The Crime of Huey Dunstan Page 2

  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.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Evidently in this instance for some minutes at least.”

  “But not so long as to prevent reason from returning before the victim was dead? So that after he had hit him with the poker and then the axe and gone outside to the car he came in again holding the kindling axe, and seeing the man lying there still groaning decided to clip him again and finish him off. That wasn’t ‘flashback’, was it? Or are you suggesting it was a kindness he was doing the victim, to put him out of his misery?” I was silent. He had exposed a basic weakness in the defence case.

  The prosecutor continued: “Then before leaving the scene he remembers to draw the curtains and put out the light so the crime won’t be discovered. How do you explain that in terms of ‘flashback’, Mr Chesney?”

  “I think the witness would prefer to be addressed as Professor Chesney,” the judge interposed.

  “Professor Chesney. I beg your pardon.”

  “I can’t explain it,” I said. “But what seems clear from the evidence is that after Mr Dunstan left the cottage in the deceased’s car, he had no idea what to do, where to go. He drove like a madman. He abandoned the axe, after smashing a telephone box with it, he then climbed a tree and spent some hours in the tree with a rope contemplating suicide. It is obvious to me he was in a blind gibbering panic.”

  “Yes. I will come back to that, professor. Tell me: did he describe the alleged incident that produced the so-called ‘flashback’?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “No details?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did he name the perpetrator?”

  “Not till I asked. A man called Glen.”

  “No other name?”

  “No. He said he didn’t know any other name.”

  “Anything else he told you about this mysterious Glen person?”

  “No.”

  “Then we are no further ahead than we were when Dr Wilson the psychiatrist was here yesterday. I take it you have read Dr Wilson’s testimony?”

  “Mr Starling,” the judge gently rebuked him. “You forget. The witness cannot see to read.”

  “It’s quite all right,” I said. “There’s a convention about these things, Your Honour. Yes, I have ‘read’ a transcript of what Dr Wilson told the court. I read it on my PAC Mate. It’s the blind man’s personal computer. But I have to disagree with the Crown that we’re no further ahead,” I said. “Nobody knows anything about what happened in the caravan except what Mr Dunstan told the prison doctor in Cornford jail. It came out I understand in the course of a routine medical examination. Had it not been for the prison doctor who learned that an inmate was in distress banging on his cell door and having nightmares, we would not know even the little we do know. Mr Dunstan had apparently resolved never to talk about it. And then having let slip that he had been bound and beaten, he swore the doctor to secrecy and made him promise not to tell his lawyer. It was only with reluctance that he allowed himself to be persuaded and his lawyer told. Even now he refuses to divulge more. I am but the latest in a chain of doctors and counsellors to come up against this wall of silence, and that more than anything convinces me that the flashback is genuine.”

  “He is in denial. Is that it, professor?” The judge spoke.

  “Yes. But for the best possible reason. He doesn’t want to bring more shame on his family. What did he do? He stole a sum of money. What followed? He was sent away to live with a stranger. He couldn’t divulge what happened—”

  “Couldn’t?” the prosecutor said.

  “Not ‘couldn’t’ but ‘wouldn’t’. My mistake. Wouldn’t. Because he thought it was being done with the parents’ approval. The parents were colluding with the perpetrator. He thought it was part of his punishment.”

  “With respect professor, this isn’t a diagnosis. This is pure hypothesis.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you put this cock-and-bull story before the jury in all seriousness?”

  “You may call it that, sir. It’s significant I think that the parents don’t know what happened, any more than we do. Mr Dunstan has never told them. I have never thought that traits that are strong in childhood disappear. They don’t vanish. On the contrary they persist and may appear even more strongly in adulthood. Yesterday when I was with Mr Dunstan I asked about his schooling. He told me his school motto: KIA KAHA, KIA TOA. It means be strong, be a man. It seems to me that whatever was done to him in the caravan, however brutal and evidently sadistic, was to him part of the medicine. He had to take it like a man. KIA KAHA, KIA TOA. He had to take it then and today, fourteen years later, he is still taking it.”

  The judge was writing with a fountain pen. It was either the judge or the registrar. I could hear a nib scratching in the silence. Somebody coughed. I caught a whiff of perfume from across the room where the jury sat. Lawrence told me afterwards there was a women juror seated in the front row who made a lot of notes. I had sensed that one of the jurors was looking at me intently from the moment I entered the stand. The cough came again and the judge said:

  “In your view he wants to protect his family?”

  “From further disgrace—in my view, yes. They are all here, I understand. His father, his mother, his sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts. The family is everything to him.”

  The prosecutor said, “But when the police interviewed Mr Dunstan on video, professor, he did not mention any of this. Why didn’t it come up then?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “because the police are not psychologists.”

  I realised my mistake as soon as I spoke. It was a cheap jibe. My answer even if correct was self-serving. I heard the woman juror in the front row laugh. But no one else did.

  “It’s a different interview,” I said, trying to repair the gaffe. “I wouldn’t expect it to come up in that situation. The police are authority figures.”

  “So are psychologists, professor.”

  Worse was to follow. The prosecutor—I had it right the first time—was not very big but compact, and deeply suited to his vocation. He had little sympathy with psychological motivation but a gift for detail. His attention to detail—he wanted to know how many meat pies Huey had eaten on the day of the killing and what was the design on the ring his girlfriend had given him before she jilted him—was irritating, I thought, and
pedantic, until I realised how cleverly he was exploiting points of detail to confuse the jury and trivialise what had happened to Huey. But there was little I could do about it, as there was little I could do about the sticky resonance of his voice which floated into every corner of the courtroom. My own voice seemed thin by comparison.

  “Just remind us, professor: you are a clinical psychologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a forensic psychologist.”

  “No. But I have appeared in court before.

  “As an expert witness?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the defence?”

  “That is correct.”

  “When did you last give evidence for the Crown?”

  “About six years ago.”

  “And before that?…Perhaps I can help you, professor. According to my records, the only other occasion was twenty years previously, when you appeared for the Crown in a case of arson.”

  Was he right? The arsonist, I remembered with a pang, was some sort of healer with a wide following in Australia and New Zealand. He had burned down an abortion clinic. After the case I had a letter from one of his followers saying that I wasn’t the first evil, ignorant and bigoted fool “hiding in the jaundiced bowels of academia”.

  The prosecutor was saying, “I’m not talking about court reports, I am talking about you standing up and being cross-examined in court on your opinion. Twice in twenty-five years? That’s about the sum of it. Is it not?”

  I had to admire the effectiveness of the attack. He had seen an opening, and pounced. Sitting there in the stand, I took a grip of my cane which I had folded up and was holding on my lap out of sight. The air in the courtroom was chilly for November. Even so my fingers holding the cane were bathed in sweat.

  “Correct,” I said.

  “Sadistic, professor. Earlier you used the word ‘sadistic’.” He said the word in a certain way, resting his tongue on the “ess” sound, then sliding it across like a bow drawn over a violin string.