This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
The following article was one of the best-read Premium articles in 2022. The story originally ran in August.
Mark Lyon was expecting to be released from prison by Christmas. Instead, he never again became a free man.
He died on Saturday [30 July] in Waikato Hospital after being brought from Tongariro Prison where he was serving a 15-year sentence for a range of drug and sex-related charges, including offences against girls as young as 14.
The Herald broke the news to the father of that girl and he said: "You've put a smile on my face that will be there all day.
"He is a totally evil man and I feel very, very happy he is now dead and was never released from prison and never felt freedom again."
He said the damage caused to his family, and particularly his daughter, by Lyon was impossible to measure.
"My daughter was destroyed by it. Now, only 10 years later, is she starting to be happy again and have a relationship. It has been enormous."
At 67, Lyon's death is on the younger side of life expectancy for a wealthy Pākehā man. Given the abuse heaped upon his body, it's a wonder he made it that far.
Lyon was an Auckland Grammar boy born with a silver spoon who set out to make his own fortune as one of the rising stars of 1980s property development company Chase Corporation.
Then came the 1990s and Lyon, on his own, accumulated wealth by buying large and building big. He was the force behind Chancery, the $60 million central Auckland development that opened in 2000.
It was around that time he found methamphetamine. It was the early days of the drug's arrival in New Zealand - the country was not yet awash in addicts and cold medicine still contained the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine.
It was a drug looking for a market and in Lyon it found an A-grade consumer with deep pockets and a huge appetite.
Lyon's consumption of meth was such that it brought him into the sphere of gang influence. One of Lyon's best friends from Auckland Grammar went on to become a senior police officer but the property developer now had a new circle that included some well-known criminal names.
They liked Lyon, his lifestyle and his money. They liked it so much they moved into his Omana Ave mansion, neighbouring Government House. One bedroom later revealed long-term habitation by a senior gang member. Other guests were more transient, but also reflected Lyon's embrace of his new lifestyle.
By one estimate, Lyon spent $50,000 on methamphetamine some weeks - as much as he could smoke and plenty for everyone else around.
Jamie Lockett, another friend from school, remembers they came in "droves".
"He stopped working and he started mixing with bad people," he says.
Along with drug use came those who sold and used drugs.
Some of the activity was pretty heavy - Lockett remembers seeing handguns. Some of it was just crazy. Lockett recalls the "Black Hole" - a square cut in Lyon's kauri bedroom floor with a chainsaw then covered in a rug to fool incoming, unwary guests.
It was a place with evidence of Lyon's meth-driven obsessions. He had taken over the ballroom with an enormous bed and decorated it with pornography. This became a feature of almost every place Lyon lived in years to come.
In the Omana Ave ballroom, the pornography adorned the enormous metal clock which served as the centrepiece artwork.
Methamphetamine use had supercharged Lyon's sexual appetites. It's notorious among men in their 40s for having them feel like teenagers again.
Lockett recalled Lyon would "order eight prostitutes at a time". It was a time when Lockett was trying to institute some sort of moderation or order - he would evict those prostitutes days later, still partying, still earning.
The never-ending party at Omana Ave ended with a fire in 2002. It was said to have started with a candle that tipped in Lyon's bedroom, setting fire to curtains. It gutted the building, leaving it uninhabitable.
The effect on Lyon, though, was to bring on an urge to separate himself from the world that had moved into his home. He found refuge, bizarrely moving into a large storage area deep under the Chancery centre in central Auckland.
The development that had contributed to his fortune was now his home. He moved belongings not fire-damaged into the vast underground space, calling it The Cave.
It was an Aladdin's Cave of wonders that Lyon protected with booby traps to deter intruders. At its furthest reaches, beyond the designer furniture, elaborate rugs and opulent artwork salvaged from Omana Ave was a mattress tucked into a corner, behind a breeze block wall, with a dirty sheet and duvet.
Lyon had similar boltholes across Auckland in the decade that followed. There was one above an old pub in Vulcan Lane. Everything was temporary and little had any value. And there was often more than one bolthole. Lockett claimed there was a rooftop path between them worked out by Lyon, whose intricate knowledge of central Auckland's commercial properties had made him a fortune.
There is a period in addiction where a visage is maintained, and then a period where the mask slips. Meth and money were turning Lyon into a feral mess of unstoppable hunger. Gone were the designer suits, replaced by a wardrobe befitting Matrix extras. What was previously seen as inspirational genius was becoming perceived as erratic unpredictability.
The meth went from supercharging sexual desire to removing the ability to satisfy it. Lyon was barred from brothels around central Auckland as his frustration turned to anger over his inability to feed the urges meth had planted.
There were attempts to straighten up, particularly as he brushed up against the law again and again. There was a period of relative calm in Rarotonga but it didn't last. The unravelling of Lyon there included the extraordinary story of the millionaire blasting off in search of the island Mangaia on White Lightning, a 2000hp speedboat, covering the few hundred kilometres in just a few hours.
The famous Cook Islands hospitality stretched as far as it could but not further than Lyon would push it. He returned to Auckland and threw himself back into outrageous self-abuse and furtive boltholes.
There were attempts at normal life but ever did the drugs creep in. There was one place on Auckland's waterfront which showed the cancer eating into Lyon's life through the growth of the pornography cut-outs pasted in jigsaws across the main wall.
Someone who hung around Lyon, like a fly around a picnic, said the pictures were a meth-driven obsession. Lyon in the grip of the drug would use scissors to painstakingly separate the women's bodies from their backgrounds. On the waterfront, there were a few pictures, then a few more and eventually a sprawling montage covering the wall in homage to an endless series of benders.
It's a source of wonder for many who associated with Lyon that it took so long for serious charges to stick. Everybody knew what he was doing. And he often did it publicly.
Lyon and meth went together down the darkest of paths. With his wealth and easy access to drugs, he had a woman aged 20 scour central Auckland for vulnerable prey. Testimony later revealed Lyon's victims included girls 14, 15 years of age. They were brought to his Eden Terrace apartment block, plied with drugs and pressured for sex.
One victim - not described as a minor - was shackled naked to a metal pole by a collar that forced her to stand hunched. She was taken to a part of the building called "the dungeon" and forced to perform a sex act on Lyon for two hours before being given a spiked drink and passing out.
Once the girls and women started talking to police there was no way Lyon would escape prison. He was sentenced to 15 years with a minimum of eight years served before parole would be allowed. Lockett says he expected to be out by Christmas.
Jailhouse lawyer and inmate of decades Arthur Taylor met Lyon in prison. Addiction helped put Lyon inside and addiction brought him to Taylor.
Cigarettes were banned from prison by the time Lyon arrived but he just couldn't quit. If he could find tobacco, he would smoke it. It was one infringement too many, said Taylor, that had Lyon put in a neighbouring maximum security cell at Paremoremo's Auckland prison for a period.
Kept to himself, Taylor recalls. "He wasn't a bad sort, pretty quiet. Gambled and played cards all day."
Good sort, bad sort. There were plenty of views on Lyon in the wake of his death and most leaned towards the latter.
"We all do good and we all do bad," says Taylor. "In Mark's case, he did more bad than good."
Others interviewed by the Herald had the same to say. Car dealer John Murphy, who rented him a place to live when he was facing the charges that led to prison, found a young girl outside Lyon's place not long before he was sent to prison, cast into a pile of rubbish and eyes rolling back in her head. With Lyon's death, he's found himself correcting those describing the millionaire in glowing terms. He wasn't all that, he says, but something else.
There will be those who see another man - or at least, saw one once. Cliff Lyon didn't want to speak. He was gracious declining and clearly grieving. His son Mark - born Alister Stuart Lyon - had shown and fulfilled such promise until methamphetamine entered his life.
And here now is a life lived - dead at 67, a prison inmate, drug addict and convicted rapist.
The father of the victim aged 14 told the Herald his condolences and sympathy went to Cliff Lyon.
"He was once a young man, his son. I feel a lot of sympathy for Cliff and his family and what they have had to go through.
"I would like to express sympathy for the loss of Mark … Mr Lyon ..." With that, the dad of the teen victim stopped, fumbling for the right way to label the man who had so damaged his own child.
"I just don't want to speak his name. I'm going through a range of emotions right now, feelings brought up by his death. I hope it was a painful death.
“And there’s relief, that in some way this is over now.”
