The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  There was a particular moment in the crime scene that they obviously wanted to see again. Three of them leaned forward when the camera showed the bloody glove print on the conservatory window. It was Christine’s blood, and the killer had left it there. I remember Levick miming his theory — the killer wore paper booties, and leaned his hand against the window for balance as he bent to take off the protective shoes. The police argued that the fact that it was on the inside of the window showed that Lundy had staged the break-in. When the film zoomed in on the close-up of the glove print, the foreperson turned to the juror behind her, and exchanged a knowing smile. Interesting. Even more interesting was the psychodrama which two members of the jury seemed to play out during the film of Lundy’s police interview with Kelly. When the film began, everyone in the room looked at it on the big screen – except for two jurors, who kept their eyes on Lundy in the dock, and watched him watching the film.

  What was that about? It felt like the funeral all over again. It felt like another journey into the bullshit science of body language. Did the way Lundy behave in court, and in the police interview, somehow reveal something about his guilt? The film of Kelly’s interview took a sudden and alarming turn when he said to Lundy, ‘I’m going to have to show you some photographs.’

  ‘I didn’t want this,’ Lundy complained.

  Kelly said, ‘The day has come.’ He opened up a folder and took out a photograph from the crime scene. ‘That is Christine.’

  Lundy turned away in horror, and cried out: ‘No!’

  ‘Christine has got severe head injuries to her arms and head area. There’s blood everywhere.’

  Lundy slid his chair across the floor to get away from the pictures, and said, ‘Oh yuck.’

  ‘Oh yuck’ didn’t quite cover it. ‘Oh yuck’ didn’t really measure up to the graphic slaughter of his wife. ‘Oh yuck.’ Who says ‘Oh yuck’?

  ‘The blows have gone across the head, Mark,’ said Kelly.

  ‘Oh God. I hate you now, I really do,’ said Lundy — and his response once again seemed significant to some jurors.

  Kelly got up and awkwardly rubbed Lundy’s shoulders. It was a strange piece of male bonding. He said, ‘Mark, the thing about this is that Amber would have been killed with the same instrument.’

  ‘Oh God, you’re not going to show me that, too, are you?’

  Lundy talked in whimpers. He turned his head away from the pictures. He was in some distress. But when Kelly asked him questions about other subjects — the bracelet found in his car, his tools — Lundy reverted to making casual conversation. It was as though he couldn’t maintain his grief and horror. It came and went. Lundy recoiled, groaned loudly, made strangled kinds of screams. He covered his face. He bowed his head. Was it horror, or a lame attempt to mime the response expected of an innocent man?

  Kelly showed him a picture of Amber lying dead in the doorway to his bedroom, and said, ‘If you look back at the photograph of her brains, they went everywhere, up the wall, up the bed, across the dresser, up the curtain, every-bloody-where but right there, and the reason why they didn’t go there, Mark, is cos that’s where you were standing.’

  ‘No,’ Lundy sobbed.

  ‘Don’t even think about lying to me, do not think about lying to me.’

  ‘I am not lying.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I was not in Palmerston North!’

  ‘I’ll show you something else, and you’re going to have to look at this because this is how it works. That is a picture of your beautiful daughter. That’s a picture of your beautiful daughter in the doorway with her head cut. That there is a close-up of it. Don’t make faces, because I’m saying you did this. And you hit her that hard, that’s her skull.’

  ‘I didn’t, Steve, I did not, I was not in Palmerston North, I was in Wellington, I did not kill my wife and daughter. Please, cover those up — please?’

  ‘Mark, why would I cover them up? You did it, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I bloody well didn’t.’

  It was the funeral all over again . . . He showed too much grief, he didn’t show enough. He wailed and whimpered, a hung-over fatty confronted with appalling photographs, pleading, crying, then talking matter-of-factly about bracelets and such. It looked bad. Or was it just footage of a man in shock? It had absolutely nothing to do with the murders, it didn’t place him at the crime, it offered nothing in the way of evidence, it didn’t point to motive, to opportunity, to anything that suggested that he killed his wife and daughter. But was it what the jury wanted to see; was it what they needed to convict?

  The mood in the courtroom changed completely after that. Hislop looked like he’d seen a ghost. I found him pacing outside on the pavement, his head bowed. I said, ‘With respect, you’re fucked.’

  He gave one of his barking laughs, and said, ‘Well.’

  I said, ‘No. You’re fucked.’

  He said, ‘Fuck off. Okay?’ He stomped off, his head still bowed.

  The end was nigh. Mike White from North & South read it that way, too; he was shocked. Mike, to his vast professional credit, was largely responsible for everyone coming to this room in Wellington to hear six weeks of evidence. His investigative story on the murders challenged the Crown case against Lundy with sufficient power to attract not just Hislop but also some of the world’s leading forensic scientists to the cause. It had led to the first conviction being quashed. His own views on Lundy’s guilt or innocence provided a model of rational thinking which I tried to follow. He said, ‘All I can do is approach it from the angle the judge instructed the jury to: can you be sure he did it? If not, then you’ve got to acquit because there’s not sufficient evidence, and thinking it’s possible, or even likely he did it, isn’t good enough. Does the evidence show he did it for sure? I’ve never been able to get to that point, personally.’

  The police started to look more relaxed. Ben Vanderkolk sat with one of his sons, who worked up the road at The Backbencher pub, and put his arm around his shoulders. I was glad Geoff Levick had decided against coming to Wellington for the verdict. I had emailed him on the weekend, and he’d replied, ‘No, I’ve decided not to come down as I will be seeing Mark anyway probably on the same day as the Not Guilty verdict. Mark is informed and is ok with that.’

  I mucked around Thorndon waiting for the verdict. I foraged for delicious golden peaches growing wild in a tree in the carpark of the Indian High Commission, and shared them in court. I stopped and chatted with the religious maniac on Lambton Quay who wore a sandwich board that advised PERILOUS TIMES WILL COME. At the Corrections Department offices on The Terrace, I walked through its entertaining prison museum — a rope made from sheets, a tattoo machine made with a ballpoint pen and a motor from an electric razor. Inevitably, there were reminders of Lundy among the museum exhibits. He would have remembered the heavy serge-green uniform that guards wore until it was retired in 2011. Beautiful penmanship in the nineteenth-century admissions register at Invercargill Gaol recorded the execution of James Welsh for the murder of his wife.

  On Wednesday afternoon I was sitting around at the courthouse with Mike White when Julie-Anne Kincade approached us, and said, ‘It’s time.’ Her face was intensely serious. The lawyers and the families and the media and the curious filed into the court. Justice France took his throne. The jury entered; they kept their eyes down. The registrar said, ‘Place Mark Edward Lundy before the court.’ He entered and gave his sister a smile; she sat behind him with her husband. He stood with his hands behind his back.

  Detective Inspector Marc Hercock, a nice man who favoured Blues Brothers dark glasses, gave a press conference outside court. A police wagon took Lundy away. I stood around in a daze for a while. I said goodbye to Mary of Epsom. She said, ‘Thank you for all your support.’ What? I commiserated with Hislop, I said so long to Mike White. He emailed a few days later: ‘Were we the only two people in court other than the defence and Lundy family that were unsettled by the decision?’
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  Before I left, I received permission to sit in Courtroom 1 and study the crime scene photographs shown to the jury. I wanted to see what the case was all about. I wanted to see what had happened to Christine and Amber, in colour, not in the creepy black and white photocopies I’d studied at Kumeu. Many of the photos were pixillated. They concealed the worst of Christine’s injuries. But they were still very graphic and terribly sad. The little girl on her front, her head in a pool of blood on the carpet with its pattern of autumn leaves. Christine was photographed at postmortem, her face wiped clean. But it was no human face that remained. I was moved to something like a crisis of faith. I felt tired and depressed. I thought: maybe the jury got it right. They’d deliberated for 13 hours, over two nights. It can’t have been easy. Twelve adults looked at the evidence. Maybe all this really was his doing, his vicious and unforgiveable act. Maybe he did do that. He killed his wife and, having gone that far, having arrived at that state of euphoria and madness, took one or two quick strides towards his daughter. Maybe when Amber stood at the doorway and looked in, the last word she said was ‘Daddy?’

  I don’t know. I think it was the same horror visited upon them by someone else, someone who was already in the house that night when their neighbour saw the sliding door open; I think the stomach contents and the gas tank put Lundy in Petone, sleeping off the rum and the escort, just another travelling salesman with a wire coat-hanger in the back of his car, who got up the next morning, threw his polo shirt with a food stain on it into his bag, ate a bacon and egg sandwich on The Esplanade with a view of Wellington harbour, and set about seeing his clients, selling a tap, fixing a scratch on a sink, showing no sign of sleeplessness or mania. The evidence didn’t stack up. What use was the discredited science of Sijen? The logic didn’t stack up. Who the hell would order an escort as an alibi? Reasonable doubt was all over the place. How to explain the flakes of dark-blue paint at the crime scene? In the eyes of the law, his monstrousness extended beyond the killings to lying about it. The alternative monstrousness was that an innocent man grieved for his wife and daughter, and was placed under arrest — and falsely convicted, certainly once, quite likely twice.

  I visited Geoff Levick after the trial. The dementia unit in Kumeu had opened, and some poor soul in a cardigan was standing outside in winter sunlight. A black shag was drying its wings on a post in front of Levick’s fish pond. The mandarin trees were in fruit. There were new manila folders stuffed with documents in the room off his garage. We talked about Hislop, paint flakes, Miller, the jury. He hadn’t given up fighting, and likely never will. Julie-Anne Kincade had filed notice to appeal. Lundy was back at Wanganui prison. The house where he lived with Christine and Amber was up for tender. It had been painted and renovated, but was immediately recognisable — there was the driveway someone had crept around that night in 2000, there was the kitchen still with its blue cupboards, there were the bedrooms . . . I wept again to look inside that house of grief and horror, to be reminded of what had happened there, and what had happened, too, at the trial in Wellington. The house looked haunted. It felt haunted by the living: by Lundy.

  Levick drove me to a foodhall in west Auckland after I visited. We talked about what would happen when Lundy’s 20-year prison sentence came to an end. Without confession or remorse, he’d probably keep going back inside each time he appeared for parole. Lundy had said to Levick that his best revenge on the people who put him there would be to live to 100, and forever state his innocence.

  Acknowledgements

  These stories have been revised, reshaped and in most cases entirely rewritten from their original publication in the New Zealand Herald, Metro, North & South and the Sunday Star-Times. One of the abiding pleasures of working in journalism is the opportunity to learn from the best in the field; my thanks and gratitude to the editorial guidance and professional expertise of staff at those newspapers and magazines: Shayne Currie, Jared Savage, Tim Murphy, Chris Reed, Simon Wilson, Virginia Larson, Cate Brett, Miriyana Alexander, and the incomparable Donna Chisholm.

  Finlay Macdonald has been my best friend since I left adolescence for early adulthood at the age of 30. His commissioning of this book, and our conversations about its thinking and its intent, are the latest evidence of his support and also his rare intelligence.

  My thanks also to Rachel Dennis and Kate Stone for their skill and attentiveness in helping to shape the book and its contents.

  Writing a book separates the author from their family. I was a remote creature preoccupied with thoughts of violent crime while I wrote this book, but my heart always was and always will be with Emily and Minka.

  About the Author

  STEVE BRAUNIAS has won over 30 national writing awards as a journalist, satirist, author and television writer, including fellowships to Oxford University and Cambridge University. He works for the New Zealand Herald, and is the proprietor of Luncheon Sausage Books. He lives in Te Atatu with his partner and their young daughter.

  Also by Steve Braunias

  Fool’s Paradise (2001)

  How to Watch a Bird (2007)

  Fish of the Week (2008)

  Roosters I Have Known (2009)

  Smoking in Antartica (2010)

  Civilisation: 20 places on the the edge of the world (2012)

  Madmen: Inside the weirdest election campaign ever (2014)

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in 2015

  by HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  harpercollins.co.nz

  Copyright © Steve Braunias 2015

  Steve Braunias asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This work is copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

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  1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, United Kingdom

  2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA

  National Library of New Zealand cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Braunias, Steve.

  The scene of the crime / by Steve Braunias.

  ISBN 978-1-77554-083-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-77549-120-0 (ebook)

  1. Murderers—New Zealand. 2. Violent offenders—New Zealand.

  3. Criminal psychology. 4. Criminal investigation—New Zealand.

  I. Title.

  793.31993—dc 23

  Cover design by Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

  Cover image by shutterstock.com