Echoes of an unhinged killer
Last week’s shooting of two police officers, one fatally, is a reminder of the dangers our police can face. Constable Matthew Hunt is our 33rd policeman to be killed in the line of duty over the last 120 years, with roughly the same number seriously injured.
The life of our most infamous police killer is well documented. Kowhitirangi dairy farmer and precision marksman Stanley Graham took out four policemen two Home Guardsmen and a civilian before he was shot by a police marksman on October 21, 1941.
Graham was as local as you get on the Coast. Born and raised in Kokatahi, he worked from an early age at his father’s Longford Hotel, 10 miles out of Hokitika. It was there he met his wife, Dorothy McCoy, when she moved from Rakaia in the late 1920s to work at the hotel.
After living in the hotel for six months, they took up a dairy property at Kowhitirangi (called Koiterangi back then) where they raised a son and daughter. The couple were not known to socialise much, but the Grahams kept cordial relations with their neighbours through the 1930s.
That all changed around 1940 after a failed cattle breeding project left them in serious debt, closely followed by the Westland Cooperative Dairy Company condemning their cream, meaning they were suddenly incomeless.
Graham’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre, ‘‘unhinged’’ was the term many neighbours used. He blamed them for his woes, poisoning his milk he claimed. He manifested his anger by ranting and raving, storming out to abuse them whenever they passed his gate.
Graham was a known gun nut, a superb marksman, but alarm bells really began ringing for many in the community when Graham and his wife began practising their target shooting out the back of their house in the middle of the night. His arsenal of guns was no secret.
As community concern escalated, the police moved to take his .303 registered for ‘‘war use’’. This was grudgingly handed over on July 15, 1941, but the couple still held onto a shotgun, two Winchester rifles, plus their big bore .405. Two months later in Christchurch, Dorothy Graham purchased a 7mm Mauser rifle. This would be the weapon Graham used to shoot his police victims.
On October 4, 1941, a neighbour of Graham’s, Anker Madsen, complained to Constable Edward Best in nearby Kaniere that Graham had accused him of poisoning his cattle. Appreciating Graham’s hot headedness, Best decided to not respond and just let things cool down. It had worked before with the man.
A week later, Graham confronted Madsen again, this time with a rifle. Best drove out to discuss the matter, but backed off when Graham pointed two rifles out the window at him. Best tore back to Hokitika for back up and returned to the farm with Sergeant William Cooper, 43, and Constables Frederick Jordan, 26, and Percy Tulloch, 35.
After a short conversation in his house, Sergeant Cooper moved to disarm Graham, who retaliated by shooting and wounding him, and then shot Constable Best as well. As Constables Jordan and Tulloch came running into the house, he killed them instantly, with one bullet going through one and into the other.
As the badly wounded Cooper was attempting to escape, Graham shot him dead on the path in front of the house. Best was shot once more after allegedly attempting to plead with Graham. He would die three days later in Westland Hospital in Hokitika.
Graham then went on to fatally wound George Ridley, a field instructor for the Canterbury education board, who had rushed over from the nearby school when he heard the shots. An armed Home Guard local had accompanied him, but Graham threatened and disarmed the man.
Graham then fled into his farmland and bush, an area he knew intimately.
Returning the next evening under cover of darkness, he discovered three Home Guardsmen in his house, and picked off two of them, Richard ‘‘Maxie’’ Coulson and Gregory Hutchison, in the ensuing gun battle. Slipping back into the darkness, Graham had sustained a wound to his right shoulder.
The manhunt was the biggest in New Zealand history, personally overseen by Commissioner of Police Dennis Cummings. One hundred armed police and several hundred New Zealand Army and Home Guard personnel combed the surrounding countryside for 12 days, their orders to shoot Graham on sight if they found him armed.
On October 10, both of Graham’s Winchester rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition were discovered in a bush cache. One of his rifles was covered in dried blood, confirming he was wounded. Over the next few days, Graham’s blood-soaked shirt and the .303 rifle he had stolen were recovered also.
Sighted on subsequent days by home guardsmen and civilians alike, he was fired on while attempting to return to his home or walking in the vicinity of it, each time managing to slip away.
It was not until October 21 that the wounded Graham was finally shot by Auckland Constable James D’Arcy Quirke with a .303 rifle from a distance of 25 metres as he crawled through a patch of scrub.
He died in Westland Hospital the following morning, just shy of his 41st birthday, in the same place where Constable Best had succumbed to his injuries. Graham is buried at Hokitika Cemetery.
Later that month, the Graham property was burnt to the ground by neighbours and Mrs Graham and her two children left the area for good.
The tragedy is well remembered by several detailed biographical accounts of his life and murders. A 1968 Australian drama series episode, Homicide, was based on the incident, while a documentary produced in 1974 by Nightwood Films recorded many recollections of those involved and was the first time a large cache of photographs taken during the manhunt by Home Guardsman Dave Stevenson was made public.
The tragedy entered mainstream culture in 1981 with the making of British-New Zealand film, Bad Blood. Australian actor Jack Thompson played Graham, the man who became ‘‘unhinged’’.