KEY POINTS:
Scott Watson was "done like a dinner" from the first days of the inquiry when police decided he was responsible, says Keith Hunter.
His voice is quiet but he speaks rapidly in the manner of a man who has much to tell.
The conviction of Watson, he contends,
not only falls short of the test of reasonable doubt but was contrary to the evidence; the media was manipulated; witnesses whose accounts did not fit the police scenario were bullied, moulded or discarded; and the trial seemed to Hunter more an exercise of gamesmanship than a pursuit of truth.
His book Trial By Trickery, Scott Watson, the Sounds Murders and the Game of Law calls for an inquiry into how an investigation, a trial and an appeal process went so wrong. It contains a letter to parliamentarians, each of whom is to be sent a copy of the book.
Hunter is a journalist of 40 years, a documentary-maker and now an author and a crusader. "I'm not a writer," he explains, "the book is written out of frustration."
Hunter knows he is making bold assertions but claims they are justified by his painstaking examination of the transcript of the three-month trial, of police files and of public records.
"The public was misled and the jury was misled," Hunter says. "It's an extraordinary story about how an inquiry and a case can go wrong from day one."
The Court of Appeal had failed to ensure the trial was fair and the conviction safe, he says. The worst court element was that the trial judge and, later, the Court of Appeal, allowed the prosecution to introduce a new scenario during its closing address, that Watson had made two trips back to his boat in the early hours of New Year's Day 1998.
Until then, the Crown case seemed to have been that Watson was the mystery man in the bar, the man in Guy Wallace's water-taxi with Ben Smart and Olivia Hope and that that was the only trip he made that night from the party at Furneaux Lodge to his boat Blade.
Watson had claimed to have returned to his boat alone.
The Crown introduced the "two-trip theory", says Hunter, at a time when it impossible for the defence to counter.
If it was a calculated tactic, it worked. Had the Crown put the assertion during evidence its improbability would been exposed, Hunter says.
On the two boats to which Blade was rafted there were several witnesses who heard him come home, once and alone, and there is no evidence of Watson having returned from his boat to the party.
Hunter says that in rejecting the defence's appeal, based on the "two-trip theory", the Court of Appeal made a "most grave" error.
In its judgment it said the matter had been dealt with extensively in cross-examination. It had not, says Hunter. "The judgment recognises an entire body of trial transcript that doesn't exist."
Hunter says an appeal against conviction should have been filed on the grounds that the verdict was inconsistent with the evidence. "Surely, that should be one of the most powerful reasons for appeal."
Such applications were uncommon, he believed, because of a view among lawyers that the Appeal Court does not welcome them because it requires the full trial transcript to be read.
Hunter's own examination of the murder inquiry and ensuing case has consumed much of the past five years, but he says without doing the work there could be no book, and it is a book he believes needed to be written.
It arose from his documentary Murder on the Blade?, screened in November 2003 on TV One.
"In that documentary, Guy Wallace, the principal prosecution witness, stood up and said: 'Scott Watson is the wrong man'. Without him, the Crown couldn't have brought a case.
"The Court of Appeal said as much, noting that if Wallace's identification of Watson as the mystery man was incorrect then the Crown case was seriously undermined.
"Wallace then took a petition to Parliament ... and nothing happened. Here's the main witness saying you've got it wrong, and the system doesn't give a damn. That's the cause of my frustration."
According to Hunter, Watson was convicted on three pieces of evidence: Wallace's identification, two secret jailhouse witnesses, and Olivia's hair "supposedly" found on a blanket from the Blade.
"They can't have Guy Wallace any more. One secret witness has retracted, the other got a car, a telephone and has been treated unbelievably leniently in the years since.
"They searched [the blanket] in January and didn't find the hairs. Then they got Olivia's hairs from her home to use as control samples, and after that it is announced that they have found these hairs on the blanket.
"There are all sorts of possible ways that those hairs could have got there. To my mind, the least likely is that they were on that little boat."
Hunter rates the likelihood of Ben and Olivia getting on the boat without anyone knowing as "a nil chance".
"It's 23 feet long at the waterline, it was moored right up to - touching - another boat on which there were nine people."
Some of the most dramatic Crown evidence doesn't survive close scrutiny. Scratch marks on the inside of the hatch prompted the alarming image of Olivia Hope's vain attempt to escape. The hatch opens from the inside, so a weight would need to have been placed on top of it to prevent exit.
"However, the greatest difficulty for the Crown argument was that some of the scratch marks went right to the edge of the hatch cover, so that they were invisible and untouchable when the hatch was closed."
Hunter writes that according to Watson's former girlfriend, Watson said his young nieces made the marks when the hatch was open.
Hunter has not spoken to or met Watson. It's not about him, he says, but the adequacy of the case against him.
Hunter's book - although the most strident in its claims - is the latest of several.
Surveys of public opinion, first in 2002, then repeated two years later, showed a rise in those who had doubts about the safety of Watson's conviction - from 39 per cent to 55 per cent.
Hunter believes few people would have cared about Watson by the time his trial began in June 1999 because police had already "spent five months producing a picture of Watson as an absolutely repulsive human being".
In fact, says Hunter, he was "a small-time adolescent criminal" whose last offence was at the age of 18 1/2. He had convictions for cannabis, burglary and pulling a marlin spike on people who were taking his dinghy."
The media emerge poorly from Hunter's analysis. By and large they swallowed what the police fed them.
It was the height of summer holidays, the quietest time of year for news. It was an irresistible story involving youth, beauty and a mystery beast.
Reporters were under pressure to produce a flow of copy and police were the main conduit of the material. A problem arises, says Hunter, when reporters can't know whether they are receiving misinformation.
A television reporter who made independent inquiries by interviewing Guy Wallace and the two bar staff who had served the mystery man was accused by the police of meddling.
The reporter showed Wallace images her cameraman had taken of Watson and asked if he recognised him as the mystery man who was on his water-taxi with the missing pair.
Wallace said he didn't recognise Watson as the same man who was on the boat.
The police complained and the reporter was taken off the story. Hunter questions whether, rather than in the interests of a fair trial, the police reaction was because the story did not suit their purpose.
He points out that a magazine article containing unsourced and extremely prejudicial claims about Watson - such as that he became crazy when drinking - did not attract the same reaction from the police.
Hunter supports retired judge Sir Thomas Thorp's call for New Zealand to set up a well-funded independent body to investigate potential miscarriages of justice.
"England did that 10 years ago. Why did we not follow suit?"
He answers his own question: "We are too young. I don't think our society is mature enough."
Although such a body is needed, it is at the bottom of the cliff and the Sounds case has convinced Hunter change is needed at the top.
"It was a systemic disaster. The problems were in every area: police, prosecution, judge and Court of Appeal."
What does he think happened to Hope and Smart? A boat came in from overseas on drug business. It did its business and went away, he says.
"I think the guy who took Olivia and Ben was doing exactly what Scott Watson was accused of doing - looking for a woman to take away on his boat - and I think that he succeeded.
"It's not a very nice story and is not one that I would want to hear as a parent."
But neither, he says, is a story about a conviction having been gained from such a flawed process.