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Scene of the crime: In October 1941, farmer Stanley Graham terrorised his tiny West Coast community with a murderous rampage, then evaded capture for 12 days. By the time the manhunt involving police, the army and the air force was over, eight men were dead.
From behind an old birch stump, Constable James D’Arcy Quirke drew a bead on his target with his .303 Enfield rifle. Around 25m from the young policeman, his quarry, not a beast but a man, crouched quietly beside a wire fence. Dressed in a long leather overcoat and wearing a brown beret, the other man had a weapon of his own, a Mauser 7mm rifle slung over his shoulder and ready for action. It had already seen plenty.
Nearly two weeks before, the man, a 40-year-old West Coaster called Stan Graham, had used this rifle and two others he owned to murder or mortally wound seven men, four of them police officers.
During the long, grim 10 days since those killings on October 8 and 9, 1941, a posse meant to find Graham had grown bigger and bigger. Police, Home Guardsmen, regular soldiers, airmen and locals had been searching for the killer in the paddocks and dense bush around Koiterangi (now called by its original Māori name Kōwhitirangi), a lush valley flanked by the Kokatahi and Hokitika rivers and in the shadow of the Southern Alps.
The manhunt had become a national emergency. Though New Zealand was at war, Prime Minister Peter Fraser had pledged “the whole of the resources of the country” to deal with the killer, including, bizarrely, a tank and a Vickers bomber armed with 8.5kg bombs. Locals were later heard to remark, with that drollness Coasters are still famous for, that “the only reason the Navy wasn’t sent in was because the rivers weren’t deep enough”.
The tank stayed at its base. But the bomber, along with much else, was deployed. Around 150 men were searching for Graham by October 20, the day Quirke took aim, though the extravagant resources had, for days, appeared to make no difference. Graham, a crack shot and a wily hunter, had not only evaded the dragnet with ease for more than a week, but had engaged some of the scores of police and soldiers in further gunfights before disappearing like a ghost through a wall.
Finally, Graham, hit by gunfire on two separate occasions and now struggling with septic wounds, had been spotted breaking cover behind the Doughboy, a large, precipitous, bush-clad hill at the head of the valley. Police in the area were notified and towards dusk a small contingent moved in.
At around 7pm on October 20, Quirke, his sergeant, two other constables and an army medic called Collier, moved south-west through the narrow basin valley between the Doughboy and the Alps proper. Graham, who unknown to police been holed up nearby in a large, hollow kahikatea stump, was at the same time moving north-east for reasons known only to him. He was walking into a kill zone.
Hidden by bush, his hunters could see Graham coming toward them across the rough, scrubby farmland, the killer apparently unaware that he’d walked into Quirke’s sights.
There was never any question that the 22-year-old constable, who’d been a cop for just a year, was going to fire on Graham. As Quirke would later tell a coroner’s inquest, the general instruction to police from their chief, Commissioner Denis Cummings, was that “Graham was to be shot on sight, if armed when seen”. Cummings had effectively declared Graham an outlaw; no quarter would be given. After taking aim, and without calling out a warning, Quirke did not hesitate to do his duty. He fired his .303.
“There will be a tragedy”
Eric Stanley George Graham was born on a Tuesday in November in 1900, the youngest son by some years of John and Mary. The Stanleys were proper Coasters, farming in Westland since the 1870s and owning, by 1900, several blocks of land in the Koiterangi valley and a hotel and public house they had built at one of its tiny settlements, Kokatahi. A 1400m peak overlooking the valley, and Stan’s farm, had even been named Mt Graham after his grandfather. The Grahams were, and always had been, popular and well-liked on their part of the Coast.
And so, too, was Stan Graham as he grew into manhood, took a wife, Dorothy, in 1930, and began dairy and cattle farming on a 40ha block left to him by his mother. Short but stocky, he proved, by all accounts, a good farmer. At least, at first. By 1941, however, Graham, now a father of two children under 10, was quite a different, much more difficult man.
Weighed down by debt, he was also suffering stock losses. They were dying because of Graham’s poor farming practices, but instead he accused neighbours of poisoning his animals. He was being regularly castigated, too, by dairy inspectors for the appalling state of his milking shed, and his milk was sometimes rejected by the local co-op. As these stresses mounted, Graham grew increasingly paranoid and argumentative with friends and neighbours, sometimes threatening them with his guns, of which he had plenty.
Psychiatric illness was little understood by those living in Koiterangi in 1941, but the consensus in the valley was that Graham was “going mental”. One of Stan’s neighbours, Bill Jamieson, was of the view that something awful was not far away. “There’ll be a tragedy in our district before many days,” he confided to others in Koiterangi. “Mark my words.”
Madness, gunfire and confusion
The calamity arrived just two days later. Koiterangi’s local constable, Ted Best, who by 1941 had been a copper for 20 years, had had months of dealing with the trouble and strife caused by Stan Graham.
Now he had four new complaints from Graham’s neighbours. At 1pm on Wednesday, October 8 he put them in front of Sergeant William Cooper, his new boss at Hokitika. Cooper, who’d never met the volatile Stan, made the snap decision that this paranoid, increasingly troubling man should be disarmed immediately.
Around 3.30pm, Cooper, Best and two other constables, Percy Tulloch and Fred Jordan, none in uniform, arrived at the Graham property in Best’s car. After a conversation with Graham during which he again accused neighbours of poisoning his stock, the quartet of cops withdrew for a short time to talk to one neighbour before returning to Graham’s to confiscate his guns.
While Jordan and Tulloch waited outside by the gate, Cooper entered Graham’s house and confronted him in his living room while Best stood nearby in the hallway. There were three loaded rifles on the kitchen table.
Cooper demanded the guns be surrendered. Graham refused. Cooper shouted to Jordan and Tulloch, “Come on boys.” Then the madness, the gunfire and the confusion began.
Psychiatric illness was little understood by those living in Koiterangi in 1941, but the consensus in the valley was that Graham was “going mental
Graham fired for the first time, hitting Cooper in the wrist. Then Best received a minor wound. Dorothy Graham ran with her two children into the kitchen. Graham fired again and Jordan and Tulloch were both killed by a single bullet as they ran from outside into the hallway. Graham fired again, hitting Cooper a second time. Best moved to help Jordon, confusing his death rattle for a groan. Graham fired again, gut-shooting Best. The badly wounded Cooper tried to run from the house for help. Graham fired again, killing Cooper on the front path.
Events now went from homicidal to insane. Dorothy found a pad and pencil and demanded the only cop left alive, the badly wounded Best, sign a “confession” saying he had fired first. “I E. M. Best tried to murder Stan Graham,” it read. When it was later handed to police, Best’s scrawled signature was on it, and so was his blood.
The killing wasn’t over. While Dorothy forced Best to sign the false confession, a Canterbury Education Board instructor called George Ridley, after brief, frightened discussions with neighbours, passersby and a teacher at the primary school up the road from the Grahams’, decided he must act.
With an Education Board carpenter called Thomas Hornby, he armed with a local’s .303, Ridley decided to go to the policemen’s aid. As they neared the murder house, Graham bellowed for Hornby to put down his gun, which he did. But there was soon a struggle for this weapon between Ridley and Graham.
“Are you going to let go?” Graham shouted at Ridley.
“No!”
“Well take it,” said Graham, firing again and hitting Ridley in the groin.
Three policemen now lay dead, while Best was badly wounded and would die before the manhunt ended. The also badly wounded Ridley would survive for months but would eventually succumb to the wound in March 1943. None had fired a single shot.
Five men were dead, or condemned to death, but Graham wasn’t finished. Nor was he going to wait around until the inevitable police reinforcements arrived. Telling his wife to take the kids to her father’s in Canterbury, he took his three rifles, 700 rounds and an automatic police pistol retrieved from Cooper’s corpse and legged it toward the nearest bush.
A telegram from Hitler
There was blood all over the place at Stan Graham’s modest Koiterangi homestead. But more was to be spilled there the following night.
In the hours after Graham killed or mortally wounded the four policemen and Ridley, more cops arrived on the scene from Greymouth, but not nearly enough. That night, and during the next day, October 9, a score or more of armed Home Guardsmen arrived on the scene from around the district to secure and guard the scene, occupying the Grahams’ house and the nearby Koiterangi Hall, school and post office. Yet the situation was far from fully controlled. In fact it was confused. The guards, who were civilians with little training, were out of their depth. Worse, no one had any idea where Graham had gone. They would soon find out.
For reasons known only to him, Graham decided to return home after dark on October 9. The house was being defended by three Home Guardsmen, Greg Hutchison, Macko Hager and Colin Howat. At around 7.50pm, Hager saw a silhouette approaching, and he and Hutchison called out for the password, “Hokitika”.
“What’s your bloody game?” came the reply. “Can’t a man go to his own house?”
A second call for the password elicited only “Stan Graham”, then the madness, the gunfire and the confusion began all over again as Graham fired into the house. When the shooting stopped 15 minutes later, another guardsman, Maxie Coulson, who’d raced from the hall across the road, was shot dead in the hallway. Also hit by Graham was Hutchison, who died of his wound the following day.
An army signals company would be sent from Christchurch. And the Vickers bomber would fly in to search for Graham from the air.
Again Graham escaped into the night, but not before Amuri King, a Guard platoon commander, had wounded him, with one of King’s bullets striking Graham’s right shoulder, tearing away the lower section of his shoulder blade. It was the chaotic end to another chaotic day.
During the coming week police would take full control of the scene and the valley. Dozens more cops, including Commissioner Cummings, would arrive from as far away as Auckland. An army signals company would be sent from Christchurch. And the Vickers bomber would fly in to search for Graham from the air.
Despite all the men and resources flowing into the valley, Graham proved astonishingly elusive. The only encounter police would have before Quirke took aim, was on the night of October 12, and it was on Graham’s instigation. Under the cover of darkness he approached the hall across the road from his house for reasons unknown. He was spotted and fired upon, but got away, though only after being wounded a second time.
By now, the murdered policemen and civilians were being buried at large funerals, and the country had found itself transfixed by the ongoing tragedy and the fruitless manhunt. Stan Graham had become international news, too. As the manhunt dragged on the German propagandist Lord Haw-Haw claimed in a radio broadcast that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had sent a telegram to Graham. “Hold the South Island,” Haw-Haw claimed it read. “Sending another man to take the North Island”.
“There are always two sides”
The .303 bullet hit Stan Graham 10cm below the left nipple, and Constable Quirke watched him drop “right where he was, on his face”. But Graham was not dead. As more police headed to the valley behind the Doughboy, a truck then an ambulance were organised to get the badly wounded Graham to Westland Hospital in Hokitika. While everyone waited for the truck to arrive, Graham, in severe pain, told Quirke “I’m done – you got me. I’ve paid in full.”
It wasn’t until 9.50pm that the maimed killer arrived at hospital and was seen by Dr Basil Wilson, who decided not to operate until the toxaemia from Graham’s earlier wounds could be controlled. A police guard was placed on him, and around midnight Dorothy Graham, accompanied by a priest, came to visit.
Graham’s last words were overhead at 12.50am by a Greymouth police sergeant, Robert McRobie, who was stationed at his bedside.
“I have nothing to tell,” Graham whispered.
“What’s that?”
“There are always two sides to a question – Bestie made my life a hell,” Graham said, referring to the now dead Constable Ted Best. He then fell silent.
At 5.10am on October 21, Dorothy, who would later change her name and move out of the district, was called to her husband’s side. Fifteen minutes later, Eric Stanley George Graham was dead.
His death was not the final act in the tragedy. Four nights later, one of his neighbours, Bert Cropp, who had been among those first on the scene on October 8, was out checking his possum traps when he saw fire. For a horrible moment, Cropp thought it was own place that had gone up. It wasn’t. The Graham house had been set alight by persons unknown. It was left to burn to the ground.
Primary source: Manhunt: The Story of Stanley Graham by H. A. Willis (1979).
In the 1980s, Stanley Graham’s crimes became the basis for the New Zealand film Bad Blood, directed by Mike Newell, then an emerging English filmmaker who would go to direct Four Weddings and a Funeral. Twenty-three years ago this week, Bad Blood premiered at Cannes.