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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keen public interest and a good deal of morbid sympathy were aroused by the appearance in the dock in 1905 of Edward Lionel Terry on a charge of murdering an aged and inoffensive Chinese in Haining Street, Wellington. The prisoner used the occasion for a violent attack on British policy towards unnaturalised aliens, and described his crime as “a merciful delivery on a world-weary man, and a service to the community”. There was never any doubt of Terry's guilt. He shot his victim down in the street and then went to the police station and described his crime, produced a revolver as evidence, and handed a copy of his pamphlet The Shadow, a harangue on aliens, to the watchhouse-keeper, with the bland remark, “If you read that you'll understand the position”. At his trial he conducted his own defence, and reached remarkable heights of histrionics and rhetoric in his speech from the dock, which was mostly an appeal for the elimination of alien influences in the Empire. The Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout, told the jury that the material question was the mental state of the prisoner, a suggestion to which Terry reacted violently with an assertion that he was perfectly aware of the quality and nature of his act. The inevitable verdict of guilty was accompanied by a strong recommendation to mercy, and the Chief Justice sent him to prison for life. Terry spent the rest of his days either in gaol or in the Sunnyside and Seacliff Mental Hospitals, but he was a perennial source of embarrassment to the authorities by reason of his escapes and attempted escapes and the violence of his conduct. Though sentenced in 1905, he was still news in 1908, especially when he celebrated one anniversary of his trial by setting fire to his quarters in the Lyttelton Gaol, one wing of which had been specially gazetted as a lunatic asylum for his benefit. He died under restraint at Seacliff Hospital on 20 August 1952.
It could be said of the case of Amy Bock, the Dunedin masquerader and general delinquent, that it has no real place in a chronicle of notable trials since, when she was laid by the heels for the last time, she pleaded guilty to everything charged against her. There was no trial. After a remand she appeared in the Magistrates' Court and was committed for sentence to the Supreme Court. Her sins were legion – impersonation, fraud, forgery, and false pretences being the chief of them. But for the Dunedin community of 1909 the reason for her notoriety was undoubtedly her “marriage” to the daughter of her host and hostess in a boardinghouse at the little South Otago seaside resort, The Nuggets. She was then 45 years of age and the “bride” was 32. Amy Bock had arrived in New Zealand 25 years before from Victoria, and at the time of her adventure at The Nuggets she had already served prison terms at Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Timaru, the sentences ranging up to three years, and the crimes including false pretences, forgery, and larceny. Her final and most heartless escapade – the “marriage” – was probably a practical demonstration of what she meant when she told the police, after her last conviction, that she was “tired of defrauding men; they are too soft and easy to work on”. It would be idle to deny that she had the experience on which to base such a conclusion.
Amy Bock used a number of aliases – Shannon, Channel, Vallane, and Skevington being among her most popular choices – but it was as “Percy Carol Redwood” that she “married” Miss Ottaway, of The Nuggets, in the grand manner, with the Anglican vicar officiating, and the local Presbyterian minister assisting. Her gifts to the “bride” included £100 worth of jewellery obtained by a false pretence in Dunedin, and for which she had given the name of her “father-in-law” as a guarantor. The honeymoon was to have been in Melbourne, and even in this she was able to persuade someone else to purchase the steamer tickets. The gay and debonair manner of “Percy Redwood” captured the fancy of The Nuggets, particularly as there seemed to be no lack of money to be thrown about, and it is perhaps not surprising that the masquerader won the heart of Miss Ottaway. In the meantime, however, the police were searching high and low for their old friend Amy Bock in connection with the small matter of a fraudulent bill of sale which she had given over the furniture and household effects of the family by whom she had been employed as a domestic. Her ready money also included a substantial sum which she persuaded a well-known young Dunedin woman to part with, and before leaving Dunedin she had had a field day among all the tradespeople she could coax to give her credit. Hence her immaculate masculine wardrobe.
The end came when inquiries followed a Dunedin man's suspicion about her sex. She was arrested on the eve of her honeymoon (on which, she confessed, she had no intention of taking her “bride”) and was taken to Dunedin. A contemporary eyewitness of her arrival in Dunedin under escort said she looked every inch a male, “walking with hands thrust deep into the pockets of a stylish grey overcoat in the way of a man when the wind is raw and his underclothes are thin”. Her appearances in Court drew large crowds of excited people, and there was no secret about the public disappointment over the failure of a sensational trial to eventuate. Amy Bock admitted the worst the police could charge against her, and after she had appeared in the Supreme Court for sentence on charges of masquerading as a man, forgery, false pretences, and theft, she was returned for a few more years to the prison cell where she had already spent not much less than half the quarter century of her sojourn in New Zealand. That she achieved fame of a sort was shown by the absurd prices paid at auction for her personal effects which were sold for the purposes of restitution. A few weeks after her final appearance in Court, divorce proceedings were brought by her “wife”. Although legal opinion agreed that such a “marriage” required no official annulment, the relevant formalities of dissolution were carried through for the sake of the records.
A special distinction attaches to the trial of Dennis Gunn in 1920 for the murder of the postmaster at Ponsonby, Auckland (Augustus Edward Braithwaite), by reason of the fact that the verdict finally disposed of all attempts in New Zealand to discredit the conclusiveness of fingerprint evidence in the detection of crime. From then on there was judicial and official recognition of the dictum of Sir Samuel Griffith, Chief Justice of Australia, who said, “He who leaves a finger-print behind him, leaves an unforgetable signature”. The reliability of fingerprint identification was relentlessly challenged by the defence throughout the trial, but both the jury and Sir Frederick Chapman, on the Bench, accepted it completely in Gunn's case. Gunn waylaid his victim at his home in the evening, stole his keys after shooting him, and robbed the post office. His reward was £67 14s. 5 d., but in the process he left his fingerprints on several cashboxes, and also on a revolver that was later found in a nearby gully, together with a collection of 229 pennies. The evidence showed that the police relied almost entirely on fingerprints to find their man. The prints of more than a score of suspects were handled in the early stages of the investigation, but none was found to coincide with those in this case. Then the files were searched and duplicate prints were discovered; they belonged to a man named Gunn from whom they had been taken some years before when he was in trouble for evading military service. Gunn was arrested, stood his trial, and was sentenced to death. He was hanged in Mount Eden Prison, Auckland.
Nearly three decades after the Winton baby farming case, in 1923, a man and his wife faced a similar indictment in Wellington. This time the husband was hanged and the wife was acquitted. Daniel Richard Cooper, who posed as a “health specialist” in Lambton Quay, was charged with the murder of an infant child after police excavations on his smallholding at Newlands had unearthed three bodies of newly born children. Cooper was already facing 10 charges of criminal abortion when official attention was attracted to his activities after the discovery of a child's body in the sand at Lyall Bay, Wellington. A fortuitous production of a letter found in the street sealed his doom. This communication referred to the Lyall Bay “find” and added, “It looks as if Cooper has been up to his tricks”. It was months before all the necessary evidence could be collected, but public reaction to the crimes was such that when Cooper and his wife appeared in the dock, the proceedings became a genuine cause célbre. Mr Justice F. R. Chapman was the trial Judge, and one of the features of the trial was the defence of Mrs Cooper on the grounds of domination by her spouse. The jury were apparently convinced that any complicity of which she may have been guilty was involuntary and acquitted her, but Cooper was found guilty and hanged. The trial Judge in this case had the unenviable distinction of having presided at the indictment of some of the most sensational murderers in the long period of his tenure of office.
Pathology, physics, ballistics, and photography, plus perseverance and brilliant detection effort, all contributed to the vast accumulation of circumstantial evidence that sent William Alfred Bayly, a 28-year-old farmer of Ruawaro, near Huntly, in the Waikato district, to the scaffold in 1934 for the brutal murder of his neighbours, 47-year-old Samuel Pender Lakey and his wife Christabel. When another neighbour on an October morning in 1933 noticed that the Lakeys' cows had not been milked and went to investigate, he set in motion a painstaking and intensive investigation that created for New Zealand new standards in police thoroughness, patience, and skill. With 50 men under canvas on the murdered couple's farm, it took the police authorities seven months to bring the man whom they believed to be guilty to trial.
Bayly was found guilty of the murder both of husband and of wife. Even at the foot of the gallows in Auckland Prison his stark composure never deserted him, and his last words were a protestation of innocence and a criticism of the purely circumstantial testimony on which he had been condemned. He was executed in July 1934, nine months after the discovery of Mrs Lakey's body in the duckpond.
There were two novel angles to the murder trial in 1951 of George Cecil Horry, an Auckland tailor, who was convicted by a jury nine years after the disappearance of his victim – his newly married wife. In the first place he used an imaginary post in the secret service to explain to the bride's family why they would probably not see or hear from her for several months; and in the second place a jury convicted him of murder without a body, and without any admission on his part; and the Court of Appeal upheld the verdict. Horry married his wife Eileen in July 1942 under the name of George Arthur Turner, secret service agent, although, as George Cecil Horry, he was employed as a tailor in a clothing factory in Auckland. On their wedding day his bride received from her solicitor a cheque for £687 6s. 8d., the proceeds of the sale of her house, and on the previous day she had taken £300 in savings from the bank. The last her family saw of her was when she left for the honeymoon at Helensville after the reception at which Horry banned photographers because of his “Secret Service” role. The following day the pair visited a friend of the bride at Titirangi, but she was never seen or heard of after that. On 12 December 1942 Horry married again, and a week later went to the home of his first wife's parents with the story that their daughter had been lost at sea when an entirely fictitious Empress of India was sunk by a submarine in the Atlantic. In the meantime he had employed a number of transparent devices to ensure a succession of letters to his “in-laws” from overseas, but they became suspicious and the police were called in. But they could do nothing, notwithstanding grave suspicions that Eileen Horry had been murdered. Eight years later, however, in June 1951, Horry was arrested. As no body had been found, there was only circumstantial evidence of the corpus delicti and Horry's connection with the crime. The police charged him with murder and secured a conviction, and he was sentenced to death. Horry appealed, but the Court of Appeal, upholding both conviction and sentence, held that the fact of death was provable by circumstantial evidence even in the absence of a body or any trace of it, and notwithstanding that the accused had made no confession. The final sentence was life imprisonment.
There have been few crimes in New Zealand more patently the product of a cold intensity of selfishness than the murder on the Cashmere Hills, Christchurch, in June 1954 of Mrs Honora Mary Parker (otherwise known as Mrs Rieper) by her 16-year-old daughter, Pauline Yvonne Parker, and her schoolfriend, Juliet Marion Hulme, two months younger. The incredible ingredients of the crime were graphically disclosed in the six-day trial of the two girls for murder. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the murder was the attempt by the two girls to represent their actions as a crusading challenge to the conventional in human behaviour and relationships. Authority and the community were not converted – merely inexpressibly shocked.
Mrs Parker was brutally done to death with a half brick encased in an old stocking which one of the girls had carried around in her shoulder bag for half a day. Moreover, both of the prisoners used the weapon in succession. An “intense devotion” had developed between the pair, and when Hulme's father made preparations to leave for South Africa, Parker refused to accept the inevitable. The two girls resolved to leave the country and later go to South Africa where they would live together. Because they were well aware that Parker's mother would veto such a mad plan, they agreed she must be killed. On what purported to be a farewell outing before the departure of the Hulmes, the two girls battered Mrs Parker to death. The strange relationship existing between them was brought to light by means of grotesque evidence from diaries, attempts at novel writing, and their own statements. Inevitably insanity was pleaded, but strong medical evidence by the defence was rebutted by irresistible testimony by Crown experts, one of the features of the trial being the broadsides of cross-examination of doctors and psychiatrists by both sides. The question was, “Are they mad or bad?” The defence declared they were insane. The Crown replied that they “were not incurably insane, but incurably bad”. The jury did not take long to decide that the prisoners were sane, and unequivocally rejected the invoking by the defence of the M'Naghten Rules (1843) which evolved from a case of delusional insanity, and are still frequently pleaded.
On 25 August 1954 the two girls were sentenced by Mr Justice F. B. Adams to be detained indefinitely. It is probable that a large body of public opinion felt that undue mercy had been shown, but under section 5 of the Capital Punishment Act of 1950, which reintroduced the death penalty, persons under the age of 18 years were excluded from a capital sentence. Parker and Hulme therefore received an indeterminate sentence, and by order of the Executive Council were detained in separate penal institutions. After serving several years they were released and have left the country.
Scarcely less sensational than the Parker-Hulme murder, but vastly different in character, was the killing in December 1953 at the Dunedin Public Hospital of John William Saunders, a 27-year-old house surgeon, by Senga Florence Whittingham, a female house surgeon, also 27 years of age. After a six-day trial, on a charge of murder, Whittingham was found guilty of manslaughter and was sentenced by Mr Justice McGregor to three years' imprisonment. A consequential penalty was the removal of her name from the roll of medical practitioners. In contrast to the cool and tranquil calculation of the Parker-Hulme crime, with its complete absence of passion or compunction, the tragic act of Whittingham was characterised by unhappy circumstances of intimate relationships. According to her story, the young doctor had become engaged to Saunders in May of 1953. She was then carrying his child, but when some months later it was found that she would not be delivered of the child, the engagement came to a sudden end. Whittingham was greatly distressed and displayed it openly. On an evening in December after a professional party at which Saunders had been accompanied by a student nurse, Whittingham, armed with a loaded ·303 rifle, followed him to a lavatory in the house surgeons' quarters at the hospital, where he was later found fatally shot. The defence was one of accident with no intent to kill. Her idea, the prisoner said, was merely to frighten Saunders.
After a trial notable for the volume and variety of the evidence adduced, Mr Justice McGregor, summing up before the jury retired, suggested that, notwithstanding that the prisoner had deliberately possessed herself of a loaded firearm, the facts did not disclose any real intent to kill or do actual bodily harm. He emphasised, however, that Whittingham's actions displayed a high degree of recklessness. In the face of such a summing up, and considering all the circumstances of the tragedy, it is probable that the public were not surprised (or, perhaps, even greatly troubled) when the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter with a recommendation that the utmost leniency be shown, because they believed that the rifle was accidentally discharged. Whittingham, on her release before the expiry of her sentence, left the country.
by Ronald Jones, Journalist and Script Writer, New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, Wellington.