Raurimu massacre: Gunman Stephen Anderson’s book The Devil’s Haircut reveals mental health battle

Stephen Anderson murdered six people, including his father, in a shooting at a ski lodge on February 8 1997. The slayings became known as the ‘Raurimu massacre’. Anderson, then aged 24, had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia two years earlier. A jury later decided he was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. He was first released from psychiatric care in 2009, was later recalled, and freed again in 2014.

Steve Anderson is quietly spoken, thoughtful, and he considers his words. Now 50, he lives with the violent echoes of his actions when he killed six people and wounded four others.

Anderson was the perpetrator of the so-called Raurimu massacre, 26 years ago. After a short jury debate, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity – someone who could be detained indefinitely at a psychiatric unit located at the then Porirua Hospital.

Anderson is now the author of The Devil’s Haircut: My Life Before and After the Raurimu Massacre. It is an attempt to explain the apparently inexplicable, admitting a reader into his world as it was – and as it now is.

“Detained as a forensic mental health patient,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “I did not squander my time. It has taken hard graft to acquire what I have learnt and make a recovery. I deeply regret my actions and if passing on the information and experiences … can spare or relieve others of certain suffering, so much the better.”

Steve Anderson, now 50, lives with the violent echoes of his actions when he killed six people and wounded four others. Photo / Hagen Hopkins

It has involved reliving the traumatic events of 1997 as well as his subsequent treatment and life. Anderson communicates his story with immediacy. It is unique in New Zealand publishing history – and, perhaps, the world’s.

“At Raurimu, the strongest problem in my mind was fear and being scared of the people I was surrounded by,” he says.

“I was pretty frightened back then before I offended. I didn’t know very much as a young man. All I knew was that I didn’t like myself very much. I didn’t like the world very much and thought it was a cruel and nasty place.

“I didn’t see a future for myself. I was on a bit of a rudderless voyage.

“My mind was in the grip of a psychosis,” he explains. “It convinced me I had no choice but to act. If I had been well, this would not have happened. It was like putting a coin in a pokie machine and winning the bad karma jackpot.”

Anderson in police custody soon after the murders. Photo / File

Around 9am on Saturday, February 8, 1997, Anderson walked into the kitchen at the family’s ski lodge near the small settlement of Raurimu in the central North Island. The area, with its native bush and proximity to the central plateau’s mountains, is a prime location for holiday homes. The family property, built by his father, slept 18 people. That weekend they had guests.

Anderson was 24, with short hair and a small beard. He was already under treatment for a diagnosed mental disorder. There had been a recent visible deterioration in his condition. His mother had been reluctant to leave him at the family home for the long Waitangi weekend and had attempted to have him reassessed by Wellington’s Community & Capital Health. The request received no response beyond a promise of future action.

The Anderson family's ski lodge at Raurimu. Photo / Mark Mitchell

As his parents and their guests breakfasted, Anderson entered the kitchen holding a 12-gauge shotgun, with another cartridge held between his teeth. He had been shooting and hunting since his teenage years. There had always been guns in the family environment. He knew how to handle a weapon.

His father, Neville, immediately rose from his seat. He could see that the matter was serious. Trying not to inflame things, he approached Anderson calmly and attempted to reach for the end of the firearm.

“What’s all this about?” he asked.

“You’re the devil incarnate,” Anderson responded before shooting him in the chest.

“I was sure my father had convened a gathering of important system players,” Anderson explains. “He seemed to be in a leadership role. They had come together to make plans for the advancement of this country’s branch of the global system.”

The panicked lodge guests scattered. One managed to put in a call to accident and emergency. Anderson shot four others before moving on to a neighbouring property, to kill another man there.

In the rugged terrain, police located Anderson using helicopters. He was eventually apprehended, naked, in farmland about a kilometre from the lodge.

He had killed a total of six people and wounded four in an event that made global news.

Steve Anderson is led from the court in Taumarunui. Photo / Nicola Topping

“It is very hard to be super-objective,” he comments, “even when things are so super-serious, because your mind has a habit of making forgiveness and letting yourself off the hook, allowing yourself to believe something that isn’t true. It is very hard to be objectively honest as a person for yourself.”

The Devil’s Haircut is raw, truthful, and confronting.

Anderson plunges a reader into his thought processes and events as they unfolded, often using the revealing material he wrote at the time. The title comes from an incident that followed his arrest.

“I was subject to a whole lot of forensic tests with a doctor and a police officer, where they took fingernail clippings, scrapings and swabs from inside my mouth. An officer gave me a haircut of sorts, where he took a snip of hair off each side of the back and the temple, and the widow’s peak. Looking at the form and the instructions where to take the snips from, it looked like a pentagram, and I decided it must be a devil’s haircut.

“You fall back on religion - well, I did. It becomes the default thing when the wheels start coming off psychologically.”

Anderson’s psychotic episodes had begun two years before, after he had been taken into custody in Wellington during a night out when he’d been drinking. He had become separated from friends and had an altercation with bouncers. He had been “lippy” to police and his treatment at their hands, he suggests, was less than gentle.

He eventually laid an official complaint, but it was as if “a major circuit-breaker had malfunctioned”. After attracting attention in a modestly threatening way, it seemed he was “profiled and targeted to receive some tailor-made attention and manipulated psychologically”. He began to read messages that seemed to be directed at him personally in television advertisements, album songs, radio talkback shows, and overheard conversations.

It was an intense psychic bombardment and he struggled to make sense of it.

Anderson was referred to a specialist who prescribed psychiatric medications. Eight months later, he had stopped taking his pills and things spiralled out of control. Following a short police car chase, he was admitted to psychiatric care.

A second, more lethal, episode would follow at Raurimu. Anderson had again stopped taking his medications. This time events would explode.

Neville Anderson was the first person to be shot dead by his son at Raurimu in 1997. Photo / Supplied

Firstly, there was his family background. “We started out as Brethren and we ended up by going to an evangelistic type of – I want to say happy-clappy, I don’t know the technical term – but it was a Christian fellowship,” he says. “My father was an elder there.”

It had given Anderson background beliefs that would govern some of his views of the world and his opinions of himself. He had consistently struggled with his sexuality. More recently, he had also formed a conviction about a universal conspiracy that surrounded him, and which extended to a view that he was constantly being bullied, taunted and teased.

He had also begun self-medicating with cannabis, a drug he had regularly used in the past and that had given him ease.

“I think that drug-users in general are trying to work in an environment that is controlled by crooks and thugs and the police,” he says.

“There are laws against drugs. People are in danger. The environment that prohibition creates is a dangerous one. It is natural that people, if they start losing control of their thinking, have a whole smorgasbord of thoughts – unhelpful thoughts – that come to mind in certain circumstances and situations.”

The Devil’s Haircut contains passages Anderson wrote for his QC immediately before his 1997 trial. They are a first-person journey unlike any other, both immediate and visceral. He describes the events at Raurimu in all their eerie light, but while they might be the weighty centre of his story, they don’t form its entirety.

Anderson lives with his mother: 'I’m trying to choose to be happy and do my best, using my mindfulness skills.' Photo / Hagen Hopkins

Anderson’s life in subsequent years presents much for consideration. Technically, he was detained indefinitely, a sentence without end. He was given a battery of psychiatric drugs, of both new and old formulations. It could easily have been a world without hope.

His medications have an array of side effects. One caused copious dribbling and he was issued with plastic pillowcases. There were dramatic weight increases from 69kg to 136kg, constipation, blurry vision, atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat), dizziness and headaches.

“The medications have got a lot of money behind them and I don’t think the drug companies are being entirely truthful about the side effects that can come from some of these treatments. There have been cases where they have suppressed things like breast enlargement in men using Risperidone, that have resulted in a number of successful lawsuits.

“But paying the millions of dollars in damages to people who have been injured in some way is a drop in the bucket from what they earn from the medication when it is on open sale after they’ve patented it. These medications have been marketed very well and people believe they correct chemical imbalances,” Anderson believes, “but they don’t correct chemical imbalances – they cause chemical imbalances in the patient’s brain.”

For Anderson, the psychiatric profession has sometimes been judge, jury and psychic executioner.

“I kind of feel like it is a cruel and unusual torture. They don’t mean it that way, but that is what is happening … They inject me with a drug every two weeks and I am really struggling on it. It is like a wet blanket on my mind. Everything is a chore. I have been on it for about a year.

“I try to get medication reviews with my team but they are happy with things as they are, because they have certainty I am taking my pills, in the sense that I cannot not take my pills.

“Instead of dwelling on all this stuff I can’t change – things that piss me off – I’m trying to choose to be happy and do my best, using my mindfulness skills.”

His mother has stood by him since the events at Raurimu. She is now 76 and he lives with her.

“Mum just wants me to be happy and well. I think that is what most people would want, though I think that there would be some who want to see me punished and continually punished. I could make a case for [there being] aspects of that happening and continuing to happen. I am not footloose and fancy-free – and it has been 26 years since Raurimu happened.”

Anderson has had periods of employment but when his identity was revealed, he would be asked to leave. He has written and published a book of poetry, Toys in the Attic, and records music with friends. He has also found Buddhism offers him practical mind techniques.

“I haven’t really gone out and looked for a relationship lately,” he continues.

“I have some self-esteem issues about how I look [being] overweight and stuff like that, which holds me back. I have lost a lot of confidence and confidence is attractive in someone.

“I have always felt that writing the story was my trump card, my only way to counter myriad things levelled at me in the process,” Anderson explains. “The story is where I can get alongside the reader and share with them my walk and see if we have got some things in common.

“There is a part in the book, when I was at Tokanui Hospital, where I had to disrobe to take a shower. One of the guys waiting around sensed my hesitance to take my turn and he said, ‘You don’t have to be shy. Don’t feel self-conscious about yourself.’

“I want to be that person for the reader. I think there are a lot of people out there struggling with all sorts of battles, not just mental health, they might have financial things, whatever. I want to be that guy who is reassuring and lets people know they aren’t the only one. Someone has to go first. I am trying to do that for people.”

The Devil’s Haircut: My Life Before and After the Raurimu Massacre, by Steve Anderson (Urban Druid Press, $40), is available now.