The Scene of the Crime

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The Scene of the Crime Page 26

by Steve Braunias


  Morgan: ‘Did Mr Lundy have any money to make the purchase?’

  Sunderland: ‘No.’

  He said Lundy’s plan was to raise the money through shares offered to investors. Lundy, he said, impressed him with his close knowledge of public subscriptions. That meeting went well, but Sunderland expressed some dismay when Lundy subsequently told him he’d made an unconditional offer to buy land valued at $2 million.

  Morgan: ‘Did you explain the consequences?’

  Sunderland: ‘Yes . . . What I said to him would have been relatively robust, given that he was an adult in full control of his faculties.’

  However, Lundy kept missing the settlement dates, and owed about $140,000 in penalty interest.

  David Gaynor, Lundy’s business advisor, described his level of encouragement when he heard about the vineyard scheme. It wasn’t a very high level. ‘I told him it was high-risk, and if it didn’t work out it would have serious consequences.’ He said he spoke with Christine Lundy about six weeks before she was murdered. ‘I encouraged her to relay my very serious concerns to Mark . . . She said she was very worried about the project, and would talk to Mark.’

  Ross Burns took to his feet and said, ‘What you haven’t done is include the other side of the ledger.’ Gaynor conceded that Lundy’s sink business was growing, and he wasn’t particularly worried about its debt levels. Burns also ferreted out similar admissions from Reginald Murphy, a police forensic accountant. Murphy had a dry cough, and presented his evidence in a kind of croak. To Morgan, he said Lundy was more or less insolvent at the time of the murders. But to Burns, Murphy croaked that Lundy’s business was ‘viable, and looking to the future’.

  Levick gave me the impression during my visits to Kumeu that the question of Lundy’s finances was the least of his concerns. He said the debts were normal for a small business, and that Lundy’s income was steady. The court heard evidence that Lundy’s sink business was ticking over, and a new laminate product was expected to boost sales. As for the wine enterprise, Levick admitted that was a total disaster. ‘He [Lundy] really thought that pig would fly,’ he said. The threat of bankruptcy, though, was fanciful. The owners of the vineyard simply had a better offer. Lundy signed up for $24,000 per acre; an American buyer offered $36,000 (and ultimately bought it). They were keen for Lundy to walk away from the deal so they could sell it for a lot more than Lundy was offering, and wouldn’t bother chasing up Lundy for penalties.

  What about the curious incident of Lundy’s mystery investor? Her evidence was that Lundy got it into his head that she was good for half a million pounds. Why would he think that? Did he simply pull the £500,000 figure out of thin air? Was he really such a fantasist? Or was it based on some kind of information? Did someone say something to him? The woman was a family friend of one of Lundy’s business acquaintances — a man who sent the woman Lundy’s prospectus. A man who stood to make personal gain in the deal — he was in the root stock business — and who was a person of considerable interest during the first police investigation. Police accused him of being involved in the clean-up of the crime, and offered him immunity if he testified against Lundy. On the day of the murders, two men came to his house wanting money they were owed. Their demands frightened the man’s wife and she called the police . . . The man was given name suppression, and provided only fairly sketchy written evidence to the court. He was too ill to appear in person. He had cancer. A month later, he died.

  7

  ‘Oh,’ said Mary from Epsom, ‘you missed a good week last week!’ We ran into each other on a Sunday night at Auckland domestic airport. We were both headed for Wellington to attend the trial. I was going there because it was my livelihood; she was commuting because she couldn’t bear to miss a second. ‘I just find the whole thing,’ she said, ‘so deeply moving.’

  I had skipped the trial for a week. Every day I longed to be in the courtroom. The thing I most wished I’d seen was the police video taken at the crime scene. I wanted to look inside the house where Christine and Amber were killed.

  It felt strange to be away from court; strange, too, to return, to once again sup on honeypuffs and filter coffee at John’s Kitchen, to study the progress of the brand-new paving at the Cenotaph war memorial beside Parliament, to look around the familiar faces in court. There was Lundy, his intellectual gravitas perhaps undermined by his habit of sitting with his mouth open like a door left ajar. There was Glenn Weggery, sitting in the back row of the public gallery, an intense, sardonic presence. There was Justice France, who had trimmed a metre or two off the top of his bouffant. There was Ben Vanderkolk, whose magnificent tan seemed less varnished. He’d looked Greek the last time I’d seen him, maybe Syrian. Now he looked like a guy from Palmerston North. There was Ross Burns, snug in his buttoned waistcoat, staring deeply into the screen-saver on his laptop: the blue waters of the swimming pool at his new home in Tauranga. There was Radio New Zealand reporter Sharon Lundy, whose excellent online reports were always asterixed with the note she was not related to the accused ‘for avoidance of doubt’.

  The subject of the morning was paint flakes. As entertainment it was about as exciting as watching paint flakes dry, but as information it was crucial to the police case. At the first trial, the jury were told that nine orange and nine light-blue flakes of paint found in Christine’s hair and at the crime scene were ‘indistinguishable’ from the paint Lundy had used to mark his tools. The exact match — based on colour, and chemical composition — meant he had surely used one of his tools as the murder weapon. But the colour-matching was made by eye only, and there’s a broad range of about 80 varieties of that paint shade. The colour was not ‘indistinguishable’. The ESR’s tests revealed that the paint in Lundy’s garage and the chips found in Christine’s hair were both alkyds, meaning they were both enamels diluted with turpentine. Meaning . . . nothing much, because that’s an extremely broad category of paint. The chemical composition was not ‘indistinguishable’. In 2015, the paint evidence was rather less emphatic. The theory that the flakes matched the paint on Lundy’s tools ‘could not be excluded’ as a possibility. As for the source of dark-blue paint flakes found at the crime scene, that remained a mystery. Did they come off a second weapon? Levick speculates that there were two tools — a jemmy bar, and the murder weapon — taken to the house that night by two men.

  When I returned to court that Monday morning, ESR forensic scientist Bjorn Sutherland was giving evidence about the possible movement of the paint flakes. He had been on the witness stand for four days — Bjorn again — and the final hours of his epic appearance concerned the subject of whether there might have been an innocent explanation for the flakes in Christine’s hair.

  Hislop, in cross-examination: ‘Can you discount the possibility she may have had paint fragments in her hair beforehand?’ He suggested — painted, you could say — a scenario where Christine had picked up one of the tools when she was mucking about in the garage, got paint flakes on her hands, and transferred them by running her hands through her hair. Sutherland said he could not discount the possibility, but in his opinion the transfer of the paint flakes found in her cracked skull required a ‘vigorous activity’.

  Gillian Leak, a stout, rather humourless blood-splatter expert from Kent in England, was called to give evidence. It was startling to hear that one of the cases she’d worked on was that of the Yorkshire Ripper. She talked about the likelihood of contamination at the Lundy crime scene. In her considered opinion, it was highly likely that blood and brain tissue was accidentally transferred by officers and other people handling the bodies. She drew a kind of diagram, with arrows. Christine’s brain tissue transfers to Glenn Weggery when he discovers the bodies. The tissue follows him to the back seat of a police car. The tissue transfers to police officer Brent Amas, who inspects Lundy’s car — where it arrives at its final, incriminating destination, as a stain on Lundy’s polo shirt.

  If that was a long bow, she had another quiver to deliver.
It concerned the likely movements of paint. Leak had written a report based on a theory. It actually only came to her the previous week when she was sitting in court and saw photos of Lundy’s tools in his garage. Leak appeared as a defence witness. In cross-examination, Morgan said to her, ‘You write a report based on something you heard in this court. Is this how it works? That’s how you came up with this theory?’

  ‘You can’t rule it out,’ she said.

  ‘And are you also seriously suggesting the paint flakes in Christine’s hair were transferred to Amber’s head when they came in contact with the murder weapon?’

  ‘You can’t rule it out,’ she droned.

  ‘It’s too silly,’ Morgan said, ‘for words.’ He sat down without another word.

  She’d come all the way from Kent to be made to look like a fool. But she had her uses. Her dour tones were put to work as a voice-over artist. Hislop asked her to provide a running commentary on a film he wished to play in the court. It was the police video taken at the crime scene. I leaned forward.

  It was a silent movie, and that made it immediately frightening. There was the weatherboard house, and there was a policeman standing outside on the pavement. There was a daisy bush and a set of swings and a police tape that shook in the wind. The green paintwork on the windowsills was chipped and peeling. It matched the colour of the letterbox.

  The camera went up the driveway and around the back, and examined the window that the police claim Lundy jemmied open to make it look like a burglary. There was an oil drum and a green corrugated-iron fence and a ladder with six rungs. Pallets from Lundy’s kitchen sink business were leaning in an untidy pile against the house. The back yard had a small scruffy lawn, a trailer, a sock on a clothesline. And then the camera moved into the house.

  The kitchen was small, with blue cupboards. There was a coffee cup on a bench, and three cans of Lion Brown. The film lasted about six minutes. It was badly lit and badly edited, and the camera shook, and all that just made it terrifying. It went up the hallway. There was Amber. She lay on the carpet. She wore a nightgown. Her small hand was curled beside her hair.

  There was Christine. Everything was shadows and blood, a dark room, a missing person — the murderer. Who was it? Who was it who made that happen, who created that bleak scene so badly filmed, so horrifying? ‘If you think about it,’ said Leak, ‘the assailant is part of the scene.’

  Leak meant that his body interrupted the various flights and parabolas of the blood when he smashed Christine’s and Amber’s brains in, and indicated where he was standing, and the length of his weapon. The waterbed looked like it took up most of the bedroom, leaving the killer only a narrow space to stand by the side of the bed and start swinging his axe or some such weapon that killed Christine and chopped at the headboard.

  She said Christine would have been lying on the left side of the bed when the first blow hit her. She tried to defend herself, and moved to the right, where she was killed.

  ‘Amber,’ said Leak, ‘wasn’t in bed with her mum.’ That was a heartbreaking thing to hear: ‘her mum’. Leak’s expertise in the field of blood splatter recreated that slaughter of an innocent. ‘She was upright long enough after the first blow for the blood to run down her shoulder . . . The final blows came when she was face-down on the floor.’

  The police video continued to move around Christine’s bedroom. There was her body and there was the floral bedspread and there were the curtains. On the floor was a cloth doll. The killer had dropped it there. It used to sit on top of Christine’s jewellery box, which had been taken from the house and never recovered. The camera moved closer. The doll had a smile on its face.

  So this was what I had wanted to see: a six-minute horror movie, set in a home in Palmerston North, with a white electric jug on the kitchen bench and a child, dead, on a patterned carpet. It was a winter’s day. The sky was grey, and the officer outside the house looked as though he was freezing. Someone had already left a bunch of flowers beside the letterbox — an offering of love for the family that no longer existed.

  8

  Leak’s appearance as a defence witness interrupted Morgan’s narrative. Justice France had allowed her to jump the queue because it was the only time she was available to travel from England to New Zealand. No matter; Morgan returned to his own witness list after she gave evidence, and arrived at the hot molten core of his story, the central drama of his narrative, the centre of his journey to establish guilt and win the trial — Lundy’s shirt.

  It was fixed to an exhibit board at the front of the courtroom. Made in China, 65 per cent polyester, 35 per cent cotton garment, sort of grey–blue, size XXL, as vast as a tent — its former owner would likely disappear inside it now, and not find his way out. It was like a weight-watcher’s exhibit. The shirt was the ‘before’, Lundy was the ‘after’. He still took up a lot of room, but he wasn’t half the man he used to be; regardless, the shirt was like a shadow hanging over him, a ghost come back to haunt him. He wore it the night of the murders. That much was agreed by all parties. According to the Crown, he wore it under some kind of protective clothing — a pair of overalls, perhaps — and Christine’s brain somehow landed on the chest and sleeve of the polo shirt while he was engaged in the process of killing.

  He changed into a white shirt the next morning. He ironed it in the motel room, and put the polo shirt, inside-out, in a travel bag with a pair of green underpants and some socks. The police took the bag and its contents after he sped to Palmerston North when he heard of the murders. It was placed in a forensic bag the following week, and was finally examined by Bjorn Sutherland 59 days after the killings. That was when he noticed the two suspicious stains. The shirt was labelled exhibit number C3003; the stain on the pocket became C3003/4, and the stain on the sleeve became C3003/3. Sutherland made glass slides of the stains. What were they? How to identify their origin? And who was best equipped in the field of transferring cellular material from one slide to another? Police asked Scotland Yard and the FBI for assistance, but got nowhere. So much for those venerable palaces of forensic inquiry. But then the call went out to Texas cancer researcher Dr Rodney Miller, who had made his serendipitous appearance at a medical conference in Palmerston North just three days before the killings, and talked about his work in the field of . . . transferring cellular material from one slide to another.

  In the event, Miller didn’t bother with Sutherland’s slides. He took samples directly from the shirt. Thin slices were mounted on glass slides, and embedded in wax, or paraffin blocks. The slides were stained with two dyes: hematoxylin and eosin. Miller examined the slides under a microscope. They suggested the presence of central nervous system tissue. Next, he applied the exquisite science of his immunostains, which provided ‘conclusive evidence’, as he said in the 2002 trial, of human brain. Case closed.

  Except that Levick’s dogged investigations long after the trial led him to other experts in the field who totally rejected Miller’s findings. Miller, in turn, scorned their views. A bitter war of words — Miller had a flair for name-calling, later describing one eminent chemist as ‘blowing smoke from his arse’ — was recorded in their affidavits placed with the Privy Council in 2013. The stage was set for a showdown at the retrial. Miller versus his critics, who would tear into the validity of his immunostains and denounce the Texan as inept, wrong-headed, a bum.

  Except it didn’t work out that way. I said to Hislop while we were waiting for the verdict, ‘Miller — he’s been vindicated in this trial, hasn’t he?’

  He said, ‘He has, to be honest.’

  I filched a photocopy from Levick’s den to take with me to Wellington. I felt it was necessary to have on hand. It was an enlarged image of C3003/3 — that microscopic stain on Lundy’s shirt, magnified many times. It was purple with hematoxylin and eosin dyes, and looked vaguely artistic, like an interesting abstract. The image was shaped something like the North Island. Miller wrote in a report, ‘Cell nuclei were clearly visible, an
d the morphologic appearance was compatible with brain tissue . . . A subsequent battery of immunostains showed that this tissue reacted positively with GFAP, S100 protein, neurofilament, and synaptophysin. This pattern of immunoreactivity is that of tissue originating from the central nervous system (brain or deep spinal cord) . . . It provided unequivocal evidence that Mark Lundy had brain tissue on his shirt from an area that also contained Christine Lundy’s DNA.’

  Miller appeared at the second trial by videolink from his home in Dallas. There wasn’t much of a cross-examination. Hislop challenged him on the cleanliness of his laboratory, and questioned him about the possibility of contamination. In his evidence to Morgan, Miller revealed that he had made new immunostains on Lundy’s shirt with the same result: clear evidence of central nervous system tissue. He also carried out the same tests on a fresh brain. They made for an interesting — and revealing — comparison with the stuff on Lundy’s shirt. The Lundy samples were taken from the paraffin blocks. ‘They will remain stable for decades, if not hundreds of years,’ Miller said. No one contested that; the issue with his immunostains had always been that the stain on Lundy’s shirt would have been so degraded that it was ‘impossible’ to determine the nature of the cells. They had simply been on the shirt for too long — 159 days had passed before Miller cut away the fabric, and tested the stains. Nonsense, Miller countered, and came up with a brilliant argument in the shape of his testing on a fresh brain. He took tissue from it and smeared it on fabric. He left it to dry in a cupboard. He tested it with his immunostains after 28 days, and his markers showed positive for central nervous system tissue. He tested it after 159 days, matching his forensic examination of Lundy’s shirt, and his markers showed positive for central nervous system tissue. He tested it after 365 days, and his markers showed positive for central nervous system tissue.

 

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