Dylan Harris, Adam North and Jasmine Murray appear in the High Court at Auckland. Photos / Alex Burton
Steve Braunias reports from the so-called “execution-style” murder trial.
Everything about a murder trial at the High Court of Auckland this past week - a man was shot in the head at a range of maybe 25cm, 30cm at most, in a so-called “execution-style” killing that might also be called something a lot less cold and calculating, something random - has the sharp chemical smell of burning methamphetamine. It lingers in courtroom 11, coats the dock where the three co-accused sit in a triangular prism behind glass, follows witnesses to the witness box - the little crackling fire inside a glass bowl, the thin wisps of white smoke, all of it transported as the central subject in the killing of Robbie Hart in New Lynn on November 5, 2021.
It was a drug deal gone wrong the worst way. The evidence places Hart driving his Yamaha motorbike to a driveway in New Lynn on a Friday morning to sell P. And that’s the other feature of the trial: its almost claustrophobic sense of West Aucklandness, the way it’s been told as a street directory of West Auckland, right down to providing a guided tour of where to eat in West Auckland. A feed at Stanley’s Roast in New Lynn, a potato-top pie at a Mobil service station in Glen Eden - these are the stops along the way, in a trial set on West Coast Rd and Royal Rd, in Green Bay and Blockhouse Bay, up on ridges in Massey and down in Henderson valley, forever turning into and off Great North Rd, the hours of the clock set at crazy angles as the co-accused and their associates move around late at night, sometimes at dawn, seldom travelling out of the methamphetamine zones of West Auckland.
Facebook messages record the correspondence that Guy Fawke’s morning - “Bonfire Day,” as an Irish witness called November 5 - between Hart and his customers. They wrote to each other for about an hour, setting up a time and a place. It wasn’t easy. Phone records seized by police record the constant appeals from Vodafone for the users to top up their prepay accounts. Calls were missed, and there were delays to charge phone batteries.
Hart’s body was found on top of his Yamaha. A forensic pathologist from Kansas was called to give evidence, and acknowledged that the country of his birth was of great assistance in his chosen field: “The US is an excellent place to gain knowledge of gunshot wounds.” He was quite confident Hart’s death was instantaneous. He described the bullet entering the left temple, and travelling slightly downward, ricocheting off the skull and bouncing upwards to a membrane that protects the brain. “In between the two points is where death happens.”
To give forensic evidence is to be extremely intimate, extremely invasive. A family member reached for a box of tissues; one of the co-accused, Jasmine Murray, seemed to listen with shock, distress, agony. Crown prosecutors have told the jury that Murray sent some of the messages to Hart that Friday morning in 2021, asking to buy meth from him in New Lynn, where she travelled with her boyfriend, Adam North, who drove a stolen Suzuki Swift. It’s alleged that Dylan Harris sat in the back seat, got out of the car in New Lynn, approached Hart, and shot him. This is the “execution” theory - that the three lured Hart to his death, pretended to be someone else on a stolen phone, worked in ruthless cahoots.
The alternative theory, proposed by the defence, dismisses the idea that the shooting was calculated or in any way organised. Each of the accused have their own lawyer. Murray’s counsel, the sweetly spoken Lorraine Smith, has advised the jury that her client had no idea that Hart would be shot. North’s counsel, Sam Wimsett, said much the same. He said it with a smile: Wimsett is forever the most cheerful presence in the High Court, and he always wears one particular number, a suit in dandyish blue check, during a trial. He modelled it on Wednesday, when he smiled at a witness, who wore silver jewellery and a variation on Ug boots, and said to her, “There’s been fairly open talk about methamphetamine today, so you might as well join in.”
The witness’s Facebook name read like a calling card: Sativa Ak. She spoke in a surprisingly deep voice - she was tiny, with a little heartshaped face - about meth and weed, but her real importance to the Crown case was that she was called as a witness to talk about her Samsung phone. Prosecutors allege the messages were sent to Hart on that Guy Fawke’s morning from her mobile. But she had lost it two days earlier. She left it in a toilet at a friend’s house. Someone had taken it. She had a good idea it had something to do with Adam North and “ur Mrs”, Jasmine Murray, and messaged them, “Yo just wondering if any of u guys have seen my phone…I am asking bc ur Mrs was only one used toilet that day…I’m not saying U have it but idk who else”.
The events of November 5, 2021 began when Hart received a FB message that read, as a request, “Eny”.
He replied, “Wat u after”.
“14″.
“How much u got for it”.
“I got 3″.
Every baker knows that 14 grams is half an ounce; a sale price of $3000 took Hart through the mean and not so mean streets of Kelston to New Lynn. He rode his bike into a driveway between a house and the New Haven Motel. His final message remained in his dialogue box, unsent: “My bike no start. Can u just come to me”.
My esteemed Herald colleague Jared Savage is the author of a book due for publication in October, called Gangster’s Paradise. I wish to give advance notice that it’s very, very good. It’s essentially the sequel to his 2021 book Ganglands - an updated series of stories about organised crime in New Zealand, and the way that gangs make vast wealth in the sale and distribution of that much in-demand household product, methamphetamine. A feature of these stories is the cash that police seize when they bust some of the dealers. They regularly find tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in bank notes, stuffed under beds, in cupboards and shoeboxes - the most common place they find money is in microwaves.
The stories are portraits of the chief executives at the top of the methamphetamine economy. The murder trial at the High Court of Auckland this past week is about the customers, driving around West Auckland in stolen cars and old bombs (one witness described a “putta putta boom boom”), desperate and addicted, Pākehā and Māori, lost and homeless, no fixed abode and no kitchen appliances - their only relationship with microwaves is ordering potato top pies at a Mobil service station in Glen Eden.
Two witnesses in particular have given the trial its sharp aromatic P whiff, its portrait of life at the bottom of the methamphetamine economy. Both acknowledged they were users. One of them gave evidence in such a manner that it was as if he was out of his mind on methamphetamine in court. He raved, he was incoherent, he couldn’t stop talking; but he was also self-recriminating, a tragic figure. He knew two of the accused, and was called as a Crown witness. It was hard to tell whether he had much to say that was helpful to either the prosecution or defence, or germane to the case.
He was capable of a sharp wit. Asked if the phone records confirmed that he called Jasmine Murray, he said, “Well, it wasn’t Micky Mouse.”
He placed a lot of importance on correct terms. Asked by prosecutor Robin McCoubrey to explain what he meant when he texted Jasmine Murray, “Pigs everywhere”, he replied, “Well, pigs as in people in my former life and the life I’ve walked, people that have been pretty much scum to us and we call them pigs, police.”
McCoubrey: “Police?”
Witness: “Yeah, scum.”
McCoubrey, meaning the text: “So there’s police everywhere?”
Witness: “No, pigs everywhere.”
McCoubrey: “Pigs everywhere, okay.”
Witness: “Is what I’ve said. Please don’t change that.”
McCoubrey: “All right.”
Pigs everywhere, from a time, he said, “When I was going through a real bad state…The big thing in my life was sex and methamphetamine…Five kids I don’t get to see majorly…The lady I love who I used to call a partner…” This was from one of his longest, most agitated speeches, the words tumbling out fast over the few teeth remaining in his mouth.
Life at the bottom. Another witness gave evidence of driving around in the days before the November 5 shooting with Dylan Harris. He said the two of them were basically living in his car, a Nissan Qashkai. Details of that arrangement were cross-examined by Harris’s lawyer, Ron Mansfield.
It was classic Mansfield, a specialist in defence cross-exam - he has a cold, insistent way about him, always remaining close to the facts of the matter and seldom descending to the low resorts of sarcasm. In his opening statement to the jury, Mansfield acknowledged that Harris fired the gun, but said there was no intention to kill, and no motive. A standover, he said, was one thing. But it was another thing, he said, to want to cause harm.
And so he continually pressed the witness about methamphetamine use in the Qashkai in the days leading up the killing. The witness continually denied that the two of them were using methamphetamine. There was, he said, only one person using methamphetamine: himself.
Mansfield: “Did you see Mr Harris using methamphetamine in the car?”
Witness: “No. He did not use methamphetamine.”
Mansfield: “Can I put it to you that you were both using methamphetamine the day prior and that night prior to the 5th of November?”
Witness: “You can put it to me like that but I used methamphetamine myself for myself. I’m a family man with my own business. Nobody knows I do methamphetamine. Do you think I do methamphetamine?”
This is how their exchange started; it continued, and continued, and continued, building to a crescendo, the two of them speaking rapidly, with equal or close to equal insistence.
Mansfield: “I put it to you that the two of you have been sharing, getting high, buzzing out in your car.”
Witness: “Methamphetamine makes me active, why would I sit in the car?”
Mansfield: “Well that’s what you were doing on the days prior to the 5th, wasn’t it, sitting in the car using methamphetamine together?”
Witness: “You’re just making up rubbish.”
Mansfield: “What I’m putting to you is a description of your then life going from one hit of methamphetamine to the next.”
Witness: “I started smoking meth when I was 16 years old. I still smoke meth today. I have not stopped smoking meth.”
It was the kind of confession that would make a jury and everyone in the courtroom gasp - if it had been the desired result from a rigorous cross-exam. But actually it was incidental to the killing of Robbie Hart, to the trial of three people co-accused of his murder.
Mansfield’s final question: “The thing that you and Mr Harris had in common was that you were both heavily addicted to methamphetamine and using it together?”
Witness’s final answer: “I’ve never used meth with Dylan Harris.”
Judge Paul Davison instructed him that he could leave. He walked out of courtroom 11, maybe heading west.
The 53-year-old fighting for compensation now has less than a year to live.