Enough. Good riddance, you would have to think about Murdoch, to bad rubbish. And cheers to the New Zealander who ratted him out. Hepi did it out of self-interest, but not, it seems, for greed. It was thought he’d claim the A$250,000 reward. He talked about it at the trial. A year later, police announced the reward had been withdrawn. They said no one came forward to claim it.
I asked Paul Toohey what he made of Hepi, and he said, ‘I liked James a lot. He was pretty straight-up, a good guy to deal with. Some people would say “He’s a drug dealer!” and regard him with horror. But half the people I know smoke dope. They’ve got to get it from somewhere. I sort of look at marijuana dealers as tax-avoiders.
‘He’s a shambolic-looking guy. But James could drink a carton of beer and you would not be concerned that he had a switch that would kick in and turn him into someone else. He’s quite level. He’s very practical.’
The prosaic Kiwi, matter-of-fact, not carried away . . . Hepi, like Toohey, was providing a lesson. I wanted to think of it as the quintessential Australian murder — Woggie Minshull’s bullbar, chicken nuggets from Red Rooster at Alice Springs, a mad dog with a gun driving at speed and on speed in terra nullius — but what was the point of collecting these scraps of national characteristics? Murder is just murder.
Chapter 12
Sex and Chocolate: ‘Bones’
I don’t need no money, fortune or fame.
— ‘My Girl’, The Temptations
1
Another murder trial in Australia, again in the fructifying heat of December, again with a Maori at the centre of it, except Tony Williams was the murder victim and his death seemed to offer a parable about the perils of following the yellow brick road to Surfers Paradise. Brisbane was preparing for the joys of Christmas 2014: a downtown pub grandly advertised St Stephen’s Day, 26 December, when it would open at the festive time of 10am. The talk at the cafés and bars all along downtown George Street (steak and schooner specials for $16, COLD BEER! HOT CHICKS! at Grosvenor’s topless bar) was of the recent storm, when large hailstones fell out of the sky with such force that they pulverised cars, tore roofs off houses, and closed the airport — it wasn’t safe to fly with Brisbane under attack from meteors of ice.
Things were back to normal by the time I got to the Sunshine State. There were the moaning crows and squealing ibises in the tops of Moreton Bay figs, and a faint breeze chasing away papery scraps of leaves from the plane trees. The fecund botanical gardens — colonists trialled mangoes, custard apples, sugarcane and tobacco in the grounds — was crowded with fruit bats. One night I couldn’t sleep and looked out my window at 4am; it was already light, so I went for a long walk, and crossed two bridges over the Brisbane River. A yellow-faced cormorant came out of the water, and stretched its wings to dry. It didn’t take long. Joggers and families were out and about in large numbers by 6am. There were mangroves and rainforest, and poetry marking the birth of Brisbane was chiselled in concrete on the banks of the river: A large tree would make the first wharf here, and a ship cut free. I liked those lines very much. I repeated them to myself as I walked alongside the river, which blazed in bright dawn sunlight. I imagined the exhilarating sense of a new beginning, a new world opening up for pleasure and profit — it wasn’t just the colonists, it was also the exodus of 21st-century Maori making their way out of our narrow islands to a land of opportunity.
Their great migration was recorded in The GC, often thought of as the worst reality TV series ever made: tacky, mindless, strangely depressing. It followed the adventures of young Maori on the Gold Coast. But there was something sincere about it, something revealing. Its publicity drivel might have got it right when it treated murder as just one of those things that happen in between singing and a break-up: ‘Jade Louise’s debut single “Vibrations” shot to. No 1 on iTunesNZ. On a high, Jade Louise was quickly brought back down after the death of her son’s father and then having to deal with the tumultuous end to her relationship with fellow cast member Tame . . .’
Thus the parable and the perils. The death referred to was the murder of showband entertainer and hospital orderly Tony Williams, who grew up in Matapihi in the Bay of Plenty, went to Mt Maunganui College, and took off for Surfers Paradise in about 1996. His battered body was found in his Mermaid Waters unit on Christmas Eve 2011. He was 37 years old. He was very handsome, a tall, strapping guy, described as shy, charming, humble, into surfing and womanising.
Question to one of his friends, in court: ‘He was a bit of a ladies’ man, wasn’t he?’
‘Yep.’
‘He wasn’t inhibited by loyalty to any of his male friends, was he?’
‘Other than sleeping with his friends’ girlfriends, he’s not too bad.’
He was exporting a tenet of New Zealand life to his new life on the Gold Coast: the extended family. He had a son to GC star Jade Louise, and a daughter to another woman, Shardai Kerr. His friends deny it, but he was also apparently the father of a son by a woman called Sarah Davies — it’s what she told her boyfriend, ex-soldier Matt Cox. Cox heard quite a lot about Williams, but never met him until the day he paid a visit and cracked open Williams’ skull with a hammer.
‘We looked at the jealousy angle straightaway,’ said Brisbane Detective Sergeant Steve McBryde, ‘because of the brutality of what happened.’ McBryde was the officer in charge of the investigation. I spoke with him at the Queensland Supreme Court. I had got there early on my first morning and found him in an office on the fifth floor. We talked about the murder inquiry, about Cox, about the moral of the story — about whether the story had a moral. ‘It’s just a sad, tragic tale,’ he said. ‘It’s wrecked families. Tony’s family, Cox’s family. And Sarah’s, too. One day her son will have to be told that his biological father was killed by his mother’s boyfriend.’
2
The security guard at the courthouse said, ‘I thought that’s what they must be. Maoris. Yeah, they’re here every day, mate. They take those seats over there. Usually about 20 of them. Every day! They bring their own esky.’
He meant Tony Williams’ whanau, who came over for the trial. You looked at them and saw the mellow blue water and pale green hills of Matapihi, that small settlement on the Tauranga harbour. Sometimes they sat together in the courtroom, and sometimes they waited outside in the shade. They were there for justice, to see Cox put away for as long as possible; their grief and rage came off them in waves, and rebuffed all approaches. ‘We will release a statement after the verdict in due course,’ said a relative, who looked away when he spoke.
The jury found Cox guilty. The family statement read: ‘Today we are grateful that Matthew Cox has been held responsible for murdering to death in a cruel and cowardly manner. We are grateful that the truth has been put forward and that Tony’s name has been cleared back to the friendly brother, son and mostly loving father that he was.’ It also expressed sympathy for Cox’s parents, but added, ‘However we cannot forgive. You are still able to visit your son every Xmas whether it be in jail, you still can!’
Cox, 27, looked afraid when I saw him in court. He had large dark eyes set in a pleasant, rather dim face. ‘He’s very articulate,’ said McBryde. ‘From a nice family. Normal people. No problems.’ He’d been in the army until he busted his knee. He started a relationship with Sarah Davies in late September 2011. Williams was dead less than three months later.
It takes time for an obsession to feed on the brain, to take over. But Cox was quick to form a bond with her son (‘They were really close,’ said Davies), and fast, too, to spring into deranged action. When he confronted Davies with a bloodied shirt he had found shoved inside a plastic bag in the cupboard, she claimed she’d worn it on the night Williams had raped her — and got her pregnant. She said she kept it as a kind of talisman, or reminder, of a terrible time in her life. She’d never reported the rape to police. In fact, she remained on friendly terms with Williams on Facebook. Was the rape accusation a lie, an invention? As provocation, i
t worked wonders. She said in court, ‘Matt was devastated and disgusted.’
They lived in Port Macquarie, in New South Wales. It took six hours to drive to Mermaid Waters, on the Gold Coast, where Williams lived. Cox got Williams’ address by calling from a phone box and saying he worked for Australia Post. Then he called army buddy Joshua Middleton, and asked him to help case Williams’ apartment building. As Middleton put it, ‘Do a recce. Get a feel for the area.’
Cox mused to Middleton, ‘Should I bash him? Put him in a wheelchair?’
Middleton: ‘Do you have to do something so drastic?’
Cox: ‘Yeah. Something’s got to happen.’
Middleton, in court: ‘He talked about that he might use a hammer.’
3
I visited Tony Williams’ closest friend, Maori entertainer Paul Thompson, at his home in the Brisbane suburb of Sunnybank. His stage name was listed on his website as: ‘The Wolfman’. I said, ‘Hello, Wolfman.’ He laughed, sheepishly. He was a softly spoken man, quite shy, and sad. ‘He’s heartbroken,’ said his wife, Anita. There was red bougainvillea in the front yard, and a screen door at the top of the stairs. A dog howled, and Paul advised against walking back to the local shops at night: ‘There was a shooting that way, another guy got shot over there . . .’
It was a happy household. Paul and Anita sat at the kitchen table and reminisced about Tony, and let their three children stay up in the lounge until the two girls fell asleep on couches, and their son dozed off on the floor. She’d made them mashed potato and sausages for dinner.
Paul had moved to the Gold Coast from Porirua in 1995. He’d sung in bands, and supported himself as a meatworker; Australia marked a new determination to live the dream and make a living from playing music. He met Tony a year later.
‘He was a cheeky Maori boy with a little glint in his eye,’ he said. ‘He had a glow about him. He was quite shy. He talked in a mumble sometimes because of his shyness. But when he talked, it was almost as if he was determined to get to know who you really are, and connect with you. That was Bones all over.
‘He had nothing to hide. He’d look you in the face when he talked to you. That’s what I loved about Bones,’ he said, using Williams’ nickname again. ‘If there’s a word for better than best friends . . . We were more than brothers.
‘I’d ring him, and say, “Bro, come over! I’ve got food.” Whenever he wanted to get away, or I wanted to get away, we’d be over at each other’s houses. We knew what we both wanted, and that was peace. A peace that we didn’t get anywhere else. Just knowing that he was there, my right-hand man . . .’
He wept, and then he said, ‘I’m all right.’
He talked about Tony’s love of surfing, of his board painted in Rasta colours with a koru pattern. ‘Surfing with his boys from Matapihi and Arataki. That’s what he loved. He was proud of where he came from. Proud of his whanau. Loved his mum. He stayed true to his nature; Tauranga boy. He was wearing shorts and a singlet as when I first met him to the last.
‘He loved the lifestyle here. Surf. Bikinis! I came over strictly for the music.’ Paul formed a band, which really was called Chur Bro, and Tony became the soundman. He formed another group with Tony on vocals (‘Bones had such a beautiful high falsetto’), and Kevin Keepa — three funky Maori guys who really did call their new band Sex and Chocolate.
They developed new moves, took on a new attitude, inspired by a movie based on the life and times of The Temptations. ‘The band was started in March 1998, and the movie came out in August,’ Paul said. ‘That’s when we started getting serious. It just connected to us. I got Tony over and we watched it every day for like a month. Every detail. We even learned word for word all the lines in the whole movie from start to finish. The dress, the hairstyle. Their mannerisms.’
It worked, and Sex and Chocolate became a smash live attraction at Surfers Paradise. ‘Things just took off,’ he said. ‘It was amazing how fast it grew. We had people packing out our gigs. We literally did every club on the strip. Shooters, The Penthouse, Avenue, Bird and Bar, all four clubs adjacent to each other, and we played all four, daily, constantly.’
They were the good times. They made good money, they had each other, they were on top of their game. Paul met Anita; Tony met everyone. ‘He was very honest about who he was,’ said Anita. ‘He didn’t lie to any of the girls about the way he lived his life. He was very upfront, he never deceived anyone.’
What about their husbands and boyfriends?
Paul said, ‘I did see his car damaged every now and then — a broken window, a FUCK YOU written on the windscreen. I’d say to him, “You crossed the wrong brother.” It was a joke. It was also a warning. I knew someone might step him out and give him a punch on the jaw, knock his lights out, break an arm, poke an eye out, at the very, very worst. But you’d always laugh it off.’
4
Williams was killed in his apartment on Sunshine Boulevard at around midday on 23 December 2011. Less than two hours later, Cox texted his girlfriend: I love you baby more than life itself and always will baby xoxo.
Sarah Davies heard the news of the murder on Christmas Day. She was asked in court, ‘Were you affected by Tony’s death?’
She said, ‘I was devastated.’
‘Did Matthew Cox say anything about that?’
She said, ‘After about a month it was frustrating him.’
‘What did he say?’
She said, ‘Basically, it was like, get over it.’
It took the police three months to make an arrest. Cox was careful; he hadn’t left any DNA, and he got his army buddy Middleton to dispose of the murder weapon — a claw hammer. But he did leave something behind. It remains a mystery how it ever got there. It was a receipt for three dresses one of Davies’ previous boyfriends had bought for her. She said in court, ‘I’d planned on breaking up with him that day that I got the dresses, but I didn’t have the heart to.’
Police tracked the receipt — a ‘foreign object’, as Detective Sergeant McBryde termed it — to her address. ‘That put us in the right direction,’ he said. Police next established that Cox was at the Gold Coast on the day of the murder. They were issued warrants to bug his phone, and listened in as Cox admitted to Davies’ brother that he had killed Williams — in self-defence, he claimed.
He was arrested in March 2012. Middleton admitted his involvement later that day. The two men had once fantasised about working as mercenaries, in Thailand, where they would shut down illegal brothels and liberate girls forced to work as sex slaves. Heroes, men following a moral code, etc. In dismal reality, Cox gave Middleton his bloodstained clothes, Williams’ brown wallet, and the hammer, and Middleton burned them with diesel in an army ration tin.
Cox never told police what happened or why it happened. He told a friend, ‘I went there to fucking hit the bloke that knocked up my missus.’ But he’d planned it very, very carefully, and the lengths he went to — the six-hour drive, casing the joint, posing as a postman — pointed towards something a lot more than a punch.
Detective Sergeant McBryde doesn’t know for sure whether Cox took his own hammer to Williams’ place and lay in wait, or whether he knocked on the door and used a hammer belonging to Williams. Before his arrest, Cox told Davies a version of what happened. She didn’t go to the police. Why wasn’t she charged?
‘That’s what Tony’s family asked,’ McBryde said.
‘It’s a good question,’ I said.
‘It is a good question,’ he agreed. ‘She did lie to the police. She did not disclose what Cox told her. But she only found out after Tony had been killed. She wasn’t involved in the planning.’
According to Davies in court, this is Cox’s version of the attack: ‘He told me that Tony opened the door to him, and they shook hands, and then Matthew headbutted him. Tony threw a hammer at him and it missed and somewhere a screwdriver came into it. Tony had a screwdriver, and they ended up on the floor. Matthew was on his back, and he had Tony on top
of him, and was fighting for his own life to stop the screwdriver stabbing him, and he remembered the hammer was behind him and reached for it, and swung up once, maybe twice.’
The prosecution told the jury that pretty much everything Cox had said was a lie. Williams was struck on the head and neck 27 times. There were a further 30 blows to the body. But some of what he said sounded accurate.
Davies was asked in court, ‘How did he know that Tony had died?’
She said, ‘Because he put a hammer through his skull.’
5
I asked ‘Wolfman’ Paul more about the glory days of Sex and Chocolate, and whether they had even bigger dreams. He said, ‘Yeah! We were never satisfied. We wanted to reach higher and higher. We wanted to be in the movies and make the albums. We never reached that pinnacle; we were just under the bar. Just riding along under that bar for the whole journey. I think we possibly could have done it.’
The great ride eventually slowed down, and the band became part-time. Tony found work as an orderly at the Gold Coast Hospital. He made up a room in his Mermaid Waters unit for his two kids. ‘They were his heart,’ said Paul.
The bachelor pad with the guitars and the surfing pictures, and the kids’ bedroom empty most of the week . . . This wasn’t a cautionary tale of what happens when you chase a dream and the dream dies. The yellow brick road had nothing to do with it. This was just the road a man’s life can take when none of his relationships work out. He had a raging argument on the morning of his death. The mother of one of his children dropped him home after they’d been Christmas shopping, and neighbours saw him jump on the car when it reversed down the driveway. He threw a stone at the car. It missed, and hit the neighbour’s fence. ‘You’re not taking the presents!’ he screamed. And then that term of abuse straight out of Aotearoa, the insult reaching back to his childhood and adolescence in Matapihi, the rallying cry of frustrated men the length of New Zealand: ‘You can’t do this to me, you fucken mole!’
The Scene of the Crime Page 18