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On 29 August 2020 Mike White of 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 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. They showed there was no crafty manipulation of the family’s computer by Lundy to make it look like it had been shut down much later than it had been.

The bizarre claims of the self-described psychic who insisted she saw Lundy fleeing the scene wearing a blonde woman’s wig, were exposed as nonsense. Christine wasn’t in bed at 7pm waiting for her husband to drive home from his Wellington motel for sex.

Oops, said the cops.

Try again, said the Privy Council, when it quashed Lundy’s convictions.

And so the police did – coming up with a completely different scenario, on the eve of Lundy’s retrial. This time they said Lundy calmly drove home after hiring a prostitute, and killed his wife and daughter around 3am, despite there being no direct evidence supporting this new timeframe.

And the jury believed them again. Because, no matter how implausible many aspects of the case remained, scientists said Lundy had a speck of Christine’s brain on his shirt, and even his lawyers had trouble countering that. “No man should have his wife’s brain on his shirt,” thundered prosecutor Philip Morgan, QC, time and again.

Quite, said the jury.

Guilty.

Again.

People still seethe at Lundy, at his refusal to admit he did it; at the millions his case has cost taxpayers; at the scab he rips at for many family members every time he appeals. They often forget that many of his appeals were justified because much of the evidence he was originally convicted on was complete fantasy.

Remarkably, despite proving this, there remains precious little public support or sympathy for him. It seems almost perverse that he could show the police theory against him was wrong, but then they just came up with another one and had another go. But that’s been the unique experience of Mark Edward Lundy.

Len Andersen, the New Zealand Criminal Bar Association’s president, has few problems with the fact Lundy was reconvicted under a completely different set of facts from his first trial. “The appropriate thing happened, because it was found that the basis of his first conviction was wrong, and therefore it was set aside. I think it’s the judicial system working as it should.”

What concerns Andersen more is the novel science employed in Lundy’s case, including tests that had never been used forensically before, and hadn’t been validated for use in this way. “That was so disturbing. You’ve got to be so careful about what you might call junk science. And we’ve seen a history of things being accepted, and then being found to be incorrect.”

Andersen stresses it is a question of whether the testing was appropriate for the specific circumstances of Lundy’s case, and whether there were sufficient safeguards to ensure all results were reliable. “And this is a case where it looks like they’ve stretched the rules. It does seem to be pushing the boundaries.”

This scientific evidence about the brain tissue on Lundy’s shirt has always been the most critical issue for Aucklander Geoff Levick, who’s devoted nearly two decades to investigating the case, adamant Mark Lundy has been wrongly convicted. They’ve been years of frustration, anger, and occasional rancour, sprinkled with some remarkable successes. Levick has always insisted the immunohistochemistry (IHC) tests that supposedly revealed Christine’s brain tissue on her husband’s shirt, were flawed. In addition, they were so novel they’ve never been used in any other criminal investigation anywhere in the world, before or since Lundy’s case, he says. Levick, a retired chemical company owner, argues the fundamental reliability of IHC as a forensic tool in this case has never been properly tested by the courts, despite them being willing to rule out other scientific tests used by the Crown, as invalid or inadmissible.

As Mark Lundy recently wrote from jail: “I am not only an innocent man, I am in prison because I am an international guinea pig in the world of forensic science and the criminal justice system.” Levick, who didn’t know Lundy before his conviction, has been a determined challenger of the police and champion of Lundy – to the point of falling out with Lundy’s retrial lawyers over strategy, and having to watch from the sidelines as their case imploded in court.

He’s been fascinated by the science and the logic of the case, and loved “uncovering the bullshit” behind much of it. What riles Levick is that nobody has ever faced any consequences for the innumerable mistakes made in Lundy’s case: Not the police for their bungled investigation and withheld information; not the prosecutors for their fictitious scenarios and exaggerations; not the judges for their errors and inventions.

Moreover, much of the scientific evidence in Lundy’s two trials was demonstrably too complex for the jurors, with even the judges struggling to understand witness testimony, he says. “It’s just impossible that you can walk in off the street and listen to people and be expected to have even a grain of salt worth of understanding about what the hell these people are talking about,” says Levick. “And then you have to make a decision based on something about which you know 0.001 per cent. There’s something wrong there.”

Levick will present Lundy’s latest appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which investigates whether there might have been a wrongful conviction, and can send the case back to the courts.

Surprisingly, given how the case has taken over his life, the prospect of perhaps never being able to prove Lundy’s innocence, or find the real killer, doesn’t frighten or faze Levick. “I’m pretty pragmatic. And we’re not at the end of the road yet.”

Levick admits it would be easier if there was an obvious alternative culprit to point to, like Robin Bain in David Bain’s case, or Malcolm Rewa in Teina Pora’s. He’s always felt there were strong alternative leads for police to follow, particularly concerning a business associate of Lundy, who was threatened by heavies over outstanding debts the day of the murders, called 111 regarding it, then rang both Christine and Mark Lundy subsequently. Police later accused the man (who currently has name suppression) of helping Lundy clean up the murder scene, and offered the possibility of immunity if he admitted involvement. He denied any role in the murders and was never charged.

“But we really have a lack of power to investigate,” laments Levick. “We don’t have authority, we don’t have resources, we don’t have anything. However, the CCRC does, and we just hope they choose to exercise it and perhaps look in another direction. Whether they’ll do that, or won’t, I’ve no idea.

“But when the day comes that Mark Lundy is given a fair go and there’s a proper interrogation and evaluation of the evidence against him, and he's found guilty, then I would say, ‘That’s it.’ But the fact is, he’s not had a fair go.”

Dave Jones wonders when he might be able to say, “That’s it,” about his brother-in-law’s case. Jones knew Lundy from their days in Scouts, and married Lundy’s sister, Caryl. While others in the family, including Lundy’s brother, Craig, have damned Lundy as guilty and abandoned him, Dave and Caryl Jones have always believed in him, never accepting he could have killed his wife and daughter, never imagining it would take this long to prove it. (Lundy’s father, Bill, also believed his son was innocent.)

“I must admit, sometimes I’ve woken in the middle of the might and I’ve laid there and I’m thinking, well, when’s this going to end?” says Jones. “When are they finally going to go, ‘Actually, we did make a mistake.’ Surely the truth’s got to come out, and the fact they got the wrong guy. Surely the penny will drop.” Jones is adamant police had it in for Lundy from day one – something one detective even told Lundy when arresting him.

“They fixated on Mark,” says Jones. “And it didn’t matter what other evidence they found, they didn’t want a bar of it. They decided Mark was the person they were going for, and they just made everything fit. If it pointed away from Mark, they didn’t want to know. “And I still can’t see where the justice is when they could present [at Lundy’s retrial] all this new theory. I don’t see where the legality of all that is.”

Lundy’s lawyer, Jonathan Eaton, QC, says this is just one reason why the case is among the most extraordinary New Zealand has ever seen. “I’m certainly not aware of any case where somebody’s been convicted on a certain basis, and then there’s been such a significant recasting of the case, requiring a jury to reject outright as utterly wrong the first basis of proven guilt, but then still be convicted on the alternate basis. That in itself is extraordinary.”

Eaton says police were under significant pressures to catch the killer, especially as it was such a violent crime. “And I think I’ve seen enough over the course of my career that once the police commit to a theory, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, deliberate or otherwise, then yes, there are lines of inquiry that are simply ignored or cast aside as being irrelevant because it doesn’t, and will not, fit your theory.”

Eaton says it’s rare for a case to remain so controversial after 20 years. “It tells you that Mark Lundy has never once resiled from the very strong position, which he advanced from day one, which is that his wife and daughter were slaughtered by somebody else, and he wasn’t responsible.”

The way the case has evolved, with the original police scenario being debunked and discarded, lent credibility to Lundy’s denials, Eaton says. “It went from, ‘We had a witness who saw you do it, and this is how you did it and when,’ to ‘Oh forget all that, here’s another theory.’ Now, that’s a pretty solid foundation for the public to say, ‘Well, I’m not surprised [Lundy] is screaming his innocence – look at the way the case has been prosecuted.’ ”

However, Eaton says, the two juries who convicted Lundy had been “prepared to excuse every other shortcoming in the case, every other deficiency, every other inconsistency in the Crown approach, because the prosecution could say, Mark Lundy had his wife’s brain on his shirt. And that trumped everything.”

On top of that was the ingrained image of Lundy, largely born from his actions at Christine and Amber’s funeral, Eaton says. “The fat guy putting on a performance. The fat guy who was with a hooker. The fat guy who nobody had any sympathy for.”

After five years taking Lundy’s case to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, Eaton admits he’s been worn out, constantly coming up against brick walls. “But defence lawyers have that sense of unfairness, and you end up fighting for that person because nobody else will. And in Mark’s case, it’s easier for a lawyer to remain committed because we know his first trial was a .

“We know that very late in the day the Crown had a complete about-face on its theory about what happened. We know that at retrial they went to great lengths to try and prove that this spot on Mark’s shirt was his wife’s brain matter – they only did that because they weren’t confident that the evidence they had could prove that. “And we know that the evidence they then got in for the second trial to prove it was his wife’s brain matter, should not have been there because it was flawed science. (Crucial MRNA testing done in the Netherlands was eventually ruled inadmissible, but only after the jury heard it, and Lundy had been reconvicted.)

“Every close examination of this case has shown significant shortcomings in the process, and yet he’s still behind bars. And so long as you see these shortcomings, as a lawyer, you say, ‘There’s something there.’ And it does strike as a remarkable coincidence that there have been so many shortcomings associated with his case, and it leaves that question lingering, ‘Could it be because he wasn’t the offender?’

“And that keeps the light at the end of the tunnel there, flickering away, and it’s very hard to turn your back on it.”

See also: Lundy murders 20 years on: Friend who propped up a sobbing Mark Lundy says funeral grief genuine Mark Lundy to have final appeal heard in Supreme Court Mark Lundy back behind bars, leaving family divided Lundy murder retrial - who's who https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/122579888/the-lundy-murders-20-years-on?rm=a