In Shane Christie’s final year, each day felt darker than the one before: his perception clouded by concussion symptoms that never let up and his belief he had developed the brain-destroying disease CTE from head-knocks during his rugby career. David Fisher reports.
Warning: This article contains distressing content
Four days before Christie is believed to have taken his own life, he shot and buried his dog, Rajah. As he buried Rajah, he said on video: “In a year or so, I can dig his bones up and they will be clean. His body will have decomposed and we’ll see where we’re at.”
At home in Nelson where Christie’s body was found last Wednesday morning, were neatly-ordered stacks of papers about his dead friend Billy Guyton, the first professional rugby player to be diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease CTE, linked to repeated head knocks.
Some of those papers were for a meeting on September 15 with members of the Guyton family and the coroner, who would hear Billy Guyton’s inquest.
Like Christie, the immediate cause of Billy Guyton’s death was suspected suicide - but there will be questions about how much of a killing hand chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) played.
Right up to the week Christie died, he had plans. He had a future of which he spoke often, places to be and people to meet.
For the Guyton family, the death of Christie on Wednesday 27 August was like losing Billy all over again. Billy Guyton’s death at 33 two years ago had brought Christie deep into the family fold.
John Guyton said it’s hard to understand how the world is seen by people afflicted with the disease he blames for killing his son.
“I thought Shane was going to hang around with us but we don’t live life in their minds.”
He was talking about the minds of those damaged by rugby, like his son and like Christie. Players who find their memories fading, and paranoia and confusion setting in. Players who show signs of aggression, depression, impulsivity and irritability - with thoughts returning again and again to suicide.
They are the players who will never know if they have the disease that may eventually kill them because CTE can only be diagnosed after death.
Christie believed he, too, carried the disease found in Billy Guyton’s brain. He announced his retirement from professional rugby in 2018, already plagued by confusion, fatigue, memory loss and head pain.
Years later, still tormented by symptoms, he wrote: “As I now understand the effects that concussion had on Billy’s brain and witnessing the drastic changes in his life, I can only assume that I’ve developed CTE myself. This realisation has been a confronting one, but it has also given me a new perspective on my own experiences and struggles.”
A year ago, symptoms of CTE weren’t strikingly obvious in Christie.
He was fiercely smart, and larger than life. Tori Guyton, Billy’s sister, talks of “mana grab” in which he would say hello by seizing your hand, looking into your eyes and powering that smile into you in such a way you were uplifted.
The week he died, those who knew him were seriously worried about the changes they were witnessing. His friends were contacting each other, and increasingly finding they held the same fears.
On the morning Christie died, an urgently-organised meeting was to be held at the NZ Rugby Players’ Association to find a way to help him, even though he did not want help.
The morning of that meeting, Christie’s body was found.
A year is a long time in brain injury
Ayear before Christie died, the casually-dressed former rugby star was looking perfectly out of place in the back rows of a medical seminar in Auckland.
Comfortable in a hoodie and cap, Christie looked more like he was heading out for a run than rubbing shoulders with neuroscientists and doctoral researchers working their way through the scientific details of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
He wasn’t the only one looking like he didn’t quite belong. With him was John Guyton whose dead son Billy’s brain had been analysed by the same experts in the room, discovering the retired rugby player had the degenerative brain disease.
Next to Christie was Gregg “Pup” Johnson, a former NZSAS soldier who has pledged his brain for research, to help find out whether a military career’s worth of head knocks can lead to the same - or similar - condition.
The three men from the provinces had travelled from the South Island to be there. For Guyton, because CTE had killed his son. For Christie and Johnson, to create greater awareness of CTE - and to help understand their own brains.
This was August 29 2024 at the University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research. It stretches across the top floor of the medical school’s Grafton Campus and shares space with the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.
That’s where Billy Guyton’s brain is kept - and where Christie’s brain will now be going for examination.
Through security-controlled doors, the three men had joined a gathering listening to Samantha Bureau of international research consortium, the Concussion Legacy Foundation.
She is an expert in neurodegenerative diseases and particularly CTE.
That day, she ran through the almost century-long research history of a disease that was discovered through “punch drunk” boxers in 1928 and is now fast enveloping the world of contact sport.
CTE, she explained, was a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts. Those head hits don’t have to be concussive, Bureau said. Lower grade hits still create abnormal deposits of tau protein in the brain.
Tau usually helps keep the brain functioning and stable, but after a lifetime of head knocks, it can change shape and cluster around small blood vessels, damaging brain cells.
The frontal lobe is where this starts to happen: the home of our high-order thinking. The centre for judgment, impulse control, mood and planning.
When abnormal tau protein clusters and starts causing damage, early signs of the disease include aggression, depression, impulsivity, personality changes and poor decision-making.
The progress of CTE is marked by cognitive decline into confusion and a struggle with routine tasks.
Towards the end, it resembles dementia - severe memory loss and trouble with movement and speech.
Also in the crowd that day a year ago was Irene Gotlieb-Old, wife of former All Black Geoff Old. While John Guyton was thinking about the early-stage symptoms he saw in his son, she was thinking about the man she lived with and how hard it had become.
Old had experienced years of decline, isolating his wife yet helpless without her, seemingly oblivious to her and the impact his increasingly erratic behaviour had on her and others.
She loved meeting the younger players, seeing that spark that had drawn her to the man she loved before brain injury crushed in on both their lives.
After meeting Christie, Gotlieb-Old spoke to him about three or four times a week. She was one of the people who later told the Herald how dramatically he changed across his final year of life.
Bureau told the gathering how the last decade of work had built what she considered unassailable scientific arguments about the connection between head injuries and sport. She name-checked the Boston University brain bank study that identified CTE in 110 of 111 brains donated by former NFL players.
“If you think about smoking and lung cancer, we’re fighting a very similar battle where they had big tobacco to go against,” she said.
As Bureau addressed the group, Big Sport was meanwhile involved in legal fights about head knocks right across the globe.
In 2013, the United States’ National Football League settled a head injury case involving CTE. The case, brought by about 4500 players, settled for US$1bn but included no admission of liability.
The National Hockey League and Canadian Hockey League have also negotiated similar settlements, also with no admissions of liability.
The biggest rugby case remains unresolved. It was lodged in the United Kingdom against World Rugby in December 2020.
About 1200 players alleged the global body failed to protect them from the consequences of head injuries. They claimed there was poor monitoring, a lack of proper protocols and inadequate warnings about risks.
Exploring CTE and its links to contact sport is not about stopping sport, Bureau told the crowd. Rather, she said, it’s about finding the place where reward and risk are balanced, and where everyone knows the price being paid.
Christie and being an agent of change
“Football is like smoking. The younger I start, the longer I’m exposed to danger,” Bureau says.
She recommends we stop full tackle rugby for children, introduce tools to better monitor impacts and develop better stand-down periods.
For Christie, this all made so much sense. He wanted to be an agent of change - that’s why he had come.
He had the Billy Guyton Foundation to launch - a memorial to his dead friend, and CTE advocacy hub he wanted to operate out of a retail space in Nelson.
He had plans to get across to Wellington and lobby in the unfamiliar space of Parliament for better health care for sport-related head injuries.
He wanted the NZ Rugby Players’ Association to be more aggressive and assertive towards NZ Rugby in arguing for better treatment facilities.
Christie wanted NZ Rugby to step away from its current position that “a causal link between CTE-NC and clinically diagnosed neurodegenerative diseases is not currently well-established”.
It’s a statement that lines up with other major sporting bodies - and not with many independent medical agencies that instead directly call a causative connection - that repeated head knocks will cause CTE.
And Christie argued NZ Rugby had to acknowledge a duty of care, not just to current players receiving improved messaging about head knocks, but to those whose careers were behind them, and who may be carrying the damage to early graves.
Christie also felt frustrated there was information he felt NZ Rugby should make public yet he wasn’t being allowed to share it.
When Christie announced his retirement from the professional game in 2018, part of the exit package was a promised review into the management of his concussions over his career.
The review was paid for by NZ Rugby, carried out by jurist Jeremy Doogue, and detailed the impacts from his earliest recorded concussion in 2006 through to the intense period of head injuries starting in mid-2016 that led to his retirement two years later.
The review was intended to be confidential so as to protect the identities of medical staff.
Four months earlier, Christie had been told in a letter from NZ Rugby’s chief executive Mark Robinson that he would not be allowed to make public any recommended improvements to the future management of head injuries among players.
These proposed changes, Christie felt, would make a positive difference and therefore should be public. He also wanted progress to be tracked.
“It shows they don’t want to be exposed for not living up to their slogan of having the best interests of players and their wellbeing at heart” he told the Herald.
“If they were confident, they would have released the recommendations straight away.”
This was Christie one year ago. Clear-eyed in his vision - it was all about head injuries and their links to CTE. In the wake of his death, NZ Rugby is now saying it will find a way to make those recommendations public.
“There’s so much trust in people, trust in institutions,” Christie said of rugby, and the faith it engendered in the playing community.
“It’s not about trust – it’s making sure the system is efficient and operating properly. It should be based on outcomes. I would say there are thousands of people suffering with head injuries and nothing being done.”
Understanding Billy Guyton
In the months that followed, Christie’s focus didn’t deviate but his frustration grew.
There were meetings organised with politicians, trips to see his local MP, letters written to seek support. But nothing appeared to change.
The Herald published a story about Christie being gagged by NZ Rugby over the changes proposed in his exit report. NZ Rugby didn’t budge - it’s only now after Christie has died that it may release the recommendations.
Christie began to realise there were skills he needed but did not have. As he pushed himself to learn he came up against headaches and struggled to focus.
“This is a war we’ve got and we’re ready to take this on for your brother,” Tori Guyton recalls him saying.
Christie wrote an essay about his friendship with Guyton, “The Untold Story of Best Friends and the Impact of Multiple Concussions in NZ Rugby” in which he revealed his efforts to understand what head injuries had done to them both.
“Simple day-to-day errands ... became painful for me as the very thought of using my brain to focus was agonising.
“Lacking education on concussion or CTE, I struggled to understand myself and felt lost.”
He developed podcasting and video skills. He wanted to be an investigative journalist. He interviewed those with connections to CTE and head injuries, many on Zoom, from his bedroom.
Among those were Professor Alan Pearce, an Australian neurophysiologist and concussion specialist who became a friend, and brain bank neuroscientist Dr Helen Walker- who will likely be among those who study his brain.
There was also an interview with Bureau recorded on the day they met in Auckland.
Christie told Bureau he wished the public knew more. He said it wasn’t until the death of Billy Guyton that he really worked to understand his own concussion issues and their impact on his mental health.
Christie was in high-energy mode during this period. He was refitting a Nelson shop to be the physical home of the Billy Guyton Foundation. And it was there he discovered his desperate quest was not the only one in town.
Gotlieb-Old recalled: “So many people were walking in there with different grievances. I don’t think he could say no to anybody.”
People came in complaining of fluoride in the water system and sharing disproved conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine.
For Christie, it was a short leap into alternative reality.
His faith in medical and political institutions was low, as it was in sporting institution NZ Rugby too - after being prevented from sharing changes he believed would make a difference.
Those coming in had similar low levels of faith in institutions and he was ready to listen.
In November, he posted a video raising concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine. And similar issues followed. Instead of interviews with CTE academics and those from the rugby world, he was now interviewing those alleging government cover ups and conspiracies.
Pearce, the Australian academic, stayed in touch with Christie, and later told the Herald the striking shifts in Christie’s character and interests accelerated around the time Trump was re-elected.
The alerts about Shane Christie
In early 2025, Christie sought out an Opposition MP he’d previously met to secure support on the issue of CTE. Now he wanted to talk to her about fluoride.
By several accounts Shane was becoming increasingly intense - and he was frustrated. To him, it seemed so obvious - why did all involved not simply declare a connection between CTE and head injuries and concentrate support on those who need it.
He brought the same fervour to the fluoride debate with talking points from the conspiracy crowd.
Christie’s approach left the MP frightened and she alerted Parliamentary Security. This was to become a pattern over the months ahead.
In March, Christie publicly asked Efeso Collins’ widow Vasa Fia if her husband died due to the Covid-19 vaccine.
During a break in a court case he’d been following, he’d stumbled upon a press conference following a coroner’s court hearing for Collins’ inquest.
“I just want to ask you, respectfully, but was there any word in the court hearing about the potential of the vaccine causing your husband’s passing, the Covid-19 vaccination?” Christie asked.
That was the end of that press conference. Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson shut it down and told Christie: “That is really unfortunate you chose to do this on a painful day.”
In Wellington, Christie was managed out of Parliament by security after he bailed up an MP’s staff member inside the complex.
On the anniversary of Guyton’s death in May, Christie was with John Ansell, the one-time creator of the infamous Iwi/Kiwi billboard for the National Party’s 2005 election campaign.
In recent years, Ansell - who has not replied to a request for comment - has embraced conspiracy theories and spoken to elements of Sovereign Citizen ideology.
Ansell filmed himself walking outside Parliament with Christie, referring to him as a “young sporting hero” who could be a leading voice in the “truth” movement.
Ansell said: “If cool people come out and make it okay then others will hopefully say, ‘well, if Shane can do it then so hopefully can I. I want to be cool too’.”
“You have the skills to help make telling the truth popular because it sure as hell ain’t yet” he said.
Christie said Ansell introduced him to “anthony-john of the house haddock”, a Sovereign Citizen adherent called Anthony Haddock who teaches the movement’s ideology. Christie wrote of attending a six-hour meeting led by anthony-john, a man with “God in his eyes” and “one man I respect deeply”.
Wearing shorts mid-winter, anthony-john stood barefoot on a cold concrete garage floor and used a felt-tip pen and paper to explain to those gathered how the system was corrupt.
He spoke of how laws are a bankrupt code that can be interpreted by using particular phrasing, and that a birth certificate creates an entity that is subject to a country’s laws. By shrugging off the name on the certificate, one can escape accountability.
This was why Christie called himself “living man Shane” when called to court in Thames after being issued with a trespass notice at the local council. His new name showed he was not an artificial construct of the law, he said.
By then, Christie was living at anthony-john’s Tairua home. The trespass notice had come as a result of Christie’s efforts to interview the local council’s mayor and chief executive.
Christie wrote of his confidence as he was called to the dock: “Three months of living and breathing in ant’s world had prepared me to address a serious miscarriage of justice”.
On that day at the Thames court, with anthony-john at his side, Christie wrote how “the 40 year veil constricting my mind from freedom” had begun to lift.
When the community magistrate insisted on calling him Mr Christie, he “made it clear to her I am alive and do not identify as your thing of imagination”.
Christie wrote that the experience “finally opened my eyes to the fact the judicial system of New Zealand is an organised crime unit”.
In the end, he wrote of the magistrate entering a “not guilty” plea, pushing the case forward to a future date that will now never be heard.
When Christie returned to Nelson on August 18, he had a new and different world view.
Shane Christie and a ‘dark place’
In Nelson, Christie launched into a fresh campaign. Nelson City Council was after dog registration fees for Rajah, the 11-year-old Rottweiler he had long called his “son”. Christie saw it as a further example of the government using its power in an unequal and illegal way.
In Nelson, an urban dog costs $115 a year. Christie posted on social media saying he’d asked the council if they could prove it was legal for it to demand the fee.
Sure we can, the council officer said.
Christie requested a meeting, and set up a camera to record the interaction with two staff, in which he used Sovereign Citizen talking points.
The next video was Christie outside council, being handed another trespass notice by police and being told he couldn’t return.
And the next video after that? That’s when he took Rajah out for his last meal and then shot him dead.
Those who know Christie are both disturbed and defensive of what might be read into this. Rajah was old, as Christie says in the video, and his back legs no longer worked properly - including for toileting. He was a much-loved old dog who didn’t have much left to give.
But Holly Parkes, Christie’s close friend and former partner, spoke at his funeral about the day he called her and ran through his plan to put Rajah down.
“I knew his brain injury was now in the driver’s seat” she said.
In the video, Christie talks about recovering Rajah’s bones so he could be reborn.
He also spoke about why he was putting Rajah down. “I believe that we need the ability to fully self-determine over our own affairs and I think with the way legislation, government, local government are set up - the police, the judicial system - they all take away the ability for us to make our own decisions.”
Most would take their dog to the vets to be put down, he said. “But what it does is it takes away .. the pain of feeling love. I think it’s important that we all know exactly how our loved one dies.
“And if our agencies and government and medical system are betraying us and not being transparent about the dangers of things like fluoride, the vaccine, pharmaceutical medication, then they are taking full authority over everything about us as men and women.
“For me anyway, shooting Raj, I realised it is about the battle for the spirit. So taking Rajah’s life today is about me self-determining my own affairs and I want to be really observant about what it does to me.
“I want to be observant of what influences I have when I post it on my social media and I’m doing it to try and get as close to the truth of the experience of taking my dog’s life as possible.”
Christie was found later that day, crying and asking: “Have I done the right thing?”
John Guyton reflects on the views Christie returned to Nelson with, and how some of those causes also appealed to his son. He sees men who adopted causes to balance out lives becoming more confused and difficult.
“I think they feel so wronged. I think they want justice. Billy has done plenty of yelling. Billy did plenty. They feel ripped off.”
For Christie, exclusion from places the rest of us are accepted was a theme of his last year. And the more he found himself unwelcome, the more he was embraced by others who told him society was the enemy.
Gotlieb-Old: “I think he did wear himself too thin. And he got confused. This disease, you can only tackle one thing at a time.
“Their brains can’t keep up but they try. And the harder they try, the more difficult it is to process anything and it’s frustrating and overwhelming. And that manifests into anger and despair.”
‘Another kick in the guts’
Christie had a lot to contend with, as did Guyton before him.
Christie revealed some of Guyton’s writing during his final year: a mix of uplifting diary notes on how to be a better man, and anecdotes about how hard that is when your failing brain is tearing you apart.
Christie and Guyton’s careers overlapped or touched edges. Both wore the Hurricanes jersey in 2013, they played side by side at Tasman for the Mako’s from 2013 to 2017. Christie played for the Māori All Blacks from 2013 to 2015 while Guyton joined the side in 2016.
Both experienced extreme symptoms. For Christie, they became extreme in 2023 after Billy Guyton died, including delusions and a series of psychotic episodes.
John Guyton: “Every time this happens, it’s another kick in the guts.” He worries there will be no one to speak on CTE in New Zealand now Christie has gone.
“How many are actually out there? There must be thousands. It’s definitely not just these two boys. It’s a dying cause, isn’t it?”
He says it with no humour or irony. “The foundation, that stands for quite a bit. We have to keep it going. It was for Billy and now Shane too because he created it.”
Tori Guyton says the same: the foundation needs an advocate and a sponsor.
Later, John Guyton sends a text saying the Billy Guyton Foundation is to be wound up. Christie’s hope it would be a vehicle to increase awareness about CTE is likely over.
Even before Christie’s death, Guyton forced himself to back away from fighting for the cause.
“I had to pull back out of it. It f**ks you up. I had to put it away in a box because it f**ks you up.”
Pearce says more work needs to be done around any links between CTE and suicide. “Is suicide a key feature of CTE?” he asks.
Research has found suicide is disproportionately common among young athletes later diagnosed with CTE, with doctors saying the disease’s attacks on the frontal lobe produce symptoms recognised as suicide risk factors.
Suicide, though, is complex - as is CTE.
There is so much that still needs to be discovered about CTE. Extreme behaviours or an inclination to extreme views? These too could be CTE.
It’s a frustrating disease because once you have it there is considered to be no way back.
Pearce says it can be crushing to discover that the mental health encouragement to speak to your mates and ring health lines doesn’t promise a positive outcome.
For CTE, there is only managing symptoms and quality of life.
Tori Guyton got the news about Christie’s death early Wednesday. Her phone was buzzing with messages of support, and she didn’t know why.
“News travels really fast in Nelson. News travels too soon for its own good.” She got to Christie’s home and found an ambulance and police outside.
It was devastating and still is. “Shane was like a brother to me. I feel like I’ve lost a brother all over again. The brutal reality of CTE, I guess.”
In saying that, Tori Guyton, has assumed a diagnosis - as Christie did of himself. It will take a professional diagnosis of his brain to know for sure.
She saw Christie on Monday - two days after Rajah died and two days before Christie died - “and he was different for sure”.
There were so many plans. She says their next enterprise for the foundation was to take the Billy Guyton story to schools.
And there was the upcoming inquest for Billy Guyton. Christie was coming to the meeting with the coroner in mid-September and preparing to testify at the inquest, likely to be held next year.
Christie was planning to be around. And yet, she says, everyday life was challenging for him. He had truths to speak, like the NZ Rugby recommendations from his retirement report.
“I think he had seen things weren’t changing and no one is listening. And that spoke volumes, especially when people in high places are not allowing him to speak.”
Tori Guyton drew parallels with the symptoms she saw in her brother: “Confusion, very paranoid, irrational thinking. Sometimes thinking the worst.”
These men, Tori Guyton says, “they just get put into categories of crazy or mad [but] they’re not crazy or mad”
“They’re screaming out for help.”
David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and being selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He joined the Herald in 2004.