The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  5

  King went on a sickness benefit in the late 1980s. He couldn’t find work as an architect. He was fading from view, retreating, going underground. All the wretched Mondays at art openings — he didn’t stand a chance. He couldn’t claim the same pretensions, was lost in their maze of put-downs and snobbery. Over thick espresso coffee served in china thimbles at a Ponsonby villa, painter John Reynolds and his brother Patrick, who photographs sliding doors and such for magazines, recreated King’s agony.

  John said, ‘I thought he was a tremendously opaque individual. Hard to read. And most people who met him had this sense of — you just backed away a little bit. There was a disquiet about him, because—’

  Patrick interrupted, ‘Why was he at the art openings? There was no engagement with the work on the walls.’

  John said, ‘Derek was someone you didn’t want to spend time with. Not because he was odious or malevolent; you just had the sense that—’

  Patrick interrupted, ‘He was slightly slippery, though.’

  John said, ‘Well, you just had this feeling—’

  Patrick interrupted, ‘He was all wrong.’

  John completed his previous sentence, ‘That he was out of alignment.’

  ‘Very bad sunglasses,’ said Patrick. ‘Too big and too flashy, and wearing them at night! And also the baffling perm.’

  John said, ‘He needed to get out in the sun a bit more.’

  Patrick said, ‘The pale, pale skin and the tight hair. And there was a sponginess to him; he wasn’t a coiled spring, he was the reverse to a coiled spring.’

  ‘Dissolute,’ said John. ‘He was dissolute. And conversations didn’t actually advance with him. He didn’t have anything to say.’

  ‘He’d make these sly asides,’ said Patrick. ‘Non sequiturs. And you get this feeling of being trapped with him.’

  ‘All of us have that social antennae where you pick up some sense of a person’s chemistry, or you get a sense of their social animus,’ said John, ‘and there was a palpable sense there was never any Mrs Derek.’

  6

  But he had another, better life, full of lissome young Maori girls, back at his townhouse, in that sealed dark zone of fantasy and grime. He said in court that he first came across street-kids in 1986 — a couple of glue-sniffers, in Albert Park, homeless, ‘living in the sewer’, runaways from foster homes and abusive families. Then he discovered 40 more, hanging around Karangahape Road. Hardly anyone lived in the city back then; King had downtown Auckland almost all to himself, it was his patch; the arrival of street-kids, frightened and tough, offered him company, society, purpose.

  He was asked in court, ‘Your house was made available to young people. How did that happen?’

  He said, ‘Living in the city, when I go out, I’m in Queen Street, that’s my patch, that’s my suburb, you know. And there they were. It never occurred to me that that would happen in a first-world economy. After the stock-market crash, it really went off then. And they got to know me as somebody who helps them out. There was a huge problem and the community wasn’t handling it. I suddenly realised, “I have to do something. I can’t just walk away from it.” That’s when I made the decision that there was no net for them, there was nothing for them. Goodness me, it — it just took you over really, it’s quite amazing . . .’

  King rented out the top floor of his townhouse to TV production company Cinco Cine. A friend remembered, ‘He used to drop blankets and food left over from film shoots to the street-kids over Grafton Bridge at night . . . We were seriously under the impression that he was being compassionate towards them with no other motives.’

  Another woman who knew him said, ‘He used to go on about how they were on the street as they were being abused at home, and that’s why he also had some of them to stay, sometimes for months at a time. He probably imagined himself as some kind of hero.’

  Well, wasn’t he operating at some level of goodness? As well as providing blankets and food for street-kids living rough under Grafton Bridge, there were many other acts of kindness, or patronage, over the years. He bought tampons and make-up, offered shelter, warmth, food; he did nice things. ‘I suppose so,’ said Nikita Jones, who showed up at his door in 1997. ‘Everyone would leave their dirty clothes there, and he’d wash them all with the Lux flakes. He fed us his famous cheese and onion on toast. But he was a cunt.’

  She meant the time he found her when she tried to slash her wrists, and responded by throwing her out of the house. ‘He shooed me out the door, going “Fuck off, fuck off!”, and I was pissing blood everywhere. That’s when I turned on him.’

  Nikita was a ‘fourth wave’ street-kid when she met King. She was born in Grey Lynn, ‘back when it was just coconuts’. She was abandoned, and made a ward of the state at four; at 13, when she met King, ‘I’d been in like 22 placements in 18 months. I kept running away. I’d get picked up probably once a week by the cops and taken back to a foster home and run away again. They ran out of suburbs to put me in, so they sent me to Dunedin. But I made it back. I was on the street for three years.’

  How did she eat?

  ‘I stole chocolates from Deka.’

  The friend who took her to meet King was ‘doing jobs’ with him — street slang for prostituting herself. ‘We went there, and a couple of other street-kids were sitting around and they were like, “Give us a fucken cigarette, Derek, you fucken prick.” That’s how they all spoke to him.’ She remembers an outing in the Jaguar to smoke dope in the Domain; the girls in the back seat burnt his hair with their cigarettes.

  Nikita began prostituting herself to him, too. She was just his type: a thin, lost child. The rate was $60 for 30 minutes. ‘After I did a job with him, he was like, “Oh, come and live with The Family, darling. You’ll get an allowance.”’

  Eight other ex-street-kids gave evidence against King. They were grown-ups, just, with kids of their own, several each; they were defensive, bewildered, aggressive. One girl accused another girl of stealing her cellphone at King’s townhouse, and said, ‘It was kind of obvious that she would of tooken it.’ Some of them told wicked lies, like the girl who claimed King paid her a staggering $200 each time they had sex, which was sometimes four times a day. His lawyer protested he didn’t have that sort of money. He could also have said that it was out of character, because King was a shocking cheapskate. Several other girls said he welched on the $60 fee, and paid them $40, sometimes only $20.

  They were runaways from Blockhouse Bay, Glen Innes, Papakura. They revealed their Auckland — sex work in city backstreets (Turner Street, Cross Street), sitting for hours in internet cafés on Facebook, drinking in Myers Park, starving, stealing, everyone ending up at ‘Derek’s place’. They were 12, 13, 14, but were told by friends to lie about their age, and say they were older. They told much the same story — a friend would introduce them, they’d smoke pot, and King would say, ‘You’re a pretty young girl.’ Then: ‘Would you fuck me for $60?’ One girl demurred, so King upped the price: ‘Would you fuck me for $60 and a bottle of whiskey?’ No, she said. He went all out: ‘Would you fuck me for $60, a bottle of whiskey, and some weed?’ Still she said no, and punched him in the jaw when he tried to kiss her.

  Most girls took the money and did the job. No one was innocent, and everyone was damaged. Morality lay outside the door. Inside that rancid den, everything was consensual, force was never applied, there was demand and supply. ‘The Family’ were a kind of family. Generations of girls found a place to sleep, and were safe from beatings, starvation, bad weather, loneliness. Operation Elephant, the police investigation, succeeded in locking up King, but it also took away a rare offer of warmth.

  I spoke to a youth worker, Faith Atkins, who knew all about King and his ‘Family’, and asked her whether she conceded that King had done the girls some good. ‘Shelter and food are a very kind gesture,’ she said, ‘but the bottom line is they’re kids and it’s against the law.’

  What use was the law
to the girls? They hated their CYFS homes in Pakuranga, Blockhouse Bay, Otahahu, Manurewa and Te Atatu; they really hated the 20-bed ‘protection residency’, Whakatakapokai. They all ran away to ‘Derek’s place’. It can’t have been too bad. Some of it must have been pretty good. King was eccentric, funny, an enthusiastic stoner (‘I’m very precious about my beautiful outdoor cannabis,’ he said in court). There were daily allowances, bus fares, snacks, outings — the court heard about a day drinking Steinlager in a park near the airport, and the time he took two girls to visit his sister in Taupo. What did he say? Family, this is family?

  There were sometimes glimpses of logic and a kind of decency when he delivered speeches in court, viz: ‘I resent the implication I’m hiring the girls as prostitutes, I mean, prostitutes are someone you pick up and dump back on the street when you’ve used them, I mean, how bizarre to make, that comparison, it’s just ridiculous.’ One girl talked about visiting King for the first time with two friends who had known him for years. She described the scene: ‘Derek was just having a brief catch-up with them, just seeing how they were, where they had come from, how they’d been.’

  But as head of The Family, King held the purse strings. A girl who lived with him for five years told the court, ‘I did form a relationship with him, but you can tell where he was coming from, because as soon as I had kids and put on weight I was straight out the door. I couldn’t even get $5 off of him. He’d tell me, “You’re out of The Family.” He does it with everyone. He does it over generations.’

  Police found a stack of porno DVDs at King’s house — Once Upon a Girl, Innocent Bystanders, Private Gladiator. They also found a CD by Maria Callas. King made fleeting references in court to attending poetry nights and folk clubs, to people from the outside world, adults — ‘an architect mate’ from Christchurch, ‘a famous violinist’. But he was most himself with little girls. In bed, he asked them to remove their pants, and kneel in front of him ‘like a dog kind of thing’, as one girl told the court. Nikita said she was always stoned ‘doing a job’ with King. ‘It made it easier. You’d just sort of buzz out. Sometimes it made it worse. It made it intense, and you’d be thinking, “Oh God, when is this going to be over?” He used to take ages. Ages.’

  Priapic, mad, nostalgic, King said in court, ‘They used to love having sex with me . . . I mean, it’s weird, I know, it’s kind of difficult to explain to people, why would a young girl have sex with an old man? I mean, goddammit, I don’t think I would if I was a young girl, but . . .’

  7

  King’s central defence was that he didn’t know the girls were under the legal age of 18 when he paid them for sex. It wasn’t an argument that went very far.

  The cross-examination was fairly routine — except for one moment when prosecutor June Jelas lost her patience, and squashed King like a bug.

  She asked him, ‘The reality is you weren’t asking these girls their age, were you?’

  King said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Of course I was. It never occurred to me these poor girls could be labelled as prostitutes; what did concern me was the fact that if someone came around searching the place and found girls under 18, I’m going to bloody jail. I come first in this whole situation. I’m no use to anybody if I’m in jail, I’m trying to help a whole bunch of people here and what — I’m going to be disappeared — Jesus, woman—’

  Jelas interrupted, ‘Yeah, that’s right, Mr King. You come first, because your first need seems to be having sex with young girls, that’s your big need, isn’t it?’

  King said, ‘Look, that’s insulting to me, but it’s more insulting to these girls. They’re not the kind of girls that you can take advantage of.’

  Jelas said, ‘But that’s exactly what you were doing, wasn’t it? You know many of them have no home to go, you know most of them have zero money, and here you are saying, “Have sex with me and I’ll give you money.”’

  ‘No, no . . .’

  ‘They’re your personal prostitutes, aren’t they?’

  ‘What happens when you build up a relationship is that they—’

  Jelas interrupted, ‘What sort of relationship, Mr King? Let’s talk about it. What sort of relationship? It’s only a sexual relationship.’

  King raved, ‘They’re my family, they’re in my care, this idea that somehow I’ve turned this place into a massage parlour where I turn up and have sex with them — it’s bizarre.

  ‘They may get additional money. I’m more likely to buy someone a cellphone if we’re having an intimate relationship than someone who’s, you know, just getting their basic survival allowance. They get $20 a week minimum. They get $5 every time they come to the door. They need to be able to catch a bus, they’ve got to go home, if they’ve got a home to go to.

  ‘They’ve got to have money to buy food, if I’m not cooking for them. I try and cook for them cos it saves me money. I’ve got a deep-fryer now. I just throw chips and sausages in there and they love it. I used to melt cheese on things, I could melt cheese on leftover food, cardboard, polyurethane, anything, and they seem to love it . . .’

  8

  You can view the School of Architecture conference centre at Auckland University as a monument to a sleazebag, or assess it as an attractive example of late-modern design. ‘It’s an illustrious start to someone’s career,’ said Paul Litterick, a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture, who made many and varied approving noises as he conducted a tour of King’s one and only building.

  It nestles below the curves of the so-called ‘banana building’ of the school’s design block. A courtyard, with two stately oaks, marks it off as School of Architecture territory, an enclosed space, cloistered. Inside, Litterick liked the light, the spaces, the playful features. There was a spiral staircase winding towards a glass turret, or ‘crystal tower’, as King’s former KRTA colleague Denys Oldham had called it. Litterick noted the use of different textures (fair-faced concrete, smoked glass), and said, ‘The design is very much of its time, but it’s adapted remarkably well.’

  Everywhere, King’s hand, his vision, his brief promise. What happened? What madness and collapse brought him to the hell he made for himself inside the house on the hill? A pleasant 10-minute stroll separated the School of Architecture conference centre from his Constitution Hill townhouse; one building had paid for the other, where he created his true masterpiece.

  Police photos reveal a house that was no longer a house. King deconstructed it. It was a tip, a cavern — ‘It was kind of a dark place,’ one girl remembered in court. An entire wall in the lounge was covered in tagging. Six generations of tags, of street names, of hearts and arrows and shout-outs, in felt and pen and pencil, the whole monstrous thing like a giant, genuinely shocking canvas, an artwork more savage and primal than anything dreamed up by painter John Reynolds, the espresso sipper of Ponsonby who wisely avoided King all those years at gallery openings. The couch with the stuffing coming out of it, the tarpaulins and mattresses in the back yard — it was so extreme, more genuinely anarchic than anything recorded by the punk bands King was drawn to in the 1970s. It was a lair, with King as its white worm, gorging on child sex. He had no use for civilisation. He was an outsider, a stately ruin. He was Kurtz who had travelled too far into a heart of darkness. He was probably happy. He had company. Girls knew to visit. They arrived in waves. They smoked his pot and scoffed his cheese on toast, they got on their hands and knees, they had somewhere to sleep. ‘Brats,’ he called them in court, indulgently, with something resembling love.

  Chapter 7

  A naked male riding his bike: Timaru

  A naked male riding his bike on High St at 3.30pm was given a ticket for not wearing a bicycle helmet.

  On and on it goes, a crime wave like nowhere else, washing up on the shore of a pretty harbour city in south Canterbury. ‘A Timaru woman, 25, was served a trespass notice at New World in Wai-iti Rd.’ And: ‘A 25-year-old Timaru man was arrested for shoplifting from Pak’nSave.’ Is any supe
rmarket safe in Timaru? No. ‘A supermarket trolley was stolen from Countdown in Church St.’

  The bulletins are courtesy of the Timaru Herald’s wonderful series, ‘Police Notebook’. No other newspaper reports its petty crimes with such style. The journalism I love the most reads like sentences spoken in a dream — strange images, disconnected thoughts, random happenings and weird occurrences which may or may not be packed with hidden meaning. ‘A Marston Rd resident reported someone threw a wooden rolling pin at his window.’ Who walks around with a wooden rolling pin? One moment, a kitchen utensil describing an arc as it flies through the air; the next, the world tipped on its axis. ‘A Wilson St resident reported his vehicle had been tipped sideways.’

  Every crime, a sentence; every sentence, a little masterpiece of brevity and accuracy, at once banal and surreal. Most journalism is either too long or leaves out too much. ‘Police Notebook’ is exact. It leaves out almost everything. You can only guess at the rest, and view it with wild surmise. ‘A 50-year-old woman lost control of her 2013 Mercedes, crashing it into a fence on Treneglos St.’ The expensive new motor, the boring street in an industrial estate — was she running from something? At 50, will she ever escape?

  A naked male riding his bike on High St at 3.30pm has been given a ticket for not wearing a bicycle helmet.

  Crime often reads like a map of the human heart. It’s a scarred landscape, a smoking ruin. ‘A Timaru youth, 18, was arrested for assault after a domestic incident outside Timaru Hospital.’ That sounds ugly — the bash, young love gone bad, patients shuffling in their gowns. This sounds worse: ‘A 14-year-old Timaru girl was arrested for assaulting her mother.’ This sounds common, pathetic, heartbreaking: ‘A Timaru boy, 16, was arrested for wilful damage after he went to the address of his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend and smashed the door.’