Steve Braunias follows the strange and tragic case of an intellectually impaired loner procured to burn down a house – but who set himself on fire, and died in agony.
He finished his drink just after 2am in a dark and fairly dingy sports bar with a low ceiling, and set off on his mission. He was a lonely little man whom no one ever noticed, an outsider drifting through the streets of Auckland at all times of day or night, on foot, one of the city's living ghosts – not homeless, not some lowlife drunk or addict. Stephen Ewart was functioning, just. He was 58 years old and had an address on Queen St. His flatmate, another ghost, polished off a cask of wine in a single afternoon when police arrived at their two-bedroom apartment. "This is Stephen's room," he said. It wasn't a room: it was a state of mind, a hoarder's mind. There was only just enough space on the bed for him to lie down. The flatmate asked what this was about and they said, "Stephen is dead."
The bar was in Kingsland. Ewart walked the dark streets for 90 minutes that Friday night on December 9, 2017, to a block of flats that backed on to the wide green fields of Keith Hay Park in Mt Roskill. He crept beneath unit three, put on his headtorch, and poured petrol into 16 plastic bottles of milk. Police later found two cigarette lighters on the ground. The idea was to burn it down or at least cause significant fire damage but he made a terrible hash of it and burst into flames. Man on fire, in a crawlspace under the house; he blundered into daylight, breathing fire. The flames tore his clothes off. He fell to the ground on his side, the knees drawn up. It was around 6am, just after dawn. One neighbour heard him screaming; pitifully, another neighbour heard him crying – really, he was a child. His body stopped growing when he was about 12 and his intellect, too, remained fixed at that age. He burned to death in agony on that sunny Saturday in summer nearly five years ago. He was there, but it was as though he wasn't there, made invisible; in a remarkable piece of criminal law, his actions were viewed as belonging to someone else nowhere near Mt Roskill. A 32-year-old woman was sentenced to eight years and three months imprisonment for arson and manslaughter in the High Court at Auckland on Friday morning.
She has name suppression. Slender, pretty, with a sweet demeanour in court, she was found guilty of sending Ewart to his death. "An interesting case," Judge Geoffrey Venning had remarked to the jury after they reached their verdict at the trial in July. Yes, very interesting; it had taken frankly amazing detective work to pin Ewart's homicide on the woman (she was nowhere near the crime scene and not a single piece of forensic evidence linked her to it), it was frankly amazing even to draw that bow in the first place to imagine someone could actually be so diabolical as to lead a vulnerable man to one of the most awful deaths anyone could suffer, but the most frankly amazing aspect of it was at the trial, when an ancient, highly imaginative doctrine of criminal law made a rare and stunning appearance in a New Zealand court, a concept so melodramatic that it wasn't just something that could come out of a novel by Charles Dickens but did in fact come out of a novel by Charles Dickens, a concept that examined the darker reaches of the human mind and its capacity for evil, a concept that attached itself to Stephen Ewart and freed him from any blame or liability in the arson and his death – the frankly amazing concept of The Innocent Agent.
It would not be entirely fair to describe the F Bar in Kingsland as a dive. It's a dive with a friendly vibe, a lair that attracts a happy crew of regular drinkers to its location at the busy intersection of Bond St, New North Rd and Sandringham Rd. A sign by the front door advises, "Criminal DNA marking system active in these premises." On a recent Thursday afternoon, a man sat outside with a hot water bottle between his knees. The frame of his glasses was broken. "Can I've $10?" he asked; another of Auckland's ghosts.
Ewart orders his first drink that Friday night in late 2017 at 11.52pm. Karaoke has finished for the night. Regulars line the bar while others sit in the gaming room, and prod at Tiki Fire and Moon Race. NRL jerseys are pinned to the ceiling. Ewart sits there, undetected in plain sight. He reached puberty early, at intermediate, was teased for his facial hair ("Gorilla!"), but then his body halted, and his height remained at 5' 1" (1.54m). He spoke in a kind of mutter that made him hard to understand and further doomed him to the fate of so many of Auckland's ghosts: loneliness. When police informed his sister Susan that he was dead, she said, "They asked about distinguishing features. I said, 'Well he'd have had a huge big scar from his bypass, and terrible long fingernails and toenails, and big callouses on his elbows from lying on the floor watching TV because his hoarding mean you couldn't sit on the couches.' They were like, 'Ah I don't think that's going to help.'" At the trial, Crown prosecutor David Johnstone described him in a video played to the court: "Poor Stephen with his eczema, scratching in his chair." He was unfamiliar with soap, laundry powder, nail clippers. He was like an advertisement for how a social outcast should look – and yet he knows he has a very good friend, a 26-year-old woman with long dark hair, who talks to him for hours.
He buys his next drink at 12.38am, and checks his backpack for the items she told him to take to the house in Mt Roskill – socks, a large pair of shoes, a new cellphone. His own Nokia is at home, but a few days ago he bought a burner phone, "the secret phone", as it was called over and over in the High Court trial that blamed the woman for his death, "the covert phone", "the alternative phone", "the different phone", bought for $50 at Warehouse Stationery in New Lynn. Police also believe the woman bought her own "secret phone" to give him instructions. He had one contact in the new phone: DAUGHTER, the name he sometimes called her. He also sometimes called her his girlfriend.
Ewart had lived for a while in a boarding house in Green Bay. He got on well with the manager, Robert Moka, who said, "He would tell me stories that [the woman] was his girlfriend and they were going to have a life together, and that she really adored him. But I thought there was something odd about it. It didn't add up. Not at all." Did he think Ewart was embellishing, telling him a fantasy? "No, it wasn't that. I just thought she was probably using him for whatever. I didn't think he was embellishing at all. I could see he was enamoured with her and I suspected he was being played."
That had long been a concern of his brothers and sisters. Ewart was closest in age to Susan Ewart, the youngest of the family, and the two of them shared a happy childhood in Oranga, then Hillsborough; he was a fun kid, played a lot of soccer, they did cross-country and harriers together. But he was a slow learner, and his stunted growth marked him out. What was wrong with him, exactly? "It was a glandular thing," said Susan. "They wondered if it was a pituitary gland, having been one of the taller ones in the class."
Mentally, too, any kind of diagnosis was vague, unspecified. Two health professionals gave evidence at the trial. When he lived at the Ranfurly Care home for people with an intellectual disability, he was seen by therapist Dr Richard Aukett, who gave Ewart the Slosson Intelligence Test, measuring his IQ between 75-85 (the average is 100). He said in court, "He functioned like a 12- or 13-year-old … He had difficulties but he seemed to handle them quite well … He was a gentle man to deal with."
Ewart was Dr John McCartie's patient since 1999. He said in court, "Stephen worked for Air New Zealand packing things, I'm not sure exactly what. Vegetables at one stage. He also worked in at least two hotels, one as a steward, one washing dishes. One of his major problems was that he was very lonely. He definitely had an intellectual impairment. The extent of it I think is probably a little bit debatable."
All of it suggests someone vulnerable, an easy mark. In court, Susan Ewart talked about the address he moved to after he left Ranfurly. "He moved in on his own, to Māngere, right out in the wops, with no streetlights or footpaths, on Ihumātao Rd. He would walk miles to Papatoetoe on benefit day, to go to the pub and see his 'friends' who would hit him up for drinks, and then he'd walk home."
She said in our interview, "We always worried that somebody would do something, and use him somehow."
I said, "Milk him for his benefit money, for drinks."
"Yeah. Use him that way."
"Because what has he got to give."
"Yeah."
"A ceiling."
"Yeah."
She had talked earlier about a claim made by a former neighbour of Stephen Ewart that he had tenants living in his ceiling. That was when he lived in the same Mt Roskill block of flats that he tried to torch, and where he first met the woman found guilty of his manslaughter. The neighbour (now deceased) told police the woman arranged for "a lot of men" to sleep in Ewart's ceiling, and took money from them as rent.
He orders his third drink at the F Bar at 1.14am. He nurses it for a while and plots how to get to the Mt Roskill address. It'd been a while since he was last there. He was evicted from it and so, too, had the woman and her mother, only that week, after disputes with the property manager; in her trial, prosecution claimed the woman's motive to get Ewart to set fire to her flat was revenge, a payback.
"He leaves the bar at around 2am," Crown prosecutor David Johnstone told the jury in his closing address, a masterpiece that developed like a short story. "He has to set off and he needs to do so by foot." Ewart misses seven calls on his "secret phone" that night but picks up at 2.31am. "He was on his way."
Retired professor of law at the University of Auckland, Warren Brookbanks, pondered the concept of The Innocent Agent, and said, "It's rare." And then: "It's very rare." And again, this time with emphasis: "It's very rare." We may be able to venture that The Innocent Agent is rare. It's legendary, a kind of white tiger of criminal law, something seldom seen and full of wonder.
To view Stephen Ewart as The Innocent Agent was central to the Crown's case against the woman at her High Court trial, and yet the phrase never passed the lips of prosecutor David Johnstone. It did, finally, in Justice Venning's closing remarks to the jury. It was as though he let the cat, or the white tiger, out of the bag, dared to speak the words out loud. It caused distress to the woman's defence team. They had sent Venning a concerned memo about it in advance. But he went ahead, and cast the spell of The Innocent Agent, that dazzling conceived idea of someone who is not entirely, as we understand ourselves to be, entirely human.
An Innocent Agent is defined as someone who is procured to perform a criminal act, and cannot be held responsible or liable for their actions. They exist in a kind of pure state, incapable of evil or moral wrong; they can be children, or in Ewart's case, childlike. They are instruments. Justice Venning, to the jury: "He was acting as her instrument or Innocent Agent if he lacked the necessary understanding but carried out the physical act by her direction … If you are sure she used him to perform a physical act, then she is guilty."
The concept inevitably works its way into fiction. Oliver Twist was an Innocent Agent. Charles Dickens' character was a little boy and a pickpocket, procured by Fagin. Jason Bourne, the hired killer in the Bourne movies, can also be viewed as an Innocent Agent; like the Manchurian Candidate, he was procured by means of brainwashing to carry out government orders. Bourne was neither a child, or childlike, or mentally insane, another characteristic of Innocent Agency. But he lacked that quality all of us demand to possess, and will create havoc if we think it's being withheld: free will.
Bourne was like a programmed robot. Significantly, the test case for The Innocent Agent in New Zealand law was in 1976, when a man was procured to steal a TV, successfully defended as an Innocent Agent, and his actions were described by the judge "as though it had been done by a robot". An instrument, a robot – there was another, actually quite shocking way of describing an Innocent Agent, made by retired law professor Bernard Brown, when he said in our interview, "If you set a dog alight and put it into the place you wanted to burn down, you're using an Innocent Agent."
Essentially the woman has been sent to jail for treating Ewart in exactly that manner. Ewart, an instrument, a robot, a puppet, a proxy, an obedient pet, something not so much less than human but other than human. He has become more fascinating in death than in life. As an Innocent Agent, his role in trying to set the Mt Roskill block of flats alight is so opaque that it complicates two very firm principles that provide the foundation for criminal law - actus reus, the beautiful and venerable Latin term that means the guilty act, and mens rea, or guilty mind. The jury's verdict shifted the guilty act of the arson from Ewart, even though he was blundering around under the house with the petrol and the cigarette lighters, to the woman who procured him. As for the necessary proof of the guilty mind, Ewart is once again absolved, on the grounds that he is basically seen as mindless. The mens rea applies to the woman: she had motive, she possessed the guilty mind. In his closing address to the jury, the final words spoken by Crown prosecutor David Johnstone described her behaviour after the fire: "She was upset because the burden of guilt lay on her shoulders. That is exactly where that burden should lay."
And so the actus reus (Ewart lighting the fire) is not actually the actus reus, and the mens rea (Ewart knowing what he was doing to the extent he knew how to prepare a fire) is not actually the mens rea, due to a third beautiful and venerable Latin term, as explained by Bernard Brown: doli incapax, meaning incapable of guilt. "That's a very ancient one," Brown said, who was then moved to remember an ancient crime. "You remember the murder of Thomas A'Becket, by Henry II?" I said I did not. A'Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in 1170. Brown continued, "When the King said in anger, about A'Beckett, to his courtiers, 'Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?' a couple of them went out and killed the priest. 'I'm doing a job for my old friend.'"
Is that the way Ewart had seen the fire at Mt Roskill? As a favour, as something he'd like to help the woman out with? Brown said, "If he had the necessary awareness to know that what he was doing was legally or morally wrong, he would be a secondary party or even a principal along with her."
I told Brown that Justice Venning had remarked in his summing up, "If he was acting voluntarily, the chain of causation is broken." This raised the crucial issue of causation. Brown said, "It's an essential shibboleth of law. There's got to be a direct unbroken chain between the offender and the offence. So it's got to be proved that what she did was the substantial and operating cause, and if anything got in the way to break that, to break the chain, for instance, if she said to this man, 'I want you to go around there and break a couple of windows,' but when he got there, he decided to set light to the house, then that would have been a break in the chain of causation."
But as an Innocent Agent, Ewart decided nothing. He lacked free will. He was a button to push, a match to strike. But it's such a vague and obscure argument, dangerously fanciful and very, very difficult to prove. It comes back to the 1976 Paterson test case of the man duped into stealing a TV. He picked it up and marched it out of the house, but could not be held liable. Professor Warren Brookbanks said, "If they are an Innocent Agent, they are deemed not to have committed a crime. With Innocent Agency, the person setting up The Innocent Agent is deemed to be the actor, the perpetrator of the offence."
Okay. But surely there was more to it than that; as the test case, the Paterson ruling needed to be examined closely. "I'll go find a copy," said Brookbanks, and set off across the house, watching where he walked – his wife was teaching a group of women how to needlework. "I'm treading cautiously … Here we go. Yep. Paterson, 1976. He persuades a person to uplift the TV set owned by another guy, and he provided The Innocent Agent with a key. The Innocent Agent acted in the belief that it was the accused's flat." And then he said, "There's actually quite a good article about this by Gerry Orchard, professor of criminal law at Canterbury. Wonderful man, great scholar. Not with us any longer."
He padded some more and found Orchard's article in a 1977 issue of The New Zealand Law Journal. Orchard took issue with The Innocent Agent ruling in the Paterson case. He referred to section 66 of the Crimes Act, which defines a person is guilty of an offence if that person "actually commits the offence". The court ruled that the words "actually commits the offence" can be accommodated to describe a person who acts through an Innocent Agent. Orchard wrote, "It is respectfully suggested that this is highly disputable ... The word 'actually' means 'in fact' and it seems wrong to say that a person can fairly be said to have 'actually' done an act when he has done it in a figurative sense only, the act being in fact done by another, albeit on his behalf."
Or her behalf. Brookbanks agreed with Orchard's objections. "The legislation is defective." He pondered the case of Stephen Ewart, and his claims to Innocent Agency, and said, "From a prosecution point of view it's a no-brainer. In a case like that if there's some evidence that a person of some authority uses somebody who is weak or disabled or incapacitated to commit the offence, then the line the prosecution would want to work is to attack the procurer for the full offence."
That was indeed the line that the Crown took, and Brookbanks was right, too, when he guessed the essence of the woman's defence: "She is innocent because she didn't have anything to do with it. He did it off his own bat." The woman's lawyer, Sam Wimsett, began his closing address by saying to the jury, "We don't know why Stephen Ewart tried to burn down that block of flats. It may well be an unresolved mystery."
When someone we know says or does something unexpected, out of character, and it's all wrong, damaging, hurtful, we say: what were they thinking? The correct answer is very often: they weren't thinking. Stephen Ewart finishes his fourth drink for the night at the F Bar, and heads out the door, turning down Sandringham Rd towards Eden Park, a phantom under cover of darkness.
To walk from Kingsland to Mt Roskill is to tromp through the middle of the isthmus, that part of Auckland no one thinks about when they think about Auckland; there's no trace of the two harbours, just flatlands and traffic and the quiet, everyday life of suburban sprawl. To amble along it in daytime is to at least allow awesome views of the smooth green maunga of Puketāpapa/Mount Roskill, Maungawhau/Mount Eden, and Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill rising in a blue sky. To walk it at 2am for an hour and a half is to creep silently, to move like a ghost beneath the sodium lights.
Scary as hell, in other words, but the journey gave Ewart purpose. He spent much of his life in one spot, pinned to the floor by loneliness. Susan Ewart said he moved to a large downstairs rumpus room in the family home after he finished school (failing School Certificate twice), with a bed, couch, piano, dining table, table-tennis table, but the only space to sit was on the floor. His hoarding had begun early, and in earnest. He sat there, rotting but basically functioning until his father died in 1999. He was admitted to Ranfurly Care, resumed hoarding, slept all day and watched TV at night. There were residents with cerebral palsy, and another who couldn't shower himself; it was hard to know what actual handicap Ewart had but he didn't belong, and he left to rent or board in Māngere, Mt Roskill, New Lynn, Avondale, Green Bay, Cornwall Park and finally in the Volt Apartments on the corner of Queen St and Mayoral Drive.
He walks down and around past Eden Park, the stadium's magnificent arches cutting into the night sky, and then in a long straight line on Sandringham Rd, past the conifers and phoenix palms lining Gribblehirst Park, past a block of shops with a halal butcher and a spice supermarket and that other ethnic food source, Chicking. He has a backpack over his shoulders and the prosecution's version of his doomed journey is that every step is propelled and compelled by his best friend, really his only friend in the world.
When you have nothing, hoarding offers a brilliant solution: you can gradually accumulate everything. Susan described his living conditions in the block of flats in Mt Roskill. "He had a track to the kitchen and another to the bathroom. There were papers and boxes of stuff everywhere, on the table, the couches; newspaper clippings, magazines, and things he'd pick up on his walks - rocks, golf balls, tennis balls, paperclips, broken stubs of pencils and pens that didn't work. He did a lot of walking. He'd walk for miles."
He walks past all the long straight streets (Lambourne, Lancing, Mars) that come off the long straight street of Sandringham Rd. It's now after 3am but the summer nights are warm even at this time.
When he was admitted to hospital for a heart bypass, the property manager asked Susan to clean her brother's flat. "Cat urine and faeces everywhere," she remembered. "Stephen loved cats. Mum and Dad used to breed Siamese cats so we'd always have a litter of kittens around. Cats never question how people are. He always got love and affection from cats, but he was always scared they'd get run over so he wouldn't have windows open or the doors. We had to bin lots of stuff, including his bedding, because of the cats. The lady next door had kept the cats inside and fed them while he was in hospital. But there wasn't any evidence the litter trays had been changed or cleaned." The lady next door was the mother of the woman found guilty of Ewart's death. That's how they met and became such very good friends.
He walks past St Martin's church with a metal rooster on its spire, a redbrick house flanked by two statues of seals, homes flying All Blacks and Tonga flags. This is classic Mt Roskill, once a Bible belt of the white working-class (a teenage Russell Crowe lay in his bed at nights, eyes wide open, driven by the absolute need to get as far away as fame could take him), now an immigrant community, very Muslim, very Indian. The men who allegedly slept in his ceiling were Indian.
"He used to catalogue stuff," said Susan. "He'd have different filings of movie stars and write down their personal data – date of birth, star signs, movies and shows they'd been in, then he'd come up with a new system and start all over again. He'd keep filing cards, and must have spent a fortune on stationery – notebooks, A4 exercise books and pads, and catalogue cards." I asked, "What made him happy?" She said, " The cats. And his treasures. His prized rock collection, which was just stones he picked up. His files, and his trading cards – and that's when we came across all of the handwritten pages." She meant about 10 copies of a statement he wrote over and over and over and later gave to police, word for word, to back up a complaint made by his woman friend. The discovery was presented at her trial as evidence she coaxed him to do what she wanted, that she'd had previous form in sinking her claws into his feeble impaired brain. A voice recording of the same statement, found on the woman's phone, provided further evidence of his history as a faithful servant, a trained robot.
Sandringham Rd rises up and meets the Mt Albert Rd intersection. It's elevated and he can see the lights to the west of the lower ranges of the Waitākeres. There's been light but steady traffic even at that time of night but when he crosses the Mt Roskill shops and drops down Winston Rd, no one is around, it's perfectly quiet. He makes no sound; he walks like a cat and his shadow blends in with the night. He turns on to Somerset Rd. There's a house with a splendid front garden of chives and beets. There's a little bridge that crosses Oakley Creek, the water running black and chatty over the stones. Somerset twists and turns, with Mt Roskill College on one side, and on the other side there's a bank of flax, grown to hide and muffle State Highway 20. A pedestrian bridge rises over the six-lane motorway and drops him down on to the edges of Keith Hay Park. It's about 4am. He's minutes from his destination.
Susan Ewart: "I remember driving home out west one evening, it was dark, and I saw somebody walking along Great North Rd looking into gutters, and I thought, 'Oh God. I hope that's not Stephen.' But it was." What did she think would become of him? "There was a chap I often saw around town, a short guy, similar height and similar stature to Stephen, with long, long dreadlocks, a homeless guy, and I often thought Stephen would become like that." Many Aucklanders will know who she means: short and filthy with immense dreadlocks, roving to and fro, a fixture on the itinerant scene, one of the few ghosts who made an impression.
A path runs beside Keith Hay Park. Beside it, Oakley Creek flows in the concrete bed of a long culvert, the water heading north.
"I had a phone call from the police and I immediately thought, 'Stephen'."
The block of flats faces the park.
"I said, 'Is he okay?' and they said, 'We'd like to talk with you in person.'"
A hatch door led beneath unit three. You had to crouch to get inside.
"So I knew it was bad. I didn't realise how bad."
There were four flats with about 10 tenants, including two small children. Everyone was at home, everyone was asleep; of course, the whole wooden house could have gone up in flames, of course, it had the potential for a mass-fatality event.
"He was always an honest, good person. I can't imagine him doing that if he'd known there was a possibility of the whole place going up. I met the neighbour who discovered him. They had a toddler and I thought there's no way he'd put them at risk."
He splashes the petrol on the wooden foundations, into the milk bottles, on himself; a little man, a kind of Rumpelstiltskin concealed beneath a house – just after dawn, The Innocent Agent is on fire.
"I totally think he was being used. I don't think he would have had the nous to come up with the idea, and transport all the petrol there – and the shoes that he was found in were way too big for him, like clown shoes, to try and hide the fact he had very small feet, very small, smaller than mine. He would wear children's shoes. So he put on those clown shoes stuffed with paper, with a pair of socks pulled over the top to try and not leave any prints. There's no way he would have had the foresight to dream that up. I'm sure he was instructed. I think he thought he was helping a friend."
I interviewed Detective Inspector Glenn Baldwin in the Avondale Police Station, and asked him, "You were there on day one. Can you describe the crime scene?"
He said, "I was called out at about 6am, and got to the scene, and there was Stephen in a fetal position, clothes burnt from his body. We couldn't identify him through facial recognition. It was a strange scene, almost to the point of being bizarre. Here's this naked burnt corpse on a summer's morning and the kids are about to play cricket in the park, so we better get the tarps up.
"Fire had licked up the sides of the building. When I put my head through the hatch, this strong smell of petrol came through. You could see milk containers of fuel under the house. And I was like, 'S***, this is a determined effort to burn this house down.'
"The ESR guy arrived and said what's happened is that he's in there slopping petrol around, probably in the dark, and in my mind's eye I see him sort of kneeling in dirt where he's slopped petrol, and not being able to see well, and has set up all the bottles, and he's gone to light something and this vapour ball that's formed under there - because it's not well ventilated - went WOOMPH and there's a fireball.
"He's got fuel on his hands and his clothes. He's inhaling fire and he staggers out and burned to death. It would be the most awful, horrific way to die. People hear him screaming and come out and do their best to put the fire out.
"And then suddenly Stephen Ewart is no more. He's a mystery man, a burnt naked corpse, in front of a house. So how the investigation starts is, 'Who is he and why is he doing this?'"
It took nearly five years for police to build a case to take to trial, and much of it was due to a police officer who sat next to Baldwin during our interview and filled the room with a kind of restless energy: Detective Libby Willis. She had worked as a snowboard instructor and wedding planner before she joined the police at 27. Baldwin said putting her on the case was the best decision he ever made in the Ewart investigation. He turned at her, and said, "Fundamentally you are the most tenacious detective I know."
In a break during the trial, prosecutor David Johnstone remarked to me that the case involved the best detective work he'd ever seen in his career. It wasn't the first time he said it.
Willis: "When he said that to me I cried. That's the highlight of my career for DJ to say that. It was so hard to get the evidence. And it was all so circumstantial. I was just so captured by Stephen's vulnerability. I was like, 'Okay, I'm just going to do everything.' I was always like, 'One more stone to turn over,' and even when I was like, 'I know she's done this. I know it,' it was still hard to be able to figure out how to present it."
The woman became a person of interest not long after Willis was put on the case. But her alibi was solid – on the night of the fire, she was at Waitākere Hospital getting an iron injection, staring at CCTV cameras in the hours Ewart was heading towards his death. Willis spent the next four years gathering evidence.
DI Baldwin said, "Eventually Libby was like, 'We need to charge her now.' [The woman] was looking to go overseas and the big concern was we'll never find her again and that'll be the end of it. So I had an audience with [Detective Inspector] Scott Beard about this case and he said, 'Charge her with the arson and that will prevent the overseas travel.' DJ [Johnstone] became involved about that point. And we met him and talked about a culpable charge of manslaughter and what would we need to establish that. One of the highlights of my time in this investigation was when DJ phoned me and said, 'We're going to lay a charge of manslaughter.'"
Libby Willis talked about some of her methods during the investigation. She found crucial voice evidence on a "crappy old" cellphone seized from the woman's house; the phone was so old that the police digital transit unit was unable to extract data from it, so she had to listen manually until the battery died, and she bought a new battery on TradeMe. Another time she went down a rabbit hole trying to determine the shop that sold the milk bottles filled with petrol beneath the house; by tracking the code on the base of the bottles, she was able to establish two were despatched to dairies and petrol stations in
West Auckland, including a dairy on the woman's street: "I even did a map and we plotted all the dairies and petrol stations and that one bottle probably came from the dairy on her street but we could never tie that down 100 per cent." You can identify the source of a bottle but not the exact destination.
The map of milk bottles was typical of Detective Willis: she loved systems, patterns, representations. "I'm all about timing. The first thing I always do is a timeline. I'm a timeline girl." As well as a fine analytical mind, she was also sensitive to temperatures in the way we behave. She told a story about a conversation with the woman when she arrested her.
"The thing that struck me was the oddness of their relationship. And I really focused on trying to figure it out. When I would talk to people who knew Stephen, you'd hear about his only real friend was [the woman's name]. But when I arrested her and transferred her back to central, I said to her, 'Did you go to Stephen's funeral?' And she said, 'Why would I have gone to his funeral? I wouldn't be friends with someone like that.'
"And that just – wow. You know? How sad is that, that for him, she was his only friend, but she wouldn't even put him in that category. And I thought, 'That is just awful. What is she getting from him? There's a reason she maintains this contact with him.' And we know Stephen had his issues and he wouldn't change his clothes, he was a difficult person to be friends with, yet she maintains this contact and I don't think it's out of the goodness of her heart - and that became clear that day when she said that, so I was like, okay, 'She benefits somehow from this and it's not friendship,' and that's kind of how it started to make sense that she was using him."
I asked her what she thought of the woman. She chose very efficient words: "I think she is highly manipulative. I think she's clever. I don't think she's a nice person at all." DI Glenn Baldwin tends to speak with a dramatic verve. His answer: "She's a wolf, but not in sheep's clothing. She's a wolf in lamb's clothing. She presents as the absolute opposite of what she is. I've been a policeman for about 30 years. On a few occasions, you realise you are in a room with evil. And she is evil. The callousness of some of her conduct is chilling. Her comment to Libby is chilling. We know she has sent this man to do this crime against his nature, but because of his desire for acceptance, to have a friend, and to be accepted, to win favour, he does it, and she had no remorse or care or concern about him."
I thought of Professor Bernard Brown's remark about setting a dog on fire to burn down a house.
Lara Stunzner lives in the Mt Roskill flat where Stephen Ewart used to live, right next to the flat he tried to burn down. She watched him die that day. A chef turned teacher, she was happy to talk about what happened; we drank cups of instant coffee at the dining table, in front of the windows overlooking Keith Hay Park. It was such a great spot for a flat. No traffic, only joggers and walkers on the sports fields, with close views of the lovely slopes of the Mount Roskill maunga. It also looks out on to the Akarana golf course, where Ewart would go on his patrols, picking at golf balls that would glitter like fallen birds' eggs on the ground, taking them home to shore up against the loneliness of his existence. He turned the flat into a madhouse. Lara Stunzner remade it into a serene and tidy home.
She said she heard a loud explosion just after 6am that December morning in 2017. It woke her up and then she heard crying. "We were celebrating my mum's 75th birthday that day," she said. "I'd baked the cake. I opened the curtains and I could see smoke billowing over the fence. I jumped up and went downstairs and I could see a burning body. He was lying down in a fetal position facing the house. All of the clothing had burned off and the body was tan - it wasn't black, it was a kind of tan colour. I could see fire coming from beneath the house. I heard somebody say, 'It's a dummy.' But why on earth would someone dump a burning mannequin in front of a house?"
I asked her if the sight had traumatised her that day and she said, "No, I was okay. But I wanted to know what happened." Well, yes; and according to a patient and ingenious five-year police investigation, and the verdict of the jury in the High Court at Auckland, what happened was extreme, psychopathic, the act of a cold, cold heart. "But for her, he wouldn't be dead," said Detective Inspector Glenn Baldwin. "He died committing a serious crime but he's not a criminal." Justice Venning invited the jury to think of Ewart as something else, something novel: an Innocent Agent, that near-mythical state of being, first identified in a court of law in 1573, when a man wanted to kill his wife with a poisoned apple but she gave it to their daughter, who died. There is nothing very difficult about viewing the wife as an Innocent Agent. The case of Stephen Ewart is more complicated, a story you have to pick out in the fog of his impaired mind. The woman's defence lawyer, Sam Wimsett, asked the jury, "Was he as incapacitated as the Crown portray? Is it the case that he was incapable of doing this without coaching?"
Even the police concede a central mystery to the case. As Libby Willis said, "I would love to know what she told him. It must have been a pretty compelling story."
A faulty microphone meant that Justice Venning had to vacate the bench in his summing up and deliver it from the witness box. He looked quite diminished sitting down there. At one point he said to the jury, "You have seen photos of his body at the scene." They were awful images. Neighbours had thrown water over the burning body and the concrete was still wet. Stephen Ewart, extinguished; Stephen Ewart, who did his best; the dark moral of the case against the woman is that Stephen Ewart did as he was told.
Susan Ewart has his ashes and is still deciding the best place to open the jar. "I'm actually thinking Cornwall Park because we had so many runs through there, cross-countries, and it's beautiful and peaceful." She cried thinking of the boy he was, running free, happy and perfectly innocent.
