The Crime of Huey Dunstan (2 page)

AS IT HAPPENED, there were two witnesses ahead of me. My evidence was held over to the next morning, Friday.

Lawrence came to my hotel on the Thursday evening. We had dinner together and he left me with transcripts of the police evidence and the testimonies of Huey and his parents which his secretary had put on to disk for me. I had been called in at short notice, travelling up from Wellington that day and arriving in the early afternoon. I had hoped to be in time to compare notes with the other defence expert, a hospital psychiatrist named Wilson who had interviewed Huey in the Cornford prison where he was being held. But Dr Wilson had been called earlier than expected and had left the court before I arrived.

Before the case opened an argument had arisen when the local legal aid committee refused to disburse funds for the defence to hire experts; Lawrence had taken out a mandatory injunction against the committee and rung the judge who had ordered the committee to pay the fees. The constraints had been such that Lawrence had not engaged me until he knew he could pay me. By then the trial had already begun. I remember the exasperation in his voice when he telephoned.

Lawrence Goodenough was a former student of mine; he had taken a course in psychology as part of his law degree. We held similar views on the retributive side of the justice system and I had followed his career over the years with interest. But this was the first time he had called on me professionally. Lawrence told me on the phone that he was impressed by his client’s honesty, yet he remained puzzled. Everyone was puzzled, he said, including the hospital psychiatrist.

“I’ll help if I can,” I told Lawrence. “What do you need?”

“I need a diagnosis,” he said.

When I arrived at the court my knowledge was limited to a few facts, and what Lawrence had told me on the phone. The crime itself had occurred ten months earlier. A man had walked into Lawrence’s chambers in Cornford one day and said, “My boy is in trouble. He’s killed a man.” Lawrence looked at the man. He was not very big. He had a squashed nose and wore a woolly hat that smelled. He
wore thick socks tucked over baggy trousers and had tied his shoelaces backwards.
Legal aid
, Lawrence said to himself. “No way (he told me) was I going to do a case like this on legal aid.” Lawrence had quoted an astronomical sum of money to do the depositions, just to get rid of the man.

“Three thousand dollars,” he said.

“All right,” the man said.

“How would you pay?”

The father thought for a moment. He said, “I couldn’t afford more than forty dollars a week. Would that be all right?”

So it began.

If I just concentrate, I can walk into the store of my memories and enter wraith-like the caravan where Huey was sent as a child. Still feel in my temple the tingle of excitement and rush of adrenalin when he broke down in my arms in the hospital. I can still smell the ammonia and other smells as the room we were in in the hospital contracted and grew smaller and his voice spoke to me out of the dark. But this was later. As I listened to the computerised testimony of his parents in my hotel room that night, two things impressed me.

The first was an incident recounted by the mother when Huey was three. She had just given birth to a baby girl who was about a week old. The Plunket nurse had been to check on the baby, she told the court:

Huey was taken to hospital. He was kept in isolation, he told the court, “for about two years”. No one was allowed to cuddle him or touch him, not even his mother.

The second incident occurred four years later when Huey was seven or eight. He stole a sum of money. He was given a hiding by his father and sent away to stay with a family friend who lived in a caravan. What happened
there was a mystery. Until he was arrested fourteen years later Huey had kept silent. In prison he had admitted to one of the staff during a routine medical examination that he had been tied up and punished in some way. More, he would not say. And still, as the trial was entering its fifth day, he maintained silence on the matter and refused when questioned to elaborate.

What else?

The deceased was a retired taxi-driver who dealt in spare parts and lived alone in a cottage below a bridge. He was familiar to the locals chiefly for his habit of crossing the road every morning with a bucket to fetch water from a spring. He was known to Huey’s father. Huey knew him just well enough to call in one night and offer to pay him for a ride to his parents’ house about fifteen kilometres away in the back country. Huey was twenty-one. He had lived with his parents until he was seventeen and after that “in town” where he worked at a canning factory. But things had gone wrong: he had taken to drugs, lost his job and his girlfriend. Now he was going home to collect some gear before leaving town altogether, to make a fresh start somewhere else. Arriving at the cottage, he helped the old man bring in some firewood and accepted a cup of coffee. Then, as he crouched down to stoke a smouldering fire, the man had reached across for the poker and smiled at him; it was the smile and look on the face of his tormentor fourteen years earlier. The two faces fused, the cottage contracted to the size of a caravan, and he reacted as a
seven-year-old but with the strength and physique of a twenty-one-year-old. He picked up the poker and battered the older man to death.

He told the court, “It was like someone else was doing the hitting. I thought I was hitting the other man.”

When he realised what had happened, he put out the light and fled into hiding, taking the man’s car. Three days later he rang his father and told him what he had done. The father collected his son and took him to the police. Only then, after nearly four days, was the body of the dead man discovered.

The charge was murder, but Lawrence had persuaded his client to plead not guilty to murder, intending to argue it down to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation induced by trauma. At this stage it had not occurred to me—the question of “provocation” seeming such a natural and obvious defence—how difficult this might prove to be.

As I listened to the evidence of the transcript coming from my computer, I kept hearing echoes of other cases. I am no stranger to trauma, to unravelling tortured experiences of the mind. Indeed, as a television presenter once joked after I began a counselling service for students in the university, “Trevor Trauma” was my name. My second name is Trevor—Harold Trevor Kenneth Chesney, or Ches for short. People think it’s short for Cheshire. It isn’t. Everyone calls me Ches. (But my wife calls me Charlie.) Before I retired from university teaching and for some years
after I was registered blind I travelled to remote parts of Australasia and the Pacific Rim in the wake of some disaster or natural catastrophe. Usually my task involved the setting up of a trauma counselling service to help the families of the victims. You may remember a case in the Gilbert and Ellice group of islands where eighteen schoolgirls and their matron were burned alive in a dormitory on the island of Tuvalu. A ghastly affair said to be the equivalent proportionately to the loss of eight thousand New Zealanders or twenty-five thousand Australians in a single avoidable calamity.

This sort of work is distressing, besides being physically uncomfortable. But it can be rewarding. Lisbeth claims I thrive on it. I don’t mind the hardship. I can sleep on a clothes line, if I have to. Once when I was in Scotland I was asked to give an opinion in a case of abuse involving a minister of the Presbyterian Church. My work has taken me to Auschwitz and, more recently, to Fiji. In May 2000 a group of men burst into the debating chamber in Suva and took sixty-four Parliamentarians captive. I spent a month in Fiji. I called on some of the local health professionals and we worked in villages with the families of those who had been taken hostage. The heat was
atrocious
. But I’m straying from the subject.

One of the echoes I got from Huey, listening to the transcript of his evidence, was a case I remembered from America, from the mid-West. I was asked to submit an opinion. It was the story of Terry whose father would
tie him to a tractor tyre in order to immobilise him and beat him with a rubber hose when he was six; and how Terry as he grew up, in order not to kill himself, created families of ghosts whom he would speak with in trees near where he lived. Terry had bottled up so many repressed memories, unable to divulge his repeated punishments for fear of reprisals from his father, that he ended up a moron, wandering senseless like an automaton talking to apparitions and fantasies of his imagination, until finally he was committed to an institution. But Terry hadn’t killed anyone, that was the point. That was the difference. In al my experience, and that included the nightmarish memories of war veterans which we were only then beginning to learn about and identify, I had never encountered a case of trauma that involved the taking of human life.

I remember the anticipation in Lawrence’s voice when I said to him, after that first failed interview: “Well, it isn’t automatism.” “What is it then?” he said. “Don’t know yet. It’s some form of dissociation. All the signs of automatism are there—blind rage, terror, panic, flashback, frenzied violence—but it isn’t automatism. He remembers afterwards everything he did.” I said hopelessly, “It doesn’t fit into any category that I know of.”

It seemed to me Huey was so out of touch with reality when it happened that unless he was spinning a yarn his bludgeoning to death of the old man was entirely understandable: a version of the soldier who shoots his best friend by mistake in the line of battle—almost a case of
friendly misfire. Naturally the Crown did not see it that way.

It was some years since I had been called as an expert witness. Normally the judge on being told of my handicap would have made provision for someone to read out my report for me, but there had been no time to dictate anything to be typed up. I had to wing it.

Lawrence took me through my evidence that Friday morning quietly, without fuss, after establishing my credentials in the usual manner. Former probation officer, prison psychologist, emeritus university professor, consulting psychologist (Department of Psychiatry, Wellington Hospital), author of numerous books and studies on deviant behaviour, stress, trauma, etc. I introduced and discussed at some length the concept of flashback and reminded the court of the mother’s testimony, still fresh in my mind from the day before. Asked about the years when her son was growing up, she described Huey’s night terrors—his fear of confined spaces and insistence on sleeping with the doors and windows wide open. She described how he tore the sheets in his sleep and woke screaming. “I thought it was just part of growing up,” she said.

The phrase had stayed with me.

“I gather from my learned colleague,” said the prosecutor when he got up to cross-examine me, “that you interviewed the accused during an adjournment yesterday?”

I nodded my assent.

“Was he cooperative?”

“He was most reluctant to talk to me about anything.”

“Did he say why?”

“What he said was, ‘I’ve caused enough trouble already.’”

“Just that?”

“He also said he would gladly give his life to have ‘the old geezer’ alive and well again.”

I was finding it hard to imagine what the prosecutor looked like. It doesn’t apply so much to people I know but I have a compulsion to form some mental image of the person who is talking to me, especially in a courtroom when I am being challenged. It’s one of my hang ups, like the necessity to force the cane up under my jawbone when I am giving evidence to help me sit up straight, to avoid giving any impression of the “blind man’s wobble”.

The prosecutor had a trick voice. Whereas the day before it had seemed to emanate low down as from a short buttressed individual, now it flapped about my ears, so that I imagined someone towering and celery-topped, a bit like me (I am almost six foot). The prosecutor whose name was Sparrow was something of a ventriloquist.

“He had ‘caused enough trouble already’?” The judge spoke. “Did you put a meaning on that, professor?”

“He was worried about the shame and hurt to his family, I think, Your Honour. He still is, I imagine.”

“Mr Chesney,” the prosecutor said. “How do you
manage to keep track when you conduct interviews. Do you take notes?”

“In some circumstances I will stop the interview and dictate notes in front of the person I’m interviewing. Have a cup of tea perhaps, take on board any comments that arise and then continue with the interview. With Mr Dunstan that wasn’t possible. I dictated my notes when I got back to the hotel. I have trained myself to remember points of detail from a long interview, although yesterday’s interview was very short.”

“Did he tell you why he killed the man?”

“Yes. He described a flashback to his original tormentor in the caravan. He described his feelings, the sudden uncontrollable anger as everything flooded back. He said he snapped. He said he thought he was hitting the other man.”

“And you believed him?”

“Clearly something snapped. When a memory is triggered like this a whole chain of events like a fuse is suddenly lit. Everything is distorted. It is as if the brain, what is called the mid-brain, skips a step. There is no dialogue for this process. It may last only a second or two, it may last longer.”