A family waits
Stuff podcast Heavy Metal, by Martin van Beynen and Blair Ensor, explores the murder of Christchurch scrap dealer John Reynolds two decades ago.
Are you sitting down?’’ he asked her gently. Frances Muir thought something must have happened to one of his two children. She heard Michael, the quiet one in the family, breathing, hesitating.
‘‘John’s been assaulted. He’s dead,’’ Michael Reynolds said.
John was John Thomas Reynolds, their hardcase, older brother. He was a 55-year-old, Christchurch scrap-metal dealer, who had been beaten to death in his yard, called Garden City Scrap Co, only hours before.
Michael had found his body around 6pm after Reynolds’ anxious wife had called to say he hadn’t come home as expected.
The scrap-metal dealer was unfailingly reliable so she knew something was wrong.
By the time Michael got to the factory unit in Hazeldean Rd, it was dark and he used a torch to make his way around the building, dodging drums and piles of scrap metal, looking for his brother.
It was April 28, 1996. As his torch beam swept around the yard, Michael was beginning to think his brother wasn’t there. They’d had coffee that morning in Reynolds’ messy office but now he could be anywhere.
Then he saw him near the scales, not far from the entrance. He was lying face down in his work clothes with blood spreading from his head. His hard-as-nails brother, who would never back away from a fight, was dead; his head smashed in.
Muir, who was living on the West Coast, had last seen her brother a few months before.
When she was in Christchurch, she would often drop by the yard, where Reynolds bought odds and ends of scrap metal from the public seven days a week.
‘‘He was always there. He liked nothing better than to be at work,’’ she says. ‘‘I would bring a packet of gingernuts with me because he was a bit tight with his money and all he offered was coffee.’’
Muir knew the scrap metal business was rough and ready, or in her words ‘‘dodgy’’, and that her brother had some troubled customers. But the news of his death came like a physical blow.
‘‘I was stunned. It was just such a shock. It’s something you don’t ever get over. If somebody is sick and they die you’re expecting it but when someone is taken like that, it’s such an absolute waste of a life.’’
She wondered if her brother had spoken out once too often.
‘‘John was a bit of rough diamond. He was a straight shooter and could be very rude.’’
Reynolds was a year older than her and growing up in Bolton near Manchester, they were close,
Muir, now 75, says.
Her brother, she says, loved collecting – bottles, stamps, coins, china, anything. Part of the attraction was finding a bargain and turning a find into cash.
Their parents Mona and Tom, emigrated to Australia in 1960 when she and Reynolds were in their late teens.
Reynolds’ mother found Australia difficult because of the heat and the family moved to Gore where Tom got a job in the freezing works.
In 1963, Muir moved to Christchurch, to where, by then, her parents had moved from Gore. Reynolds joined the family two years later.
Within two years, he was married to a young Ma¯ ori woman who was eight years younger and who worked in a dairy Reynolds frequented for his bananaflavoured milk shakes. The marriage produced two children and Reynolds liked to keep some distance between his rough and tumble work life and domesticity.
‘‘After work he went home to his wife. He never went to the hotel. He wasn’t a drinker, he would go home,’’ Muir says.
Muir says if he had his own way the house would have been ‘‘full of crap’’ but his wife kept the house immaculate.
‘‘He wouldn’t have been an easy person to live with. You couldn’t change John. It was just the way he was ... One year he said I’m going to make some wine. O my god. I think it was plum wine. It was absolutely hideous and we all had to sit around and drink it. He also made beer. He could never sit still, even as a young fella.’’
Reynolds was made redundant from his railways job in 1990 after which he went into the scrap metal industry. It suited his collecting instincts and his bargaining skills.
After the killing, Muir got regular updates about the investigation into her brother’s murder.
Initially she thought the killer or killers would be found quickly. ‘‘Then it started to drag on and after a while you lose hope.’’ She fully supports any renewed effort to find Reynolds’ killer and believes it would not take much to solve the case.
‘‘Nothing goes unseen. At the end of the day somebody else must know.’’
She still thinks it was a violent robbery despite the fact Reynolds still had $2200 on him when he was found. Her brother often carried several rolls of notes, she says. She believes the killer got some cash but didn’t realise her brother had another wad of notes in his shirt pocket.
The shirt pocket cash was probably the money he used to pay suppliers, she says, and her brother may have had a separate stash of notes in another pocket, perhaps for the washing machine he and his wife were going to buy that afternoon.
Memories fade and 22 years is a long time but Muir keeps her brother’s memory alive in small ways.
In a light blue address book, she keeps several photos. Reynolds features in one photograph reading a newspaper.
‘‘Probably looking for a bargain knowing John,’’ Muir says.while his killer remains undiscovered, the family can’t put the matter to rest, she says. A long way from the West Coast, another member of the Reynolds family is also looking for an end to the matter - Reynolds’ older sister Marjorie Collier, who had stayed in England when the family moved to Australia. She was already married when the family left.
Reynolds used to defend Collier from bullying remarks from people who made fun of her thick glasses.
Only able to be contacted by letter, Collier, who still lives in Bolton, wrote to Stuff saying she was grateful her brother’s case hadn’t been forgotten.
She is approaching her 80s and says she loved her brother and thinks about him often. ‘‘It would be very good to have some kind of closure for my peace of mind while I am still alive,’’ she writes.
Heavy Metal is a three-part podcast series. You can listen to all the episodes now on itunes and Stitcher.