The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  16

  We know more about their deaths — the violence of it, the executioner swinging some sort of axe in the dark bedroom — than their lives. But we know and remember their names. Christine and Amber Lundy have been given the same kind of wretchedly sad immortality as Ben and Olivia, Sophie Elliott, the Crewes, the Bains.

  Once upon a time they walked to school together. It took three blocks from their home to the end of the street, then around the corner and over the railway line to Roslyn Primary School — the same familiar journey, the same deep happiness of mother and child together. They last walked it on a Tuesday morning in late winter.

  The flatlands of cold, rivery Manawatu, the edge of town in Palmerston North. ‘They lived in a modest little home,’ as Morgan described it, ‘in a blue-collar suburb.’ The letterbox and windowsills had matching green trim. There was a set of swings and a trampoline in the front yard, a trailer parked out the back.

  Amber was seven. She was born on 9 July 1993, at 1.25am, by emergency Caesarian after Christine had been in labour for 20 hours. Everyone said that her parents adored her; no one needed to point out that she adored them. Mark Lundy told police, ‘She used to put on little concerts for us. We would be watching TV and she would appear in a pair of plastic shoes, and dressed up with a little feather boa around her neck, and do a little dance.’

  She was enrolled at Rocket dance studios when she was three and a half. Christine took her there on that Tuesday, after school. She wore her favourite outfit — a pink and orange leotard with blue tights — and Christine waited in the same seat where she always sat. There was a show coming up, and the girls tried on their costumes.

  The class lasted an hour. After it finished, Amber was due at Pippins. Amber was the third generation in her family to go guiding; her grandmother, Christine’s mother, Helen Weggery, was active in the movement in Tokomaru, and Christine, too, had gone through Guides, and met her husband at the 1978 Gang Show. ‘Fantastic dancer,’ he said of her. They were engaged in Easter 1982, and married in May the next year.

  There was $11.19 in change in the kitchen, and a collection of 83 bottles of wine. Mark and Christine belonged to the Manawatu and Bacchus wine clubs, but she didn’t drink much. She liked the company. They were a popular couple. They’d had the Durhams, Stewart and Caroline, over for a barbecue the previous Saturday night; they’d played cards, and stayed until midnight.

  Mark Lundy’s favourite author was Wilbur Smith, Christine was an avid reader of Mills & Boon. Her habit was to read in the conservatory with her lunch. She also read New Idea and Woman’s Day, sometimes the Australian Women’s Weekly. The TV shows she enjoyed most were light ent — Changing Rooms, Taste New Zealand, Shortland Street.

  After she had walked back to the house, having taken Amber to school on Tuesday morning, Christine and Mark had driven in separate cars to Lighting Direct. She wanted a lightshade for the spare bedroom. Mark had to drive to Petone, on a business trip; they kissed goodbye in the store.

  Last kiss, last walk to school, last supper at 5.48pm when Christine and Amber ordered McDonald’s. Pippins had been cancelled. They ordered nine chicken nuggets, a chicken burger, a filet-o-fish burger, large fries, and two apple pies. The owners of a nearby dairy remembered Christine coming into their shop almost every day for a 1.5-litre bottle of Diet Coke and a Sante chocolate bar. The family were big people. Christine weighed 112 kilograms, Amber 45 kilograms. A verbose pathologist who wore snowdrop-patterned socks said at the trial, fairly unnecessarily, ‘They had a body mass of 44 and 31, which you would say is obese.’

  Christine didn’t cook. Her friends conceded she wasn’t the tidiest person in the world, either. But she was brilliantly organised. She ran her husband’s kitchen sink business from an office in the house, and worked on the accounts until late at night. Afterwards, she’d play Patience and Solitaire on the computer to wind down.

  She turned off the PC at 10.52pm that Tuesday. Christine was a night owl, and often stayed up late to read or watch TV. Amber had her routines — pyjamas on at 7pm, bed at 7.30pm, lights out by 8pm. ‘She was the easiest child to babysit,’ Helen Weggery told police. Sometimes her parents read her a bedtime story, sometimes she read it to them. She slept with a soft toy of Rolly, a jowly dog who featured on TV commercials for toilet paper. Lundy had fixed a net in her bedroom for her stuffed toys and her dolls. There were bunk beds in her room. She slept in the bottom bunk.

  The dance lessons and swimming lessons, Pippins, friends, school, family — she loved her life. It was safe. Her mum and dad looked after her.

  She spoke to her father for the last time on Tuesday, when she asked him over the phone whether it was okay to have McDonald’s for dinner. ‘Of course you can,’ he told her. The exchange was read out in court. A smile touched Lundy’s face, the memory reaching back to him after 15 years of a little girl saying, ‘Please, Daddy?’

  After she put Amber to bed, Christine worked on her brother’s GST accounts. Glenn Weggery had called around that morning to see whether she’d finished. He’d called around the previous morning, too, and then on Wednesday morning, when the curtains were still closed.

  Mark Lundy appeared on the witness stand the first time he was found guilty, at his trial in 2002, and was asked, ‘What do you miss most about Amber?’

  ‘Everything,’ said her father, who will be known and remembered for the rest of his days as her murderer.

  17

  Lundy was found guilty at two minutes to four on April Fool’s Day. The last I saw of him — the last time he might ever be seen in public — was when he was led from the courtroom after the jury were dismissed. He was a man in shock, in disbelief, in agony. The judge promptly sent him back to rot in jail for the remainder of his life. It was over. He was made to disappear.

  I left Wellington the next day. It felt strange to be leaving Wellington for good. The brand-new paving at the Cenotaph war memorial beside Parliament was nearly finished; when I left court that afternoon, it was to the sharp, loud clang of the bell at the Old Government House. The flight was called, and I found myself in line with David Hislop. He was on his way home, too, to London; he was in jeans and a groovy shirt, and was glum, beaten, quiet. He’d emailed early that morning, ‘Just a word of thanks for your commiserations and support yesterday.’ I’d found him after the verdict, standing in a room in the High Court with Ross Burns and Julie-Anne Kincade, the three of them devastated. I didn’t stay long. He wrote, ‘I am unshaken in my belief that the jury got it wrong but perhaps 12 years of entrenched belief in his guilt was just one hurdle too high to clear. After four years on the case I am bowing out and others with more energy can carry on if they can.’ Burns was finished with it, too, but he’d made it plain all along that this was his swan-song — he’d come out of retirement for the case.

  Hislop was at the airport with Kincade. She’d resolved to carry on, and was soon at work on Lundy’s appeal. Her lead argument was that the RNA evidence — Dr Sijen’s test in support of the Crown’s case that Lundy wore Christine’s brain on his polo shirt — should never have been allowed in court. The defence had bungled that one, made a poor submission at the pre-trial hearing when they had tried to get it thrown out of court. Their subsequent pleas to the Court of Appeal, and then directly to Justice France, had also failed. What chance of that same exact appeal finally working the fourth time around? And what difference had it made to the verdict, anyway? Did the jury seriously consider anything remotely scientific?

  ‘You are anonymous,’ Justice France had said to the chosen 12 on the opening day of the trial. Fine. I don’t want to know their names. I don’t want to see any of them ever again — yes, I’m sure the feeling is mutual. I think I probably hate them. I hadn’t really thought all that much about them during the trial. The pretty forewoman took a lot of notes. The cripple seemed as though he was asleep most of the time, and the callow youth looked as though he didn’t have a clue what was being said. The munter was in his ow
n amazing production — that radical makeover had transformed him, but his face remained in a state of agitation. Were there little alliances, important cliques? The forewoman seemed on especially good terms with the hipster. He sat directly behind her, and now and then she’d turn and they’d exchange a knowing smile. They were sometimes seen sharing a joke as they entered court, and they were also sighted together on the morning of the verdict at Tank Juice Bar on Lambton Quay. They walked through the grounds of Parliament on the way to court. Their relationship took on a sinister turn at the precise moment Lundy’s chances of an acquittal went from extremely likely to zero.

  The verdict was on a Wednesday. Justice France summed up on Monday. It drew a crowd, with every seat taken in the public gallery. People were excited to be there, to witness the end of a truly horrible saga in New Zealand history. Mary from Epsom was there, and Anne from Woburn was there, and they were joined by Nathan from Plimmerton, who had a court-watching speciality — he only appeared during the wait for the verdict. He loved the tension, the uncertainty. He loved the verdict most of all, its power on a room. He was in Courtroom 1 when Ewen McDonald was found not guilty of the murder of Scott Guy, and he said he’d never forget that moment. He worked as a gardener; he was strong, with big hands, and there was a sensitivity to him. He was separated from the mother of his children. He said to me that Monday, after the judge had given his summing up, that he was in a new relationship, and things were going as well as could be expected. A radio journalist came over and made a long speech about his history of failed relationships. It was a very long history. I escaped outside, where tui sang in the flax bush. Glenn Weggery was there, standing with detectives from Palmerston North; they weren’t happy. Things looked bad for the prosecution. After the jubilation of Morgan’s exhilarating closing defence, their mood had been brought crashing down by Justice France’s summing up.

  France was most famous as the judge who had ordered journalist Laura McQuillan off the media bench during the Ewen McDonald trial for wearing an apparently distracting pair of gold lamé sequinned ‘disco pants’. He was a stickler for a dress code during the Lundy trial, too; no man could sit before him without a tie. He presided over the court with good grace and unflagging attention to detail. He ruled it with a silver bouffant. But his greatest contribution was his summing up, when he established himself as the most brilliant jurist at the trial. He’d spoken for nearly three hours. He maintained his flair for the malapropism, the flat-out blunder. He referred to Hislop as a character by the name of ‘Mr Wislop’, claimed that Lundy’s first trial was in 2003 (it was 2002), and called the accused ‘Mr Lundry’. Dirty Lundry, or clean Lundry? The remainder of France’s address was a masterclass, a model of clear and nuanced thinking. It was balanced and judicious, as you’d expect. But it was also an instruction to ignore much of what the Crown had put forward, and to acquit.

  He told the jury to reject Morgan’s hard-boiled term ‘the killing journey’. That had no place in court, he said. The prosecution kept returning to the bracelet found in Lundy’s car, saying that it had fallen out of the jewellery box which he had taken from the crime scene. France dismissed it as an unproven nonsense. On the matter of no one in the scientific community coming forward to back Dr Sijen’s critical evidence that the stain contained human RNA, he said: ‘Sijen stands alone.’ The best he could say in support of the tests: ‘If you accept that it is human brain, then the Crown’s case is considerably strengthened . . . Mrs Lundy’s brain tissue is obviously a very significant thing.’

  He ticked off Hislop’s ‘three impossible things’ that ruled out Lundy being the killer. France was in support of Lewis Carroll. ‘One can’t believe impossible things,’ says Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. ‘If you accept he did not have enough petrol to make the trip,’ France said of the defence’s first impossibility, ‘you must acquit.’

  And then he trashed the motive. The Crown said that Lundy did it for the oldest cliché in homicide — an insurance cheque. They examined the accounts of his sink business, and declared that it was on the verge of collapse. Lundy was in serious debt. Really? France told the jury: ‘You may be drawn to the view that the business wasn’t hopeless, wasn’t great, but they had no real reason to think they wouldn’t at least stay the same and maybe get better quite soon. I think it fair if I say to those of you who haven’t had business experience that owing money to people, and being owed by others, is not unusual for small businesses. It is to be noted equally the Lundys were owed money.’ As for the insurance pay-out, France said, ‘It’s important to remember the change in insurance was nothing to do with him. The $200,000 had been in place for a while; the idea of increasing it came from the broker, not Mr Lundy. He knew it would not go up until it was all settled and that had not been done yet, so why kill her now?’

  He gave Kleintjes a bad review. He gave Pang a bad review. He gave his worst review to dear old X, the jailhouse snitch, the comedian with his thick neck bursting out of his tightly buttoned shirt. ‘You saw him in the witness box. I don’t know — maybe in one sense he seemed to you in his own way an engaging witness,’ he said of the wretch. ‘But you should think about things such as the likelihood of Mr Lundy admitting this to a relative stranger, and the error the witness seemingly made about Mr Lundy waiting for an appeal. You also heard of his past offending and how others have called him manipulative. These are matters to weigh in the mix.’ He smiled sweetly, and said: ‘Great care is needed.’

  The evidence of Detective Inspector Kelly, too, caused him to make comments on ‘misleading witnesses’. Kelly was the officer who conducted the filmed interviews with Lundy, leading to his dramatic arrest. Kelly had denied to Hislop that Lundy was always the number-one suspect. But France took the trouble to point out to the jury that Kelly had said the complete opposite to Lundy himself, during the interview, ‘in a bit of the video you didn’t see’.

  The police had tunnel vision. There wasn’t any motive. There was concern that several prosecution witnesses were ‘misleading’. There was no support for Sijen’s claims. X was a wretch. And: ‘If you accept the analysis that Mr Lundy could not do it because he did not have enough fuel, then you should stop there and acquit.’

  Thus the glum faces of the police. Thus Lundy in good spirits outside court that afternoon; thus the celebratory night out on the piss for Hislop and Burns. I caught them on the way out. I said to Hislop, ‘How would you describe things as they are right now? Are they finely poised?’

  He said, ‘I would have thought it was finely poised at nine this morning. But having heard the summing up, and watched the jury — and I was looking at them carefully — I think we’re a few yards ahead. I’ve seen some long faces on the other side.’ He meant the police and the prosecution. Hislop’s laugh was like a happy woof; the thought of those long faces made him bark.

  I said, ‘What did you see when you watched the jury?’

  ‘I was seeing them writing down all the right stuff. But also, it was just that the summing up was much better than I expected. The judge was making some pretty sound remarks. He basically told them to forget the NFI [Netherlands Forensic Institute] stuff. He steered them.’

  ‘He said something like, “Sijen stands alone.”’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. And he’s right of course.’

  Hislop had never heard of Lundy or his case when he took it on in 2010. I said, ‘What do you make of your client?’

  He said, ‘He’s probably one of the least likely murderers I’ve come across. He does genuinely seem like a gentle, rather soft kind of guy. It’s one of the things that just doesn’t add up. I genuinely don’t think he did it. I don’t think he’s got the balls. You need big balls to do that.’

  Burns had been on holiday in Cyprus with his wife, about to have his first beer of the midday, when he had opened up his emails to find Hislop asking him to join the defence team. He knew all about the case. ‘Like everybody else, I assumed he was as guilty as sin.’

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p; I said, ‘You’re an officer of the court and your feelings about guilt or innocence don’t come into it. But did you cross that line, and say, “My client is not guilty”?’

  ‘I had that epiphany when I was going through the petrol consumption evidence and realised he couldn’t have done it,’ Burns said. ‘I remember sitting down — I was at home, at our house in Mangawhai Heads — and then getting up and saying to my wife, “This is an innocent man.” And that’s frightening.’

  He didn’t think the Crown had presented enough evidence for a conviction. He didn’t think it had the jury onside. He said, ‘The body language of three, four people tell me they’re prepared to give Mark Lundy a free ticket home. That may change in deliberation . . .’

  I said to Hislop, ‘If your guy didn’t do it, then what the hell happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Was it a hit wrapped up with the aborted sale of purchase, or the root stock . . . You just don’t know. There’s no evidence that that’s right. There are nutters out there. Was it purely a case of mistaken identity? A hit on the wrong house? We’ll never know.’

  I asked him to comment again on France’s summing up, and he said, ‘Just his tone seemed to me to be very, very weighted towards the defence. He concentrated quite a bit on the burden of proof, which was nice. He kept coming back to our three impossibilities, especially the petrol. I mean, what are you going to do? The guy couldn’t drive there to do it. He didn’t fly.’

  ‘Well, Morgan talked about discrepancies in the mileage.’

  ‘Ahhh, that’s a pile of shit. No. This jury is hot on the petrol. Hot on it. A lot of serious note-taking on the petrol. But, hey,’ he said, and raised his palms to Heaven, ‘I could be dead wrong.’

  He was dead wrong. The verdict was unanimous. ‘Guilty,’ said the foreperson, twice, in a small, childish voice on that beautiful afternoon in autumn. The word fell from her lips. It floated around the courtroom. It was the damnation everyone had expected since the jury had made an extraordinary request the previous day at about 2pm. Word went around that they had something to ask Justice France. It’s not uncommon for juries to seek clarification on particular issues; the difficult science at the Lundy trial meant that it was inevitable that a question would be asked of some arcane matter. But then the word went around that they didn’t have anything to ask about science whatsoever. They wanted to see films. They’d requested repeat screenings of two police videos — that frightening six-minute tour of the crime scene, and much of the second, climactic interview between Lundy and his nemesis, Detective Inspector Kelly.