The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  He came prepared. He brought five journals with him to the stand. They formed an impressive stack, but that was nothing compared to his back-up — another police officer entered the court dragging a two-wheeler trolley loaded with journals and folders containing goodness knows how many pages of various assorted memoranda.

  Vanderkolk stood for the prosecution. He knew Grantham well — they were respected establishment figures together in Palmerston North, and had worked closely together on the trial in 2002. He asked Grantham, ‘Do you remember a meeting with Mark Lundy on December 4, 2000?’

  Grantham said, ‘Can I refer to my notes?’

  He was told that he could. He searched his pockets, and wailed, ‘In my hurry to get here I left behind my glasses!’

  It was interesting to note his anxiety, his small wave of panic. A police officer was sent to search for the glasses in an office outside the courtroom. He didn’t return. The judge gave Grantham permission to track down the spectacles. The three pips and the merit award were lost in a blur of blue as he legged it out of the court. He was away a few minutes. He returned, triumphant. He took his seat, put on his spectacles, peered inside a folder, and said to Vanderkolk: ‘Yes.’

  They discussed the December 4 meeting. Lundy had called it, to check on the police investigation into the murders. Grantham asked him whether police could search his car and some belongings, and Lundy said sure, no problem. ‘The accused said he wanted to help us any way he could.’

  Vanderkolk then asked Grantham a series of questions about the slides containing samples taken from Lundy’s polo shirt. Grantham said he kept the slides in a safe in his office. He packed them — and the polo shirt — for the visit to Dallas, Texas, where Dr Miller snipped out the stained areas on the fabric, embedded them in paraffin wax, removed small slices, and exposed them to his immunostaining technique. Grantham took the paraffin blocks back to New Zealand, and put them in his safe.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Vanderkolk. ‘That will be all.’

  Grantham was on the stand for all of 15 minutes. Justice France called for a break; the defence would go at Grantham after lunch.

  But the defence did not go at Grantham after lunch. Ross Burns treated him with great courtesy, and asked him not especially detailed questions in a pleasant and respectful manner for 45 minutes. It was all over so fast the prosecution were unable to call their next witness. ‘I’ve been caught short,’ Morgan told the judge. He had plainly expected that Grantham would remain on the stand for all that Thursday afternoon and probably into the following week.

  The five journals, the two-wheeler trolley supporting millions of words about Mark Lundy — none of it was needed. Grantham floated out of the courtroom.

  What just happened? What was Burns playing at? He hadn’t done much more than engage Grantham in small talk. There were a few questions about potentially suspicious activity reported in Lundy’s neighbourhood on the night of the murders — a woman screaming, dogs going berserk, the sound of breaking glass. That didn’t go very far.

  Things looked more promising when Burns raised the controversial subject of Grantham’s meeting with pathologist Dr Heng Teoh. Grantham arranged the meeting in January 2001 to ask Teoh whether he could identify tissue on the slides taken from Lundy’s shirt. He wrote at the time, ‘He [Teoh] would only commit to saying the cells are tissue cells. He opined that the time lapse between the murders and the preparation of the slide (59 days) was too long. The cells had degenerated badly. What concerned me about Dr Teoh was that he was quite clear that he did not want to be involved in a police investigation and did not want to have to give evidence in any court proceedings. When he looked at the slide he commented that he did not think Mark Lundy should be convicted on the strength of the cells in the slide. He then pointed out that just because Christine Lundy’s DNA was on his shirt didn’t mean a lot, as she was his wife. He later commented that this case may have to remain an unsolved mystery.’

  Grantham’s failure to disclose his report to the defence at the first trial was only made known three days before the Privy Council hearing in 2013. ‘Out of the woodwork it came,’ as Hislop put it, during our interview in the Wellington High Court. ‘It was absolutely incredible that it had not seen the light of day.’ Surely, then, Burns would demand Grantham explain the omission. But he didn’t. Well, what about the curious business of Grantham keeping extremely sensitive evidence — the glass slides — in the safe in his office? What sort of practice was that? And did it have anything to do with the mystifying fact that the tissue on Sutherland’s glass slides was very poorly degraded after 59 days, but the tissue that Miller took from Lundy’s shirt after 159 days, in Grantham’s presence, was in a much better condition?

  Leaving aside the science, what about the focus of the investigation? How soon did Grantham decide it was Lundy? Was he obsessive in his determination to bust Lundy, and was this at the expense of failing to investigate other options? Minor example: did police ever follow up the presence of small rubber fragments found in Christine’s bedroom, as recorded in the notebooks of two police officers? A tomahawk with a rubber handle was stolen from a neighbouring property that night. Did police look into the possibility of a match? Was the information somewhere among the suitcases and folders and volumes that Grantham wore like an armour into Courtroom 1?

  There were other, much better questions that could have been put to Grantham. But there was no rough-housing, no inquisition. It was more like a genteel conversation which eventually petered out. After Morgan admitted that he didn’t have any witnesses on standby, France announced with great pleasure that court was adjourned for a long weekend.

  I bailed up Burns outside the courtroom, and demanded of him, ‘WTF?’

  He smiled most charmingly, puckishly even, and said, ‘Oh, come now. He’s a very senior policeman. It wouldn’t do to try to undermine his credibility. It wouldn’t do at all.’ At least he resisted the temptation to wink.

  Yes, Hislop said later, it was a deliberate tactic. ‘We didn’t need to attack him; and it’s hard to know how juries are going to react when you confront a copper.’

  I said, ‘Behrens did that in 2002 when he accused Grantham of planting brain tissue on Lundy’s shirt.’

  ‘Yeah. Catastrophic. It blew up in their faces. It’s pretty desperate unless you have evidential basis. Keeping it in the safe was a bit odd, but apart from that . . . We weren’t going to attack the man just because some of our supporters didn’t like him. Geoff and others blamed him for Mark’s incarceration. I’m sure Grantham thought he was in for a royal roasting, but we didn’t need to go there.’

  Grantham’s release brought an end to week four of the trial. Mary from Epsom reluctantly went to Singapore; it was an annual holiday, and she’d booked it well in advance, but it pained her to miss even a day of the trial. She’d made a friend, Anne, from up the Hutt railway line in Woburn. Anne said: ‘He’s guilty, isn’t he?’ Mary regarded it as a mystery and a tragedy. I regarded it in much the same way. I went home for a week. I loved the strange half-life I was leading in Wellington, a detached observer in Courtroom 1, quietly roaming the waterfront and the town belt at day’s end, honeypuffs for breakfast and garlic prawns for dinner, but I longed for my family, too. I was caught between love and an interest that went beyond professional curiosity. Important events took place outside of the Wellington High Court. Local and possibly international news led with the story that Natalia Kills had said mean things to some drip on X Factor New Zealand. I remained preoccupied with the the trial. They have a rhythm, Justice France had said. They have a momentum. The weeks had gone by like carriages on a railway track, creaking and thumping along, twisting and turning, always moving forward. You never knew what would happen next, or who the cat would drag out from under a rock.

  12

  There he was, at last, in person, his presence advertised on the very first day of the trial when the prosecution stated in its opening address that it would call on the se
rvices of one of the most fabled and despised characters in criminal history — a jailhouse snitch. Witness X, as he must be known, was asked to swear on oath. ‘Aw yeah,’ said X.

  This was how the Crown prepared to come to the end of its massive effort to prosecute Lundy for a second time: not yet with a bang, in the meantime with a snitcher. The court was cleared, the door locked, the TV cameras switched off. Outside, a fresh autumn day in the capital; inside, a murky little sub-plot to the trial. The police did their best to conceal signs of shame. Detective Andy Partridge, who was always the coolest man in the room with his long black hair and pretty shirts, tried to assume a poker face. It was hard not to laugh. X was a comical and gnome-like character, tattooed, smirky, who wore his shirt buttoned tight up to his neck. He had a wide chest and looked as though he might be handy with his fists, but his record of violence was restricted to acts of despicable cowardice — domestic assault, beating partners and children. He listed his CV — his criminal vitae — by way of admitting to stretches in numerous prisons. He met Lundy at Rimutaka in March 2002.

  Lundy showed no sign of recognition as X was led into the court. Perhaps he didn’t remember him. It was a long time since they had met, and the two men hadn’t actually spent a lot of quality time together. But X remembered Lundy.

  In fact, he remembered him in some detail. He said Lundy wore shorts, a jersey, and white trainers. They were in a prison yard. They sat opposite each other on benches. X sat astride the bench.

  There were two other inmates and the four of them were going to play cards, but the other two just sort of jumped up and wandered off. It was getting on to lunch. X and Lundy talked about what was on the menu. Probably sandwiches, X remembered. Peanut butter sandwiches.

  They’d never met before and they never talked again other than to say hi, how’s it going, during the two weeks they were in the same segregation unit of the prison. ‘He looked familiar,’ said X, ‘but I didn’t know who he was. I knew his first name was Mark.’ The whole country knew that, too. Lundy was a household name, and one of the most recognisable people in New Zealand. He was enormous, a big fatty with Coke-bottle glasses and a bland, round face. They started talking. Morgan asked X, ‘What did the two of you chat about?’

  X said, ‘He asked me what I was in for. I told him it was a bank robbery and I wouldn’t be in there if it wasn’t for my mum telling the police. He said he wouldn’t be in there if his daughter hadn’t come in and seen what he was doing to his wife. He told me he’d been planning it for a while and she had it coming to her.’

  And there it was. Startlingly, frankly, absolutely: the confession. Lundy had denied it to police, to family, to friends, to everyone, but blurted it out to a small-time crook he had only just met in a prison yard.

  X didn’t find it particularly interesting. He said, ‘I just thought he was in there for beating his wife up or something like that.’ He added that Lundy mentioned he was waiting for his appeal to go through.

  The years passed. Curiously, they didn’t keep in touch. X went back to prison, got released, went back inside again, over and over. The stretches were usually about three months. He once told a parole officer, ‘Some people go to Paris every year. I go to prison.’

  He was quite a funny guy; he had an appealing kind of smile, and his comic timing was excellent. The court was played a farcical telephone recording of his call to the police in 2013 when he’d seen his old mate Mark on TV — the Privy Council had overturned Lundy’s conviction, and ordered his release from jail.

  X: ‘I hadn’t really thought about what he’d said to me for a long time, but when I saw him on TV I had a flashback.’ He decided to inform the authorities of that conversation of old. Morgan said, ‘Why?’

  X said, piously, ‘It was the right thing to do.’

  He went about it in a haphazard way, though. X chose to call the motorway traffic number *555 (‘It just popped into my head’) and asked to be put through to police because he had vital information about Mark Lundy. The operator said she couldn’t do that. A recording of the call was played in court.

  X: ‘If you can’t put me through, sweet as, I won’t bother about it.’

  Operator: ‘Okay.’

  X, under his breath: ‘Fucken hell.’

  Later, X sat down and wrote a letter to a judge. It began: ‘Sir. I have the smoking gun to end all smoking guns. I have information about a cold-blooded murderer . . .’ The rest of the letter was a whining demand to be released on bail.

  His lawyer advised him not to send the letter if he wanted to be a credible witness.

  For the defence, Burns asked, ‘Have you ever taken any advice on being a credible witness?’

  ‘Nah,’ said X.

  ‘Perhaps you should have,’ said Burns.

  X, Burns pointed out, constantly elected to be in segregation in prison. It offered a better chance of protection from harm. Burns: ‘You probably saw Mark Lundy as a really good opportunity to get segregation for life, I suggest. Narking on him would get you favours. This is one of the biggest trials this country has ever seen, do you agree with that?’

  ‘You probably know better than me,’ said X.

  ‘One way of ensuring segregation is to say, “I’m the one who narked on Mark Lundy.” That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘To put it bluntly, in order for you to have a comfortable time in prison, you’re prepared to put another man in prison for the rest of his life, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nah.’

  Burns talked about X’s long criminal history (‘I’ve made some bad decisions’), which included about 30 dishonesty offences, and read from reports which described his character as ‘manipulative . . . with multiple personality disorders’. X couldn’t even lie straight in his little cot. A good liar sometimes tells the truth; X was compulsive. Those peanut butter sandwiches he remembered having for lunch in prison — was it Eta or Sanitarium, smooth or crunchy? Burns should have asked, because X had an answer for everything.

  The subject returned to that amazing conversation between X and Lundy back in 2002. Burns said he had some interesting documents that he wanted to share with the court. He searched manila folders, bound volumes, his briefcase. ‘Perhaps we should adjourn for afternoon tea,’ France sighed.

  ‘Thank you, Your Honour.’

  When court resumed, Burns had found his documents. He was right. They were very interesting. They placed X and Lundy in the yard together on four occasions. The dates were all during the weekend.

  And then Burns said, ‘Do you know why you weren’t together between Monday and Friday? It’s because Mr Lundy was in court. He was on trial in 2002. He hadn’t even been convicted. He couldn’t possibly have been waiting for his appeal, as you have told us. Everything you’ve said is a lie, isn’t it?’

  X said, ‘Nah! Cos he said he was waiting for an appeal!’

  Snitch, squirming; snitch, stitched.

  13

  There was one last witness for the prosecution: Lundy. Lundy, as he was in 2000 and 2001, when he was interviewed by Detective Inspector Steve Kelly in a small interview room in the Palmerston North police station. The films were played in court. They were long, rambling, inconsequential, pedantic, humourless, boring — then suddenly chilling and apparently deeply incriminating.

  The first interview was filmed on 14 September 2000, a fortnight after the murders, and the day before Lundy would be taken back to the house for the first time since he had left to travel to Petone. He was nervous about it. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to handle that,’ he told Kelly towards the end of the interview. ‘I did a sort of practice run the other night. I drove round the roundabout [near the house] and had an anxiety attack. It was too close.’

  Lundy subsequently described the visit at his first trial: ‘They opened the ranchslider. It took courage but I went in . . . There was a half-bottle of Crossroads merlot on the kitchen bench. I was asked if it was cooking wine. Crossroads would have
been disgusted at the thought, and I made that comment . . . I then had to go up the hallway. I saw blood on the floor outside my bedroom door and I lost control. I’d put a scenario in my head where Christine and Amber had not suffered, and not seen each other die.’

  A police officer gave this eyewitness account: ‘We made our way to [the] start of the hallway and that’s where he stopped. He became very upset. He was breathing very heavily, and I recall him holding the arm of the Victim Support guy and I recall him placing his hands over his face, and taking every possible last gasp of breath. He didn’t walk up the hallway, he sidled up against the wall, like you would if you were creeping.’

  Genuine, awful horror and despair, or the over-actor at it again, making an exhibition of anguish? Keen observers of body language no doubt picked up signals or whatever in the film of the police interview, too. Lundy and Kelly sat at a small table. There was a clock on the wall. Kelly was a compact man in his thirties. He wore a white shirt and tie. Lundy slumped forward in a grey tracksuit. He had a smooth, round face, a fringe, and was huge, a whopper. This was the Lundy everyone remembered. This was the Lundy everyone loathed. Kelly said, ‘How are you feeling, mate?’

  ‘Truthfully? Absolute shit. Honestly, I am an absolute wreck.’

  ‘Can I ask how you’ve been sleeping?’

  ‘Badly. Last night I ended up watching cricket and fell asleep on the couch. Sometime after three I got up and went to bed. It took probably about three-quarters of an hour to an hour to get to sleep and I slept for about an hour. Then just lay in bed.’

  ‘Mate, do you want a drink of water or coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, water if you could.’

  Kelly asked Lundy about his movements in Petone on the night of the murders. He said he had dinner in his motel room, and then drove across the road to read a book. His favourite author was Wilbur Smith: ‘I’ve read all except one of his books.’ When it got too dark, he went back to the room and polished off most of a 1.125-litre bottle of rum mixed with Diet Coke. He was celebrating the launch of a new kitchen product. ‘It’s going to be extremely profitable.’ He talked about phoning the escort.