The Scene of the Crime

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The Scene of the Crime Page 8

by Steve Braunias


  ‘That was the time I really got to drill down and see what was going on. There was an observation written about him every hour, regardless of day or night, and I interviewed him incessantly every working day. And things had altered. Things had changed. He still had this core paranoia of being followed, but he kept presenting these really odd symptoms which didn’t make any sense. In fact, I was sure after about two weeks that he had been coached. That he’d done some reading, or had been meeting somebody trying to work out how to present certain things.’

  ‘Is he mad?’

  ‘He’s not mad in the psychiatric sense. He’s a person with a damaged personality and a paranoid view of the world, and has great difficulty maintaining normal relationships.’

  I asked, ‘Is he interesting?’

  ‘Moderately so,’ he said. ‘He’s not somebody you have scintillating conversations with. But he genuinely does try to make contact with you as a person. He’s good at reading people. He’s very good at getting information from people. In fact, he’s excellent at that.’

  ‘Is he charming?’

  ‘Occasionally, when he was after something, or was just having a good day. He could be quite pleasant. But you do see that a lot in these psychopathic individuals. That they do have the superficial charm, and the ability to engage with people. It’s only as the relationship develops over time that the more unacceptable stuff comes out. He was consistently violent in all of his relationships with women.’

  ‘What forms a “psychopathic individual”?’

  Dr Goodwin replied, ‘His early life was pretty damned miserable. His childhood was awful. He was extraordinarily ambivalent about his mother; she’d beat him, but at one level he probably cared about her. He was certainly upset when she died. He did have some attachment.

  ‘He was exposed to violence from a very young age. Not only from his mother, but from his father when he was around, and the boarders, and people from the Jehovah’s Witness — they’d regularly dole out beatings at the instructions of his mother. Violence was something he grew up with. And sexual abuse, too. It gives you a background that everything else is built on.’

  I said, ‘You diagnosed him as having a severe personality disorder. What does that mean?’

  ‘He sees the world as a place he has to try to control. But the rest of him is functioning. He was a very successful car thief. He was a self-taught mechanic. He had a good work ethic.’

  ‘Was that undone by P?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He had been functioning before that. For instance, he was quite well versed in martial arts.’

  I asked, ‘Is that why he had a Samurai sword?’

  ‘Well, at the age of 15, he was found with two Samurai swords under his bed. He had a real interest and training in martial arts. But mostly he was interested in cars.’

  ‘What did you find about him that was likeable?’

  He said, ‘Not a lot I would say was likeable. He was personable, and reasonable most of the time.’

  ‘Do you think he’s at risk to himself?’

  ‘When you go to prison, you get control taken away from you. It’ll be really difficult for him. If he can’t exert some control, I think he does represent a risk to himself.’

  ‘Were you astonished when he appeared in court wearing that haircut?’

  He laughed, and said, ‘I was! But I thought he’d do something. One time we found he’d secreted a razor blade in his rectum, and he later told me it was his intention to go to court and slash himself up in front of the judge.’

  I said, ‘The night of the crimes in 2003 — what the hell was all that about?’

  He said, ‘I’ve looked for an explanation. In my position, you’ve got to make sense of it. Here’s somebody who has a fairly damaged personality, constitutionally paranoid, all the time, and then he gets heavily into P, and becomes increasingly wired. And rather than it being free-floating, he starts to latch onto specific things that confirm his paranoia. And the thing that really triggered the violence in the end was his conviction that he couldn’t trust Renee and Simonne.

  ‘I think once he started it, once it had happened, he realised just how serious it was. And what he started to do was to work out, “Well, I might as well get a bit of notoriety out of this.” I think that appealed to him, to keep the night going. I have no doubt his intention was to take out more than one person that night. He was trying to generate a fairly spectacular event.’

  ‘Did he ever show remorse to you?’

  ‘I didn’t see any,’ he said. ‘He never said sorry about Te Aute. I think he did regret what had happened to the girls at one level. But he didn’t feel as though he had lost anything in those relationships. Even though he attacked them, it didn’t make a great deal of difference from his perspective.

  ‘When he was about 17, he was seen by a psychiatrist. He wrote in his report, “Dixon seems devoid of moral or social conscience.” I think that’s probably right.’

  ‘Will he have therapy in prison?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ought he?’

  ‘If he develops more symptoms, or remains psychotic, he’ll be treated. But in terms of actual therapy to change his view of the world, of trying to undo years of abuse and neglect, then, no, that’s not going to occur in prison.’

  I said, ‘That’s an appropriately dismal way to end our interview.’

  Dr Goodwin said, ‘It’s a dismal story. It’s sordid. It’s a sordid little affair.’

  That morning, when Justice Potter sentenced him to life imprisonment, Dixon clapped his hands, and shouted: ‘Bring back the electric chair!’ He wore a smile on his smooth, gormless face. The grinning idiot left the courtroom, and was led down a narrow corridor. They really may as well have strapped him in then and there and released the volts.

  Chapter 4

  That spring: ‘Mr X’

  1

  For four weeks one spring, a sad-eyed, moustachioed Iranian apple-picker and a cheerful Maori woman who managed an escort agency were forced to sit together in the High Court of Auckland, jointly charged with conspiring to supply methamphetamine, a.k.a. P. It was pitiful and depressing and I couldn’t tear myself away.

  The public gallery was empty, except for two detectives involved in the arrest and an occasional family member of the two accused. I sat in on the trial by chance. I turned up at the High Court one day to see if a case caught my fancy. I came across a friend who had previously worked in journalism. His appearance — he was a dapper, elegant figure, with silver hair and an ironic smile — beat all the odds by managing to equal his splendidly Victorian name: Hedley Mortlock. He had found work as a court registrar. Black gowns suited him. I asked him whether there was anything juicy marked down for the day. No, he said, it was business as usual. He was right. I did the rounds, walking in and out of trials, until I stopped in at Courtroom 7 for the trial of Gholemreza Nobakht and Gina Rye.

  The two ‘conspirators’, according to the prosecution, intended to supply 768 grams of crystal meth. Police valued the haul at $750,000, at roughly $1000 a gram. ‘It was a good intercept,’ said the detective in charge. But I only became aware of that later.

  I arrived mid-way through the trial. As soon as I took my seat in the public gallery, a prosecutor told the jury that he was going to play a film. You could describe it as secret footage. You could also describe it as very dull, but that would be a wild exaggeration — it was so entirely boring that I was glued to my seat, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Nothing happened.

  The film was a 70-minute surveillance tape of Nobakht and another man at Auckland International Airport’s arrivals lounge. They, too, were waiting; they, too, experienced the agony of the viewer, because nothing happened. Nobakht ate a burger at McDonald’s. He was a fastidious diner. A strong man, slow in his movements, there was almost something dainty about the way he unpeeled the wrapper. His friend sat with him, rolled a couple of Park Royal cigarettes, left, came back. They both looked aroun
d, a lot. The friend used his mobile phone, a lot. They hardly talked to one another. On and on the 70-minute film continued, its grainy images projected onto a screen opposite the jury, its apparently meaningless narrative brightened by cameo appearances of other people at the arrivals lounge — a black man poring over a street map, a fat woman wolfing down a burger and fries without pause or napkins.

  Hooked by the riddle of that private screening, I stayed on until the trial finished three weeks later, writing down the unimportant details of an unimportant trial, my feet up, sharpening pencils and allowing the shavings to fall on the carpet, sloping outside now and then to smoke a cigarette beneath the magnolia tree in the front courtyard, then sloping back inside into the warmth of the courtroom — yes, I was quite comfortable, thanks. When the trial ended, my troubles began.

  I worked for the Sunday Star-Times. What sort of story could I write? I wasn’t providing the newspaper with any kind of scoop; it had no particular drama, no moral lesson; it fell far short of the standards required of sensationalism.

  The opening sentence of my story read, ‘An Iranian living in Japan walks into a bar in Bangkok with another country on his mind: New Zealand.’ I was very taken with the racy tabloid flavour of that introduction — but it doomed the rest of the story to follow in its footsteps, as I set out to attempt a dramatic narrative of international connections and high intrigue. It was the worst story I wrote in five years employed at the newspaper, a jangling mess — like all racy tabloid prose, it read like bad fiction, an inexpert, constipated thriller (sample: ‘The mule was turned into a pigeon’), its eager revelations tugging at the reader’s sleeve to get their attention.

  But what drew me to the trial, kept me pinned to my seat, was its sheer ordinariness. I was seduced by the flat, seedy New Zealandness of the crime, by the familiar misery of courtroom justice. It was so entirely average, because it was exactly the kind of trial that had moved in like a plague across the high courts of New Zealand. The war on P was hell on court staff.

  In 2003, the government introduced legislation that promoted the drug from Class B to Class A; almost immediately, P trials began to overload the court system. They became the meat and drink of the High Court trials, and the press viewed them as much of a shabby muchness. The P trial in the spring of 2006 had nothing. Nothing to set it apart, nothing of news value, nothing to declare except the banality and despair of all P trials — and the riddle of the secret footage.

  2

  Nobakht was 41; Rye, 36. When I first saw them in court, I assumed they were a couple. Their heads were close together as they sat in the little crate of the defendants’ box. Actually, they loathed each other.

  To return to that boring surveillance film: police contended that it showed Nobakht lingering at the arrivals lounge to follow a drug courier bringing in the crystal meth to New Zealand. The courier was a Godot who never arrived. He’d already been arrested, at Customs. By the time he was released, to play out his new, undercover role given to him by police, Nobakht had left the airport.

  Nobakht was later arrested, and when he appeared at the High Court, enough evidence had been accumulated for the prosecution to label him as ‘the overseer’, the man in charge of the P once it arrived in New Zealand. He was charged with importing and supplying a Class A drug. The buyer, according to prosecution, was Gina Rye. She was charged with supply of a Class A drug. Like Nobakht, she denied the charges, and pleaded not guilty. Nobakht presented himself as a Hawke’s Bay apple-picker. Rye said she ran an escort agency. She could have called herself a madam, but her mischief ran higher than that; the title she preferred was ‘mama-san.’

  Rye — long-haired and wide-faced, described as ‘solidly built’ by one police officer who had kept her under surveillance, and, less flatteringly, by another cop on the surveillance team, as ‘plump’ — was loose, liked a good time; Nobakht was upright, no fun. From his cross-examination:

  How do Iranian men view prostitution as a business, run by a woman?

  I cannot tell you how bad it is, but it is very very very bad.

  His pieties did him no favours. Of course the jury could only consider the evidence presented in court, and the evidence against Nobakht was damning. But it was obvious they found him difficult to like or understand. Closed off, a mysterious Other, he was too . . . Iranian. He had come to New Zealand in 1998 for political asylum. He had been a lieutenant in the Iranian Air Force. In the New Zealand social pecking order, an Iranian refugee is near the bottom of the heap; Rye, too, was identified in court as a low-life, a Maori woman with tattoos on her back, a ‘mama-san’ who ran hookers, and who described herself as a ‘transient’, but she was one of us, as recognisable by her skin as her speech. Police had intercepted her texts to family: Luv ya heaps, she wrote.

  Nobakht had no redeeming informalities. From the evidence of a police officer sent to arrest Nobakht at his house in Napier:

  Are you able to tell the court anything of Mr Nobakht’s demeanour?

  He was concerned that we had not taken off our shoes inside his house.

  A woman who had visited Nobakht also gave evidence.

  You would know that in the toilet you had to put on a pair of slippers to go into the toilet?

  Yes.

  And step out of them when you left the toilet?

  Yes.

  Your New Zealand style and Mr Nobakht’s eastern style had its differences, do you agree with that?

  No, I think that when two cultures come together, people have to learn about each other’s cultures and he wouldn’t give me time to learn about his culture and he would never try to learn about mine. He expected every New Zealander to become eastern and he would never try to westernise himself. You’d think if he came to this country he should try and do that a little bit.

  Her whining reply was the authentic voice of middle New Zealand. It judged Nobakht guilty of another kind of crime: resistance to mend his foreign ways, failure to observe and share in the New Zealand way of life.

  When Nobakht elected to give evidence, he asked for a translator. This was repeatedly mocked by the prosecution, who implied it was a put-on, a tactic to give him time to prepare his answers while the translator muttered to him in Farsi — Nobakht had lived in New Zealand for eight years, surely he knew enough English? In any case, it clearly vexed the jury, because it dragged out the trial even more. Even the translator seemed as though he found Nobakht repulsive. Forced to act out his role in court as Nobakht’s confidant and amanuensis, he scowled his way through the onerous translation, and couldn’t move from Nobakht’s side fast enough whenever recess was called.

  Nobakht wouldn’t speak English, wouldn’t assimilate; he wasn’t a New Zealander; he wasn’t even human — he was likened to a grasping, scuttling, creeping creature of the underworld. From the cross-examination of an arresting officer:

  Is it customary for the police when dealing with a large operation to give such an operation a name?

  Yes.

  And the police have named this operation, that this trial is about, Operation Precious, is that right?

  Yes.

  Was this name taken from—

  Prosecution: Objection, Your Honour. Relevance.

  Her Honour: I don’t see any relevance.

  Defence: As Your Honour pleases. I will move on . . .

  What this concealed is that Operation Precious was taken from The Lord of the Rings. Gholem, an abbreviation of Nobakht’s first name, sounds like Gollum: ‘My preciousssss . . .’

  And yet this Gollum who appeared in the High Court of Auckland had a wife and daughter. They sat in the public gallery. Now and then so did someone who knew Rye, a young Maori guy who wore his address tattooed on his forehead: EAST COAST. His presence may not have won the hearts of the jury. But Nobakht’s wife was a lovely woman, Maori, asthmatic, bewildered, grieving, and their young daughter was quite frankly an adorable little girl, perhaps three years old, with big, dark eyes, long eyelashes, and beautiful c
olouring. Together, they made a heartbreaking sight. Nobakht’s wife was convinced that her husband was innocent. He picked apples from 6am to 6pm, she said. He was a good provider, a good father. But the prosecution twisted everything, made him look so guilty . . . We would talk outside the courtroom, her daughter at her feet, playing with a teddy bear. And this was one of the familiar miseries of a trial. I have seen it so many times: the helplessness of the family of the accused.

  As a trial grinds on, as the days and weeks pass, the family can only sit and watch, and wait for judgment. They can’t do anything, they can’t intervene — they can’t make it stop. They are surplus to the court’s requirements. They are reduced to bystanders. They have nothing to hold on to, and they float away, like kites, always in sight, but always hovering just out of reach. Anxious and exhausted, worn down, their skin takes on a courtroom pallor — pale, bloodless.

  Meanwhile, the accused sits on display in the defendants’ crate. In front are the rows for lawyers, and then the judge’s bench; the jury sits on the left. There is nothing to look at except each other. The room contracts, tightens its grip as the days and weeks pass. All trials are a purgatory, the outcome suspended between verdicts of guilty or not guilty, jail or freedom. Life is put on hold. Something resembling life takes its place. The lawyers swish their gowns, chant their obedience to the judge: ‘As Your Honour pleases’, ‘Yes, sir’, ‘Yes, ma’am’. Clerks deliver fresh pages of transcript. Slowly, quietly, agonisingly, the court goes about its business, does the paperwork, measures out the exposures as the days and weeks pass . . .

  Outside the High Court of Auckland, the paved entrance is dominated by an enormous magnolia tree, its flowers as luscious and ripe as a succulent fruit. There is wisteria, too, prettily spreading itself about. The lawns are neatly manicured. It’s a very nice part of town, ordered and posh, probably the most Wellington that Auckland gets, with its rare concentration of a lot of men wearing suits and expensive overcoats — the High Court attracts numerous nearby law firms. It’s also probably the most English that boisterous, yahooing Auckland gets — Parliament Street, Princes Street, Waterloo Quad. Opposite the court is ye olde Old Government House, and the luxuriousness of the university gardens. The High Court building itself has been superbly restored to its original nineteenth-century design, when architect Edward Ramsey modelled it on the English image of Warwick Castle.

 

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