A new collection of true-crime writing
I was at a loose end the other day and naturally the first thing that came to mind was to march up to the High Court of Auckland to see what kind of miseries were being debated. Besides, it's in the prettiest part of town. This is Auckland as London, with its shady paths between fine old oak trees, and its colonial mapping (Waterloo Quadrant, Parliament St); there is Old Government House, that long wooden shack where the Queen once slept, and there is the ivy-creepered Northern Club ("A jacket and tie are required in the Members’ Dining Room after 6.00pm"). All of it implies empire, order, administration. All of it narrows to a clean, sharp point at the High Court.
The daily list featured the usual mysterious civil disputes ("New World vs Qian Zhong") and the criminal courts included the Red Fox murder trial, and the Crown vs Earl William Opetaia. But the Red Fox case was in an adjournment. Only the registrar and some legal drudge, bent over a stack of papers, were inside. This was a shame. I'd attended a day of the trial in its first week and it was so interesting that I filled an entire 3B1 notebook – two women were called to give evidence about the night they were sitting in the Red Fox tavern in Maramura on a Saturday night in 1987 when two men burst in through the back door with a shotgun and a baseball bat. It took the police nearly 30 years to make an arrest. A detective working on the investigation came up to me outside the courtroom for a friendly chat; he remembered me from the 2005 trial of Antonie Dixon, that P-fried wretch who went at two women with a Samurai sword. It was good to see the detective again.
I poked my head into Opetaia's trial to see what was happening. Sometimes I think to myself, "My ideal role as a journalist would be to wander into courtroom trials on a whim." And then I remind myself that this is exactly what I do for a living. I like courtrooms. I like the careful and meticulous examination of random, mean, brief, and violent events. I like the idea of order and the ideal of justice. Mainly of course I like writing about courtrooms. They contain so many unhappy stories and none of them have a beginning and most of them end in death. My new book Missing Persons looks at famous cases such as the Lundy killings and the Grace Millane killing; I wouldn’t describe the book as a comedy, but it's got Colin Craig in it; throughout, there are wrong turns, bad luck, points of no return.
Opetaia was giving evidence as the first witness in his defence. A former boxer, 59 years old, with a big hands and very black hair tied back in a ponytail, he had a large, square face, a face that looked like it had been given a beating not in the ring but by the things that life had thrown at him – he spoke in court about suffering two nervous breakdowns. He also made mention of smoking methamphetamine. But he wasn't in court to talk about his own miseries. Opetaia is facing 27 charges including indecency with boy aged 12-16 (seven charges), sexual assault by unlawful sexual connection (11), and threatening to kill (three). The essence of the case against him is that the Crown allege Opetaia preyed on vulnerable boys for sex. He ran a Child, Youth and Family home in Kelston between 2001 and 2006. There are six complainants who had been boys in Opetaia's care. He denies all the charges. His lawyer Anoushka Bloem said the complainants "fabricated" their stories in an attempt to "rort" money from ACC.
Guilty, not guilty; did it, didn’t do it; a trial is a story based on real events, some imagined. Everyone deserves a robust defence, even Jesse Kempson, who killed Grace Millane. I attended every day of his trial in late 2019 and my account of those intense weeks appears for the first time in Missing Persons. Kempson continues to dispute the circumstances of her murder and the evidence raised at least the possibility of reasonable doubt but there was never any getting away from what happened after she was killed. Kempson, running his stupid little errands - shopping for a suitcase, buying a shovel – then parking up on the side of the road in the Waitakere Ranges…There is a legal ruling for every act of human behaviour and Kempson invoked the rare and sparingly used section 103 (e): depravity. Once upon a time he was just a quite good-looking guy, thought of as skux at Aotea College. No doubt he has good qualities, something of value. We like to tell ourselves that we refuse to be defined by a trauma, or disappointment, or whatever kind of misfortune that we experience. But Kempson went too far. He reached the point of no return. What happened defines him: someone depraved.
I sat at the back of Opetaia's trial and listened to him present himself as an outstanding caregiver who improved the lives of the boys referred to him by CYFs. "They came in with pimples," he said. He fed them healthy food. "Their pimples would disappear." He got them to call each other by their names. "Not 'G' or 'nigga'. I told them not to do that." He took them swimming at West Wave in Henderson, to movies at Westgate, and barbecues at Cornwallis. The boys placed in his care had been exposed to drugs, alcohol and sexual assaults at previous homes. “My place," Opetaia said, "wasn’t like that."
Earlier in the trial, the complainants gave evidence against Opetaia. One said he was 14 or 15 when the alleged abuse began. From a story in the Herald: "The abuse the man alleges is too graphic to report."
Crime reporting is exempt from the noble principles of public interest journalism. The government launched a $55million fund in February to boost reporting of issues deemed in the public interest; NZ On Air will administer the contestable funding. It's not going to go to fund crime yarns or court yarns. I was interviewed on the AM Show last week about Missing Persons and host Duncan Garner cheerfully remarked, "You're a bottom feeder." Well, okay. I never promised you a rose garden. I make no particular claims for my own crime writing but as a subject, as a genre, I think crime writing actually fulfills a pretty noble principle of public interest: it covers the lives and deaths of people in the community, and the public quite rightly want to know. Certainly crime stories can be sensationalist and puerile. I was walking back to my Wellington hotel one evening after a day at the Mark Lundy murder trial, and ran into a sensitive publisher; when he asked me what I was doing in town, he sighed. "These kinds of stories," he said, "are so narrowing." But these kinds of stories also touch on deep sympathies and genuine care. The whole country grieved for Grace Millane.
My mind wandered a little bit while Opetaia gave more examples of his excellent leadership. I wasn't quite sure at first why he started mentioning someone called Liam. But I came to realise he was talking about Liam Ashley, the 17-year-old strangled to death by a maniac inside a prison van in 2006. Opetaia knew the boy. Liam had been placed in his care in Kelston.
He said, "He couldn't live with his parents cos he'd robbed them five times. That was the basis of his criminal career – robbing his own family." After the sixth time, the teenager was arrested and placed in custody. Opetaia was asked to place bail. He refused. "I was at home fixing my car when I got the call and I just thought, 'No. A few weeks in the Mount would do him good. He needs to learn his lesson.'" He was referring to Mount Eden prison.
Opetaia paused in the telling of his story, and reached for a box of tissues. Then he said, "That night he was attacked and killed in the police van."
He closed the boys home later that year.
"I’d had enough. Too many bad things had happened. People were dying left, right and centre. I was stressing out. I wasn't in a good headspace.
"One night I took my boys to my uncle's 70th birthday. I told them they could have a couple of beers but they were sneaking LTDs and staggering around. We got back and I said, 'Fuck off to bed, the fucken lot of you.'
"They'd all done a runner in the morning. But I didn’t want them back. End of story for me."
But his story was coming to another end. Versions of the past - real, or imagined; did it, or didn't do it; a predator, or an innocent man accused of wicked lies - had caught up with Earl William Opetaia. I went back to the High Court on Tuesday. Another of his defence lawyers, Phil Hamlin, was giving his closing address to the jury. "This man," he said, "made the boys respect each other and themselves." Hamlin snuffled, and reached inside his gown for a handkerchief to blow his long nose. "He wanted to impart life skills to make their lives better." I lingered outside the courtroom afterwards. One of the jurors walked past, gave me a knowing smile, winked, and raised her thumb. A reader? Maybe she'll buy Missing Persons. A verdict in the Opetaia trial is likely today or tomorrow.
Missing Persons: 12 extraordinary stories of death and disappearance in New Zealand by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins,$35) is launched this evening (March 24) by Simon Bridges at Time Out books in Mt Eden, and is available in bookstores nationwide.
