Gerald Hope and Scott Watson believe they are both victims who are yet to get the truth about what happened to Olivia Hope and Ben Smart in the Marlborough Sounds.
It's one of the topics the still grieving father and convicted murdered canvassed while meeting in prison last month.
ReporterMike White was with them and tomorrow his 16 page story about the two-day meeting will run in North & South magazine.
Today a teaser has been published by Bauer Media revealing snippets of the conversation and the mood between the men.
"There were never going to be handshakes. There were moments when the gulf between them seemed as wide as it was nearly 19 years ago," said the teaser. "The suspicion, the cynicism, the different worlds they lived in. And then there were times when there was an understanding, where they saw things the same way, where there was concession and common ground."
Excerpts from the interview include the men talking about them both being victims who "never got the truth".
Hope: "You and I are both victims. You believe you're a victim."
Watson: "I know I'm a victim - I know I'm a victim."
There was a conversation about a key piece of the Crown's evidence - the two trip theory in which Watson had to return to shore between 2am and 4am if he was responsible for the murder of Olivia Hope and Smart. The pair disappeared in the early hours of New Year's Day 1998 after boarding a yacht with a stranger in the Marlborough Sounds. Watson has always maintained he wasn't that person. The Crown said he was. According to the teaser Watson says the police and prosecution had to invent the two-trip theory because they couldn't prove he'd done anything.
"Even Hope admits it was "a hand-grenade lobbed in there - everyone was shocked when it was mentioned."
White said during a Facebook Live interview on Noted's Facebook page that the process of setting up the meeting between Hope and Watson took "more than three years".
It began in July 2013, when Watson's father contacted White and asked for help setting up a meeting.
"We had hoped it would be a very simple process."
White said there were "regular rejections" from Corrections to have a meeting take place with a journalist present.
"Scott Watson wanted an independent person there. Both parties strongly supported having an independent person there, an observer who could record the meeting. They felt that it was the fairest way that they could go about this meeting."
White set up the meeting between himself and Watson in prison to set a precedent of a journalist interviewing a prisoner, and once he had accomplished that they "immediately made an application" for the meeting between Watson and Hope with White present.
After a legal battle the meeting was allowed to go ahead, and happened last month.
White said the 16-page article he wrote on the meeting would not solve the case, but he hoped it would inform people about it.
The six-hour discussion focused on evidence used to convict Watson.
He said Hope's desire to meet with Watson was about "an effort to more overturn every stone . . . to make sure you've done everything you can to get Olivia the voice she doesn't have and to try and find the truth about what happened to Olivia and Ben".
"I think we've also got to remember this meeting was a meeting for Gerald Hope and Scott Watson, while the public are now being informed about it, it was for them to better understand each other and for Gerald Hope to ask questions that he always wanted to ask Scott Watson."
White's 16-page story on the meeting between Hope and Watson appears in North & South magazine, on sale tomorrow.
