With both the Prosecution and Defence having given their closing addresses and with the Judge to follow on Monday for many long distance watchers of this trial there will be a feeling of uncertainty. Despite the PC decision regarding the withheld DNA advice of it being too down graded to be a reliable source, and other evidenc which the defence called bad science, it seems there was at least partial agreement that Lundy may have had DNA on his shirt likely to be brain or stem cell, however there is doubt that it was human material.
On that note in particular it's been difficult to reconcile the small amount found, if Lundy had been wearing that shirt and was indeed the killer of his wife and child - shouldn't there have been more dna found, in fact a lot more. His counsel David Hislop QC pointed out that there was no dna found on Lundy shoes, glasses, his ring or in his car. The other significant point that Hislop made, apart from the obvious that the Crown had abandoned their original scenario used in the 1st trial, was that with the 'new' timing of the deaths of Christine and Amber required that Amber would have been needed to have been woken from sleep to eat dinner in the small hours. He said the idea was preposterous. I agree, and if we want to look for something else preposterous then the prisoner who claimed Lundy confessed to him whilst awaiting an appeal against his conviction, when in fact Lundy had not been convicted, fits the bill. In the first trial there was the 'mad' trip which no one saw from Wellington to Palmerston North, and back.
This time the trip was made cautiously, according to the Crown, in order that Lundy not be seen. Thinking about a person not wanting to be seen driving a car is pretty odd, hardly something one can quickly hide in the face of oncoming traffic or a following car. Miscarriages of Justice often are held together by odd (could be said desperate) logic. Of course the fat lady running away in the 1st trial and said to be Lundy in drag was also spectacularly odd, as odd as the Crown reduced to needing a deranged prisoner with problems as a star witness, a mother feeding her daughter McDonalds' in the middle of the night, and a driver, driving with stealth a trip of 100s of ks in order not to be seen.
For me at least enough has been seen, a changed story given an odd replacement and no unambiguous evidence pointing to Lundy. From what I read of the Crown's summing up the motive, hammered away for days at the outset, that Lundy was caused to kill his family by a dire financial situation was put on the back boiler. I think the whole Crown case was on the back boiler from the start when they admitted they were changing their story.
Unrealistic, to me, are 1) booking an escort hours before, or after, a murderous attack, if the attacker wants to look like a loving husband and father...a more thoughtful alibi could have been easily created 2) keeping any clothing with the slightest chance of evidence. 3) fiddling with a computer shutdown time, by any suspects other than Lundy.....i.e., I cant see why robbers or mob enforcers or any of the other suggested suspects would care about that computer timing.
ReplyDeleteThe unaccounted 400 km on the odometer seem suspicious, and I don't know how Lundy explained that. Parking away from the motel's parking space seemed less suspicious, and I can think of many reasons for parking the car away from the motel.
The evidence from the former housekeeper, who saw three people in the white car days before the murder concerned me, and the wikipedia page still claims DNA from 2 unknown men was under the fingernails of both victims, so my guess is that a couple of bad guys murdered Amber and Christine.