty well.’ The other said, ‘It was like something out of a bad western.’ He had been in threatening situations before but ‘this was the closest I thought I was to dying’.
The stand-off lasted about 30 minutes until the cops arrived, tempers calmed, and the people outside every surrounding house went back inside.
In court, Hutton pleaded not guilty to two charges of threatening to cause grievous bodily harm, and wittily remarked that the club was tucked down the back of his gumboot because he’d put it there after attending a kapa haka session.
The judge sentenced him to 200 hours’ community service and warned that the next time he threatened assault he’d send him to prison. He sent him to prison in 2011 for six months after Hutton admitted hitting his girlfriend in the face. Taranaki Daily News: ‘Judge Roberts noted Hutton’s early guilty plea but also noted his previous convictions for assault, assault on a female, rape, breach of parole, and threatening to kill.’
Hutton was bad news. Alan Gurden, the henchman of Blackball, was fucked up. But Kieran Grice of Tangimoana was the nicest vigilante you could ever meet.
Small, witty, impulsive, Kieran was a romantic, someone who felt moved by life. He was also bogan incarnate, with his tattoos of Angus Young (‘I’m mad on AC/DC. Favouritest band in the world’) and black T-shirt tucked into black jeans. He’d just come off working fourteen days straight, welding in the Wellington railyards, when I met him on Friday night at Tangimoana Boating Club. He needed a drink. He said he had to pace himself for his stepdaughter’s 21st the next night. He wasn’t pacing himself. It didn’t look as though anyone was. The club, a members-only bar around the corner from the campground, was enjoying a brisk trade, which is also to say that just about everyone was completely off their faces.
I arranged to meet Kieran at his house the next morning. I got there at about ten and met his partner Brenda, her daughter Nikita, and Nikita’s boyfriend, Michael McKay. They were in the kitchen cooking up strips of fresh venison. Michael said, ‘Go well with one of these.’ He opened the fridge and took out some beers. ‘Can’t hurt,’ said Kieran. We went outside and sat around a picnic table in a kind of garden grotto, fringed with native ferns he’d rescued from earthworks in the bush.
I was surprised he hadn’t suggested we drink in his shed. He loved his shed, which was as enormous as an aircraft. It was his second home, possibly his first. His house was just somewhere to crash, and cook up strips of venison. He said, ‘I lock the shed but I never lock the house.’ He’d set up a bar, and the sh
ed also contained his motorbikes and chainsaws. He talked about his love of machinery and then he said, ‘I really wanted Brenda to buy me a bulldozer for Christmas. I found one that was nice and it was only $30,000, but nah.’
He was fervent about the bulldozer, crazy about Brenda. He said he met her in a pub when she was eighteen and he was eight. ‘She was playing pool and I fell in love with her. I said, “I’m going to marry her.”
‘Time went past, she got married and had two kids, and then I came along and said, “Brenda, you’re the one I want.” I was with someone else, but when I saw Brenda again I thought, oh, cool. I wanted her. I had my mind set. Now I just got to convince her to buy me a bulldozer.’
He talked about his welding work, how he set himself to the task and went for it. ‘I’m known as GC at work. The initials don’t stand for Jesus Christ. They stand for Grumpy Cunt.’ I’d met his mum at the Boating Club the previous night and she’d told me Kieran was dyslexic. He said, ‘I was held back in form two for a year, I was so hopeless at reading and writing. I went to high school for nine months. When I turned fifteen – boom, I was out of there and straight away got a job.’
Michael McKay poked his head around the corner and asked, ‘More beers, boys?’ He threw a couple of bottles our way. I said to Kieran, ‘So. The night in question.’
‘I suppose I was the ringleader,’ he said. ‘I was the one who rallied everyone together. I said, “I’ve had a gutsful. Let’s go grab the little bugger.”
‘Me and a mate next door had been working on cars in the shed – oil changes and servicing, that sort of thing. We went to the boat club for a couple of beers and that’s when I got the phone call from the fire chief saying, “You’re on standby.” He’d heard the little bugger was threatening to burn the shop down.
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