Prison wedding shocks partner

By MONIQUE DEVEREUX, South Island correspondent

Until last month, Graham Cunningham thought his relationship with Coral Branch was going smoothly.

The couple had a short break last year but he said they got back together at Christmas and were engaged.

They lived together, with her children, for much of their four-year relationship, and postal records show they shared two Rotorua addresses.

Although not his biological children, Coral's children called him Dad in the numerous Father's Day cards he has kept from the past few years.

But this week he discovered that his former fiancee had promised to love someone else - and sealed it with a wedding.

Coral Branch's marriage to convicted double-murderer Scott Watson "shocked me so much, I'm really gutted", Mr Cunningham said.

The worst part, he said yesterday, was learning that she and Watson had also been a couple for four years and that Watson's parents believed she had been "faithful" to their son all that time.

The forestry worker was aware of his fiancee's friendship with the convicted killer and even drove her to Auckland to visit him. Coral told him she and Watson had been friends before his incarceration.

Last month, Mr Cunningham started to wonder if there might have been more to it.

"She was sort of giving me a bit of a cold shoulder so I said to her, 'Is there anything going on between you and Scott?'

"All she could say to me was they were only friends and that's all they could ever be. What a lie that was."

The couple had not lived together this year but Mr Cunningham said he still stayed regularly.

"I'd been staying about three nights a week because she's on the benefit and I didn't want to take full responsibility for the kids straight away."

He said he ended the relationship on May 16. He picked up a car she had borrowed and returned the silver necklace she had bought him.

"I just said I needed more from my relationship than what I was getting."

His claims were denied yesterday by the new Mrs Watson.

She said she and Mr Cunningham were never engaged and that their relationship ended "years ago". She believed he was angry because he had been unsuccessfully trying to resurrect the relationship.

Mr Cunningham said: "Of course she'd say that. But all our friends and family know the truth."

He has kept a letter Coral wrote to him just days after they separated, dated May 24, which says, "I never wanted this to end."

On May 28 she married Watson in the chapel at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo, north of Auckland.

Watson, who turns 33 this month, is serving at least 17 years for killing Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, who vanished in the Marlborough Sounds on New Year's Day 1998. He will not be eligible to leave prison before 2016.

When news of the wedding broke in the Herald this week, Mr Cunningham called her for an explanation.

"I gave her the opportunity to be honest with me and she wasn't willing to do that."

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