KEY POINTS:
It was the early hours when Tai Hobson wrote his letter. He had gone to bed restless, not knowing what he would say.
When he woke up at 4am, the words poured out. "It came from there," he says, touching his heart.
The letter is to be given
to politicians. While Hobson is a quiet and private man he wants his words made public.
They are about justice and terrible grief. This is Hobson's last bid at compensation for the brutal and needless murder of his wife Mary. Justice has not been served, he says softly. Mistakes were made in the management of Mary's killer and they have not been learned from. Parolee Graeme Burton's alleged crime spree last week in Wellington, ending in the death of an innocent man, is proof of that, he says. He pulls a folded handkerchief from the back pocket of his faded jeans. "Excuse me," he says, though he is not embarrassed by the welling tears.
"I try my best not to show my emotions but, ah, it's something I can't help, even though I say to myself 'you've got to be strong'. I know I've got to be strong ... "
He crumples the handkerchief in his hand, keeps it there.
It's only minutes since we have sat down on his little porch in the sun with its sofa decorated with a colourful crochet throw, a reminder of happier days. Mary had bought three of the throws. The mention of her name brings tears.
It is just over five years ago since she, and others, were murdered in cold blood by a violent criminal on early release from prison, the release sanctioned by the Parole Board and the criminal's freedom largely unmonitored by the Probation Service.
Hobson puts a hand to his chest again. People ask how he's doing and he says, " 'I'm alright, I'm good'. But in there, it's still in there." People tell him he should move on. And he tries. But Mary is never far away. When he's alone she's there. She's always there.
How do you move on from murder? For Hobson, compensation and an apology from the Government might help.
He has already been through the Courts, all the way to the Court of Appeal, exploring legal avenues for compensation. He failed. Judges expressed sympathy and the Crown "sincere regret" but the judges awarded no money and the Government has offered no apology.
Hobson's last option is to apply for an ex-gratia payment from the Government, a one-off amount at their discretion. Hobson will use his letter to appeal to the conscience of Cabinet Members as to whether the mistakes of the Corrections Department, Parole Office and Probation Service warrant responsibility and official acknowledgment.
Can money ever make up for what happened to Mary? No, he says. But this is not just about money, though he thinks Mary would approve of what he is doing, for their children's sake.
Hobson doesn't want pity either. But he believes there are principles at stake. If the mistakes had not been made, Mary and the others would be alive.
He looks away, blinking. They met at the Fisher & Paykel factory where they both worked, not far from their house.
"Well, yeah, I fell in love with her ... I think everybody knew what she was like, she was a woman with a heart of gold. Do anything for anybody. Always smiled. If someone wanted to go somewhere, she'd take them. Everybody knew her, she never turned away from anybody."
Not far from here, too, is where his wife of 18 years died. The Panmure RSA is a stone's throw from this porch. From Hobson's gate you can see the building, just a few blocks away.
After the murder he went back to work at the RSA but one of the the hardest parts was not knowing for sure what went on. When he's alone his thoughts often return to why he wasn't there, "not that it would have stopped anything. I might have been another victim but I always think, 'shit, I wish I was there, why wasn't I there?"'
Hobson had been a duty manager at the RSA and had worked with William Bell who was there on work experience. Hobson taught him how to pull a beer and thought he was a just a bloke who wanted a job. Bell returned the favour by casing the joint, stealing money and murdering the staff.
"We didn't know he was an ex, that he was on parole. And we should have been told that, then he wouldn't have got to work there."
Bell is said to have told Mary it was a pity she was there, because he liked her husband. He killed her anyway. Mary's last moments involved kneeling and praying and weeping, a shotgun used as an axe, a head caved in, a ring flattened from where her hands tried to stop the blows. Mary had been in the front row of the Panmure Santa Parade the day before and had gone to her job as cleaner the next morning still high from the fun.
It is said Bell enjoyed taunting his victims. Wayne Johnson was bashed and shot to death then bashed again. Bill Absolum was bashed to death. Susan Couch was bashed so hard her head was knocked off-centre. She was left for dead but survived and is still fighting her own battle through the courts for compensation.
Families torn apart. What we know of Bell is that he was out on parole, that he had 102 previous convictions before he was released into the community early and left to his own devices. He had been jailed for a savage assault at a gas station in the late 1990s which nearly ended in murder. We know his parole conditions were flouted, that he was charged with assault while out on parole but still remained at large. A tip off to the police regarding another robbery, for which he was a suspect, a week before the killings was not investigated until it was too late.
Hobson shakes his head. Burton's spree last week is history repeated. "Surely they must know these guys will reoffend so how can they grant them probation? I can't see it, that's one thing I can't see. And when it happens they've got some excuse."
Hobson has fought for four years, with the support of the Sensible Sentencing Trust and legal representation provided free by lawyers, for compensation.
The case is about justice but money would help him and his family to get by. An income was lost with Mary's death. She was only 44.
There is a long pause, then he says "if I got compensation maybe she would feel better too. Mary, you know. Say 'oh well, that's good', 'cause then it would help the kids along."
Hobson has two adult children by his first marriage and two younger adult children by Mary. Their daughter, Angela, still doesn't say much. She was very close to her mum, he says.
When he rang Angela at her flat to tell her what had happened, "I think she kicked every wall in that place. I know she did because we had to go fix it up later."
Hobson is 72 now, a pensioner who works part-time as a handyman and cleaner for a taxi firm. He plans to hand his letter to his local MP Mark Gosche and then wants it handed on to Parliament.
He has cried several times since he wrote it. He won't read it again, he says.
Two of Hobson's grandchildren come tumbling out of the house on to the porch. The older one is 5-year-old Destiny-Reigh, one of Angela's daughters. Destiny-Reigh pushes her 2-year-old sister, Ella-Marie, around in a pram under the watchful eye of their grandfather. The girls are giggling but this, too, is a sadness for Hobson.
Mary knew Destiny-Reigh only briefly, when the pretty little girl was a tiny baby, but Ella-Marie was born after she died. A week ago Ella-Marie was taken to tiny Paparore in the Far North to visit her grandmother's grave. To meet Mary.
This is Hobson's home turf, not Mary's - he is a direct descendant of Governor Hobson, the first Governor of New Zealand - but is where Mary is buried, along with middle child Shane who died from cancer when he was six.
Hobson blinks again at the tears. One slips past the handkerchief and splashes on his T-shirt.
Moral obligation for compensation
An ex-gratia payment will never ease the pain of Mary Hobson's death, but it might help her widower to find closure, says Tai Hobson's lawyer.
While the courts have decided there is no legal obligation to provide compensation to Hobson, there is a moral obligation, says David Garrett, one of the lawyers who has been providing free legal advice as Hobson tested his case through the courts.
Ex-gratia payments are one-off amounts which can be made when there is a moral obligation but no legal requirement to do so.
"We're saying that the moral obligation arises from the fact that the [Corrections] department was so grossly negligent."
A legal opinion prepared for Hobson by human rights lawyer Robert Hallowell says that when the Court of Appeal turned Hobson down, one of the judges said there was no doubt very serious errors had been made.
The judge also referred to the Crown's lawyer who had "acknowledged the Department of Corrections must take a real measure of responsibility for the errors which undoubtedly occurred in the handling of Mr Bell's case. The Department sincerely regrets the awful consequences which resulted for the victims and their families."
Hallowell says that while the judges allowed Susan Couch's [who was beaten within an inch of her life by Bell] claim for negligence to continue, they said Hobson was different because he was a stage removed from the direct actions of Bell.
But Hallowell says there is a strong argument that Hobson is an individual suffering the burden of administrative activities imposed for the whole of society.
It was possible that the nature of the injuries suffered, that is, the normal grief which the spouse of any murdered person would suffer, could lead to the Government saying that grief is too broad a category for it to assume a moral obligation.
"The counter to that may well be that this is a case involving special and hopefully limited circumstances," writes Hallowell. "In using the word limited I am intending to convey the thought that it would be very comforting to every member of society if this was the last occasion upon which someone whilst on early release from jail murders a comparative stranger."
Garrett believes that while money is not a remedy for murder, it is the only tangible way in which Hobson's wrongs can be acknowledged.
He believes one of the main reasons the case was lost in the Court of Appeal was because of what is known in law as the "floodgates argument". If Hobson had won, his case would have set a precedent for all other victims in similar circumstances to sue the Government.
"Unfortunately ... Tai's case is a precedent for the proposition that no matter how bad the Corrections Department's [expletive] up, no one is going to pay the price."
Parolee Graeme Burton's binge in Wellington last week was a carbon copy of the William Bell case and showed nothing had changed, he says.
"The thing that really pisses me off about the Burton thing is that no one's been held to account in Tai's case and no one's going to be here either, in the sense of paying out money for their negligence.
"Tai's making a point. He's never been in it for the money, I'm sure you've got that impression yourself. He's pissed off as all hell, there's a lot more going on in his quiet head than he shows, that's why I was pretty struck by that letter.
"He's hugely pissed off that his wife of so many years has been lost through what he can see himself - you don't have to be a bloody genius to see the level of [expletive] up - and no one's accountable, and I imagine he's even angrier now that this has happened with Burton."
Even more offensive was the fact that some prisoners have been awarded compensation for abuses while in prison.
This means it was possible that if William Bell was ill-treated in jail he could claim damages.
"Bell gets a hiding he'll get compensation." In language too colourful to print Garrett said this was a situation that was wholly wrong.
Garth McVicar from the Sensible Sentencing Trust says Hobson's battle is about trying to ensure people are not let out of jail to offend again.
"We really felt that the glaring injustices with what happened over the whole William Bell affair was such that the Crown would recognise it and we expected that the Crown would make a settlement."
Instead, the Crown had fought every step of the way. A decision on an ex-gratia payment would now be up to the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and her Cabinet Ministers.
