She said he misquoted the Bible, and his version of Jehovah’s Witness teachings were confused. ‘The things he used to say were really wrong. I know a little about it. My nana is a Jehovah’s Witness, and I did Bible Studies to appease her from 10 to about 12.’
Yes, she told Hart, she had problems in childhood. ‘But not in the same calibre as him.’ Dixon ‘was always unbalanced, I guess you’d call it’. Hart asked her about his religious ‘rantings’, and she said, ‘Before the end, when I got chopped up and stuff, he was really full-on.’
Hart said, ‘We’ll get to that day later.’
In March 2002, she bought a home on the Hauraki Plains. She had plans to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, and run a naturopathy clinic. Meanwhile, Dixon was phoning her 20 times a day, saying that people were trying to kill him. He heard voices in his head. He continued his habit of pacing, ‘up and down, back and forth, his arms flailing’. Their relationship — ‘tumultuous, a horrible dysfunctional cycle’ — came to an end, but in June that year, Dixon ‘sleazed his way back into my bed’. She got pregnant, and had an abortion in September.
Her evidence got to that day, on Tuesday, 21 January 2003.
She described the attack. Hart asked her to slow down so that the court stenographer could catch up. She told how Dixon asked her into the dining room. He locked the door behind her and ordered her to sit down at the table. Renee Gunbie was already there. She was bleeding from a cut in her neck. Dixon started screaming, accusing them both of being ‘in with’ the police, ‘working against him’, that they had to die, that they were ‘sacrifices’.
She said, ‘His god had told him we were going to die. The New World Order was taking over. He went on about Allah for a little bit. He was screaming, and bouncing about, just crazy and psycho and horrible. I’d always been able to calm him down in the past, but he just wasn’t responding to me.’
Hart: ‘And then?’
Butler: ‘And then we were all screaming.’
Paramedics estimated that Gunbie was five to ten minutes from death when they arrived. She was handless, scalped, and her throat was slit. Butler’s left hand was reattached in a marathon 27-hour surgery. Both women were taken to Middlemore Hospital; a few days after the attack, flowers were sent to their rooms. Gunbie received tiger lilies and gerberas. There was a note. It read: With love. Sorry. Tony.
In cross-examination, Butler talked more about the attack. She said: ‘I don’t know who he went for first. I think he went back and forth between us.’ And then she came up with the most evocative line of the entire trial: ‘There was just so much screaming and blood and silver.’
The language students were given a powerful lesson in how plain English can seem so cryptic, so loaded with meaning.
Hart asked her about the week leading up to the attack. She remembered she had gone to the Big Day Out concert in Auckland. Jane’s Addiction was the headline act. On the following Saturday, she visited Dixon’s ex-wife.
‘I don’t remember Sunday and Monday. And then Tuesday . . .’ She sighed, and said in a flat voice: ‘Tuesday was Tuesday.’
4
You don’t have to be the world’s leading authority on the hallucinogenic stimulant ketamine to be called as an expert psychiatric witness in a trial about a killer under the influence of another mind-blowing chemical, but it probably helps. Dr Karl Jansen was a tall shrink. He loomed at a height of about 6’ 6”. He wore boots, jeans, a tan leather jacket. He had worked at the Glastonbury rock festival in England as an on-site psychiatrist. At Otago University, he studied the use and consequences of magic mushrooms. His work on Ecstasy was admired. His interest in ketamine partly derived from personal experience: it was given to him as an anaesthetic after a motorbike accident, and it brought on a NDE — a near-death experience. He told an interviewer, ‘I had the full effect. Tunnels of high speed, the light, God, life review, out-of-body, the lot.’ He published numerous papers on how the ketamine experience mimics the NDE in terms of brain functioning and blockage of neurotransmitters.
Jansen, a New Zealander practising psychiatry in London, was a defence witness at Dixon’s trial. His essential position was that Dixon was mentally ill at the time of the killings, and also that his illness predated his use of P. The drug, Jansen said, aggravated Dixon’s symptoms, which he listed as ‘impulsive . . . explosive . . . paranoid . . . narcissistic . . . psychotic’.
He spoke at great length about everything. He said everything in the same calm, measured voice. His accent was a kind of masterpiece of fastidious Englishness. He stroked the sound of each syllable; he was careful never to pronounce the first ‘h’ in the word ‘methamphetamine’. The jury surely hated him.
Jansen went too far. It was one thing for his fussy enunciation and polysyllabic replies to make everyone listening feel as they, too, were experiencing a NDE. That made him merely unlikeable. But he walked gaily into the zone of looking completely ridiculous on the day that he speculated that Dixon’s bulging, staring eyes at the opening of the trial might have been a symptom of a thyroid condition — that’s ‘thyroid’ with a silent h.
Over and over, prosecutor Simon Moore put it to him that Dixon was faking a mental illness. The word he used was ‘malingering’.
Moore: ‘Do you accept evidence of malingering, doctor?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. Malingering is present. But it is entirely possible to malinger, and act the madman, and also to have a core of paranoid illness behind that. And once you say he’s not ill, he’s pretending, you’re also saying he doesn’t need any treatment. If you’re wrong, that’s a huge responsibility. There is so much evidence that he is not of sound mind.’
Moore: ‘He said before the trial that he thought of turning up in a nightgown, or would claim he was the son of God. Another psychiatrist has told us that Mr Dixon was too crazy to be genuine. Do you accept that?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. He has clearly manufactured some of his symptoms. But Mr Dixon is what was once known as a psychopath, and is now called a dissocial or anti-social personality disorder.’
Moore: ‘Mr Dixon has said that God is a triangle. In prison, he claimed he saw a ghost called Sid. The problem, doctor, is that there are some areas which quite clearly are a nonsense and a fabrication. Do you accept that?’
Jansen: ‘I accept that. But this is a complex man in a complex case. Mr Dixon has said things to me like, “I’ve been fucked by 50 men.” I thought this was unlikely. But there is evidence he has been abused. It may have been the case. Terrible things have happened to Mr Dixon.’
Dixon grew up among outpatients from Carrington Psychiatric Hospital in a boarding house on Vermont Street in Ponsonby. His mother, a devout but unstable Jehovah’s Witness, tied him to the clothesline. He was ordered to bark like a dog. The lunatics sexually abused him. As an adult, he made a good living as a car thief, but was constantly in and out of prison. By 2002, further out of his mind on P, he raved that cop cars were following him everywhere he went, that 747 aircraft trained cameras on him on their flight path over the deserted Hauraki Plains, that secret cameras were likewise trained on him by courier vans and taxis — the kayakers on the brown Piako River were also maintaining covert surveillance. One day, he cut open his leg with a penknife because he wanted to dig out a tracking device.
Barry Hart asked the jury, ‘What more do we have to prove that the accused had a disease of the mind?’ Jansen and another psychiatrist called by the defence gave their expert opinion that Dixon had a disease of the mind, and was mentally ill. Two psychiatrists called by the prosecution gave their expert opinion that Dixon maybe had a few problems, but was as sound as a bell. Farce was never going to be far away in a dichotomy as clear as that, and it duly arrived when co-prosecutor Richard Marchant meant to ask psychiatrist Dr David Chaplow, ‘Is it your opinion that Dixon is suffering from a disease of the mind?’ But what he actually asked was, ‘Is it your opinion that Dixon is suffering from an opinion of the mind?’
Farce is brief. Tragedy lasts. Backstage, outside the court, Jansen was funny and charming company; it’s always exciting to chat with a genius. Inside the court, I loathed him. Dr Jansen, his credentials bringing in another superlative to the trial — world’s greatest living authority on a horse tranquiliser — was the hipster quack and exasperating, long-winded bore who looked as though Dixon had pulled the wool over his eyes. I thought: he couldn’t tell Dixon was playing him for a fool.
But Jansen was right. He told the court, ‘Mr Dixon may yet end his life. I think the risk is high.’
5
One of the remarkable aspects of the Dixon trial was the quality of the lead counsel. Crown prosecutor Simon Moore and defence lead Barry Hart were then in their pomp. Yet more superlatives: they were the best in their field, or the most in-demand — Moore took on all of the big cases, Hart likewise. Courtroom 6 was oftentimes a match of wits between the two bastions. In fact, they were friends. They both belonged to the same hunt club. There was a warmth to their little off-the-record exchanges in court. A kind of nostalgic glow rests over their work on the trial. The well-fed, beautifully spoken Moore, a King’s College old boy and one-time Northern Club president, ended up a High Court judge; Hart, small and thin-lipped with a shock of white hair, his gauche manner and Kiwi vowels plainly not to the manor born, was later struck off after he was found guilty of professional misconduct and ‘gross overcharging’. He was also made bankrupt, with debts of over $30 million.
Hart was a cold man. He had a black belt in karate, was brisk, unsmiling, vain. But I interviewed him a few years before the Dixon trial, and remember sitting with him in the dark one evening in his chambers while he wept, talking about his mother. ‘In the last two years of her life, she actually had both legs cut off. And . . . It . . . She . . . It was really hard for her, being wheeled around and not being active. Yet she became the champion of her rest home.’
At the Dixon trial in 2005, supping from the trough of legal aid (‘I’m not exactly crying poverty,’ he said to me), his name in enormous letters on the side of his chambers in expensive Herne Bay, a familiar, scary sight in the High Court, Hart was at his undazzling best. No one ever accused him of eloquence or intellectual flair. He did rave and he did rant. He shouted, a lot. ‘There stands an innocent man!’, etc. His closing address at the Dixon trial was the longest of his career. It was a shocking mess. Much of it seemed extempore, improvised, off the cuff; Hart lost the thread, found another one, went around in circles, and once lost his footing and nearly fell face-first into the lectern.
His best form of defence was always attack. He had a superb eye for advantages. Hart lodged an appeal after the 2003 trial — and was successful in having the conviction quashed. He argued that Justice Judith Potter failed to correctly address issues of insanity, and that she should have directed the jury to consider an alternative charge of manslaughter. He won a second trial, in 2008. It was a replica of the first, right down to the verdict: guilty.
Dixon committed suicide the night before sentencing. The inquest into his death heard that he strangled himself with a piece of cloth torn from something called an ‘anti-suicide blanket’. He had been returned to the cell just hours before from a ‘tie-down’ room, where his hands and legs were restrained to prevent self-harm. He covered the CCTV camera with wet toilet paper. There was blood splattered on the door at head-height and lower, suggesting he’d hurled himself at the side of his cell.
Coroner Garry Evans ruled that Dixon took his own life, and said: ‘Had Mr Dixon been moved to accommodation in the Mason Clinic or other mental-health unit, it’s unlikely he would have died.’
Before the suicide, Hart had talked of another appeal, of forcing a third trial. He probably would have lost that one as well. Moore was too good for him. Moore, the golden boy of his generation; Moore, who had survived the humiliation of the media discovering a photo of him wearing a red tinsel wig and a fake pair of women’s breasts on a boat coming back from the Pitcairn Islands, where he prosecuted the famous sex abuse case; Moore, with his superior grooming and his thrilling voice, told a more powerful story than Hart. He spoke slowly, carefully, and kept his eyes narrowed.
He told the jury, ‘Dixon is not normal. But he was a man in control and in charge. It was just an attack by angry man. This was the extreme end of domestic violence.’
And then he demonstrated the Samurai attack. He raised the imaginary sword above his head with both hands. He held it there. His waistcoat rode up, and revealed a plump tum straining against his white shirt. Farce, briefly; and then tragedy, enduringly, as Moore brought down the pretend lethal weapon fast, again and again, chopping, slicing, miming all that ‘screaming and blood and silver’, and said: ‘He hit them as hard as he could with the intention to kill. This isn’t a madman out of control. It’s all planned. It’s all precise. This is an execution. Nothing this man does is an accident . . . This case is all about understanding the human spirit.’
6
I was mooching around inside Courtroom 6 the day after the jury were sent out to deliberate when I heard two soft, really quite polite knocks on a door. It was the jury. They had reached their verdict. It was 11.03am. A junior lawyer was brushing her hair, a detective was reading the sports pages of The New Zealand Herald; otherwise, the court was quiet and deserted, as it had been since the jury was sent out at 12.17pm the previous day. And then came those taps on the door. Within 20 minutes, the courtroom was packed, at attention, silent, tense, wondering, waiting for the final word on the seven-week trial.
Seven weeks of beautiful weather, blue day after blue day, cicadas scratching up a racket in the courtyard magnolia. So many other cases came and went. Heavyweight boxer David Tua was there that first week to fight his ex-manager for money. He strummed his guitar in the shade on Parliament Street, and chowed down on $30 steaks at the nearby Hyatt for lunch. There were appearances by the Refugee Status Authority, and Pop ’n’ Good Popcorn. The First Samoan Pentecostal Church v The Door of Hope City Church was heard in chambers.
Mad, or bad? The pointless question was about to be answered. Two rows of journalists were there. Joyce was there. Thin and giddy, she was a veteran spectator of High Court trials, had seen a lot in her time, but the Dixon trial was something special. I talked to her that first week. She was genuinely excited. ‘It’s got everything!’ she said. ‘There’s drugs, there’s murder, there’s maiming, there’s kidnapping!’
Joyce’s companion, Helga, was there. Joyce was nimble, cheerful; Helga walked stiffly beneath a big black umbrella in the sun, and never smiled. ‘I know the boy,’ she said. She knew Dixon when he was a child. She was friends with his mother. They were both Jehovah’s Witnesses. She said in passing one day to me that evolutionists and psychiatrists were encouraged to practise sodomy.
Kathie Hills was there. She came every single day. She took swigs from a homeopathic remedy to steady her nerves. I don’t know whether it did her any good. She is Renee Gunbie’s mother.
Hart was there, Moore was there, Justice Judith Potter was there, a gracious lady who was in the ungracious habit of yawning with her mouth open. Dixon was there. His haircut had grown back, and resembled someone normal. But he plainly wasn’t well. He had vomited in the police van on the way to court earlier that week; he was given something light to eat to settle his stomach, but then he was rushed from the court, and threw up, loudly and heavily, on his way to the cells. He also had diarrhoea.
He was such a wretch, hopeless and demented, and horrible right to the bitter end. After he was found guilty, Justice Potter remanded him for sentencing, and he was bundled out of the courtroom. Kathie Hills sarcastically said to him on his way out: ‘See you later, Tony.’ Just before he disappeared, he got in his reply: ‘It won’t get you her hand back.’
A few minutes later, Courtroom 6 was once again quiet and deserted. A trolley was brought in to wheel out the great stack of court files; police discussed the removal of exhibits, including bulle
t fragments taken from James Te Aute, the gun, the Samurai sword.
I took away something else. A kind of souvenir, filched from the rubbish tin in Courtroom 6 — Dixon’s Styrofoam drinking cup, with his handwriting on the side. He’d given it to Barry Hart while they were waiting for the jury to come in. It was a thoughtful gesture, a kind of condolence. It read: If anyone’s fucked this case it’s me.
7
The last time I saw Dixon was a month later, at sentencing, on a Friday morning. That afternoon, I went to the offices of forensic psychiatrist Dr Ian Goodwin. He said, ‘I know Tony pretty well.’
He’d interviewed ‘Tony’ more times than anyone — 17 sessions, when Dixon was held at the Mason Clinic — and had declared him sane. His opinion was crucial to the verdict, to Dixon’s fate. He was affable and gentle, a little bewildered by the media’s demonising of Dixon. He said he saw people as damaged as him all the time. It was as though he overlooked the severing of hands.
I asked, ‘When did you first meet Tony?’
‘When he was admitted to us about 48 hours after his arrest,’ he said. ‘He asked me to kill him. He was initially quite agitated, and wound up, and paranoid. He was talking about using large amounts of P. He gradually came down.
‘And then it all took a really interesting twist. About a year later, Barry Hart had obtained two independent psychiatric reports, one from Karl Jansen and another from Paul Mullin, and they basically said, albeit in rather guarded terms, that the guy didn’t seem very well and wasn’t fit to stand trial — or, in the words of the law, would have been “under a disability”. That’s interesting. The court only needed two such opinions; if you’re found “under a disability”, that’s the end game. There’s no trial. The Crown was alarmed, so he was transferred to us again, for another assessment, and that’s when I cared for him full-time. I ended up with him for 30 days in total.
The Scene of the Crime Page 7