Christine, Mark and Amber Lundy and their former home. Mark Lundy was convicted of murdering Christine and Amber, and now seeks parole. Composite image / NZ Herald
Steve Braunias signs off at the New Zealand Herald with a preview of a parole hearing for one of New Zealand’s most reviled convicted murderers
It just so happens that my last story for the New Zealand Herald on my last day of work before I wander towards the pale sunset of redundancy is on Mark Lundy, who I wrote about, at length, immediately after I first joined the paper in late 2014.
“What do you want to do for us,” asked my hiring editor, Shayne Currie. “Lundy,” I said.
Lundy, when the door opened; Lundy, when the door was slammed shut; strange to bookend 10 years at the paper with a story that remains delicately poised as something unfinished and unresolved.
Lundy will attend a parole hearing at midday today at Tongariro prison. He will say he is innocent. Admission of guilt is not a requirement for parole approval, and so there is every potential that Mark Edward Lundy – now a 66-year-old jailbird, back in 2000 a 41-year-old sink salesman charged with the bloody murder of his wife and daughter in their Palmerston North home – will be released.
I spoke with Dave Jones, married to Lundy’s sister Caryl; they will be there for him at the hearing, just as they have always stood by one of the most reviled convicted murderers in New Zealand history. “I’m a bit hopeful,” he said. And then: “But I’m also thinking they’ll find another excuse to keep him in.”
It marks Lundy’s third parole hearing. “Caryl thinks third time lucky.” I don’t recall luck ever playing any part in all the years I followed Lundy’s story, when I mooched around Wellington at his six-week retrial in 2015, returned for his week-long Court of Appeal hearing in 2017, and flew in and out for his two-day dismissal at the Supreme Court in 2019.
He never got a break, fortune never favoured him. He was found guilty at his first trial in 2002 and again in 2015, and the conviction was upheld by our wise law lords grimacing and sighing at defence appeals in 2017 and 2019.
He was made eligible for parole in 2022, having served his jail sentence of 20 years. His first parole hearing was a flop. His second parole hearing, in 2023, also failed.
Maybe this time. “Maybe,” said Dave Jones, making it sound like maybe not.
“Caryl’s quite optimistic they’ll let him go. I’m not so sure. I’ll be hoping to be proved wrong.”
The board will want to know about Lundy’s safety plan. Jones said, “People may recognise him and just be a bit stupid about it. If that happens, the safety plan is to walk away and perhaps go into a shop, and call Caryl or I, and we can go and get him as soon as possible, and for him not to do anything to inflame the situation.
It becomes a matter of Lundy removing himself.
“I know Mark. I know him very well. He’ll behave himself. Last time at parole they were concerned with the struggles he might have, reintegrating into society, and what sort of things could go amiss – financial troubles, personality clashes, people recognising him and saying something. But he’ll be keeping pretty much to himself.
“There are other issues they think are pertinent, like is he a danger to society, which of course we know he’s not. He’ll adhere to all the rules. He’s done all the rehabilitation, all the counselling ... We think the safety plan and release plan is OK. But you never know what the Parole Board wants.”
The media will attend via audio-visual link. Dave and Caryl Jones were going to do that, too, but Lundy asked them, “Can you come down, please?”
The hearing is scheduled for 12.30pm. “But it’ll be later, it always is at Corrections.” It’s set down for 45 minutes.
They will likely arrive at the prison at about 11.45am. A nice drive along the lakeside, turning inland at Motuoapa Bay (they do a good iced chocolate at Licorice Cafe) through swamp country to the prison.
“We see him when we can.” They speak on the phone once a week, sometimes twice. He has taken up carpentry in prison and makes pōhutukawa clocks. He’ll be eligible for the pension if he is paroled.
I asked, “How is Mark?”
“He’s good. He’s good.”
It was as though I were asking after an old friend.
“Give your daughter a hug for me when you see her,” Lundy said, when I left after visiting him one afternoon in the summer of 2015 before his retrial. My daughter was 7. He had asked for her age, and I told him without thinking.
He didn’t say anything for a while. We sat on the porch of a home in Kumeū. A native hawk circled the air and a plum tree was round with fruit. His daughter Amber was seven when she was murdered.
The back of Amber’s head was split open by a weapon that hit her three times in the hallway of the family’s home in Palmerston North on the night of August 30, 2000.
His wife Christine was obliterated in her bed. Palmerston North playwright Peter Hawes felt compelled to attend the first trial, and wrote: “He took away her face in 17 blows, in order to expunge her from the memory of his and the human race.”
I saw the crime scene photos. So did the jury. Lundy was shown them by Detective Inspector Steve Kelly, who said to him of one particular photo taken in the doorway, “Her brains went everywhere, up the wall, up the bed, across the dresser, up the curtain, every-bloody-where but right there and the reason they didn’t go there, Mark, is cos that’s where you were standing.”
A great deal of this sort of awful detail is included in my book The Scene of the Crime. Re-reading it now is a reminder of how much time and how much thinking I put into the Lundy case – the documents, the visits to see him in Kumeū, the trial, the appeals – and how flexibly I regarded his guilt or innocence.
Either were eminently possible.
Lundy claimed he was at a motel in Petone at the time of the killings; police claimed he drove home and murdered Christine and Amber with a weapon that has never been found. The case against him was, sometimes, very powerful.
His defence was, often, very plausible.
I never held a firm view one way or another. But the point has always been whether the evidence was strong enough to secure a safe conviction.
The one thing everyone remembers about the Lundy killings is the bizarre and very exciting police theory that he drove a 300km round trip between Petone and Palmerston North at an average speed of 120km/h to execute his wife and daughter at the time it was claimed they died.
The Privy Council later dismissed it as fiction. They ruled the conviction was unsafe, quashed it, and ordered a retrial.
Police revised the time of death, and no mention of that manic drive (the Lundy Five Hundy) ever resurfaced.
Philip Morgan led the Crown prosecution in 2015 and went at it with considerable force. David Hislop led the defence and shocked the hell out of everyone when he accused the first witness – Christine’s brother, Glenn Weggery – of being the murderer. Little about that trial was subtle.
The Crown produced a jailhouse snitch as a witness, a weird dwarf-like creature dredged out of some black lagoon.
The defence provided substantial grounds for reasonable doubt. It was a dismal sight to see Lundy led away, back to jail; I didn’t like him all that much, thought of him as self-centred that summer in Kumeū, but the verdict felt like a grave injustice.
If today’s parole board hearing orders his release, it will resolve the issue of his freedom. The issue of his guilt or innocence remains unfinished business.
It will eventually be tested by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which began investigating his case in 2020. I inquired about its progress last April.
It replied: “We can confirm that we are still investigating this case and we are not at the point of releasing a report soon. We are still seeking expert advice and will then collate and review the information. This is still expected to take several months.”
I asked, “How long is ‘several months’?”
It replied, “We cannot provide further information about this case due to it being an active investigation. I have added you to our list of media outlets so you will be notified of any updates from us.”
There have been no updates.
Meanwhile, as always these past 25 years, Geoff Levick continues to pore over the evidence at his Kumeū home in his long campaign to free Lundy. It was his brilliant investigation that led to the Privy Council quashing the original conviction. Like Joe Karam with David Bain, Levick had no connection with Lundy and no background in criminal justice; as a private citizen, he simply took an interest that became an obsession.
It was Levick who destroyed the Lundy Five Hundy theory. He also found serious flaws in a crucial piece of evidence – the stain on Lundy’s shirt that he wore on the night of the killings.
An obscure scientist in Texas testified that it was central nervous system tissue, ie Christine Lundy’s brain. “A man,” Crown prosecutor Philip Morgan informed the jury, “does not wear his wife’s brains on his shirt.” Great line, but possibly entirely baseless. Levick regards it as junk science.
He has collected his thoughts on the case in a manuscript. “This is why,” he writes of the evidence regarding the shirt stain, “Mark Lundy went to jail and has stayed there. The jury could not possibly know and understand that they were listening to GARBAGE as nobody made any attempt to explain all of the faults to them.” That passage is typed in bold.
The screaming caps, the bold font. I have conformed to journalism notions of quiet, sober prose in my various writings on Lundy but there are times when I prefer Levick’s angry and emphatic approach. Strange to think of the two of us writing in a kind of tandem these past 10 years on the curious case of Mark Edward Lundy.
Dave and Caryl Jones will be pulling into the carpark of Tongariro prison later this morning. One day they might drive home with a passenger in the back.
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