Twenty-five years have passed since Scott Watson was convicted of murdering Ben Smart and Olivia Hope. Image / NZME
The 1998 murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope remain one of New Zealand’s most talked-about cases.
Scott Watson has spent the last 25 years behind bars after being convicted of murdering them, despite no bodies ever being found.
While his latest parole bid has been delayed, Watson is heading back to the courtroom on Monday, four years after his case was referred back to the Court of Appeal.
He has always denied killing the pair after New Year’s celebrations in the Marlborough Sounds holiday hideaway, Furneaux Lodge, and has repeatedly been denied parole since he became eligible after 17 years behind bars.
NZ Herald senior journalist Carolyne Meng-Yee told The Front Page she remembers when the news of Hope and Smart’s disappearance first hit the news.
“It was extraordinary for a number of reasons because most people remember New Year’s Eve nights and going out and partying and no one would ever think two young kids would never come home to their families and are still missing,” she said.
NZ Herald senior editor Oskar Alley covered Watson’s three-month trial in 1999 and told The Front Page it was like New Zealand’s version of the OJ Simpson trial - a case that dominated news media and captivated a nation.
“The whole country was watching,” he said.
“People just couldn’t get enough information. You could feel the pressure on everyone, the jury, the judge, the lawyers. The media, we felt it too, because your bylines are on the story. People realise who you are and every party or social interaction you have, they’re talking about this case.”
Both Meng-Yee and Alley remember there being a sense of prejudice from the public about Watson from the very beginning.
“Because he was a dodgy character by nature and also just because of his previous convictions, which there were 48 of. So already, in the public’s mind, he was guilty,” Meng-Yee said.
Alley said so many lives had been damaged or destroyed because of this case.
“Not just Ben and not just Olivia, but the trial opened with evidence from Ben and Olivia’s parents, and it was just horrific,” he said.
“What I would say about the Hopes and the Smarts, they were lovely people. Grief was just etched on their face at the trial, you could see it.
“Guy Wallace’s life never recovered from this. And the guilt that he feels about being the person who dropped these kids off at this mystery person’s ketch.
“And to be fair to Chris Watson, Scott’s father, he’s a really nice guy too, and he is quite convinced his son didn’t do it.”
A quarter of a century later, New Zealand is still talking about the case.
“For me, it’s those lasting impressions of those two young kids, with their whole lives ahead of them, just taken,” Meng-Yee said.
“I can still see that photograph that we used every night on the news, on television, newspapers, the two of them together, Olivia and Ben and you think they would be in their 40s now. They should be parents for their own children, sending them off to a New Year’s Eve party.”
Senior NZ Herald journalist David Fisher told The Front Page a piece of evidence that has led to Watson’s latest appeal revolves around DNA from two hairs found on his boat, the Blade.
He said police searched Blade from top to tail and found about 400 hairs on a blanket on the yacht. Two of those matched up with Olivia Hope. Those hairs were identified on the same day Hope’s hair samples - taken from a hairbrush at her home - were being studied in the lab.
Fisher said the difficulty is that those hairs were examined on the same day Hope’s hair samples, from her home, were examined and in the same lab. Later at trial, the sample bag that had contained Olivia Hope’s hairs was found to have a one-centimetre long slit.
“And so, there was this question, could it have been contaminated? Could the hair from one have fallen into the other bag?”
Fisher said the case is a jigsaw made of many different pieces and the argument has always been, how many pieces do you need to knock out before the picture makes no sense.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about the early days of the case and why it’s one that has captivated New Zealand for decades.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A previous version of this story and episode didn’t include the fact hairs were found on a blanket on the Blade and two of those hairs on the blanket were found to have DNA characteristics that matched Olivia. The split in a bag containing comparison hairs was also taken from a hairbrush in Olivia’s home. Neither Police nor ESR took the hairbrush from her home.
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