Double murderer Mark Lundy’s release: How will he adjust to life outside prison?

• Mark Lundy, convicted twice for murdering his wife and daughter, will be released next month on parole.
• Lundy, 66, has spent more than 23 years in prison and maintains his innocence.
• Friend Dave Jones has spoken about what he believes life will be like for Lundy on the outside.

Convicted double murderer Mark Lundy will be nervous about going out in public until he becomes another “faceless” stranger in the street, a friend says.

Lundy, who was convicted twice for the murder of his wife Christine and his 7-year-old daughter Amber, will be re-integrating into a post-Covid society and totally new world next month, after the Parole Board yesterday granted his release from prison.

He has spent more than 23 years behind bars for the killing of Christine and Amber, who were found bludgeoned to death in their Palmerston North home 25 years ago with what is believed to have been an axe or tomahawk.

Lundy, 66, has always denied carrying out the killings and continues to fight to prove his innocence decades on from the deaths.

The Lundy family, Christine (back), Mark and Amber. Photo / Supplied

He took his fight against the first conviction to the Privy Council, which quashed the guilty verdict in 2013, only for him to be found guilty again in 2015 on retrial and sent back to prison.

Friend and brother-in-law Dave Jones said it had now been 10 years since Lundy was last out of prison on bail while he awaited his retrial, and the world had changed dramatically.

“Things have changed, the world’s changed, we’ve had Covid,” he told the Herald.

“Now he’s got to come out into society ... he will experience a lot of these things for himself. It will just take time for him to adjust.

“He’s a little bit nervous, as you would expect. It’s just re-integrating back into the community. Until he becomes that faceless person walking down the street, when people walking down the street don’t recognise him – that was what was difficult during the bail period too.”

Jones said Lundy was “always nervous” and took a long time to build the courage to go out in public alone.

“He will fit in fine, it’s just going to take a bit of time.”

A grieving Mark Lundy during the funeral of his wife and daughter in 2000. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Another big change would be moving from a prison setting where he was surrounded by many other people all the time, to living nearly alone. Jones expected this would be the biggest change.

“We spoke to him yesterday afternoon. We had time with him after the hearing and then he contacted us about an hour or so later after we got home. It probably hasn’t really sunk in yet.”

Lundy is now past retirement age and as far as Jones was aware, did not have any plans to re-enter the workforce. Any job he might want to get would then have to be approved by his parole officer.

If he were to work, it’s unlikely he would take a public-facing role, Jones said.

“He’s not going to be working at Bunnings or Mitre 10 – even though he would be very good at that, he would be excellent at that sort of thing,” Jones said, noting Lundy’s background in carpentry.

Regardless, Jones wanted to reassure people they did not have to worry about Lundy being out of prison.

“He’s not a risk to anyone,” he said.

“When he was out on bail, I would say 99.9% of the people he came in contact with who actually spoke to him ... went, ‘Oh, he’s a nice guy’. I said, ‘Well of course he is, because he didn’t do what he was convicted of’.”

Mark Lundy in the dock during his retrial in the High Court at Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Lundy’s parole decision was announced yesterday after the hearing. It was his third appearance before the New Zealand Parole Board since being re-convicted.

Christine’s sister-in-law, Maria Norrelle, yesterday told NZME she felt “resigned” about Lundy’s pending release.

“It’s been a long time, he had to come out at some point,” she said.

“He’s coming out into a world that has changed considerably … it’s not much of a future for him.”

Lundy was first convicted in 2002, even though the murder weapon has never been found.

At his first trial, the Crown argued he travelled from Wellington, where he was on a business trip, back to Palmerston North to commit the murder and then travelled back to the capital, where his alibi was being with a sex worker at the time.

An appeal to the Privy Council in 2013 based on the time of the victims’ deaths, the presence of organic tissue on Lundy’s shirt and the time Christine’s computer was turned off resulted in his convictions being overturned.

In his 2015 retrial, the window of the time of death was expanded to 14 hours, with the Crown instead alleging Lundy had returned home in the early hours of the morning to kill his family.

Amber Lundy was 7 when she was murdered.

Lundy was found guilty a second time after this trial and has remained behind bars since, with bids in 2017 to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court failing.

Previous parole bids have been rejected, hampered by Lundy’s denial of guilt, but at the latest hearing lawyer Ella Burton argued this should not bar him from early release.

She noted Lundy had been assessed by a psychologist as having a low risk of reoffending, and factors like denial of guilt were built into the way they came up with that finding.

“He is very ready to go and the evidence supports this … even in the circumstance of the denial.”

One of Lundy’s conditions upon release will be that he can’t initiate contact with the media or give interviews, and he’s forbidden to use social media, including dating sites, and pornography.

Among Lundy’s other release conditions are restrictions about where in the country he can go; specifically, he’s not to enter Manawatū – this would prevent him from visiting his family’s grave.

Lundy will also be subject to a curfew and is not to have any contact with the registered victims, who are mostly Christine’s surviving family members.

Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.