The mad, bad, dangerous parade of alleged criminals has long been fodder for journalist Steve Braunias, and last year’s Polkinghorne trial inspired a book.
And then there was the time I took tea, served by a grovelling minion, with a man accused of butchering two men to death with two knives. One weapon was a hunting knife with an image of a howling wolf on the handle. The other was a steak knife purchased for $3 from the Daiso Japan bargain store on Queen St, Auckland, where I went to buy an exact replica. It was pretty sharp.
For a few years afterwards I would conceal it in my briefcase, and take it out with a dramatic flourish whenever I gave talks to schoolchildren: good morning class, I am a death correspondent.
“You will like it,” he commanded. “Best tea. Quality.” His name was Cheng Qi “Chris” Wang. The two dead men were Zhuo “Michael” Wu and Yishan “Tom” Zhong. Chris, Michael, Tom – the made-up names signalled their attempt to make better lives for themselves in the Southern Hemisphere. It ended in tragedy.
Wang was charged with double murder. He achieved fairly liberal bail conditions and I visited him at his home before the trial. I had interviewed a real estate salesman who dealt with him and he made a curious remark: “I’d go around and it wasn’t unusual for Chris to be out in his kitchen, because when you live like a pauper, you live in the kitchen.” We sat at either end of a long table in a dark kitchen. The only things in it were his manservant and a grandfather clock. Neither moved.
I felt two things. One, a bit scared. He was a volatile character and he jumped up out of his chair to perform the lethal kung-fu moves that he claimed he used to disarm the two men who he killed. He gave a little screech (“Yaaah!”) as he smote the air with blows. I smothered a little screech as he got closer. But he was harmless, in that context anyway, wanting to declare his innocence in front of a representative from the world’s media over a cup of green tea.
Wang was vain, shrewd, tough. The murder charges didn’t so much hang over him as drift past him, like steam from the kettle. He wasn’t worried about the trial. The jury, he said, would realise he had been acting in self-defence. He sat down again. We drank the not very special tea.
The other thing I felt that day, as ever when reporting on violent crime, was happiness.
I ought not feel that way. It’s probably a deep moral failing. The fact that I have spent quite a lot of my professional life these past 20 years attending murder trials – and writing about it in a very particular way, often with humorous asides and hopefully memorable zingers – is an ongoing and unresolved source of concern, regret, shame and other flagellations. But it’s an interesting way to make a living, and I particularly enjoy observing what goes on inside a room set aside for the consideration of allegedly illegal acts.
High court fixture
I am a creature of courtrooms. I feel at home in them, an old stick of furniture, parked in the High Court at Auckland off and on ever since the Antonie Dixon murder trial (the samurai sword, his courtroom performance as a wide-eyed nutter) in the summer of 2005.
That was the one that got me interested. It was the engine that ended up driving three books, a trilogy of my writing about many various murder trials and associated mysterious deaths. Just when I thought I was out, that I’d had enough, no more misery tourism, no more books of this kind (“That’s it,” reads the opening sentence of my last collection, The Survivors, “I’m gone”), I was pulled back in this time last year, unable to resist the black suburban magic of the Polkinghorne trial.
The reason I’d sworn off any more true-crime books came not exactly as an epiphany ‒ nothing quite that sudden or illuminating ‒ more like a gradual sickening of the subject that eventually formed a good old slough of despond.
Things had got too bleak. I was sick of that room set aside for the admin of evil. I began to hate just about everyone in it. I hated the bored judges. I hated the bored juries. I hated the defence lawyers least of all; you expected them to be cynical, but I was surprised to realise that the prosecution lawyers were even more cynical, and I hated them most of all. The police, court staff and daily news reporters were exempt from this wave of loathing. They were just doing their jobs, generally very professionally.
That then left the most important person in the courtroom: the accused. Wretchedly, dismally, just not sustainably for much longer, I began to hate them, too. They were mostly disadvantaged and disenfranchised lowlifes – desperadoes, junkies, abusers who had been abused, trespassers who had been trespassed, killers on the edge of being killed … I didn’t inhabit their world or walk their mean streets, and wouldn’t survive it for a second. “They would beat me, rob me, generally show a marked lack of respect,” I wrote in the introduction to The Survivors.
What it meant is that I didn’t really know who I was writing about and, worse, began to lack a basic level of kindness or empathy towards them as they yawned and seethed in court.
No more of that. Time to step away. I thought there must a better, more positive way to go about making a living as a journalist, and sat down over a cup of tea with old mate Paddy Gower to try to thrash it out. He was on the same path. He was on the run from politics. We both needed to find goodness in our hearts and our careers. His solution was to pivot, and create his excruciating good-news series at Stuff. Just as I was dithering about whatever sunny new direction to take, along came Dr Philip Polkinghorne.
He arrived at the High Court of Auckland as a better class of alleged murderer, a professional rattling around in an architecturally designed box in Remuera – he was upper middle-class and I represent the lower middle-class but the distinctions are vague. He was someone I could relate to. Even so I intended to go along only for the first few days. But the trial was too interesting to want to stay away. I never left. I had regained my missing happiness.
Criminal appeal
The genre of true crime – what a dismal little term, as if it needed a category of its own – plays on our worst fears. They are all versions of horror stories. They are scarifying, menacing, thrilling. The books and the podcasts and the streaming TV dramatisations jolt us out of the numbness of 21st-century life, remind us of the primal urge to kill and, where possible, get away with it.
“It’s the mystery of what really happened,” Errol Morris said in an interview.
Morris is the great modern father of true crime: his 1988 classic documentary The Thin Blue Line came long before The Jinx and all the other contemporary portraits of American murder. He was asked to account for the massive popularity of the genre. He surmised, in a fit of italics, “It’s the mystery of personality. Who people really, really are is powerfully represented when you have a crime standing in back of all of it.”
I like the sound of that but I don’t know if I actually subscribe to it.
One of the central attractions of the Polkinghorne trial was his personality and character, the way the prosecution worked hard to present him as an angry little sonofabitch soaring on twin jet engines of methamphetamine and sex workers. He was accused of killing his wife, Pauline Hanna. He was found not guilty. The forensic evidence in favour of his innocence was so strong and overwhelming that it set aside the crown’s character assassination of Polkinghorne as – I would have liked this next phrase as the book’s title, but it got voted down – a malignant sex dwarf.
The defence called two expert forensic pathologists who ruled out any possibility of a homicidal death. There was no coming back from that. It didn’t matter a damn who Polkinghorne really, really might be; the verdict told us he had nothing to do with Pauline’s death.
In any case, I never attend trials in any kind of anticipation that a person’s true sense will be revealed. Courtrooms present untold scraps of knowledge. I love the scraps, the random details, the irrelevant facts. They seldom form a complete or even especially telling picture of someone. It’s not surprising; people are unknowable, and we barely know ourselves.
The nervous Raskolnikov, who kills his pawnbroker and her sister with an axe in Crime and Punishment, is like a missing person in his own life. Dostoevsky writes of the fatal moment, “He swung the axe with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head.”
Raskolnikov exits the building. “He was only dimly conscious of himself now, and the farther he went the worse it was.” On the run, “scarcely conscious”, “dimly conscious”, he seems to lose all consciousness by the time he gets back to his room.
“He flung himself on the sofa just as he was – he did not sleep, but sank into blank forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then, he would have jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts …”
Trial of the year
These are the defendants we see in murder trials, with their “scraps and shreds” of thought, desire, impulse. Polkinghorne was vivid and complicated. I enjoyed his company. I didn’t form a definite idea of his guilt or innocence. I was just happy to take in that strange, historic trial, and bring to it a kind of literature which felt an apt way to describe it.
Sometimes, though, things are simple. Tea-drinking knifer Cheng Qi “Chris” Wang did not strike me as an overly complex character. The most interesting thing about him was the English that took unusual shapes around him. He had met a young Korean woman in the week of the two killings; she was at his house when the two Chinese men walked in to confront Wang. They wanted to have a serious conversation about the root of some but not all evil, money. The woman sensed their presence.
She said in court, “I felt some indication of human being so I lifted my head.” She told Wang he had visitors. He got out of bed and saw them at the top of the stairs. Wang said to me in his kitchen, “I scared. In shock. I in my pyjama.”
There was a fight. Two men died. Wang was found not guilty of murder on both counts, and guilty of one count of manslaughter. “I accepted that you acted in self-defence,” said the sentencing judge, “but that you went too far.”
He was sentenced to four years in prison. It was to be served concurrently with another sentence of two years and nine months for dishonesty and money laundering.
The Serious Fraud Office announced, “Cheng Qi Wang has lived in New Zealand for a number of years and set himself up as a property investment adviser, principally to new immigrants within the Chinese community.”
Its investigation found he directed the same-day purchase and onselling of properties at significantly different purchase prices. “He also dragged other individuals into his scheme.” We nodded at each other as he was taken out of court on his way to prison. It was neither sad or poignant. He was just a bad egg.