An Early Tragedy

If not the first, at least one of the most significant of the early murder trials in New Zealand was that of a young Bay of Islands chief, Maketu, for the brutal killing of a Mrs Roberton, her two children, and a half-caste servant, at Kororareka, in November 1841. Maketu made no secret of his crime and in consequence posed a pretty problem for a Government hardly yet established and totally lacking in law-enforcement authorities. It was Maketu's own father who delivered him up to justice after a meeting of chiefs at Paihia, and the prisoner was tried before the colony's first Chief Justice, Sir William Martin, at the first criminal sitting of the Supreme Court in New Zealand. In every respect the occasion was an embarrassment to the Administration. First, it was necessary to make the mechanics of trial intelligible to the Maori; and secondly, it was essential that the European notion of the sanctity of human life should be demonstrated.

To this end, Maketu's trial, originally fixed for 28 February 1842, was postponed for a day to enable a European to be tried for murder first, in order to convince the Maoris that English law was no respecter of persons, but was prepared to treat Maori and Pakeha alike. The European was found guilty of manslaughter only, but Maketu was convicted of murder and was hanged. His body was buried in the precincts of the old gaol in Queen Street, Auckland, but a year or two afterwards his relatives were permitted to take the remains away.

Murder at Wanganui, 1861

With only the excuse that his victim hounded and abused him on the parade ground and off, Colour-Sergeant James Collins, in 1861, strode into the orderly room of the Queen's 65th Regiment at Rutland Stockade, Wanganui, and shot Ensign William Alexander dead. His trial for murder was notable for the strenuous attempts made to save him from the gallows. He had been a fine soldier in peace and in war, but in the face of the jury's verdict and the starkly simple circumstances of the case, Mr Justice Johnston had no option but to sentence him to death. Throughout the district, and as far away as Wellington, where the Bishop of Wellington took a hand, unremitting efforts were made to secure a reprieve, but they were of no avail and Collins was hanged for his crime. This was the first occasion in the brief history of the colony when a hanging was not carried out in public, the Execution of Criminals Act 1858 having abolished the barbarous practice of hanging convicted murderers in public.

The Jarvey Trial, 1865

When Captain William Andrew Jarvey, master of a small vessel trading between New Zealand and Australia, murdered his wife in Dunedin by poisoning in 1864, he did so almost in the presence of his 15-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He was found guilty after a second trial and was hanged in Dunedin Gaol in October 1865. Unfortunately his crime and trial were also responsible for the death of an expert witness who had been brought from Melbourne to testify to the presence of strychnine in the exhumed body of the victim.

Elizabeth Jarvey was putting one of the younger children to bed in the house at Caversham, Dunedin, when she heard loud cries from her mother in the next room, where her father was administering “medicine” to the sick woman. She went to see what she could do, and arrived in time to be told by her mother: “Your father has poisoned me for the woman in the big hat and cloak”. The unfortunate woman then died. A Dr Hardy gave a certificate to the effect that the cause of death was “fits”, but the young girl knew only too well what had happened. Obsessed with the idea of what would happen to the motherless family of five if she disclosed the ugly circumstances, the daughter held her peace for three months, until her father's treatment of her, and the arrival in the house of “the woman with the big hat and cloak”, caused her to change her mind. Jarvey was at once arrested and his wife's body was exhumed in the Southern Cemetery. Stomach samples were taken, but because at that time there was no Government analyst in New Zealand, they had to be sent to Melbourne for examination. Dr Macadam, the Victorian analyst, reported the presence of strychnine in lethal quantities, and Jarvey was put on trial.

According to Dr Hocken, in the Report of Jarvey's Trial, Jarvey was an unsavoury character, being suspected of the murder in Tasmania of several of his illegitimate children. Actually, this damaging fact was injudiciously mentioned by his counsel at his trial. Mr Justice H. S. Chapman presided at the first trial in March 1865, and the strongest possible case was made out against the prisoner. Jarvey's daughter was unshaken both in evidence and in cross-examination, and the defence could make little impression either on the chemist who sold Jarvey strychnine, ostensibly for killing rats on his ship, or on the doctors who also gave evidence. Dr Macadam, however, was anything but at home in the witness box, and quickly fell a victim to astute cross-examination. In addition, he was severely reprimanded from the Bench because of his failure to bring the assistant, who helped in his investigations, into Court, and also on account of some out-of-Court observations he had made to local doctors. His evidence of the existence of strychnine in the body was never broken down, but the attitude of the Court towards him had some effect on the jury. After a retirement lasting from 6.30 p.m. on the Wednesday till 10 a.m. on the Friday, during which time the jurors were kept without food, drink, or fire, they failed to agree and Jarvey was remanded for a new trial.

Dr Macadam returned to Melbourne a very worried man. He had an accident on board ship on his way home, and after his arrival flung himself feverishly into the task of preparing the case for the second trial. But his treatment in Court had become an obsession, and when he left Australia for the new hearing in September, this time with his assistant, James D. Kirkland, he was a very sick man. He died at sea, one day out from Port Chalmers. The verdict at his inquest was “excessive debility and general exhaustion”. He was only 38.

When Jarvey again appeared in the dock, it was before Mr Justice C. W. Richmond, and the prosecutor was C. J. Prendergast, later to be Chief Justice of New Zealand. Kirkland presented both his own testimony and that of Dr Macadam, and it took the jury only four hours to find Jarvey guilty.

Maungatapu Mountain Killings, 1866

Probably one of the most grisly crimes perpetrated in this country is that of the Maungatapu Mountain murders, and Murderers Rock in the Nelson district still bears the name with which it was invested when it was discovered that the killers used it for their ambush on 12 June 1866. As a result of this trial three men were hanged for the murder of four others. John Kempthorne and James Dudley (storekeepers), Felix Mathieu (a hotelkeeper) and James de Pontius (a miner) disappeared between the Wakamarina River and Nelson while en route to the West Coast goldfields with a joint capital of gold dust worth £300. They vanished so completely and inexplicably that murder was immediately suspected. Four men, Philip Levy, Richard Burgess, Thomas Kelly, and Joseph Thomas Sullivan, strangers in the area, were detained on suspicion and a 50-man search party at once began to scour the countryside. A dead packhorse and the missing men's swags were found, but there was no sign of the bodies. Rewards were offered in vain for information, but when the Government promised £200 and a free pardon to any accomplice (not the actual murderer) who would turn Queen's evidence, Sullivan, one of the four men in custody, confessed. Under his directions the bodies of the four men – two shot, one strangled, and the other stabbed and shot – were recovered on Maungatapu Mountain. And three days later a fifth body, that of James Battle, a Wakamarina farm labourer, who had not been seen after being paid off by his employer, was also found. He, too, had been murdered on 12 June. Sullivan's evidence was more than enough to hang the other three. He had been the party's lookout man. The trial took an unprecedented turn, however, when Burgess, one of the three accused, who was conducting the defence for himself and Kelly, savagely cross-examined Sullivan in the witness box. Failing to implicate Sullivan, who was in the witness box for 15 hours, he asked him why he had killed James Battle. The Court advised the witness that he need not answer such questions, but three days later, after his companions had been found guilty and condemned to death, Sullivan was charged with the murder of Battle and was also sentenced to be hanged. The other three were executed at Nelson Gaol on 5 October 1866, but Sullivan, because of his confession, escaped the gallows and received a life sentence. All four prisoners were natives of London with unsavoury criminal records in England, Australia, and the Central Otago goldfields. (See alsoMaungatapu Murders.)

The Hall Poisoning Cases, 1886–7

A case of wide interest and unusual circumstance which set the south Canterbury centre of Timaru agog in the 1880s was that of Thomas Hall, a young businessman who was convicted in 1886 of the attempted murder by poisoning of his wife, and in the following year had a verdict of guilty of the murder of his father-in-law, Captain Henry Cain (also by poisoning), quashed by the Court of Appeal because the only real evidence against him was his unsuccessful attempt on his wife's life. On a case reserved by the Judge (Mr Justice Williams, who had sentenced Hall to death) the Court of Appeal held that as there was not sufficient proof that the two poisonings formed part of the same transaction, or were effected in pursuance of a common design, the conviction must be quashed.

Hall first appeared in Court in October 1886 when he faced an attempted murder charge. The trial lasted eight days and he was sentenced to life imprisonment for what Mr Justice Johnston described as a crime that had been committed from “hour to hour, day to day, and week to week”. Hall, the year before, had married a young woman of means and even greater expectations, but almost from his wedding day he found himself all but submerged by a flood of debts, overdrafts, and defalcations which made the acquisition of a large sum of money essential. His wife's death seemed to be the answer. He insured her for £3,000 and persuaded her to make a will in his favour. In the meantime he had provided himself with Taylor on Poisons and fairly generous supplies of antimony and colchicum, both deadly poisons. These he began to administer systematically to his wife after she had been delivered of their first child. It was a long time before the family doctor could convince himself of the truth of what was going on almost under his nose, but Hall was finally arrested. The evidence, which included the discovery of a phial of antimony in Hall's pocket when he was apprehended, was overwhelming, and it took the jury seven minutes to find him guilty.

In the meantime, however, a month before, the police had exhumed the body of Captain Cain, who had died in January 1886. Hall had been a constant visitor at Cain's bedside for several weeks before his death. When, after exhumation, Cain's body was found to contain traces of antimony, Hall was brought from prison and in January 1887 was tried at Dunedin for murder. The Crown was handicapped by lack of evidence but presented the sordid story of his poisoning of his wife. The admissibility of such evidence was vigorously challenged by the defence, but Mr Justice Williams told the jury: “You have a perfect right to take all these circumstances into account…. If antimony is found in the body of a person to whom the prisoner has access, and if later antimony was without doubt administered by him to another person, it is for you to say if it is not a reasonable conclusion that the antimony found in the body of the first-named person was also administered by the prisoner”.

His Honour incidentally conceded that, without the testimony relative to Mrs Hall, there was insufficient evidence for any reasonable jury to convict. The jury did convict, and His Honour pronounced the death sentence; but at the same time he reserved for the Court of Appeal the question of the admissibility of the vital evidence. The Court of Appeal, presided over by the Chief Justice, Sir James Prendergast, quashed the conviction because, in the words of Mr Justice Johnston, who delivered the judgment of the Court: “In fine, the strong moral probability that the prisoner, as he was the agent in the one occurrence, also brought about the prior event, is not the kind of proof of guilt which the English law exacts – it is indeed a kind of proof which the English law, rightly or wrongly, rejects and excludes.”

So Thomas Hall escaped the scaffold and was returned to his prison cell.

The Winton Baby Farmer

In the history of crime in New Zealand there could hardly be a sorrier dossier than that of the infamous Minnie Dean who in June 1895 was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of an infant child. In legal history she has been known, with approximate accuracy, as the Winton Baby Farmer. Under the guise of benevolent motive she received unwanted children and apparently destroyed them, the generally illegitimate character of her victims no doubt contributing materially to the temporary success of her grisly operations. Minnie Dean was tried for only one murder, but the mass of evidence adduced against her at her trial, and the discovery in her garden at “The Larches”, Winton, of two bodies and the skeleton of a third, pointed strongly to a systematic programme of child murder. One curious aspect of her crime was that her husband, Charles Dean, who lived with her, was ignorant of it. At first his name was coupled with hers in the charge, but before the preliminary hearing had progressed very far he was discharged “without a stain on his character”. For a premium, never very large, Minnie Dean adopted unwanted infants, but the payment of the fee invariably marked the disappearance of the child into the care of a “lady” whose name or abode was never disclosed. After hearing 40 witnesses, the jury took exactly half an hour to return a verdict of guilty, and Mr Justice Williams, with equal dispatch, passed sentence of death on the first and only woman to be hanged in New Zealand. Hangings in those days still bore a high day and holiday flavour, and the final office of Minnie Dean's shameful end was described in the local press to the tune of a column and a half.

Ward and the Colonial Bank

It is probable that the special Parliamentary Committee on Banking in 1896 would have had no more interest for posterity than most of its kind had it not been for the connection of the then Colonial Treasurer in the Seddon Government, J. G. Ward, later Sir Joseph Ward, with the sale of the Colonial Bank to the Bank of New Zealand and the subsequent liquidation of a number of its accounts. What, in the first view of the matter, was a routine official commission, developed into an inquiry that was publicly commented on in the strongest terms all over the colony. The Bank of New Zealand, shortly after its purchase of the Colonial Bank (with Government approval), found itself in need of State aid, and a Committee was set up by the Premier to find out why, and also to investigate the sale of the Colonial Bank. The hearing took three months, and the evidence, together with the charges and inferences sought to be drawn from it, fanned political and religious differences to an intensity that survived for many years.

The Colonial Bank, itself a child of discord, came into existence in 1874 because Dunedin and the South Island generally resented Auckland and London domination over the only genuinely colonial banking institution in the country – the Bank of New Zealand. By 1894 it was in deep water. Its reserves were small and its advances included some very large troublesome accounts. Unfortunately, among the more difficult accounts were those of the Ward Farmers' Association (of which the Colonial Treasurer was managing director and chief shareholder) and Ward himself, both being heavily indebted to the bank. Personal animus and opposition to Ward's financial policies were brought to a head by the explosive political atmosphere of the day, and when the Bank of New Zealand bought out the Colonial Bank, in 1895, Ward's enemies said that he had persuaded the Government to approve the deal to avoid the embarrassment to his company and himself if, as seemed most likely, the Colonial Bank were to go into liquidation. Here was the source of most of the acrimony and bad feeling. The Bank of New Zealand rejected certain categories of accounts in the Colonial Bank and these were handed to liquidators to wind up. The Ward accounts were included, and when shareholders found that all they could expect from the final wind up was 11s. 1 ¾d. in the pound, they began to demand the investigation of the Ward accounts and also those of the directors. The story of the liquidation is shrouded in a good deal of mystery, but it was 10 years (1905) before the Official Assignee at Dunedin achieved the final dissolution. In the meantime the Ward Farmers' Association had been forced into liquidation and the Colonial Treasurer adjudged bankrupt.

The Committee of Inquiry sat long and earnestly, and the general view was that it was designed mainly to exonerate the Colonial Treasurer from the charges of his political enemies. It could all have been a great deal worse, but for the firm stand taken from the outset by William Watson, then president of the Bank of New Zealand, and former chief inspector of the Colonial Bank. He pleaded the deeds of secrecy associated with his appointments and point-blank refused to discuss individual accounts. He was hailed before the Speaker of the House, told that his attitude was “indefensible”, and fined £500. The Bank of New Zealand paid the fine and Watson stood his ground. He was examined day after day from 15 August to 9 September, but he successfully short-circuited the efforts of certain members of the Committee and the Opposition to have the accounts of Ward and his company and those of certain directors of the two banks investigated. Other bank directors and executives were questioned interminably from July to September, when the Committee returned to the House with recommendations that brought about the reconstitution of the Bank of New Zealand under the Bank of New Zealand and Banking Act Amendment Act of 1898.

“Marine Scandal”, 1899

In the official, and probably subterranean, archives of the General Assembly Library in Wellington lies the 380-page report of the Marine Commission of 1899 which tells the story of the “Marine Scandal”. The tribunal differed from many of its kind by reason of the fact that the Premier of the colony, Seddon, spent several hours in the witness box refuting serious charges preferred against him and one of his principal Ministers, the Minister of Marine, W. Hall-Jones. It was not a trial in the ordinary sense of the term, but since it involved the impeachment of the Premier and his Government, it had no less a judicial character than one of Her Majesty's highest Courts. The proceedings lasted a full 15 days and at the end of the hearing District Judge Ward and Dr Joseph Giles found that the charges of wrongful use of ministerial powers by Seddon and Hall-Jones in the matter of the issue of master mariners' certificates were entirely unfounded. The case arose out of an attack from the floor of the House of Representatives by John Hutcheson, a ship rigger, who was also a member of Parliament for the city of Wellington. Far more than the personal integrity of the individuals concerned hung on the outcome of the investigation, and on that account alone it takes its place among the more significant judicial hearings in New Zealand's legal history.

Wreck of the Ariadne, 1901

When the Ariadne, a schooner-rigged luxury yacht, reputed to have cost £30,000, foundered at the mouth of the Waitaki River, north of Oamaru, in 1901, Lloyds' surveyor in New Zealand (Captain Willis, of Lyttelton), after attending the nautical inquiry at which the master, Captain George Mumford, lost his certificate for three months, considered that some further investigation on his part might be profitable to his principals. Lloyds' interest in the craft stemmed from the fact that the Ariadne, bought for £2,000 in 1898, had been insured with them for £10,000. The Ariadne's owner, Thomas Caradoc Kerry, a globe trotter of means temporarily in Sydney, had sent the vessel to Port Chalmers for refitting and provisioning. Captain Willis was intrigued by the fact that a craft of that type should have been dispatched right across the Tasman from a free port like Sydney for such a purpose. He sought out Captain Mumford and finally extracted from him the startling information that Kerry had promised Mumford £400 if he would cast the Ariadne away on the voyage to Port Chalmers. The idea, according to Mumford, was to wreck the yacht, buy another, and then wreck that in the Straits of Magellan.

Captain Willis paid Mumford the £400 in consideration of a full confession, with documents, if any. These Mumford obligingly supplied, and in due course he appeared with the owner, Kerry, and a crew member, E. J. H. Freke, in the Supreme Court in Christchurch to answer charges of conspiracy to cast away the Ariadne. The trial was notable for the legal representation engaged. Mr Justice Denniston was on the Bench. T. W. Stringer (later Mr Justice Stringer) prosecuted with the assistance of Michael Myers (later Sir Michael Myers, C.J., (q.v.)), and Kerry was defended by C. P. Skerrett (later Sir Charles Skerrett, C.J., (q.v.)) and A. C. Hanlon of Dunedin. Mumford was represented by George Harper (later Sir George Harper).

The case looked to be a strong one for the Crown and Lloyds, but as the evidence snowballed it disclosed an unmitigated fraud on the part of Mumford, and branded him as a liar, a perjurer, and a forger. His documents were proved to be as false as his confession. In the end it took the jury only two hours to acquit Kerry (Freke had earlier been discharged from the case) and to find Mumford guilty. He was sentenced to four years' gaol. The case deserves a place among notable trials by reason of the exemplary but characteristic impartiality and fairmindedness of the Crown Prosecutor, attributes which, perhaps as much as any other, distinguished the career of Sir Walter Stringer both at Bench and at Bar. The sequel to it all took place some months later in London when Kerry recovered his insurance on the Ariadne.

The Thompson Case, 1901

A case described by that doyen of New Zealand jurists, Sir Joshua Williams, as “almost, if not altogether, unprecedented”, was that of Alexander Thompson, a seaman of the s.s. Otarama at Port Chalmers in 1901, who was twice charged and discharged on an indictment for the murder of a greaser on the same ship, one George Gibbs, who was stabbed to death during a general mêle in the forecastle of the vessel. Thompson was committed for trial by a Magistrate, but when he appeared in the Supreme Court the grand jury ignored the bill, and he was discharged. As he left the courtroom the Crown Prosecutor issued the order to the Police: “Arrest that man again immediately”. Thompson appeared once again in the lower Court, charged on precisely the same evidence, and a Magistrate and two Justices of the Peace committed him for trial for the second time. A somewhat diffident grand jury accepted the bill on Thompson's second appearance, but they had the benefit of a carefully reasoned and thoughtful direction by the trial Judge (again Sir Joshua Williams) on the peculiar situation that had arisen. On this occasion the grand jurors, like their predecessors, debated the matter for several hours and eventually sought a direction from the Judge on the point whether a majority decision of the jury would be acceptable and binding.

Within a few minutes of being advised that no fewer than 12 of the grand jurors must be agreed upon the confirmation of the bill, the grand jury returned with the second “no bill” in the case. Thompson was discharged again and no further attempt was made to place him upon his trial.