Steve Braunias on a killing in Albany.
There was no one at home when I visited a big rotting weatherboard pile in Castor Bay where a Chinese man lived until he drove to a cul de sac in nearby Albany just after midnight on January 12, 2022 and stabbed another Chinese man to death.
I walked up the front staircase and on to the timber deck. A hole was drilled in the wall to allow a hose from a gas bottle to hook up to a two-element cooker in the kitchen.
There was a jackfruit on the bench, and an open packet of Nescafe Fine Blend. The deck had an excellent view of the good life of Auckland - Milford Beach, Rangitoto like a castle floating in the harbour. But the loveliness was out of reach.
In the front yard, a stunted old rose bush bared its teeth in the remains of a rock garden; in damp earth at the side of the house, a runner bean was tied to a bamboo pole. It wasn’t running very fast. It looked ready to give up.
Police had visited, too, and took photographs of his Seaview Rd address. They were very bleak photographs. His little rented room was divided by a curtain; someone slept on the other side.
Six of his T-shirts were hung out to dry on a length of blue cord beneath the ceiling. There was only enough floor space for a mattress and an office chair at the foot of the bed.
Detectives were looking to see whether he took his knife from the kitchen before he drove out that night. That would have suggested intent, premeditation. But there was no evidence, no drama. It was such a flat and resolutely meaningless death, really over nothing, a crazy misunderstanding - it was a very Auckland death, hard workers sending their money back to China, going about their lives in shadows and corners, chasing the New Zealand dream.
Chao Chen, 32, appeared for sentencing at the High Court of Auckland on Tuesday morning. He had a smooth and guileless face. There was a small scar beneath his right eye, and he wore his hair short. He had broad shoulders - he worked as a landscaping gardener these past four years since arriving in Auckland. He spoke no English and was brought into courtroom six looking dazed. It had been an Esol trial, conducted in the low background murmur of Mandarin translation; like a bad phone line, he heard everything in a kind of delay. He leaned his head towards his court-appointed translator and she repeated Justice Venning’s judgment of five years in prison.
Chen elected to give evidence at his trial. He spoke in a quiet voice and his manner was shy, gentle. There was a simplicity about him, a farmer’s son from the Shandong province of modest habits - he rarely drank, didn’t touch drugs - whose only pleasure in New Zealand was fishing from the wharves. He was charged with murder. The weapon was his fishing knife. He immediately admitted to the killing and was co-operative with police - the only time he was heard to speak anything in English is when he said to paramedics trying to save the life of his victim dying on a sidewalk beneath the streetlights on Vinewood Drive, “Sorry, sorry!”
He was found not guilty of murder. His story had clearly touched the jury, led by a very young foreman with a startling resemblance to Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker. Jarvis wore a nice range of collared shirts beneath a nice range of knit jerseys. The trial was just as tidy, a neat week, Monday through to Friday. Police could have called 30 witnesses but Chen agreed with very many of the facts - not least that he had killed someone - and pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and only five witnesses were needed. There were no serious courtroom disputes, only the occasional moderate warning from Justice Venning. “Just keep it relevant, Mr Cordwell,” he sighed, interrupting a cross-examination from Chen’s defence lawyer, Lester Cordwell. He replied with real feeling, “That’s my life’s work, sir.” There were attempts at drama, from Crown prosecutor Fiona Culliney. She picked up the knife in the courtroom and presented it to the jury. They looked at the knife. They may also have looked at her long pink fingernails. “This knife,” she said, “that he knew so well.” And: “This big, long, sharp knife.” Also: “He uses it to gut fish.” In cross-examination, she said to Chen, “You’ve sliced that knife through many a fish, haven’t you, Mr Chen?” He missed the inference. He replied with all due honesty and considerable keenness that yes, he had indeed sliced that knife through many a fish, and happily described his gutting techniques. “I like to catch snapper,” he said. “Kahawai. The kingfish.”
A murder trial without drama (apart from a small commotion when poor old Jarvis suffered a bloody nose), without premeditation, without anyone there. I was the only journalist in attendance. Now and then, a woman who knew someone who knew Chen turned up, and we chatted sometimes outside the court. Otherwise, the public gallery was empty. I met with Detective Sergeant Ross Clapp after the trial and he put it very well when he said, “That person you spoke to was the only person in the room who wasn’t being paid to be there.”
I interviewed him at the North Shore police station hangar. Clapp has a kindness about him, a sensitivity. He expanded on his comment, and said, “No friends, no family - the victim and the defendant in this case were both very isolated in their existence in New Zealand. The judge, the jury, the lawyers, the cops - oh, and you - we’re all doing our piece, our service, or our job. It’s quite stark by normal standards for a homicide trial that the defendant was the only person who wasn’t there for a different motive.”
A very Auckland death, forgotten migrants engaged in an obscure argument; a lonely trial, as bleak as the photos of Chao Chen’s depressing little room, as bleak as the even more depressing bedroom of the victim, Lele He.
I visited He’s room at the Mt Albert Dumpling House restaurant. Police photos showed a narrow bed on an iron frame, a desk, a chair; there was writing in Mandarin on the wall above the bed, two lines of graffiti. The words looked quite small in the photo. I was wrong about that, and I was wrong in assuming his room was above the restaurant. In fact, it was beneath it, and the room had a creepy, hopeless resemblance to a dungeon.
A chef who spoke no English led me down the stairs. We walked down two flights, past the can of ant killer, past the sack of monosodium glutamate. The staircase was vey narrow, and completely dark – the chef switched on the torch on his phone. Lele He’s room was also pitch black. It had no light switch, no windows. It was a storeroom with a low ceiling. The bed had been taken out and I saw a two-seater couch in the shadows. The message in Mandarin remained on the walls. The letters were actually quite big, written in black felt-tip; the size of the two lines suggested something important.
Cathy Chen, owner of the New Flavour restaurant in Dominion Road where Lele He worked as a chef, has seen the message. She went to his room after he died and gathered his things to send back to his wife in China. “I see a small notebook,” she said. “He [was] writing lots of recipes. I was very impressed.” She also saw the writing on the wall. “I cried.” It’s something that haunts her whenever she thinks about him.
He arrived in New Zealand in 2016. He would return to China once a year - like Chao Chen, his killer, he came from Shandong - until Covid restrictions began. He was given a work visa in 2020 and set about applying for permanent residency. His wife and their son, now aged 10, were planning on coming to join him. “Lele was so happy,” said Cathy Chen. “The thing he was looking forward to was happening.” He worked the night shift at New Flavour, from 5pm ‘til midnight, and was also labouring in the daytime. He met Chao Chen on a building site. Two strangers in a strange land, two ghosts moving invisibly across the isthmus, both here for the same reason: to support their families back in Shandong. Chen arrived in New Zealand with his wife in 2018. An immigration agency claimed they would be given working visas. It was a scam, and his wife was forced to return to China. Chen remained in New Zealand, an illegal overstayer laying low, sleeping in his awful Castor Bay room, fishing (“Kawahi. The kingfish”), working cash jobs only. He made some friends in New Zealand, other Mandarin speakers, but contact was limited after he was placed in remand prison. The last time was when a friend passed on a package of dictionaries sent by his ex-wife. The couple have divorced. She lives with his elderly parents. When she returned to China, she was pregnant. Chen has never seen his daughter.
What a depressing biography - but the story of Lele He’s family is worse, much worse. They live in the village of Gongli. His New Zealand wages kept them going. New Flavour paid him $1200 a week, before tax; weekly rent for his dungeon was less than $100. Like Chen, he also surely worked cash jobs: police found $8000 in $100 notes inside a notebook in the desk. It has been returned to his family. His widow. Panpan Wang, prepared a victim impact statement. “Has it been made available to Mr Chen?” Justice Venning asked of Lester Cordwell on Tuesday. “No, your honour,” Chen’s lawyer replied. He really ought to get around to it. It makes for devastating reading. Victim impact statements seldom make for any other kind of reading, but there was a particular kind of helplessness to Panpan Wang’s portrait of a family shattered by a death on the other side of the world, in faraway New Zealand, a country they could only imagine.
“He was the breadwinner in the family,” Lele He’s widow told a translator. The English translation is imperfect, but none of her grief is lost. “How can I keep the family going? The stress and pressure are like a massive mountain landed on my shoulders. Our beautiful dream bubble is broken, the family’s future becomes unknown, my mind went dark, I could not breathe, I could not find a way out. I didn’t know what to do. I cried every day. I [was] forced to tell myself that I had to find the way out. I must work, I still need to look after our son and Lele’s parents. Even I am sad and lost, but I need to take actions to keep the family going…”
On her son: “My son does not want anyone to talk about his dad anymore. He would become very agitated and aggressive when someone [mentioned something] about his dad. He would hit and verbally abuse whoever talked about his dad. He is also extremely jealous when he sees other children spending time with their dads. He becomes depressed when school finishes at the end of the day. Especially when he sees his friends’ dads [come] to pick up their children from school…”
On her future as it is: “I am trying very hard to keep the family going. I try to stay positive in front of the family although I still cry at night alone, but life continues. I don’t want my appearance or emotions [to] affect his parents. I am afraid they cannot make it if they get sick [from] being sad. Now the whole family is avoiding talking about Lele. Avoiding any topics or conversations which could be related to him…”
On her future that could have been: “We were planning to come to New Zealand [at] the end of 2022. We were so excited, and I could not wait to see my husband again and started to dream about our new life in New Zealand. When I was informed about the incident, I was in the process of preparing our visa applications.”
To read her statement was to only imagine life in a small village in a faraway province of an enormous country. How to picture it - how to picture Panpan Wang? Victim support offered to bring her out to New Zealand for the trial. But she works seven days a week to support the family. As for Lele He, the only photo I ever saw of him was in death. The sheet on the right side of his body was white. The sheet on the left side of his body was a different colour: dark, oxygenated blood, soaking the sheet red. He had been stabbed in the shoulder, but the knife travelled down and across, severing his pulmonary artery. His widow’s victim impact statement - the loss, the damage - rose and rose towards a terrible howl of pain. It read, “I want to ask the defendant: did you actually have such deep hatred which required you to take someone’s life to get your satisfaction?”
Chao Chen is a Buddhist. You could sense the bowed head, the prayer beads, in his interview with probation services. He said, “I feel like I cannot pay back the victim’s wife and child in this life and not even in the next life… I will try my best to help the people I have hurt. I cannot fully pay back the karma, but I will try my best.” After his sentencing on Tuesday morning, he left the courtroom looking like a ghost. He will be deported back to China when he is released.
The day before sentencing, I visited the cul de sac in Albany where Chen had killed Lele He. Here, exactly, in all its comfort and wealth (the big 21st century houses, the money trees on the doorsteps), was the New Zealand dream that both men were chasing, that had enticed them from Shandong, was worth the sacrifice of being cooped up one side of a curtain in Castor Bay and in an underground dungeon in Mt Albert; and it was here, too, that it destroyed them. There was a classic New Zealand sign beside a reserve for the benefit of Chinese: TAKING OF WILDLIFE PROHIBITED, illustrated by a pair of hands reaching out to strangle a duck. The two men had argued on the reserve. Behind the houses, Lucas Creek silently bends through a mangrove forest. I tramped a lovely walkway. There were kingfishers in flowering mānuka, an abandoned boat run aground in the mud. Rainfall had turned the water milky. It was so quiet, so peaceful.
The thing that led to Lele He’s pointless death happened over dinner at BBQ King in the Albany shops - it’s opposite Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot - on the night of January 11 last year. Lele He invited a friend, Keda Li, for a meal. Li was a good contact. As a project manager on construction sites, he could give He more labouring work. That day they had concreted a driveway in Long Bay alongside Chao Chen. They’d all talked about where they could learn English.
I visited the restaurant. The owner, Mark Ma, remembered the table. He served them Tsingtao beer. No one got drunk, he said. No one made any trouble.
Lele He and Keda Li sat down for a meal (menu highlights: sour fern root noodles, roasted beef penis) with Li’s girlfriend.
And then something was said which Li regarded as innocuous. Certainly, he thought it meant nothing to Lele He. They resumed their meal.
Li was the chief witness for the Crown. He said to prosecutor Fiona Culliney, “We had a chat about the construction site because he was interested in doing some projects.”
“And what else did you talk about?”
“Some precautions he needed to take care [of] to do the job well.”
“What is it that you said to Mr He about that?”
“Such as he needs to be flexible, not be stubborn.”
“Why is it that you mentioned that he needed to be flexible and not be stubborn in his work?”
“Because the friend who referred him to me said sometimes he could be stubborn.”
And that was it, that was the whole thing; that was what it was all about, why He ended up dying in an ambulance later that night, why Chao Chen is right now in prison with his ex-wife’s dictionaries. After dinner, Li invited He back to Vinewood Drive to spend the night. It was late, and a long way back to that cheerless, windowless cell in Mt Albert. They drove to Li’s house. In his guest bedroom, He immediately started firing off furious messages on the WeChat app to Chao Chen, accusing him of telling Keda Li that he was “stubborn”. He regarded it as a gross insult, deeply disrespectful. Chen replied that he didn’t know what He was talking about. He wanted to go back to sleep. But the messages kept coming, accusatory, threatening, incoherent: “Don’t f***ing think I’m easy to bully, you want to die then come to me… I am not afraid of it.”
They spoke on the phone. It was an abusive phone call. Incensed, Chen called Keda Li and asked him for his address. Li gave it to him and said it was a good idea they sort it out now and not the next day at the worksite. Chen drove across the North Shore to Vinewood Drive. He met Li and He on the street in front of the reserve. Li tried to act as a peacemaker, but the two men continued to argue. Chen claimed in court that he felt threatened; he walked back to his car and got out his fishing knife. Li took it off him. The two men argued more, and then, according to Chen’s testimony in the witness box, He said to him: “Go f*** your mother.”
Chen grabbed the knife off Li, raised it above his head, and plunged it deep into He’s shoulder. To scare him, he claimed. His victim stepped backwards and then fell down on the pavement. Chen and Li rushed to his side and tried to save his life. Li called 111. The recording was played in court. Li listened to it in obvious shock. He trembled and shook in the witness box. Fiona Culliney asked him, “Are you alright?” He said he was okay. He wasn’t okay. I interviewed him recently at a building site in Remuera. He said he had stayed inside for months after watching a man die in front of his eyes. The only time he went out was to shop at Pak’nSave. He couldn’t talk to his girlfriend. They broke up. He blames himself for giving Chao Chen his address that night. I said, “Are you okay?” He said, “Pretending to be.”
At the trial, when Li told Culliney that a friend told him that He could be “stubborn”, she asked, “And who was the friend?”
“His name is Xie,” he said.
Lele He had got it into his head it was Chao Chen. Lele He, the He pronounced “her”; Lele He, with his recipes and his $8,000 in cash in his notebook; Lele He, sleeping on a narrow bed beneath the earth, looking up at the two large looming lines he had written on the wall that had made New Flavour owner Cathy Chen cry. It was a message that meant everything to him. It got him through his lonely years stranded in Auckland. It was an instruction that would one day lead to his wife and son joining him in beautiful New Zealand. He wrote it in Mandarin. In English: “Work hard.”