Lone drifter seethed with resentment

By Eugene Bingham and Alison Horwood

Scott Watson's career of crime began at home when he ripped off his own mother. As a teenager, he stole several hundred dollars of takings from the family fish and chip shop.

Concerned about their son's deceit and criminal tendencies, Beverly and Chris Watson went to the police.

So began a criminal record that would catch the attention of detectives investigating murders dubbed the crime of the decade.

Not that the Operation Tam team needed Wanganui police computer files to realise Watson stood out the night Blenheim friends Olivia Hope and Ben Smart disappeared.

Trouble was looming the second he clambered on to the jetty at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds on New Year's Eve, 1997. Smuggled beneath his shirt was a bottle of rum, the poison that would unleash his simmering hatred of women.

The boaties and South Island gentry who had gathered in the grounds of the lodge were in for a night none would forget.

Though the Marlborough Sounds had been his childhood playground, Watson clearly did not fit in. Of the 1500 partygoers, most held steady jobs or were the privileged offspring of the landowners and professionals settled around the sunbaked region famous for its wine.

Watson, with fingers missing from his left hand thanks to a run-in with cutting equipment in a boatyard and the word "SKIN" tattooed on his left forearm as a mark of his Aryan beliefs, was the antithesis of these people.

He was born on June 28, 1971, in Christchurch, the couple's third and youngest child.

His American-born father worked as a dairy farm worker and a furnace fireman.

The three children attended Rolleston School, with Scott staying on for four years, the longest time he would spend at any school.

When Scott was aged 9, the family moved to the suburb of Hornby, where he attended South Hornby School for two months.

From there, Mr and Mrs Watson made a dramatic decision to uproot their young family and head for the sea.

They bought an 11.5m steel cutter. Eldest son Tom, six years older than Scott, stayed ashore and joined the Navy - he had first tried to enlist at 11.

The rest of the family began a six-year odyssey around the coast of New Zealand.

"While they lived off the cutter, they cruised around New Zealand, mostly in the Marlborough Sounds and the Bay of Islands," said Tom Watson.

"They would mainly cruise in the summer and stop somewhere and work in the winter."

Scott's schooling was by correspondence, but he was more eager to learn the secrets of the sea, his only great love.

He displayed a disdain for normal schooling when he was enrolled as a boarder at Marlborough Boys High School for part of the fourth-form year. From May to July 1986 he spent only 15 days at school, earning a reputation as a truant and a shadowy character.

He left on his 15th birthday, without going through the proper procedures.

Life became a haze of dope, drink and the dole. Though he sometimes found work on fishing boats, or at Carey's, the Picton boat-building yard where his father still works, Watson drifted through his teenage years.

He became obsessed with skinhead culture, shaving his head and daubing his hand and head with various crude tattoos.

Seemingly incapable of forging strong relationships, however, Watson even failed to join forces with others of similar beliefs, and he is not known to have been a member of any white supremacist gangs.

He did pick up gang talk during a stint in Invercargill Prison - including the expression "dog on a chain," which he repeatedly mouthed while circulating among New Year revellers at Furneaux.

Though his criminal record is devoid of serious offences, Watson was jailed for repeat assaults and thefts. He had 48 previous convictions.

Psychiatric assessments behind bars concluded that he was a racist who had a problem with aggression.

Among his convictions was a 1995 fine for possessing an offensive weapon - he used a marlin spike to threaten a truck driver in a dispute over his dinghy at Waikawa Bay.

A witness to the confrontation describes Watson as a "scary little bastard."

"When he found out I was a witness, he would spit on me, throw things out of his car at me, drive past and do the finger at me. He was trying to intimidate me, but I knew what he was like. If you put him in a room with 200 other people, he would stand out like a sore tooth."

About this time, Watson was living on an 8.2m yacht while building his own boat.

With help from his father, he built the 8.6m sloop in the backyard of his parents' house in Hampden St, Picton. It was his proudest achievement, and one he would talk about at any opportunity.

Brian Kinder, a worker at Carey's Boatyard, saw the steel-hulled yacht several times as it was being built and was impressed with the job Watson did.

"Given the materials he had to work with and where he was building it and the budget he had, I think he made a very good effort."

Watson's new boat became his sole significant possession. It was his life.

The yacht was launched in 1996 without a name - a hint of the anonymity with which Watson tried to live his life.

In a rare revealing moment, he would tell fellow drinkers at a Marlborough Sounds campsite just days before New Year's Eve 1997 that anonymity allowed him to slip in and out of ports without being noticed and without paying mooring fees. Though the country would come to know his yacht as Blade, it had several names during a 1997 journey to the North Island, including Cascade and Caravel, or Caligula - a vicious and mentally unstable Roman Emperor.

Another name he fancied was Cavalier. But taunts from drinkers in a pub in Napier who told him the name sounded "gay" convinced him to favour Blade.

Whatever the name of his boat, Watson attracted attention long before he became associated with the Hope-Smart case.

During his jaunt up the east coast of the North Island in the second half of 1997, he became known among the boating communities of Tauranga and Northland.

Most found him strange, though many people said he was a "nice enough bloke" - when sober.

By night, he would drink rum and smoke cannabis.

Authorities at the ports said Watson was suspected of stealing gear off boats.

Staff at Tauranga warned counterparts in Tutukaka about him because he had left without paying mooring fees and was wanted for questioning over thefts from a boat in Gisborne. In July, police searched Watson's boat at Tutukaka, but no further action was taken.

He considered sailing to Fiji with another yachtie, and even had his parents send his passport to Tutukaka.

Then something strange happened: he got himself a girlfriend.

Though he remains close to his family, especially his brother and sister Sandra-Jo, Watson failed to make close friends.

With his new girlfriend, though, things seemed different.

Watson first set eyes on her in July 1997 when he went in for a social welfare quote at the Whangarei health centre where she was an assistant.

Romance blossomed and the pair shared weekends away on his boat. They seemed happy, even if she was seasick at times.

However, they broke up in November after a surprise birthday party at the home of one of her work colleagues.

Watson became jealous when she innocently danced with a young man, and threatened to beat up the youth.

Friends, who had felt uncomfortable in his presence that night, urged her to dump him.

Watson fled south. He sailed to Tauranga, where he stayed four days.

While there, he met the 16-year-old son of one of the marina staff.

They talked about weapons and war, a topic Watson knew plenty about. He would read stories of war and killing and fantasise about them.

The boy told Watson's trial that the two of them wandered through an Army surplus store on December 4 and Watson bought a bullet-shaped cigarette lighter and a pair of chrome handcuffs.

(The latter would be seized by Operation Tam police.)

The next day, Watson fuelled his boat and set sail for Picton.

Within a month, he was rafted up next to a yacht called the Mina Cornellia, shaking hands with members of the Rutte family, who had chartered the boat for a summer holiday.

Initially, Watson made a good impression as he chatted in the late afternoon sun off Furneaux Lodge.

But as darkness fell, the first signs of trouble appeared. Slurping from a rum bottle, Watson became obnoxious towards the women on board.

The Ruttes became uneasy in his company and decided to head for shore.

Before they left, however, they observed a family tradition by toasting the New Year with a bottle of Moet champagne brought back from Paris.

Not wanting to be rude, says Ernst Rutte, they offered Watson a glass.

"He tipped it over the side, saying it wasn't his type of lemonade."

Ashore, Watson propositioned more than 20 women, particularly blonds.

"Come down on to my boat and I will do things to you you never imagined or dreamed of," was one of his more obvious pick-up lines.

In the early hours of New Year's Day, he began talking to a group of youths, introducing himself as "Mr Prozac."

He told the girls he would give them free T-shirts if they would help him sail to Tonga and perform sexual favours.

At one point, Watson taunted one of the group, Ollie Perkins, telling him his sister, who had cancer, was going to die.

Friends of Mr Perkins rounded on Watson but he remained cool, and started rolling a cigarette while bouncers intervened.

About 2 am, Watson assaulted a blond woman out by the garden bar. A witness told police of seeing the woman crying, saying "Why did you hit me?" as Watson walked away.

Despite exhaustive efforts, the victim has never been found.

Detectives rue the fact that somewhere out there is someone who could have told the jury exactly what it was like to be a young blond woman at the mercy of Watson that night.

Someone who could tell what it was like to see the flash of violence in his dark eyes.

That same night another young blond woman and her friend would see the same sight and die.

* Additional reporting by Angela Gregory.