Tony Williams (left) was in the band Sex and Chocolate with Paul Thompson (centre) and Kevin Keepa.
The killing of big Maori surfer dude Tony Williams on the Gold Coast at Christmas three years ago barely makes sense.
Brisbane was preparing this week for the joys of Christmas: a downtown pub grandly advertised St Stephen's Day, December 26, when it would open at the festive time of 10am. The talk at the cafes and bars all along George St in the city (steak and schooner specials for $16, COLD BEER! HOT CHICKS! at Grosvenors topless bar) was still of last week's storm, when large hailstones fell out of the sky with such force that they pulverised cars, tore roofs off houses and closed the airport " it wasn't safe to fly with Brisbane under attack from meteors of ice.
The sunshine state was back to its usual state of tropical melt on Wednesday, with its moaning crows and squealing ibises in the fructifying heat, and a faint breeze chasing away papery scraps of leaves from the plane trees. A cormorant came out of the Brisbane River and stretched its wings to dry. It didn't take long.
At lunchtime, about 20 Maori from around Matapihi in the Bay of Plenty left the Queensland Supreme Court on George St and waited outside in the shade.
The jury in a murder trial had been sent out at 12.30pm to consider their verdict. The earliest they were expected back was sometime the next day, more likely Friday, maybe even Monday " they had sat though 10 days of evidence and arguments, heard a lot of covert recordings, examined the blood splatter in a lot of photos. A jealous rage, said the prosecution.
"We looked at the jealousy angle straight away," said Brisbane Detective Sergeant Steve McBryde, who attended the crime scene on Christmas Eve, 2011, "because of the brutality of what happened."
McBryde was officer in charge of the investigation. I spoke with him on Wednesday morning in the court. He was in an office across from courtroom 11 on the fifth floor, where the accused, Matthew Cox, sat directly in front of the Maori family whose lives he had completely shattered.
Cox, 27, looked afraid. He wore a black suit, and had large dark eyes set in a pleasant, rather gormless face. "He's very articulate," said McBryde. "From a nice family. Normal people. No problems. His mum and dad have come to court every day." The judge reminded the jury, "No one person can look inside another person's head."
The killing of big Maori surfer dude Tony Williams on the Gold Coast at Christmas three years ago barely makes sense. Cox, in the army until he busted his knee, had never met him until he murdered him. He knew about Williams, as the ex-lover of his new girlfriend, Sarah Davies; they'd got together in September, and about a month later she told him Williams was the father of her young son Taj. She also claimed Williams had raped her. She said in court, "He [Cox] was devastated and disgusted."
It takes time for an obsession to feed on the brain, to take over. But Cox was quick to form a bond with Taj ("They were really close," said Davies), and fast, too, to spring into deranged action. He lived with Davies in Port Macquarie, in New South Wales. He drove about six hours to Broadbeach, on the Gold Coast, where Williams lived, and got his address by calling from a phone box and saying he worked for Australia Post. Then he got in touch with army buddy Joshua Middleton, and asked him to help case the Mermaid Waters apartment building where Williams lived. As Middleton put it, "Do a reccy. Get a feel for the area."
Tony Williams' mother, Kiriwaitai Williams, and his son Harlem Williams were among family at the murder trial.
Cox mused to Middleton, "Should I bash him? Should I put him in a wheelchair?"
Middleton: "Do you have to do something so drastic?"
Cox: "Yeah. Something's got to happen."
Middleton, in court: "He talked about that he might use a hammer."
On Tuesday night this week, I visited Tony Williams' best friend, Maori entertainer Paul Thompson, 44, at his home in the Brisbane suburb of Sunnybank. There was red bougainvillea in the front yard, and a screen door at the top of the stairs. A dog howled, and Paul advised against walking back to the local shops at night: "There was a shooting that way, another guy got shot over there ... "
It was a happy household. Paul and his wife Anita sat at the kitchen table and reminisced about Tony, and let their three children stay up in the lounge until the two girls fell asleep on couches, and their son dozed off on the floor. She had made them mashed potato for dinner.
Paul said he came to the Gold Coast from Porirua, in Wellington, in 1995. He met Tony a year later.
"He was a cheeky Maori boy with a little glint in his eye," he said. "I called him Bones, but he was tall, well-built. He had a glow about him. He was quite shy. He talked in a mumble sometimes because of his shyness. But when he talked, it was almost as if he was determined to get to know who you really are, and connect with you. That was Bones all over.
"He had nothing to hide. He'd look you in the face when he talked to you. That's what I loved about Bones. Very much. If there's a word for better than best friends ... We were more than brothers.
"I'd ring him, and say, 'Bro, come over! I've got food.' Whenever he wanted to get away, or I wanted to get away, we'd be over at each other's house. We knew what we both wanted, and that was peace. A peace that we didn't get anywhere else. Just knowing that he was there, my right-hand man ... ". He wept, and then he said, "I'm all right."
He talked about Tony's love of surfing, of his board painted in Rasta colours with a koru pattern. "Surfing with his boys from Matapihi and Arataki. That's what he loved. He was proud of where he came from. Proud of his whanau. He stayed true to his nature. Tauranga boy. He was wearing shorts and a singlet as when I first met him to the last.
"He loved the lifestyle here. Surf. Bikinis! I came over strictly for the music." Paul formed a band, which really was called Chur Bro, and Tony became the soundman. He formed another group with Tony on vocals ("Bones had such a beautiful high falsetto"), and Kevin Keepa - three suave, funky Maori guys who really did call their new band Sex and Chocolate.
They developed new moves, took on a new attitude, inspired by a movie based on the Temptations. "The band was started in March 1998, and the movie came out in August," Paul said.
"That's when we started getting serious. It just connected to us. I got Tony over and we watched it every day for like a month. Every detail. We even learned word for word all the lines in the whole movie from start to finish. The dress, the hairstyle. Their mannerisms. "
It worked, and Sex and Chocolate became a smash live attraction on the Gold Coast. "Things just took off," he said. "It was amazing how fast it grew. We had people packing out our gigs, daily, constantly."
But it slowed down, eventually, and the band became part-time. Tony found work as an orderly at the Gold Coast hospital. By 2011, he had two small children - Harlem, a son with Jade Louise Harawira from reality TV show The GC, and Lyric, a daughter with Shardai Kerr.
She was asked in court, "Did he take part in Lyric's life?"
She replied, "Every single day."
He'd got a room made up for the kids in his apartment.
"They were his heart," said Paul.
He closed his eyes. "I'm all right," he said.
THE JURY made short work of it. Given they would have taken a break for lunch, it took them less than two hours on Wednesday to return to courtroom 11 at 4pm. They reached a verdict of guilty. Cox's sentence was immediate: life imprisonment.
Williams was killed in his apartment on Sunshine Boulevard at around midday on December 23, 2011. Davies heard the news on Christmas Day. She was asked in court, "Were you affected by Tony's death?"
She said, "I was devastated."
"Did Matthew Cox say anything about that?"
She said, "After about a month it was frustrating him."
"What did he say?"
She said, "Basically it was like, get over it."
It took police three months to make an arrest. Cox was careful; he hadn't left any DNA, and got Middleton to dispose of the murder weapon - a claw hammer. But he did leave something behind. It remains a mystery how it ever got there. It was a receipt for three dresses Davies' previous boyfriend had bought for her. She said in court, "I'd planned on breaking up with him that day that I got the dresses, but I didn't have the heart to."
Police tracked the receipt - a "foreign object", as detective McBryde termed it - to her address. "That put us in the right direction," he said. Police next established that Cox was in the Gold Coast on the day of the murder. They were issued warrants to bug his phone, and listened in as Cox admitted to Davies' brother that he killed Williams - in self-defence, he claimed.
He was arrested on March 21, 2012. Middleton, his friend from the army, admitted his involvement later that day. The two men had fantasised about working as mercenaries, in Thailand, where they would shut down illegal brothels and liberate girls forced to work as sex slaves. Heroes, men following a moral code, etc. In dismal reality, Cox gave Middleton his bloodstained clothes, Williams' brown wallet, and the hammer, and Middleton burned them with diesel in an army ration tin. He pleaded guilty to accessory to murder. He was given a light sentence of six months' jail in return for helping the prosecution case against Cox.
Tony Williams loved the surfing lifestyle on the Gold Coast.
Cox never told police what happened. McBryde doesn't know whether Cox took his own hammer to Williams' place, and lay in wait, or if he knocked on the door, and used a hammer belonging to Williams.
Davies said in court, "He told me that Tony opened the door to him, and they shook hands, and then Matthew headbutted him. Tony threw a hammer at him and it missed. Tony had a screwdriver, and they ended up on the floor. Matthew was on his back, and he had Tony on top of him, and was fighting for his own life to stop the screwdriver stabbing him, and he remembered where the hammer was and reached for it, and swung up once, maybe twice."
Prosecutors said pretty much everything Cox had said was a lie. Williams was struck on the head and neck 27 times. There were a further 30 blows to the body.
Davies was asked in court, "How did he know that Tony had died?"
She said, "Because he put a hammer through his skull."
Paul went to the apartment that night. He was furious; Tony had missed their gig at a club. "It was the first time that'd ever happened. So I went over and looked in the window. Pressed my nose against it. Couldn't see anything. I said, 'Bones! Wake up! You in there?' I went to the front door. It was unlocked. All I had to do was turn the front door knob. I actually had my hand on the handle. I could have gone in ... "
The body was found the next day by Kevin Keepa from Sex And Chocolate. A neighbour saw him approach the apartment. They were asked in court, "What did he look like?"
"A New Zealand type of guy."
"Do you mean Maori?"
"Like Maori, yeah."
Keepa started screaming to his wife, "Don't come in! Don't come in!" Emergency services were called, and then he phoned Paul. "He was just screaming," he said. "He couldn't talk properly. You couldn't understand what he was saying. I was saying, 'What are you saying? Did someone hurt Tony?'"
Rigor mortis had set in. There was blood, and vomit. A tap was running. Tony's guitars were still on their stands, but a Christmas tree had fallen over. There was a bubble-blowing toy on the floor, bought that day when he went with Kerr and their daughter to K-Mart. He'd also got bread and onions, probably to make stuffing for Christmas Day. It had been a bad morning - he and Kerr had argued when she dropped him home, and neighbours saw him jump on the car when it reversed down the driveway.
Keepa told the court he knelt beside Tony, and prayed for him. He was deeply traumatised. He left the band afterwards.
Paul said, "I wish it'd been me who found Tony. I wish I'd just turned the handle and opened the door. But at the same time I'm thankful that it wasn't me. Because I don't know what kind of person I would be right now."
What sort of person was he right now? "Heartbroken," said Anita.
"But Tony's death gave us a determination to keep the band going," said Paul. He credits Anita for giving him the strength to bring in new musicians, and rename the band Sex and Chocolate 2.0. The band has taken off, winning entertainment awards, and packing out clubs on the Gold Coast.
No, he said, he hadn't actually dreamed about Tony. "Probably because I think about him every day when I'm awake. Tony's always there."
Death of a bro, of a Maori guy on the Gold Coast - I asked detective McBryde what he thought it was all about, and he said, "It's just a sad, tragic tale. It's wrecked families. Tony's family, Cox's family. And Sarah's, too. One day her son will have to be told that his biological father was killed by his mother's boyfriend at the time."
And that his mother didn't go to police. Why wasn't she charged? "That's what Tony's family asked," he said.
"It's a good question," I said.
"It is a good question. She did lie to the police. She did not disclose what Cox told her. But she only found out after Tony had been killed. She wasn't involved in the planning."
I asked Paul what he thought the story meant. He talked about Bones, about Tony.
He said, "He loved what he was doing. He came here for the good life. He wanted that dream. This is the place to do it. The Gold coast. Dreams - they can happen here."
The participant's death was unrelated to the pilot, according to Oranga Tamariki.