As the sad and meticulous Black Hands TV series comes to an end tomorrow night, Steve Braunias rejects the widespread belief that David Bain killed his family.
Delivering 150 copies of the Otago Daily Times on his Monday morning paper run had given David Bain black hands. He scrubbed off the printer's ink with soap and cold water. He put on the laundry, including a green jersey. It was a winter's morning, colder inside the house at 65 Every St than outside, but that was Dunedin for you, he was used to it – he wore shorts all the time, and the day before, Sunday, he'd taken the annual Polar Plunge at St Kilda with his younger brother, Stephen. Their father, Robin, stayed on the beach with their clothes and scanned the horizon one last time.
On the Monday morning, Robin got out of the little bed he slept on in an old, mildewed caravan on the property. His wife, Margaret, had dispelled him from the house and the couple lived separate lives for the past four years. He was a kind of cuckold; Margaret was involved in an all-consuming relationship with God and saw Robin as the devil. She was shot point-blank through the left eye that morning with a .22 Winchester fitted with a Whisper silencer and the first, simplest and I think the best police theory was that Robin Bain put an end to his long and deranged misery by killing his wife and the three children in the house before turning the rifle on himself.
A 2007 Privy Council ruling quashed David Bain's 1995 conviction, and a jury of 12 pinned the blame on Robin when they found David not guilty at his retrial in 2009. An audience of two and a half million listened to journalist Martin van Beynen patiently and forensically pin the blame back on David in the 2017 podcast series Black Hands. Who did it? Father, or son? The five-part, $5m TV series Black Hands, based on van Beynen's podcast, ends tomorrow night and provides an answer: one or the other. No, not exactly a firm answer, but the series – beautifully filmed, written, scored (who knew the Dunedin sound was actually a lot of violins), and acted – operates as a deeply felt tragedy rather than an exercise in sleuthing. Its final scenes are among the saddest and most affecting minutes ever put to film in this country.
Police found chocolate wrappers on the floor all around Margaret's bed. She was 50. Laniet, 18, choked on her blood. Stephen, 14, had told a friend he spent hours in his treehouse in a sycamore tree on the property to get away from the arguments inside the house: "He looked as if he had blushed all over," said David Bain, describing his brother's blood-stained body. Arawa, 19, was shot on her knees. Robin had a ready supply of Dad jokes and some of them were quite good quality: "I've got a new Commodore," he once said, meaning that he'd bought a door for his old Commer van. He was 58 and by every theory was the last to die. In tomorrow night's show, we see the outline of a figure resolutely tromping around the house in the darkest hour before dawn holding a rifle in a pair of white gloves.
Black Hands made Dunedin look Gothic and empty. It pictured Robin Bain forever travelling back and forth along the bleak Otago peninsula in his Commer, a dream catcher hanging in the front window, the sky always silent and grey. Much of the series was downright really quite boring. Nothing much happened in the Bain household until something terrible happened; Black Hands is alert to the little acts of madness in New Zealand life, like the rows of bottled fruit that Margaret filled in the kitchen. It was her obsession. No one actually ate the fruit, and it went off. "The fruit glowed in the jars," wrote James McNeish, in his extremely thoughtful and sometimes extremely wrong-headed 1997 book The Mask of Sanity, "the smell of over-ripe apricots and plums oozing out where the seals had lifted."
The series was like a finely assembled mosaic of correct details. I apologise to the producers for an earlier review when I scorned its recreation of the police arriving at the Bain household on June 20, 1994, and arming themselves with revolvers as they swept the dark rooms with torches. It appeared to be dramatic licence – guns n' torches, just like every US cop show, ever - but in fact this is exactly what happened, right down to the scene of a police officer using a stick of firewood to smash open a window to gain access.
And so Black Hands was meticulous, but what did the pattern mean? Like the wretched crystal pendulum that Margaret used to make her shopping decisions for peaches or apricots (always with the fruit!), the series swung between pointing at David or Robin as the killer. Its case against Robin was as subtle and artful as the acting performance by Joel Tobeck. Tobeck has long impressed as a character actor with a similar level of intense commitment as his New Zealand contemporary, the great Marton Csoskas, but he brought it to another, finer level in his role as Robin Bain. He wore a lifetime of suffering, despair, shame, decency, humour, faith, and pain in his face and on his shoulders.
The pendulum of guilt trembled and shook whenever the show swung it towards David Bain's guilt. For all its sensitivity and tact, Black Hands worked quite hard to insinuate that David was, variously, a control freak, a nutter, a friendless wretch, a loser, seething with rage, frustration, envy, and malice, who formed some sort of psychosexual longing for his sister Arawa and was forever sitting in ominous shadows and cleaning his .22. Such scenes raised the tension and gave the series its few thrilling moments.
Listener journalist Bruce Ansley attended the first trial in 1995. "At the end," he wrote, "it was clear that the monstrous killing lacked a monster." There is so little about David Bain and his story that suggests he had the requisite mania and criminal genius to execute his family. Ansley's story was the first to hint at something kept from the jury that made Robin Bain the more compelling monster: claims that he was secretly in an incestuous relationship with his daughter Laniet. Robin's motive, according to David Bain's successful defence in 2009, was that Laniet had threatened to go public, and had possibly already told her mother on the night before the murders. As well, and in any case, there were numerous accounts that suggested Robin was going downhill, going to seed, going mad. Low tide in the harbour on that fatal Monday morning was at 7:23am, and the sunrise was set for 8:19am; one last lonely night in the caravan…
But it's obvious and even kind of dull to suspect Robin. To suspect David is to wander along the darker hues of the human mind, to entertain the power of Oedipal fantasies, to very nearly admire the brilliant handiwork of a killer who put into practice a dastardly master plan that involved expert timing, ruthlessness, stealth, a clever alibi, and an awesome resolve – to pin it on David instead of Robin is to be enthralled by a much more interesting story.
The son, or the father?
"Disturbed … obsessed … bizarre", prosecutor Bill Wright described David Bain at his first trial, in 1995. His exciting theory was that the killings were planned well in advance: "He would kill them all. He would not be constrained by the family. His father would be blamed … He would have everyone's sympathy." Wright presented the inventive "four-plus-one" equation, which had that Bain killed his mother and three siblings, then went on his paper run, and raced back home earlier than usual to lie in wait behind a curtain for his father, whom he shot and killed, placed the rifle beside him, and typed a suicide note. Bain told police that after he discovered the bodies, the shock was so great that he couldn't immediately remember looking in on Arawa, Laniet, and Stephen. Wright: "Loss of memory is the first refuge of the guilty mind."
But it's as though motive is neither here nor there in Wright's closing address. "We try to understand. And we can't." The most recent legal ruling on the Bain killings has that same hollow echo. In 2015, judge Ian Callinan was asked by the Government to ponder the question of David Bain's innocence in light of his compensation claim for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. Callinan refers to motive as "a non-essential ingredient". In the same dismissive tone, he finds claims for an incestuous relationship between Robin Laniet to be "unreliable", and sets that motive aside; his report then returns to its central and relentless theme of pinning the blame on David Bain, and once again readers are given a horrifying and bewitching narrative of a psychopath who ran through the dark streets of Andersons Bay on his paper round with the knowledge that he'd left four corpses at his home and needed to hurry back to keep his appointment to kill his father – who, Callinan confidently asserted, with next to no evidence to back it up, David "hated". He pinned the blame on David.
Callinan didn't bother interviewing Bain. Judge Ian Binnie did, in his 2012 compensation report, and found him "a credible witness". Binnie pinned the blame on Robin. His report is as thorough as Callinan's and just as aware of the various assorted ambiguities of the evidence. All the well-known relics and icons of the Bain case - the luminol footprints in blood, the fingerprints on the rifle, the bruises on David Bain's head, etc – are examined. It's a responsible piece of work. But there's something disappointing about the Binnie report. It takes away the magic of the darker and often far-fetched narratives that cast David as the killer. It breaks the spell. It sets out a mundane and really not very spectacular likelihood of Robin Bain – at the end of his tether, typing out a suicide note on his computer – deciding that the most effective way to maintain silence was to annihilate everyone in the house. The banality of familicide.
Joe Karam's three books on the Bain case have the same effect. Karam's support for David Bain will continue until his last breath, and his imagined scenario of the events at 65 Every St allows for no doubt in his mind that Robin committed murder-suicide. But the telling is flat. Man gets out of his caravan, walks inside his house, shoots everyone and himself; there are strong grounds for a motive. The story has pathos, but it's absent of the very thing that the David Bain theory thrives on: mystery.
No one has a solid reason for why they think David Bain did it. Martin van Beynen is a seriously good journalist but his Black Hands podcast flounders when he attempts to look inside David's mind. "A manipulative genius? Maybe. A talented actor? It can't be ruled out." Good grief. As for motive: "Maybe more failure was just around the corner. Maybe Margaret had got back together with Robin. Maybe the only thing in David's mind was doing what he had to do." Maybe something, maybe nothing.
The son, or the father? It's terrible to impugn the dead but it's not too flash to impugn the living, either. "Deep down," wrote James McNeish in The Mask of Sanity, "I believe he [David] knows he is guilty." Around about the time he published this piece of divine knowledge, Bain was getting his teeth smashed in by another prisoner in the east wing of Christchurch Men's Prison; in all, he spent 13 years in jail on the basis of circumstantial evidence, much or at least some of it equivocal. Example: were the fingerprints on the rifle pressed on human blood, or rabbit blood? Example: Bain says he heard Laniet "gurgling"; does that place him as the shooter, or was she experiencing the known phenomenon of the body making noises after death?
The pendulum of guilt swings towards Robin Bain in a crucial – and entirely imagined - scene in tomorrow night's episode of Black Hands. I told Joe Karam about it on the phone this week. "Oh," he said. He assumed the show was a mere replica of the podcast. It has Robin turning to Margaret on that Sunday night, and saying, desperately, "What are we going to do now?" When he got up the next morning, took the paper out of the letterbox (its daily Bible passage was from Jeremiah: "The fathers have eaten a sour apple, and the children's teeth are set on edge"), and left it unread in the hallway of that house of shame and disgrace, an answer may have occurred to him.
