Steve Braunias on his new collection of true crime stories

Mark Lundy being supported after the funeral of his wife Christine and daughter Amber in 2000. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Author Steve Braunias’ new book is a collection of recent New Zealand court cases and criminal files, including the Mark Lundy trial. In this extract, he recalls some famous and not-so-famous moments in our criminal history

The possibility exists - a rough calculation here, a journalist's tendency to exaggerate just about everything there - that I have spent an entire year of my life sitting in courtrooms. Strange to think of it as a block of 365 days. The passing of the seasons, summer to summer, while sealed inside a zone of other people's horror - I remember excitedly approaching the wife of a policeman accused of rape and telling her that my daughter had just been born. Dad will be home after court. I've been attracted to the peculiar power of trials for every year of her life.

I've loved it and hated it and I could seldom tear myself away. All reporting is the accumulation of minor details, and nothing is too minor in a courtroom devoted to a case of murder. There is such an obsessive quality to trials. There is no such thing as courtroom drama and the idea that a trial is a kind of theatre is facile, and wrong. It's far more powerful than that.

It's a production of sorrow and paperwork, a clean realism usually conducted in a collegial manner, in dark-panelled rooms with set hours of business. The orderliness is almost a parody of the savage moments it seeks to understand. Inside, the black silk robes and the swearing on Bibles; outside, the dirty realism of New Zealand as it goes about its business, the everyday chaos of love, sex, and money, for the most part settling into patterns of happiness or droll compromise, sometimes going too fast to stop and ending in violent death.

A court is a chamber of questions. Who, when, why, what happened and exactly how - these are issues of psychology and the soul, they're general to the human condition, with its infinite capacity to cause pain. The question that very often most interests me in court is: where. It's impossible and pointless to try to put yourself in the mind of a killer, but the setting takes you to the scene of the crime, shows you something about New Zealand.

Sometimes I think it's the setting and not the mystery that explains why our most famous murder, the Crewe killings, has such a hold on the public imagination. The rural New Zealandness of the 1970 double-killing offers a parable of the way we lived - the isolation, the hard work, the pioneer spirit. Jeanette and Harvey Crewe were killed in their farmhouse in obscure Pukekawa.

Justice Derry (left) and members of the jury and council of Arthur Allan Thomas' 1973 second trial at the Crewe house in Pukekawa.

It was Waikato hill country, submerged in dense fog. "The talk was of calvings and eczema spores, stock prices and rainfall," wrote Terry Bell in Bitter Hill, his 1972 book calling for Arthur Thomas' release. No one heard the two gunshots. The bodies were mummified in bed linen, bound with pieces of galvanised wire from the farm, and placed in wheelbarrows. It was a murder case in which a cow served as an alibi. Thomas said he couldn't have been at the Crewe household because he was with a sick cow, Number 4, which he helped calve that night. The only shot he fired from his rifle that month was to destroy the animal.

It took two months for the bodies to surface in the Waikato River; until then, police searched in limestone caves, and also considered the possibility the Crewes were wandering "dazed" somewhere in that lonely country.

The only vivid detail in the very first case of murder tried in New Zealand - Joseph Burns was found guilty of murdering a couple and their daughter in Devonport, on October 22, 1841 - takes you to the scene of the crime. It was also the same exact spot where Burns was hanged. The courthouse on Queen St was packed during his trial; a fortnight after his death sentence, Burns was unshackled in his cell, and escorted by armed guard to the Auckland wharf, and across to Devonport by boat. The scaffold was erected on the same spot where Burns had hacked the family to death, and burned down their house at the Devonport naval base.

Dudley Dyne writes in Famous New Zealand Murders, "Near the tall scaffold ... lay the coffin ready to receive the body of the prisoner. Burns sat down for a rest upon the coffin, a sight that moved the chaplain to tears."

Dead man resting, on his own coffin, on a Saturday morning on the gently lapping shores of pretty Devonport. Then he stood on the gallows trapdoor and the rope placed around his neck. He asked the hangman to place the knot a little higher. The trapdoor fell. "Thus," penned the watching reporter from the New Zealander, "terminated the first European execution." I wonder if he came back for more. I would have.

The first time I stepped into a courtroom was in Greymouth. I was 23. I had joined the staff of the Greymouth Evening Star, and made court reporter. It was fascinating and baffling and terrifying and I never really got used to it; I felt on edge, and didn't know what to think. I was afraid of murderers and frightened of men who gave the bash - the most common cases were drink-driving, supply of marijuana, and giving the bash. Pat, a very fat man from the Christchurch Press, sat next to me on the press bench. He had seen it all; he sucked on barley sugars, slept, and was extremely helpful.

Most of the time I worried about spelling people's names right. But I also wondered what those days in court were telling me about life in Greymouth. There was a long trial involving two businessmen, one a former policeman, who drove a young guy off the road one dark night and beat him up. He'd been following the ex-cop for weeks and gathering information on him on behalf of a friend - his wife was sleeping with the former detective. The other businessman pushed me against the wall one day during recess. "I don't like you," he said. I didn't say anything. He had his hand on my throat.

Punks - "punk rockers", I solemnly described them in the paper - were always in brawls. They had come to the Coast from Christchurch for peace and quiet, or for the easy access to dope, cactus and datura. One day they started a brawl in court. The judge picked up the hem of his robes, and legged it from the courtroom. Police reinforcements grabbed at the marauding punks. A girl with spikey hair and laddered stockings, who was awaiting her charge of offensive language, crossed the crowded courtroom and gave me a note. She'd written her name and phone number. She lived in a cold house next to the cemetery.

We feel we get to know something revealing and crucial about people defending serious charges, and reach our own judgment on their character. We watch, we inspect, we somehow divine their true nature. I think a great deal of this is dangerous nonsense.
Volumes of court transcripts are filled with fiction. Some of it's intentional - the lying witness, the dishonest cop. Most of it's confused, mistaken, guesswork, half-truths, or just lousy science and longbows. The sum of it is a demented, swirling kind of fiction; with their competing narratives of guilt and innocence, a trial is always going to take on the literary form of an unreliable memoir. I think that's one of the main reasons why I like attending court. I like the way it tells stories. I like the ambiguities, the uncertainties.

But trials end with a verdict, which becomes law, and regarded as fact. A strange phenomenon then immediately occurs in the media. Until the verdict, court reporting is typically cautious; it's stenographic, recording what was said by who. After the verdict, all bets are off. Verdict equals law equals fact, and guilt becomes absolute guilt. Suddenly, you can say what the hell you like. Because you know he did it. There was bilge in a newspaper, after Lundy's first trial in 2002: "He is a hefty, rubbery figure with a huge bulge in the middle, like the Michelin man. When he walks, his palms face backwards instead of in towards his sides ... His eyes swam behind thick lenses, like lazy fish in two small tanks ... He was a keen watcher of crime documentaries on Sky and the Discovery channel. He planned the crime carefully and contrived an alibi. The planning was cold-blooded."

Christine Lundy, Mark Lundy, Amber Lundy.

Well - possibly. I doubt it. I don't know. But I hate the certainty of it, and it was the only thing I promised Lundy when I met him before his second trial - that if he was found guilty a second time, I wouldn't declare some sudden knowledge of his movements and motives when I came to write about it.

It wasn't because I particularly liked him. And I wouldn't have felt all that bad about betraying him in print if I had come to think he was guilty and that the verdict was correct. The horror of the killings and pity for Christine and Amber Lundy were more important than respecting a murderer's feelings. But accepting his guilt is different than claiming an absolute knowledge of how he went about killing his wife and daughter.
In any case, he didn't pay much attention to my pledge. He thought he'd be acquitted. canvas

Extracted from The Scene of the Crime: Twelve extraordinary tales of crime and punishment in modern New Zealand (Harper Collins $36.99) by Steve Braunias, out tomorrow.