Lynne Maree Martin has been found guilty of murdering her father 10 years ago. Photo / S. Curtis, Gisborne Herald
Lynne Martin was mistaken when she commented to an undercover cop that “arson was the easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to prove”.
What she hadn’t reckoned on was “the patience and tenacity” of police determined to “take her to justice” for the death of her father Ronald Russell Allison, known as Russell Allison, 10 years ago, Crown prosecutor Steve Manning told a High Court jury this week.
That jury took about two hours on Wednesday to find Martin, 63, guilty of having burned her father alive by deliberately setting fire to his beloved Whatatutu farmhouse - the place he hoped to live out his life - in the early hours of January 25, 2013.
Martin was stony-faced, showing little emotion during the 12-day trial, but burst into tears and sobbed loudly when the verdict was read.
Justice Helen Cull remanded Martin in custody. A sentencing date is yet to be scheduled.
Martin’s father was largely immobile, his eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell were failing him, and he’d taken a sleeping pill as he did every night before going to bed.
His son, John Allison, was at his father’s house until just after midnight, having helped with the bedtime tasks as he did every night.
However, just before drifting off to sleep, Russell Allison had told him about a disturbing phone call from Martin earlier that day. John Allison’s last conversation with his dad had been about the need for them to step up security at the house.
Confronted later by the fire scene and the little that remained of his family home and his father’s life, John Allison immediately told police at the scene he suspected his sister was responsible.
An investigation led to cellphone polling data which put Martin in Te Karaka only hours before the fire. However, charges weren’t laid against her until last November after two police operations, including an undercover one that ran for three years.
Martin had revealed to a young undercover cop, “Millie”, that she knew how to start a delayed ignition fire using a pot of oil and that “arson was difficult to prove”.
Police tasked fire experts with carrying out a series of tests using pots of oil and cooking lard, which confirmed it was the same method used to start the blaze.
In a two-and-a-half-hour closing address to the jury on Tuesday, Manning said Martin was “flat broke” at the time, wanted to buy some property, and needed a $150,000 inheritance she knew her father had earmarked for her, notwithstanding her attempts to blackmail him in 2010 over unproven claims of historical sexual abuse by him.
On January 24, she phoned her father and was angered when he hung up on her after refusing to give her his boat.
“That phone call sadly seems to be all it took to set her off on a chain of events that led to her father’s death,” Manning said.
“This was a call that followed a pattern of trying to get money or possessions out of her father. On this occasion he said ‘no’ and her reaction? She ‘nutted off’.”
She drove to Te Karaka, downed a 1.25-litre bottle of cider, and burned his house down.
The “elephant in the room” at the end of the trial was the question of what Martin was doing in Te Karaka the evening of January 24 if it wasn’t her who started the fire, Manning said.
He took the jury carefully through each of the numerous strands of evidence the Crown said intertwined to form a strong rope in the case against Martin - telecommunications data, CCTV footage, witness testimony and covertly recorded conversations.
The telecommunications data was evidence enough in itself for the jury to safely convict Martin, Manning said.
It showed that after the phone call on January 24, Martin travelled from her house in Tauranga to Ōpōtiki.
Her phone was then out of service for the equivalent time it would have taken her to drive through the communications black spot in the Waioeka Gorge to the next cell tower, which was at Te Karaka and had a limited range of about 10 kilometres.
“It can’t be someone else using her phone as she took a call from her husband and sent a text to her counsellor [via that cell tower]”, Manning said. “She was there for a couple of hours - not fleetingly.”
The defence had not challenged telecommunications experts. “They weren’t asked if there could’ve been a mistake. The system was working as it should have been.”
Therefore, the jury could safely infer Martin was in Te Karaka that night, despite her continuous denials and lack of any other explanation.
Even if she went there for innocent reasons, she would have to have been an “extremely unlucky” person for it to have coincided with a night in which her father just happened to die in a fatal house fire, especially given she had lied about her whereabouts and had tried to construct an alibi for supposedly innocent reasons.
“Why would she need an alibi?” Manning asked.
Context was important. “This didn’t happen against a background of nothing.” There had been “disharmony” between Allison and his daughter for two to three years.
She knew Allison had earmarked $150,000 for her in his will and had deliberately tried to avoid suspicion by telling police her father had “cut her out of the will” because of her allegations against him.
It was just another of the lies, which evidence revealed Martin had told “on multiple occasions on a multitude of topics”, Manning said. He ruled out other “candidates” the defence would likely raise as potential other prime suspects. One of those was likely to be Martin’s brother, John, who she admitted “hating”.
However, John had given evidence during the trial and was clearly “a thoroughly decent hard-working man”, who loved his father and had nothing to gain from killing him, Manning said.
The defence had already suggested police were “tunnel-visioned” in their pursuit of Martin, Manning said, but “their vision in that tunnel was illuminated by Lynne’s own actions. They were following the evidence”.
Martin also had a propensity for resorting to arson as a solution to difficult relationship and financial problems. In 1999, she had been convicted in Australia for torching two of her then-partner’s vehicles.
In her closing address, counsel Rachael Adams said there was no direct evidence against Martin - no eye witness, no DNA, no fingerprints. No one saw her at the Whatatutu farmhouse at any time that night. There was no confession and no admissions by her.
The police operations targeting Martin had “come close to entrapment”.
Martin wasn’t broke in 2013 but was in a better financial position than she had ever been. Her husband supported her financially and was happy to do so. Police had simply failed to find that out.
The Crown’s rope analogy was flawed. If each of the strands of that evidential rope were unravelled and really proved nothing in themselves, then the rope collapsed, Adams said.
Her closing was designed to show the strands of that rope could be unravelled against Martin and plaited against other likely suspects - people police had failed to investigate with the same level of scrutiny they’d focused on Martin.
Martin lied about her whereabouts and tried to get an alibi for that night because she had been secretly drinking and she didn’t want her husband to know, Adams said.
She knew her husband didn’t like her drinking, that it made her argumentative and put stress on their relationship to the extent he had given her an ultimatum - the booze or him.
Adams took the jury through reasons why three other people could have been responsible for Allison’s death and said Allison himself could have been. He lived in the house alone - no one knew his overnight activities. He hadn’t eaten since his caregiver prepared his meal many hours earlier. He could have put the pot on the stove himself then inadvertently forgotten about it and gone back to bed.
- Gisborne Herald