A minute or so after everyone turned back to what they had been doing, my phone rang and everyone looked around. I yelled out, ‘It’s a private number’, and the room fell silent. It was Detective Sergeant Phil Sparks, the second in charge of the police investigation. I asked, ‘Is the jury back?’ and he answered, ‘Yes.’
I nodded my head and the room turned into controlled chaos. Most of those under the age of 25 headed for the emergency exit, ran down the 16 flights of stairs and hightailed it for the courthouse. We had had a plan on how everyone was getting to court, and Jayne was in charge of getting Mum and Dad and some others down to the car and driving them. I ran to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and took a deep breath, thinking ‘this is it’.
I grabbed Phil’s ashes, which had been waiting patiently in a discreet bag by the door, and told him this was it, the moment we’d been waiting for: justice was about to prevail.
Ruth and I looked into the foyer, which was filled with enough people to fill two lifts, so for some insane reason I agreed to take the stairs. We had always intended on going by foot to court but definitely not down the stairs! So Ruth, Phil and I descended the 16 flights and ran for the courthouse. I arrived, short of breath and red-faced, just after Jayne entered with my parents.
After putting Phil through the x-ray machine, Ruth and I were the last to enter the courtroom. I sat to the right of Jayne, the jury was brought in and we stood as the judge entered.
Helen was brought into the dock and the court registrar asked the head juror if they had come to a unanimous verdict on each count. He said they had.
‘On the first count of attempted murder, how do you find the accused, guilty or not guilty?’ she asked.
‘Not guilty,’ he said. I was mentally prepared for this so I wasn’t surprised, I just waited for the next one.
‘On the second count of attempted murder, how do you find the accused, guilty or not guilty?’
The head juror replied, ‘Guilty.’
I collapsed in tears of relief onto Jayne’s shoulder, hardly aware of the court registrar asking for the verdict on the murder charge. I knew it would be guilty.
It was such a relief: all the sacrifices I’d made, all the sleepless nights. The word ‘guilty’ on two of the three charges made it all worthwhile. I didn’t get a chance to see Helen’s reaction; I just collapsed onto Jayne and broke down with relief.
Justice Gendall set 20 February as the date for sentencing, then thanked the jury and dismissed them. The courtroom began to clear and we were ushered into the Crown room where we thanked the police and the Crown for their diligent work and took time to take in the verdict.
The media was waiting outside, so Ruth helped us plan an exit strategy. Somehow some of the guys managed to get let out an emergency exit, and I had done an interview with Woman’s Day that would appear in the next week’s issue so I was unable to talk to any other media. So Ruth went out with Andrew and Rhys and started talking to the media while we snuck out.
Everyone was so relieved it was finally over. Back at the apartment Lance played the Meatloaf song ‘Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad’. Ruth dealt with the media and we got on with letting family and friends know the good news. That night we went out for dinner to celebrate.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT I NEEDED some space. Our lives had revolved around court for almost three weeks, so I took Rajon and Lacau out for dinner, then we called in to see Jayne. We got home around 10 p.m.
Dad was concerned about Mum’s foot, as she had tripped earlier and was still in pain. Mum was adamant she’d be fine and just needed a hand to get down the long hallway to the bedroom. I was absolutely exhausted and had the worst toothache. I knew I needed sleep.
We got Mum to bed and I made Dad promise to wake me in an hour if she was still in pain — I just needed a recharge. Dad woke me about 5 a.m. to say Mum hadn’t slept at all and she was in agony. There was no way we could get out of the hotel and into a car by ourselves, so we called an ambulance.
It turned out Mum’s foot was broken. The staff at Christchurch A&E were absolutely amazing, and when I explained I wasn’t going to be able to shower Mum with a cast on her leg and that she was flying to Australia the next afternoon they said they would shower her before putting her cast on. Mum’s nurse noticed I was also in pain and when I explained I had a toothache she admitted me into A&E, gave me some painkillers and put me to bed while they looked after Mum’s foot.
Mum and Dad got away on their flight the following day with Mum in a wheelchair, plastered to the knee. We would have changed their flights as they were arriving home only days before Christmas with no home help or way to shower Mum but because Victim Support had booked their flights we didn’t have the authority to change them.
The property managers in charge of the apartment offered me an excellent price to extend our stay, so the girls and I stayed until after Christmas. We had a lovely Christmas Eve dinner with my children and some good friends. It was a buzz to have special time with family and friends that wasn’t marred by the trial which had consumed every waking minute of our stay in the apartment until the verdict the week before. Things were changing and the focus was beginning to move from justice back towards a sense of a normal life.
AT THE END OF DECEMBER, before we went back to Australia, I received a call from Kurt Bayer, a Christchurch reporter who had covered the trial. He was chasing Greg Murton’s cell-phone number to try to confirm a lead he’d received. We had a casual conversation about how I was feeling and I expressed my desire to confront Helen in jail and ask her why she had killed Phil. I let him know this conversation was off the record and not for printing.
He asked me what I knew about Keith Bonner, who was mentioned in the trial. When I’d received the inquest file and it was noted that the first person the police contacted to come and be with Helen was someone called Keith, I’d assumed that they really meant Barry and never thought any more about it.
That is until a conversation I had with Ruth while we were waiting for the verdict. She spoke about the second day of the trial, when evidence came out that Helen had been having an affair with a man called Keith Bonner for years.
I found it quite shocking that the first person who had been contacted and asked to come and be with Helen after Phil’s death was in fact the person she had been deceiving Phil with throughout the relationship. It was stated in court that they had met on a dating site approximately 15 years previously and he described the relationship as ‘no strings attached’ and ‘friends with benefits’.
Kurt said there was currently a Keith Bonner in jail convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, Tracey Lee Morris, in January 2012. His source had said this was the same man. He was wanting to contact Greg to confirm this information.
Late on 3 January, as I was going to bed, I got an email from Blair at The Press, who I had made plans to talk to after my Woman’s Day article came off the shelves. Blair thought I’d betrayed our agreement. I was furious with Kurt, ringing him and leaving a text message asking, ‘What part of “don’t quote me or print anything I’ve said” didn’t you understand?’ I Googled and found his story was printed in the Otago Daily Times. To say I wasn’t happy was an understatement.
After a restless night I also Googled Keith Bonner and found the court photo of him. I then sent it to Adam and asked if he recognised the picture as a man his mother knew. He replied confirming that both he and his brother Greg were without a doubt it was the same man their mother had a thing with over the years.
I then passed this information on to Blair, who reported on it later that week. My word is my honour and I wasn’t happy that it seemed I’d welshed on our agreement, so I was eager to make sure Blair got the jump on this story.
Helen had been charged on 27 October 2011 with Philip’s murder, and 68 days later Keith Bonner murders his ex-girlfriend in his home. Is this merely a coincidence? I think not! What was the relationship between these two that both had murdered people they had been or
were in a relationship with? Did they have some sort of sick, competitive relationship where what one does, the other feels compelled to do? It’s not often that two seemingly ordinary people who know each other both separately commit murder. My heart went out to Tracey and her family.
AFTER CHRISTMAS WE STAYED AT Shelley’s and were all set for a few weeks camping around the South Island before our return to Australia. But I hadn’t realised how much the trial had taken out of me. I was exhausted, and just the thought of driving, setting up and packing up camp each day was too much to contemplate. Plus the weather wasn’t favourable, with cold temperatures and rain forecast, so we just chilled out at Shelley’s and caught our breath. All we managed to do was venture from Rangiora to Spencer Park north of the city for two nights over New Year’s, where we caught up with my hairdresser Lance and his tribe.
But as usual there was always something to deal with. I went in to Christchurch on 9 January to catch up with Greg Murton and while I was gone Rajon managed to break her toe chasing the little kids around. So that was another trip to the hospital and another speeding ticket as I entered Rangiora. I was looking forward to getting back to Australia and a fresh new start.
We stayed at Rendezvous for the weekend before we left for Australia and spent more time with Lance and Aaron. The girls were going to miss their brothers and leaving them behind in Christchurch wasn’t easy for any of us.
But the New Zealand chapter was over and it was back to a new start on the Sunshine Coast of Australia.
The family at Caloundra RSL, 28 March 2009, the day Phil and Helen returned to New Zealand.
Twenty
The Consequences
We flew in to Brisbane just after seven on the morning of 20 January, ready to start the new chapter of our lives. We stayed with a friend, Sally, while we got settled and looked for a rental. It was only eight days till the girls started school, then three weeks before we would be jumping on a plane again back to New Zealand for sentencing. It was nice to be back in Australia away from it all, where only my friends knew my story and I had a sense of anonymity.
There was so much to do and arrange before our trip back. Now that we finally had justice it was time to lay Phil to rest, so before I’d left New Zealand I had started sending out invites to a memorial to be held straight after the sentencing.
Phil had spent the last four and a half years in limbo, starting at the crematorium office at Linwood until Helen gladly gave up his ashes to our family. Then he spent a week or so with Lance and Sammy before Lance flew him to Mum and Dad at the end of July 2009, where he hung out for the next three years before he took a cruise back to New Zealand with my gear. A friend tried to talk me into taking him on the plane to Christchurch via my Fijian holiday, but the risk of losing him at Customs in another country wasn’t worth it! He spent the next three months on the farm in Marlborough then the next year near the beach in Christchurch. He came to court with me for the verdict, then a friend of mine took care of him till we returned for the sentencing.
The girls settled into school well and I got organised for the next chapter in my life. Because of everything I had gone through in the wake of Phil’s death, I had decided to enrol in a Justice and Legal Studies course at the University of Queensland, looking at moving on to do a law degree. First I had to do a tertiary preparation pathway (TPP) course, so it was back to the books for me.
Sally helped with the order of service covers for the memorial and our cousin Kelvin helped sort things in Christchurch. We made arrangements for a weekend in Hanmer Springs before our return home, well away from Christchurch and the spotlight of the sentencing.
A lot of time in those four weeks was consumed by writing and helping others get their victim impact statements into the police to be scrutinised and approved to be read in court. It’s sad that as a victim you can’t say what you want to — you can’t express your hurt the way you choose; the world has become so sensitive and we daren’t offend the offender.
I wrote two statements, one to hand in and the other to pull out and read in court, but when the time came closer I chose not to take the stand to express my true feelings in the fear of being arrested for contempt of court and ruining Phil’s memorial for everyone. So I sucked it up and adhered to the system.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF 18 FEBRUARY our four family groups converged on Brisbane International Airport: myself, Rajon and Lacau; Mum and Dad; Andrew and Rhys; and my other brother Roger and his wife Nikki. We arrived in Christchurch just before midnight, where we were met by family and friends.
The Wednesday was busy, with Andrew and I finalising the memorial. In the afternoon as I was trying to finish the order of service I received a call. Before a sentencing, all victim impact statements are revised by the police and then submitted by the Crown to the judge and viewed by the defence counsel and the offender. Who is reading each one out in court is also known to all parties.
Ruth and Jayne from the Sensible Sentencing Trust, who had become dear friends, were to read several of the victim impact statements to save members of my family the stress, but unfortunately we were denied the right to choose who read these statements. The counsel for the defendant strongly objected, as Ruth and Jayne were members of SST. I wondered if their objection was influenced by the fact that Helen was about to be slapped with her first ‘three strikes warning’, legislation that had been brought into effect after a tireless SST campaign.
This totally blew my afternoon plans; I was disgusted that the offender’s counsel could further victimise our family in this way. I had to make alternative arrangements for the reading of Mum and Dad’s statement.
It was after 5 p.m. when I left Rendezvous for South City to get the memorial sheets printed. As I drove through the car park to Warehouse Stationery, a vehicle pulled out of a park and T-boned me in the front passenger door. I couldn’t deal with it — I didn’t have time — and without thinking about it properly or checking the damage I told the driver, through tears, not to worry and ran to get my printing done. Some bystanders took the vehicle’s number plate and gave me their details, for which I am immensely grateful. It had been an insane day and if I didn’t get the printing done I was stuffed. The lovely staff at Warehouse Stationery printed the sheets for me even though they knew it would take them past closing time, so it was nice to finish my tasks for the memorial on a positive note.
THE NEXT DAY A GROUP of us met at our hotel and walked to the court. It was a refreshing way to begin what was ahead. As we walked around the side of the court we met up with Lance, my friend and hairdresser, who gave me a reassuring hug and went upstairs to the public gallery with the kids.
The sentencing was held in High Court One, the larger courtroom with an upstairs public gallery. Most of our family and friends went upstairs, except those reading statements and a few others, including Mum and Dad.
There were seats held for us as the place was full. We were seated in the front row for ease of reading statements, and in the row behind us sat some of the jury members. I wanted to speak to them to thank them for giving up their time to be on our case, to hug them and let them know how much their verdicts meant to our family, but that would have caused no end of problems and implications from the defence and media.
The Crown read the victim impact statements from Helen’s son Greg and Phil’s son Zak. I was the first to go up to personally read a statement. I took Phil’s ashes and placed him on the table to the side Helen was on to read my statement and a joint one by Rajon and Lacau. Reading these was very hard and emotional.
I was followed by Dad’s cousin Maureen reading Mum’s victim impact statement then my son Lance reading Dad’s. Andrew finished with his own and his son Rhys’s. Andrew started to break down and I just wanted to get up and be with him but didn’t know if it was out of order to do so. He brought Phil back to me.
This is my father James Nisbet’s victim impact statement, read at the sentencing:
Philip Nisbet is my son.
I loved my son with all of my heart. To get to my age in life and lose my son to murder is a nightmare that I wish I could wake up from.
Phil’s untimely death has seen my health and memory rapidly decline. I will never again have the quality of life that I used to enjoy. The months and years of lies and deceit by Helen have taken a toll on me.
We welcomed Helen into our family and treated her as one of our own. We stayed with her after Phil’s funeral believing that we were grieving together, but it was all a lie. She couldn’t wait until we were gone so her new man could move in and she could begin her new life from Phil’s life insurance.
The hurt and deceit she has caused us with the suicide note and claiming that Ben was not our grandson was painful and stressful.
We have suffered enormous financial loss as we had to travel to New Zealand to attend Phil’s inquest hearing and the trial. Now we are back again for the sentencing.
To realise that Helen spent months planning and attempting to murder my son fills my heart with pain.
To my son, I will always love you and miss you! My heart aches to know that your sons will grow up without their father and that you should have outlived us, your mum and dad.
I feel helpless that there is nothing that I can do and do not wish this tragedy on anyone.
This is my mother Yvonne Nisbet’s victim impact statement:
Philip Nisbet is my son.
The pain of losing my precious son has truly broken my heart. I find it difficult to get out of bed in the morning and at times I lose my will to live.
My health has deteriorated like an avalanche since Phil’s untimely death and I find it difficult to do everyday things.
Black Widow, The: How One Woman Got Justice for Her Murdered Brother Page 16