The same lawyers. Brent Stanaway modelled his latest range of groovy ties. John Haigh carried his familiar gloomy air of a man about to attend or more likely conduct a funeral. Paul Mabey had once again climbed into his snug little QC jacket of many buttons, and once again performed his slow, assured, precise craft in cross-examination — it was to his questioning that the woman said, ‘I know poor Louise Nicholas lost her case and I am trying damn hard to make sure these guys get done.’ The prosecution case wasn’t entirely lost then and there, but perhaps it never really recovered.
She said she met Shipton at Cobb & Co. She was 16 and had just left school. She fell in love. She said they would go driving in his car, park up at Sulphur Point, and have sex. But Shipton must have felt lonely, because he soon began asking her to have sex with him and Schollum.
She said she went to visit Shipton at a house one day. She said other cops were drinking in the lounge, passing around whiskey, and Shipton suggested they all go into the bedroom where they would pass her around. No, she said. She said Shipton picked her up and took her into the bedroom where they had group sex, and Shipton — Shipton, always Shipton — assaulted her with what she thought was a whiskey bottle.
Shipton and Schollum gave statements to the police saying that they had had sex with the woman, but that the assault didn’t happen. As for Rickards, his defence was simple: he’d no idea who the woman was, had never even heard of her, had never seen or met her until she arrived in court.
In any case, Haigh told the jury, Rickards’ leg was in plaster during the time she claimed the offences took place. As hard evidence, that was the leg he had to stand on.
There were other discrepancies, other gaps in the story, and the prosecution’s case fizzled out. Shipton and Schollum were free to go back to jail. Rickards was free to go, and to at least try to obey one of the golden rules of the New Zealand way of life — once something is finished, move on.
10
He had and he hadn’t, but mostly he basically had. ‘Life just sucks sometimes,’ he said at the Te Atatu café. ‘That’s all I can take from what happened.’
He ordered hot chocolate. A toddler waddled past, and gave Rickards a toothless grin. He wiggled his fingers at the little boy, and gave him a lovely smile. He said he still wanted to do something about getting his memoir published. I advised against it. I said he could probably do without the grief. He said he didn’t expect it would change anyone’s mind about him.
Wasn’t he just as inflexible in his own thinking? He wrote in his manuscript: ‘Phil Kitchin needs to be held to account, NZ Police need to be held to account, and, more importantly, Louise Nicholas needs to be held to account.’ His book details why. But it doesn’t hold himself to account. Surely his own behaviour led to his downfall? As Heather Henare from Women’s Refuge said after the Nicholas trial, ‘As a police officer he and his colleagues took advantage of a young woman in a situation that was beyond her control.’ Also, engaging in threesome sex with another cop was never going to be a smart career move; as an ambitious young detective wanting promotion to positions of trust, he must have been aware that he was playing with fire.
Strangely, it didn’t occur to me to give him a stern lecture on issues of morality when we met. In fact, the above lines — about his behaviour, playing with fire, etc. — wasn’t even what I thought. They were said to me a few days after I met Rickards by another journalist who had covered the Nicholas trial. My own thinking didn’t stretch that far; I was more taken with the notion that Rickards had kind of gone rogue after his early experience as an undercover cop. He got assigned to Invercargill at 19. He writes excitingly about those 14 months: ‘drinking with the lowest of the low — freezing workers, shearers, pub bouncers and gamblers — in fleapit clubs and hotels all over Southland’. Throughout, he experienced the intensity of living a double life, the constant adrenalin of being discovered. Maybe it was something he craved when he returned to Rotorua. He was never debriefed; he said he came out a changed person, someone a lot less conservative.
We talked a bit about that at the café. We talked for two and a half hours, and inevitably a lot of it was about various aspects of the trials, of the past. I asked him how close he thought he came to being appointed commissioner of police. He said it was always going to be a political decision, and it was possible that he’d have been passed over. But he really wanted the job. He talked with enthusiasm and vigour about the community and grassroots policing methods he had wanted to introduce.
While he talked, I thought about how he and Nicholas actually had a lot in common. Rickards wanted to make things better for people; so did Nicholas. Rickards as a defence lawyer and Nicholas in her various roles were both concerned with matters of justice, with standing up for the vulnerable. They were of the same generation, the same background — both left school early, both came from working-class families in the same North Island catchment. They were both fighters who stood their ground, were staunch, resolute.
Rickards’ manuscript, and the book by Nicholas and Kitchin, were both artless tirades. Rickards writes about his feelings after the second trial, and why he wanted to get his side of the story across: ‘Like a dog kicked into submission, I had become pliant, begun to lose my bite. But as I cogitated on the hell I had been through, I realised that getting angry wasn’t the way to get even. Only the truth would put the magic salve over that festering sore.’ Nicholas writes about her feelings after the second trial, and why she wanted to get her side of the story across: ‘I needed the New Zealand public to stop taking as gospel what they were reading in the newspapers or hearing on TV.’ Mission accomplished: the New Zealand public now believe the gospel according to Nicholas.
The three men were found not guilty, but almost no one regards them as innocent. ‘Punishment comes in all forms,’ Nicholas said with terrific piousness to a women’s magazine in 2014, ‘and they’re judged every day.’ Schollum reportedly had cancer. Shipton had gone ga-ga. Clint Rickards finished his hot chocolate at the café in Te Atatu, and the waitress asked whether he wanted something else. He ordered green tea.
Chapter 14
The killings at Stilwell Road: Chris Wang
Music and food, and also I saw somebody is riding the horse.
— Chinese witness describing a party given by Chis Wang on his rural property
1
The first person I ever met who had been accused of butchering two people with a blade was Cheng Qi ‘Chris’ Wang, a small, lithe fellow with a shrewd face and thinning hair. I had an appointment. I went around to his house. It was gated. An old Chinese lady was pottering about in the front garden. I called out to her: ‘Hello! Is Chris home?’
She said, ‘What you want?’
I yelled, ‘I’m here to see Chris!’
She said, ‘No English!’
She fled indoors. I hung around on the pavement and Wang eventually drove up and invited me inside. He had a kind of manservant who poured cups of tea. We sat at either end of a very long dining table in a dark kitchen with small windows. When the sun went behind a cloud, I could barely see him. He was 53 then, and the last time I saw him he had just turned 56. It had been a curious three years, and it ended when a jury in the Auckland High Court reached a curious verdict in his double-murder trial. He was accused of stabbing two men to death on a summer’s morning in the expensive Auckland suburb of Mt Albert. It was his third trial. The first was abandoned very late in the piece. The jury was already down to 11 — a juror realised she had been treated by the police doctor who gave evidence, and had to be excused — when the prosecution called its last witness, a cheerful pathologist from Vermont.
He was asked, ‘Did you identify a large number of stab wounds?’
‘Yes,’ smiled the American.
‘Did they in fact total 23?’
‘Yes.’
He went on to explain that to accurately measure the length of a wound, you press the edges of the skin together; skin has tremendous ela
sticity. The jury stared at him, and bent their heads to study a death booklet — images from the autopsy, pale bodies on a white sheet. One of the two dead men had his eyes open. An afternoon tea break was called. Suddenly, the jury was reduced to 10 — an ambulance shrieked to the side entrance of the High Court, and a juror was taken to hospital for emergency surgery on a ruptured bowel.
Court resumed for the judge to announce that it was all over. Wang was free to go. As he made his way past the press bench, I handed him my card — with both hands, something I’d seen in Japan, and thought might convey to Wang, who was born in China, that I was a polite and respectful fellow. He took the card, and bowed. He phoned the next day and I went over for a memorable afternoon.
The second trial went the whole way. And then it got nowhere: the jury was unable to deliver a verdict. They had signalled to the judge that they were ‘very close’ to reaching a majority verdict of 11–1, but couldn’t go any further. It was assumed there were two obstinate jurors. Had they prevented a verdict of guilty? Family of the victims wept bitter tears.
The third trial was held a year later, over three weeks in the middle of winter. It was a kind of re-enactment: the same evidence, most of the same witnesses. It was in a different courtroom, upstairs in Courtroom 14, with views of the museum through the window. Three weeks of rain, and storms; on the opening day of the trial, a bottle of Landscape merlot had been smashed on the front steps, and broken glass lay among wet leaves.
Jury selection, held downstairs next to the criminal office with its soft toys and All Black flags, resulted in a woman foreperson. She wore confident outfits. There was the matching green jacket, skirt and shoes, and a bright red polka-dot top with a large white ribbon around her skirt on the day she announced their verdict. The other jurors included a tired man with a ponytail, and a woman who wore blue-rimmed glasses, her hair in a bun, and an expression of furious distaste.
But there was one person missing that morning: the accused. The proper release forms hadn’t been filled out, and Wang remained in his cell. The jury weren’t aware that there had been two previous trials, nor could they be told that Wang had recently been sentenced to two years and nine months’ imprisonment for money-laundering and fraud.
Calls were made to the prison. The trial finally began after lunch. Wang stood in the dock, once again in his usual tunic — a collarless jacket, with a horizontal pinstripe, its cuffs unbuttoned to reveal a tartan lining. Was it all he owned? His shoes looked old. Wang, too, was worn; in the year since his last appearance in the High Court, his face had lost some of its vitality.
Justice Venning welcomed the jury. Crown prosecutor Kevin Glubb, a thin, stately individual with a throbbing voice, which he kept moist with furtive handfuls of Eclipse mints, gave his opening address. For the third time, a tragedy was told about two men who were chopped up and killed on a summer’s morning at one of the most amazing addresses in Auckland.
Police photographs of the crime scene show bright sunlight falling through the upstairs windows at 23 Stilwell Road, a grand old mansion with a glass elevator, an indoor spa pool, chickens out the back, and a trail of blood leading to the body of Zhuo ‘Michael’ Wu, 44, who collapsed and bled to death at the bottom of the stairs. His friend, Yishan ‘Tom’ Zhong, 53, had also tried to escape the slaughter. He made it outside. Drops of his blood led past a white fountain and down the front steps onto the driveway; he collapsed and bled to death in a clump of leaves.
‘Michael’, ‘Tom’, ‘Chris’ — the made-up names signal the otherness of Asian life in Auckland. The three men got to know each other through the Chinese community, conducted business in Mandarin and broken English, flew in and out of Beijing. Witnesses talked of yum char and karaoke; Michael Wu’s widow quoted an old saying: ‘You can get rid of the monk, but you still will not get rid of the temple.’
Wu and Zhong drove to Wang’s house on a Friday morning in January. It was 23 degrees, cloudless. They opened the front door and walked straight in. Did the two men — and this was the question which haunted three juries, and became the central riddle they tried to solve — step into the kitchen and grab a knife? Wang was in his bedroom. In a doorway at the top of the stairs in the house on the hill on Stilwell Road, there was a fight to the death.
Wang claimed self-defence. He said the two men had come to kill him. He gave a four-hour interview at the Avondale police station that afternoon — he had changed out of his blood-soaked pyjamas into a white police-issue suit — and demonstrated his miraculous escape. He was, he explained, expert at kung fu.
2
In broad daylight, 23 Stilwell Road is a magnificent sight to behold, as big as the sky. From The New Zealand Herald’s homes section, when the mansion was put on the market in 2007: ‘You approach the house through an arbour draped with bougainvillea . . . The formal dining room . . . The elegant leadlighting . . . Breathtaking deck views stretching from Waterview, across to the Waitakeres and around to the Chelsea Sugar Refinery . . . A ladder pulls down to take you up to a secret door, which leads onto an even higher deck. Here the view widens to include Huia, Rangitoto, the city and Mt Eden.’
All of Stilwell Road has a gentle, soothing quality; the pulse slows, the struggle and narrowness of life is elsewhere. The trees are so pretty. There are the cedars and conifers planted in the 1930s by Reverend Thomas Joughlin, a Methodist minister who lived at 7 Stilwell Road. There are the wonderful palms, grown from seed in the 1970s by botanist Alan Esler, who lives at number 7 to this day.
Stilwell Road is within the ‘golden triangle’, property-sales blather for the three most expensive and desirable streets in Mt Albert. The other two streets are Sadgrove Terrace and Summit Drive. The swimming pools, the ornamental gardens, the grassy slopes of the volcano . . . Anne Duncan of Ray White Real Estate listed three recent sales on Stilwell Road. One went for $1.4 million, another for $1.66 million, and the highest for $2.45 million. ‘All,’ she said, ‘to nice families attending local schools.’
Schools in the immediate zone include Mt Albert Grammar, Marist College and Gladstone Primary, with its vital statistics of decile 8 and 61 per cent white.
The epicentre of this happy, well-educated colony of the rich is 23 Stilwell Road. More from the sales pitch in the Herald: ‘Hollywood glamour meets genteel colonialism . . . Park-like grounds, a colonnade entry, sculpted fountain . . .’
It was built in 1929 for a fantasist. The first owner was Maria Cossey, who passed herself off as the Princess Marie-Jeanne de Guise. She claimed direct ancestry with the royal House of Lorraine in France. The family line included Marie de Lorraine, queen of both France and Scotland, and mother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Maria of Mt Albert’s grandson is Andrew Hunter, who lives in France, and demands to be known as the Prince de Guise. The Baronage Press reports: ‘We have full particulars of Andrew Hunter’s ancestry, which show his claims to be a total fantasy . . . It is presumably his grandmother’s fantasies that he has adopted.’
Her faux palace in the Antipodes sold to a knight. Sir David Henry emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand in 1907 when he was 19. He found work as a farm labourer. Clever and ambitious, he rose to become New Zealand’s pre-eminent industrialist as the head of Forestry Products, building Kinleith pulp and paper mill. ‘Past-president Auckland Rotary. Past-president Auckland YMCA . . . Recreation: bowls and golf.’ Former Cabinet minister Michael Bassett, who lived on Stilwell Road for 37 years, read out loud from his copy of Who’s Who in New Zealand, the sixth edition, published in 1956. He noted of Sir David: ‘He probably would have been in the seventh edition, gone by the eighth.’
Sir David put in an elevator for his wife, Mary, a paraplegic. A year after her death, he married her younger sister, Dorothy. He had created fabulous wealth, and made a profound difference to the New Zealand economy, but a cold and joyless rage lingers over his name. In his history of New Zealand forest products, Brian Healy wrote, ‘Sir David lacked warmth and humour in his working rela
tions and tended to be abrupt and demanding with his subordinates.’ Sydney Shep of Victoria University wrote in a research paper on the Kinleith mill, ‘Business contemporaries found him stiff, sombre, intense, driven, and dictatorial.’ Michael Roche, writing Sir David’s entry in the New Zealand Dictionary of Biography, noted his subject’s ‘erratic behaviour’ in later years. ‘Many meetings were held in his Mt Albert home, during which he repeatedly lashed out verbally.’
He died in 1963. The house went on the market after Lady Dorothy died in 1979. Historian Michael Bassett attended the auction. He said, ‘Every sticky-beak in the neighbourhood had a look at the place. The rooms were large, the kitchen had Terrazzo benches — they were all the rage in the 1930s. We had one at home. The only trouble was that whenever any lemon juice got anywhere near it, your Terrazzo would end up being all pitted. Anyway, it had Terrazzo benches, it had a lift that went up, it was dingy, dark, old. Nonetheless, at the auction, it went for the staggering sum of $155,000, which had everybody gasping and nobody could work out who had actually bought the place. Up steps this guy in short pants and a singlet. He slaps this woman next to him and says, “Meet my de facto!” And then, “Ho-ho-ho, keeps you young!” His name was Barrie Cardon.’
3
The first witness called by the prosecution took the jury on a guided tour through 23 Stilwell Road. It was a strange kind of open home. Jason Barr, a forensic technician at the ESR, who wore a tight black suit and a hipster’s full-strength beard, had used specialised camera equipment that allowed viewers to walk through 22 locations. A screen was set up in court. Barr loaded a DVD. It played moving images of the approach to the house — the driveway in sunshine and shadow, Tom Zhong’s body with one foot poking out from beneath a sheet, wisteria in the courtyard, a gas barbecue on the front porch.
The Scene of the Crime Page 21