David Bain and his supporter Joe Karam emerge from the High Court after Bain was found not guilty in June 2009. Photo / NZPA
While The Front Page is on its summer break, we are revisiting some of the biggest news stories from 2024. New episodes return on January 13th.
On June 20, 1994, a now-infamous 111 call was made. A shaky voice barrelled down the line: “They’re all dead.”
Police descended upon 65 Every St, Dunedin where they found the bodies of five members of the Bain Family.
The sole survivor, David, was later convicted of murdering his parents and siblings.
He served 13 years in prison before the Privy Council quashed his convictions and he was subsequently found not guilty on all charges at a retrial in 2009.
Three decades later, David Bain is living a quiet life in New Zealand away from the spotlight he has endured for much of his adult life. He has a wife, two children, and “a great support network”.
Despite reports he had moved across the ditch to Australia, he has been here all along.
“He had one short holiday there on the Gold Coast with his wife, but he never contemplated living there and never went there at all,” Joe Karam told The Front Page.
Bain checks in with his long-time supporter often. A man who would become synonymous with his story. An unlikely ally and someone who had been referred to as a “raving redneck who’d lost the plot”.
In 1996, Karam read an article in the New Zealand Herald about a small group of people who’d set up a trestle table in Dunedin’s Octagon selling jams and pickles to raise money for a friend they said was innocent.
It sparked an intense curiosity in the former All Black - and was the beginning of what would encompass the next couple of decades of his life.
Karam told The Front Page if he hadn’t become involved when he did, there would not have been a retrial.
“I think it’s fair to say that David Bain, instead of being happily married now with two lovely children and a gorgeous wife, would still be rotting away in prison.”
After he came forward in support of Bain, he said it’s difficult to describe to anybody who wasn’t close to him just how vicious the assaults on him were.
“I separated from my wife soon after. One night not long after we’d separated she’d been shopping in the evening, it was in the wintertime, and she went to get in her car two guys approached her, and they were both private investigators, [hired] to follow me around and try and dig up as much dirt on me as they could. They thought that a jilted wife might be a great source of information for them.
“They did all they could to persuade her to spill as much dirt on me as she could, but she didn’t. She rang me up and told me what happened.”
In retrospect, Karam said he’d do it all again.
“I wouldn’t be able to change anything, because if I didn’t be as feisty and determined and outspoken and voice things publicly as I did, I’d be just like the Watson case now, struggling on 23 years later, hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
“So, the only thing I did wrong was have faith in the powers that be that they would take my concern seriously, but they didn’t. And so when they treated me the way they did, I treated them the same way back,” he said.
Karam said David and his family are doing well, even as the 30th anniversary of the Every St murders approached. .
“They eventually shifted to where they now live. His wife has a very good job and is highly respected, and they’ve built a great life for themselves.
“They’ve got two children who are doing exceptionally well, and they’ve got a great support network in the community where they are.
“We speak to each other regularly. Not every day or every week or anything, but once a month or two months. We have a good old chinwag on the phone and talk about how things are going.
“He talks about his family, what he’s doing for work. I’ve talked to him recently about the media scrutiny that’s been going on and he said, ‘Look, we’re living a happy life. We’ve got a good support network around us. And I just want to sort of just keep my head down and be tight with my family and close friends’.”
So, is it time for New Zealand to finally lay the Bain case to rest?
“Leave it alone, or if you’re going to touch it, at least acknowledge the shortcomings,” Karam said, “The controversy is at the feet of the authorities, not at David’s or mine.”
The Bain case is far from the only ‘true crime’ story that has fascinated New Zealanders over the years.
June 17th marked 54 years since the murders of Harvey and Jeanette Crewe, while this Saturday marks 70 years since the Parker-Hulme murder case - the tale of two teenage girls murdering one of the girls’ mothers in Christchurch.
AUT University Professor of Popular Culture, Dr Lorna Piatti-Farnell, told The Front Page there’s a morbid fascination with true crime stories.
“There’s probably, a certain strange layer of unspoken mixture of fear and excitement that goes with the experience as well. The thrill of delving into the crime and all its details.
“Unfortunately, if we look at all the research that has been conducted in this particular area in several fields from criminal psychology to gender and race studies to cultural and media studies, there is ample evidence to suggest that, unfortunately, race, gender and class do play central parts in victim and perpetrator definition in the creation of sympathy or lack of sympathy and the attention that the case may get in the news.
“There is a lot of stereotyping that happens and more often than not this can reflect negatively on the victims or on the perpetrator. It is regrettable and it is essential that we maintain a continuous awareness of this, especially when presented with criminal acts in both real life and fictionalised accounts,” she said.
The brutal killing of Honorah Parker by Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in June 1954 remains one of the most infamous in New Zealand crime history. It was later adapted into Sir Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures, released in 1997.
Piatti-Farnell said it’s a prime example of how the news and cultural hype of murder isn’t a new phenomenon.
“Certainly from the late 19th century onwards with famous cases like that of Jack the Ripper, there has been a fascination with the idea of crime that has been fueled by storytelling.
“And this has been transported from the news or other forms of media, such as film and television, and more recently, podcasts.”
Listen to the full episode to more about Karam’s campaign and why New Zealanders are still intrigued with the case three decades on.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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