A journalist who has extensively studied the Mark Lundy case won't say the re-imprisoned killer is innocent, but is questioning whether the jury was capable of making the right call.
Mike White's 2009 North & South article on the murders of wife Christine and daughter Amber in 2000 led to international lawyers and experts joining Lundy's defence team, eventually paving the way to having his original convictions quashed by the Privy Council in 2013.
But last week, his retrial ended the same way as the first.
- READ MORE: Lundy guilty of murdering wife, daughter
Mr White was there, and was also the last journalist to speak to Lundy before he was sent back to prison. In a new article for North & South, he raises a number of questions and lines of evidence the trial left dangling.
"As a mere matter of logic, if you're going to plan to kill your wife, what's the one thing that might point to you having a loveless relationship and not really caring about your wife? That would be hiring a prostitute just before you did it," he said on TV3's Paul Henry programme this morning.
"That doesn't make any sense to me, if this was a planned murder as the police and Crown say."
There are also questions about why the back door to the Lundy house was open at 11pm on a winter's night – Lundy was still in Wellington at the time – and whether Lundy had enough petrol in the tank to make the round trip to Palmerston North and back on the night of the killings.
Also, Mr White says Lundy would have to be "really dumb" to request an increase of the sum insured on his wife's life insurance policy, then kill her before it was processed.
"For me, having sat through two months of trial, I couldn't get to that stage of beyond reasonable doubt; and the jury is told they have to be sure and certain that he did it. Not that just he think he did it, or that he probably did it – they have to be absolutely sure he did it, and for me, I couldn't. There were many things that left me with great doubt, actually."
The article concentrates on a number of other unanswered questions – but Mr White's still on the fence on the central issue of whether he did it.
"It's been something that everyone's been trying to work out for 15 years, and for the last seven years that I've been looking at this case, I wouldn't mind a buck for every hour that I've laid awake wrestling with that question."
Much of the evidence presented in the retrial was of a highly scientific nature – particularly in regards to biological tissue found on Lundy's shirt, who it belonged to and whether it was even human. Mr White suggests the jury might not have been able to understand it all, considering so much of it was contradictory.
"This wasn't a task that they asked to do. It's an awful responsibility for them. But you have to say that during the trial they were exposed to some extraordinarily complex scientific evidence that everyone in court struggled to understand – even the judge, who's an enormous brain."
3 News
source: newshub archive
