The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation is the third book in Steve Braunias' trilogy of true-crime narratives and, he says, his last. Photo / Hayden Woodward
Steve Braunias is an award-winning New Zealand journalist, author, columnist and editor.
OPINION
The other day I took the train from Britomart to Panmure to interview a man convicted of murder. It was the second time he’d been jailed for killing someone: when he was 20, he killed a man in a fight, and was found guilty of manslaughter. Throughout the interview I wrestled with the issue of whether or not I hated him.
Journalists observe, that’s all; I like it like that, staying as still as a lizard and just watching, listening, not really feeling anything other than fascination at the things people do to each other. My latest book The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation is a fascinated gape at bad things happening – the murder of a police officer, the murder of someone desperate for love, the murders of two babies. It’s the third book in my trilogy of true-crime narratives. Third, as in final book; as I write in the introduction, “I don’t think I can take it anymore”.
This is the last time I put together a collection of crime stories in book form, and part of why I want out is that sometime last year I began to feel just how disconnected my life was from the people I was writing about. Not a crim. Not a fighter. Not a tough guy. It shouldn’t make any difference – I don’t think they choose judges or criminal lawyers on their fight record – but it got to the point where I felt totally alienated from the people I was studying closely in court. It sometimes also got to the point where I began to hate them.
I wondered whether I was back in that unpleasant territory when I interviewed the man convicted of murder. The reason I interviewed him, though, was for another story entirely. He didn’t want the events of his younger life to overshadow the other story. I thought that was fair enough so I made only a brief mention of it when I wrote the article. But we actually spoke at some length about his involvement in the killing of two people – a teenage girl, a young guy – and for what he had done.
I loved his house. It was a classic Auckland two-storey brick home built above a garage, with iron railings and a concrete porch – I once owned a house like that, and just like the convicted murderer, I was only the second owner. His house was built by a returned serviceman after the war. It had fantastic rimu panelling inside, and a small, ornate fireplace. We sat in the living room. There was a sexy painting of a dusky maiden on the wall. He was in his 70s and seemed in good shape; I tried to imagine him in his youth. It wasn’t that hard to picture him as a crim, a fighter, a tough guy.
He talked about growing up in Panmure, that suburb built above the magnificent volcanic basin that fills and empties on the tide from the Tamaki River. It’s a working-class area that grew from a small village to a commercial centre with the 1950s housing boom.
“So I was a guy,” said the convicted murderer, “that got brought up in a post-war environment and a home that was apparently fairly normal, but internally there were a fair amount of difficulties. It took my father a long time to get through the war. And as a young kid, I struggled with the house because I know my parents would start arguing and then eventually my mother would be hit and then she’d be talking about leaving, until one day, I was probably a 6- or 7-year-old, I said to him, ‘That’s it. You’re not going to do that anymore.’ And it shows that he was a reasonable person inside because he left Mum alone from there on.
“The problem was that I closed off. So maybe that was part of, you know, why I went astray, obviously. People said I had a lot of promise in various things. But I thought I had to be aggressive to, you know, to hold my position in life and things like that.”
I asked him, “Did you become a tough guy?”
“Yeah, yeah, I suppose I did eventually,” he said. “And it got away on me. I wasn’t a crook in terms of living off crime but I was street fighter for sure. I went to jail for the first time as a result of a street fight.”
I asked him, “And what was the consequence of that street fight?”
“A seven-year sentence.”
“Was somebody killed?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you strike them?”
“Yeah. And then I went into the prison system and I don’t think it helped me. I had already become a loner years before that and prison didn’t make that any better. I just thought, ‘Well, I’ve got to fight my way through here.’ And I came out and I was knocking around with guys that I’d known inside, and I already had a sort of reputation in Auckland.”
I asked him, “What do you mean, a reputation?”
He said, “I was known as somebody that was dangerous.”
One of his passions these days is curating a Facebook history page for Panmure and its neighbouring suburbs, Glen Innes and Ellerslie, which form a kind of triangle on the eastern slopes of the isthmus. It’s a fun page with a strong sense of community. A recent photo of Avon’s, a fantastic butcher shop in Glen Innes, drew this remark: “These guys sponsored our Mt Wellington RL 3rd Grade back in the mid to late 70s. Player of the year got $500. That was a lot of money back then. Our then-coach Bill Abraham Sr had his business above Avon’s.”
This nice little memoir - $500! A fortune back then! – was set at the exact time my host in the brick house was given a life sentence for murder. A girl was shot outside a nightclub. He denies he fired the shot and the jury agreed, but found him guilty as a participant.
He said, “One of us was having a bit of a dust-up with the bouncer. So how we get from there to shooting a 17-year-old girl, you know, I’m absolutely not on that bus. I never was. That just wasn’t me in terms of who I was even then, which was very hard for Barry to make sense of”.
He meant his famous or infamous defence lawyer Barry Hart. “I was trying to say to him, ‘Barry, I’m the guy that comes at you with fists, maybe a weapon, but I’m the guy that erupts, you know, not the guy that might be sneaking around in the dark with a gun,’
“And he said, ‘You don’t get it. You guys are going out and you’re having punch-ups all over the place, and the jury aren’t going to like that.’”
But all we were talking about was his involvement, his actions, his apparent innocence. I kept thinking about the girl who was shot. I said her name out loud, and said, “What does that make you think?”
He said that all he wanted to say about her was that he later discovered that they might have been related. That was a weird, awful twist, but it wasn’t really getting at what had happened to her and how he felt about it, and I said, as a kind of prompt, “But obviously, you know, poor girl. 17. Jesus.”
He said, “Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And the stupidity of it all, you know, that it had to happen and, well, it didn’t have to happen. I regret being involved because I never thought for a minute that would happen.”
It happened. She worked as a waitress and was waiting for a taxi at 3:30am. She was shot in the head.
He turned his life around in jail. He was attacked from behind, and suffered a serious head injury; the theme, or pattern, of his life had been violence, and he was sick of it. He had enough of being a tough guy. He devoted his time to helping prisoners with their appeals, and continues to do that, long after his release. Criminal defence lawyer Nick Chisnall has admiringly described him, “A white knight.”
We talked a little bit about Panmure as I was leaving at the front door. I told him I sometimes caught the train there for the sole purpose of buying pastries and pretzels from an amazing bakery. I couldn’t remember its name. “German woman runs it,” I said.
He said, “I know the one you mean. Sylvia’s.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I said, and shook his hand. We said goodbye. I hated him, fleetingly, but he had been fascinating company. I just wouldn’t want to put him in a book.
The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
Londoner Jennifer Abbott was known professionally as Sarah Steinberg.