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Scene of the Crime: On December 5, 1963, one of the most notorious crimes NZ has seen took place in Remuera, the Bassett Road machine-gun murders. This is the first in a new monthly series looking at NZ’s most infamous cases of murder, mayhem and the missing.
The first of the horrors was the smell. As the cops stepped through the door of the elegant Auckland villa they were almost overpowered by the unmistakable miasma of decay coming from a front bedroom, the one overlooking the veranda at 115 Bassett Rd, Remuera.
Inside the room they found the bodies of two men. Both had been murdered, shot multiple times at close range.
One lay on the room’s single bed, his mouth wide open, his blood soaking the sheets bright scarlet. Dressed only in a T-shirt and Y-fronts, he had been shot three times with a .45 calibre weapon before being covered with a bedspread.
The other man had taken two bullets. Wearing a sports shirt and undies, he lay on the floor face down near the bed, his right arm thrown forward toward a radio which had taken a bullet itself.
This man, too, had been covered, and under him lay a copy of the New Zealand Herald, dated December 4. That explained the stench. It had been warm that first week of December in 1963, and the bodies had been lying in this room for as long as three days.
The rest of the thinly furnished villa, rented by the victims just a week before, appeared to have escaped the carnage. But there were clues to what had been going in this house in Remuera, a suburb which even then thought rather too well of itself.
In the living room police discovered rows of glasses, dozens of unopened beer bottles and cans, and many more empties. It looked like a “sly grog” den, a dwelling used for the illegal after- hours sale of booze to punters still thirsty after the pubs closed at 6pm. And so it proved.
The fellow on the bed, soon identified as Kevin James Speight, was a 26-year-old seaman with outsized dreams of making big money from sly-grogging and the sex trade.
The other was George Frederick Walker, “Knucklehead” to his mates. He was 38, called himself a commercial traveller. Mostly he was a small-time crook who acted the big shot, had a loud mouth and liked a drink.
The cops were certain this was a sly-grog den, but there the case stalled. After the house had been thoroughly searched, the victims identified and the murder weapon determined to be a submachine gun, a rarity in New Zealand, Auckland CIB’s investigation struggled to fathom why the murders had happened, let alone who had committed them.
Who was the target? Speight or Walker, or both? Knucklehead, a career crim, seemed the more likely mark.
And what was the motive for this terrible crime? A robbery gone wrong? A bloody sequel to blackmail? Or had the pair been rubbed out in some sort of grog-house turf war?
The following week’s NZ Truth newspaper decided it was much worse than that: “Chicago comes to Auckland”, screamed its front page.
For many New Zealanders in 1963, the “Bassett Road machine gun murders”, as they quickly became known, came out of nowhere. To the bloke and his sheila in the street, they were like something from a Mickey Spillane crime novel — pulp fiction banned for being too violent, but still illicitly traded — or maybe even, as was suggested, from Al Capone’s Chicago.
As true crime author Scott Bainbridge writes in The Bassett Road Machine-Gun Murders, his 2013 book to which this story owns a debt, until the discovery of the bullet-riddled corpses in Remuera, most of New Zealand, then a conservative, parochial but law-abiding little country, had no idea of the “seedy and violent underbelly” of Auckland. Until then, its vices and its crimes were known only to its cops, its crims and their victims.
Not anymore. As the investigation played out on the front papers of the era’s many newspapers, and in the High Court two months later, it became clear to a dumbfounded nation that while it did not have its own mafia exactly, organised crime, or at least semi-organised crime, not only existed in Auckland but was thriving.
In New Zealand’s sin city, drugs were still a rarity. But sly-grogging was widespread, and a reliable earner for the enterprising villain. Meanwhile, an underworld of safe blowers, racehorse dopers, conmen and standover merchants frequented the roughnecked pubs of downtown Auckland and the illegal beer houses of the squalid nearby suburbs of Ponsonby and Freemans Bay.
Into this cesspool floated Seaman Speight. While on shore leave in late 63, he was invited to 37a Anglesea St in Ponsonby by an acquaintance called Gerald Wilby, an ageing unionist, but also a clever crook and a thug who was opening his new sly grog in the house.
Over several beery nights at Anglesea St in the weeks before his murder, Speight took a fatal fancy to two things: the idea of becoming a sly-grogger himself, and to Wilby’s sexy, young girlfriend, Mary Rapira.
The latter would take care of itself; Mary fancied him, too. But it wouldn’t take much to get a sly grog operation under way and the pounds rolling in either. Speight had the start-up cash and a source of booze down in Onehunga. All he needed now was a house somewhere quiet and a hard man partner to keep the peace and collect the money from their drunken punters.
On November 18, Speight ran into Walker at the central Auckland tavern, the then seedy Shakespeare. Did Walker want the job? Knucklehead was no tough guy, but he was down on his uppers. He took the gig. After all, how much trouble could you get into being hired muscle in a grog house in poncy Remuera?
The High Court trial lasted eight days. But it took only three hours for the jury of 12 men to bring in its decision on who had done the Bassett Rd machine-gun murders.
In the early hours of December 5, 1963, they unanimously decided, career crims John Gillies and Ronald “Jorgie” Jorgensen had driven to 115 Bassett Road and executed Speight and Walker with a Reising machine gun.
But why? Was this really a sly-groggers’ turf war?
During the three weeks leading up to Gillies and Jorgensen’s arrest on New Year’s Eve 1963, the case’s 32 detectives, led by future Police Commissioner Bob Walton, had plenty of theories, but no hard facts despite shaking down — and roughing up, some villains claimed — many of the city’s crime figures and their hangers-on. All had kept shtum.
But as Christmas drew closer, they caught two breaks. The first was Tamaki MP and future prime minister Rob Muldoon bringing in a frightened bloke called Jones, an old borstal acquaintance of Gillies, to talk to investigators. Jones, now on the straight and narrow, reckoned a drunken Gillies had confessed to him he’d done the crime.
Not long after, one Craig Curtis, a playboy society type, but also a gun collector and a dope fiend with criminal connections, admitted he’d lent his Reising to a crim called Peterson, a crim who happened to be a mate of Gerry Wilby, the Anglesea sly-grogger and, it soon became clear, the now suspicious boyfriend of Mary Rapira.
It was she, and her friend, fellow goodtime girl Lola Fleming, who separately told the cops why the Bassett Rd machine-gun murders had gone down: Speight had cuckolded Wilby, and Wilby wanted revenge.
Late on December 4, Wilby made the drunk, stoned, wannabe gangster Gillies a proposition: if he killed Speight, Wilby would give him a £1000.
In the early hours of December 5, a stoned Jorgensen, at Wilby’s request, drove Gillies, now in possession of the gun lent by Curtis, to Bassett Rd. Both knew if Speight had to go, then Walker would have to go, too. Knucklehead was a talker.
After sitting outside 115 in Jorgie’s car making sure all was clear, they went inside. Speight was murdered first, then, once he was on this knees, Walker got it too.
Gillies and Jorgensen got the hell out, disposing of the gun off the Auckland Harbour Bridge, where it would never be found. And in the days after the bodies were discovered, Wilby, a bastard but no fool, fled the country.
That was Mary and Lola’s yarn, and they had no reason to lie. But the cops and the crown prosecutors weren’t convinced it was the best story, the most dramatic story, for a jury.
The court and the rest of country were told that the machine-gun murders were the bloody consequence of something that could have come, like The Truth said, straight out of Chicago: a fight for territory between sly-groggers that ended with murder at 115 Bassett Road.
There was some of that, alright. But the deeper truth was the most notorious crime the country had ever seen happened for reasons older than dirt: lust and revenge.
