Martin van Beynen - Black Hands

Several decades after five bodies were discovered on that freezing Dunedin morning in 1994, the Bain murders still start rancorous debates in New Zealand. The case continues to divide families, friends and media personalities. It has spawned lobby groups for David and his father Robin and has made David an immediately recognisable figure.

Why should this be so? New Zealand has had other mass murders, yet the Bain shootings polarise New Zealand in the way the O J Simpson case still divides the United States. Every country has a collective store of old and modern stories; some glorious, some quirky, and some just awful. The story of the Bain murders is one of these, and has thereby entered the national consciousness.

One answer is that the Bain murders involve the middle class. Middle-class murders featuring outwardly normal and functional people always attract more interest and intrigue than random acts of violence among the less privileged.

The case stirs strong emotions. If the system has prosecuted and jailed an innocent young man who came home to find his family dead, the injustice is extreme and guaranteed to arouse outrage. Equally, if David Bain is guilty and is falsely claiming innocence, great upset is justified.

Another factor ensuring the cases celebrity could be the frustrating puzzles at the heart of the saga, which stimulate endless debate. The complex evidence seems to challenge the amateur detective in everyone. Without diminishing the horror of the shootings, it remains a classic whodunnit. In the Bain case there are only two candidates. Seldom does a murder provide such a clear-cut yet complex dilemma. The evidence allows for many views and has something for every theory. One of the most perplexing aspects is the question of what drove either Robin or David Bain to shoot their family. Why would seemingly caring and kind people want to annihilate their loved ones? How could outwardly normal, educated people cold-bloodedly murder their nearest and dearest? And if neither seem at all the type, that raises perhaps the most disturbing conclusion about the whole case that we cant trust our own judgement about people. We are happier declaring killers mad than confronting the fact they could be completely sane but capable of evil deeds.

Killings like the Bain murders demand an explanation because they shake the foundations of our beliefs. How someone can hide behind a mask and then turn overnight into a mass murderer needs to be understood partly because we need to spot the signs and be ready to take pre-emptive action. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesb says murders become symbols of other things chaos, the fear that what we see as safe and solid civilisation really is just varnish.

The case has characters that would trump the most creative of screenwriters. The figure of David Bain evokes a sympathetic response from many people. He is polite, boyish, middle class and sensitive. He is a blank page on which people can project their life-view about authority and the unfairness of society. He outwardly exhibits none of the criminal tendencies that usually make people suspicious of claims of innocence.

Few cases feature an advocate as determined as high-profile former All Black Joe Karam, who worked relentlessly to persuade the country the police had made a mess of the investigation and prosecuted an innocent man.

The Bain saga is also abnormal for its length and tortuous progress through the system. Not many New Zealand cases can boast two major trials with different results, numerous appeals, two bids for compensation and a raft of official and not-so-official inquiries. The controversy over the case goes to the heart of the New Zealand justice system including the police, juries, expert evidence, the adversarial format and the process for examining possible wrongful convictions. The case has highlighted problems with almost all facets of the system.

At the time of the Bain murders in June 1994, I was working for The Press newspaper in Christchurch. However, it wasnt until 1997, when I reviewed Joe Karams book David and Goliath, that I began to follow the case closely. I found Karams book a convincing read, although after talking to the Otago Daily Times court reporter Kay Sinclair, who had covered Davids 1995 trial, I became sceptical about a lot of Karams rather dogmatic pronouncements.

As well as reviewing Karams book, I also wrote about James McNeishs book on the case, The Mask of Sanity. McNeish, one of New Zealands most accomplished writers, had sat through Davids first trial and believed the jury had come to the right verdict guilty.

Then in 2009, I reported on the entire 58 days of the second Bain trial for The Press and the Stuff news website. Wed been promised new defence evidence that would sink the Crown case against David and I was genuinely ready to be convinced.

I wasnt terribly surprised by the jurys not guilty verdict. The defence team, led by the pugnacious Michael Reed QC, had challenged just about every aspect of the Crown case and their expert witnesses raised possibilities and added complexity that clearly had a major impact on the jury.

After listening to all the evidence and seeing each of the witnesses give evidence, I concluded David was far more likely to have been the killer than his father. Most of the reporters who covered the trial thought so too. One of my bosses at the time, Paul Thompson, suggested I write an opinion piece on my doubts about the verdict. As David himself said in a New Idea article after the trial: If anyone can pass judgement it can only be those who sat through the whole trial.

The article seemed to touch a nerve in the country and was widely read and reviewed. In saying the jury had got it wrong, I nailed my colours on the Bain controversy to the mast. For a journalist it was an unusual thing to do and it felt like I was asking for trouble, but at least it put my view out in the open so people could judge what I wrote about the case against that background.

The developments in the case since 1997 were certainly deserving of another book. I thought the trial would be the end of the matter and didnt expect David to apply for compensation. In the event, he did, prolonging the states connection to the case until late 2016.

The idea of writing a book on top of my day job was a daunting prospect. The 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes and a brush with cancer gave me plenty of scope to procrastinate, but the book became something that had to be done. Part of my motivation was to work through all the material to check whether I might have got it wrong with my prognostications about Davids guilt. Also, at the back of my mind was the thought that buried somewhere in the mass of material on the case was the key to solving it.