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Networked Knowledge Media Reports Networked Knowledge New Zealand Homepage This page set up by Dr Robert N Moles [Underlining where it occurs is for NetK editorial emphasis] On 29 August 2020 Mike White of Stuff reported ‘The Lundy murders, 20 years on’ Some time on the night of August 29, 2000, Christine Lundy and her seven-year-old daughter, Amber, were violently killed in their Palmerston North home. Public revulsion at the crime turned to horror, when Christine’s husband and Amber’s father, Mark Lundy, was arrested, then convicted of the murders. Mike White looks back over one of New Zealand’s most bizarre and disturbing cases, and asks why Mark Lundy is still fighting to prove his innocence after 20 years. Mark Lundy, kitchen sink salesman. Sink salesman, scout leader, Wilbur Smith reader, dreamer. Until 2000, that’s who he was. At best, a loving dad and decent friend. At worst, a bit of a boaster, a bit of a drinker. Someone from a weatherboard house in suburbia where weeds grew in the cracks at the driveway’s edge. Forty-three, six-foot-three. Someone whose love of cooking and food and wine showed in his 130kg frame. Then, on August 30 that year, his wife and daughter were found hacked to death. Initially he was surrounded with the sympathy of a shocked community, but then they started wondering. Whispering. Suspecting Lundy might have been the killer. “You know he shagged a hooker the night his family was murdered?” the rumour began to spread. It was true. And remember him at Christine and Amber’s funeral, all wailing and collapsing, overplayed grief in a dark suit and dark glasses? That’s how it was seen by the public, and for 20 years that’s the lens through which we’ve considered Mark Lundy and his claims he didn’t murder his wife and daughter. Mark Lundy the bad-acting ham and bumbling fool, who was a vile scheming killer. A figure of ridicule, yet a totem of evil. Mark Lundy, a caricature of the gauche and grisly, at once laughable yet malevolent. His case has been two decades of controversy and courts, two trials, three Court of Appeal hearings, visits to the Supreme Court and Privy Council. But all that matters in the end is that he was convicted once, then convicted again. That’s certainty for you, everyone said, that’s the end of it. But it was never going to be, Lundy all the time proclaiming his innocence, and his supporters soon to deliver an extensive application to the new Criminal Cases Review Commission, appealing for his case to be reconsidered by the courts. Meanwhile, Mark Lundy sits in a bleak North Island prison, waiting for his first parole hearing in 2022, remembering his only child and wife, recalling a simpler life selling sinks and kitchen benches. I’ve met Mark Lundy twice. The first time was in 2013 after the Privy Council quashed his initial conviction, and he was released from prison. He was staying with his sister and brother-in-law in Taupō, and I joined them for dinner. I’d been investigating and writing about Lundy’s case for six years by then, and the Privy Council’s decision was vindication of the concerns that had been raised about his case. There was something of a celebratory atmosphere that evening as fish and chips were unwrapped across the dining room table, and tomato sauce squirted on to the corners of the paper. It was Lundy’s second night of freedom, and it was clear the world had moved on and left him behind in the 12 years he’d been in jail. Technology astounded him. The dark unnerved him – in prison there was always a light on. Going to the toilet meant more than taking two steps across his cell. Freedom had been hard won, but was hard to get used to. The next time I met Lundy was a few days before he was returned to prison. It was late- March 2015, the weekend before the jury in his retrial began its deliberations, and he’d invited me to the house where he was staying in Wellington. By then, everyone had listened to two months of evidence from prosecution and defence, and all that was left was for the judge to sum up, and the jury to decide its verdict. Much of what they’d heard was bewildering science. A lot was completely different to how police alleged Lundy had committed the murders, when he’d been convicted in 2002. However, some of it was as damning as it had been at his first trial: the barely challenged claims Lundy had a speck of his wife’s brain on the shirt he was wearing the night she was attacked so savagely her face was rendered unrecognisable. But that weekend, Lundy was surprisingly sanguine. He sat there in shorts and jandals and a polo shirt with a bit of breakfast dripped down it. And he insisted he was confident he’d be found not guilty – but he’d thought that in 2002 and been shatteringly let down. “I don’t want it to happen, I’m 99.99 per cent sure it won’t happen, but I don’t know what’s going through their mind.” In all likelihood, the jury had already made up their minds by that stage. Eight weeks of argument had seen them favour the prosecution’s version of events. Mark Lundy was a ghastly killer, they believed, not an innocent framed. But right then, Lundy didn’t know that, and was still glimpsing redemption and freedom, while realising it could be snatched from him. He’d forced himself to think about that, and how he’d cope if the worst happened. “All I can do is respect their decision. I won’t agree with it, of course, and won’t understand how they could have reached it, but it’s their decision and I have to respect it. There’s nothing else I can do except fight against it – which I will.” And fight he has. The last five years have seen him take his case to the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court. I didn’t do it, he has persistently cried. Didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t have. But in December last year, Supreme Court Justice Mark O’Regan took just six minutes to dismiss Lundy’s last appeal, saying there was no doubt he had butchered his family. People often ask, what was Lundy like? You’ve met him, they say. Did he do it? It’s as if by sitting across the table from someone you can divine if they’re telling the truth, or determine guilt. Some swear they can do it, and various reporters have said they were seized by a spectral chill in Lundy’s presence, or believed they could see through his denial and posturing and stare into his evil soul. But I’ve never been able to do that, with anyone, and think it’s a fickle shortcut people look for. If it was that easy, we wouldn’t need courts, just witch-sniffers and seers and Sensing Murder shysters. Mark Lundy insists that’s pretty much how he’s been judged – on gut instinct not evidence, on prejudice not science, on flawed behaviour not fact. The case against him was this: Having got into financial strife by committing to an extravagant vineyard venture in Hawke’s Bay, Lundy could only see one way out – killing his wife for her insurance money. So he hatched a plan that would supposedly give him a perfect alibi. He would steal home from Wellington while there on a business trip, carry out the murders, then sneak back to his Petone motel. As long as he wasn’t seen anywhere on that 300km round trip, he would surely avoid suspicion. Police say he brutally bashed Christine around the head with something like a tomahawk as she lay in bed. Then, when Amber heard the disturbance and came into her parents’ bedroom, he turned on her and hacked her down. Lundy then drove back to Wellington, and in the morning bought a bacon-and-egg sandwich for breakfast, and carried on his business rounds, acting normally and cheerily according to witnesses. The murders had been meticulously planned for a long time, police insisted, and Lundy thought he’d got away with the perfect crime. But he made one crucial slip – a tiny fragment of his wife’s brain tissue ending up on his shirt. The way police described it, when removing the coveralls he must have worn, Lundy brushed a bloodied hand or glove across the pocket and sleeve of his XXL polo shirt, leaving a barely perceptible trace from the crime scene. For six months, Lundy remained oblivious he was the chief suspect, while all the time police built a case against him, including conducting novel forensic tests in Texas. Then they hauled him in, tried to get him to confess, and arrested him. In 2002 he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to at least 20 years in jail. For the next decade, the few people who still supported Lundy picked apart the case against him, exposing much of the evidence as a sham, revealing an investigation riddled with incompetence and error. They proved there had been no mad three-hour, 300km drive to and from Palmerston North in rush-hour traffic at speeds nobody could replicate. They proved the claimed 7pm time of death was impossible, and the science supporting it was internationally ridiculed.