Gone but not forgotten
Her younger brother Michael was on the phone. ‘‘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 hard-case 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 him to say he hadn’t come home as expected at 1pm. 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. In the industrial area just outside of the Christchurch main centre, it was quiet as a country churchyard.
As his torch beam swept around the yard, Michael was beginning to think his brother wasn’t there.
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. M
Muir, who was living on the West Coast in Kumara in a little green cottage when Michael called, 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. He would just come out and say things.’’
Reynolds’ ability to handle himself when things got physical had always given her confidence he would be all right in a tight situation.
‘‘He wasn’t that big a guy. Probably only five ten or five eleven but he was very strong and would take anybody on ... he had a certain presence that said ‘don’t mess with me’.’’
Reynolds was a year older than her and growing up in Bolton near Manchester, they were close, Muir, now 75, says.
‘‘He was only 15 months older. He was a bit of a ratbag as a kid, even as an adult. He was always out doing. He wasn’t the kind to sit around and always had mates doing the things naughty boys do. But they were no worse than any other kids around the neighbourhood.
‘‘He found school work hard. Just had trouble sitting still. His mind was always working but it wasn’t on school work.’’
Their parents Mona and Tom, emigrated to Australia in 1960 when she and Reynolds were in their late teens. An older sister Marjorie, who was married, stayed behind in England.
It was sad leaving Marjorie behind and Muir recalls how Reynolds had once got in a fight to defend her.
‘‘She had very poor eyesight and thick glasses which kids used to tease her about. She used to get very upset. I remember one kid was giving her a hard time and John sorted him out.’’
In Australia Reynolds lived at home with his parents and went straight to work. One job was in a tannery where he earned good money for dirty, heavy work.
‘‘He made lots of friends especially in the Greek and Italian community. He got on really well with them,’’ Muir says.
Reynolds’ mother Mona found Australia difficult because of the heat and the family moved to Gore where Tom got a job in the freezing works.
Muir and Reynolds both had jobs in Australia and stayed behind, at one point living together. His penchant for trouble continued.
When Reynolds was about 19 he was shot and although he later liked to show off his wounds and make up stories, the truth was more mundane.
‘‘He and a mate went shooting in the bush and were fooling around. It was an accident and he got shot in the stomach. He was in hospital for two days and by the end of the week he was back to work,’’ Muir says.
Muir had a difficult marriage and at one point her brother had to intervene.
‘‘My then husband, he was being a complete idiot so John kicked him out. He came back a couple of nights later and set the house on fire while we were all in bed. They found some torn up phone books and John said it must have been that arse I kicked out of here and sure enough it was.’’
In 1963 Muir moved to Christchurch, to where, by then, her parents had moved from Gore.
Tom worked as a maintenance engineer for a lift company. Reynolds joined the family two years later. His first job was as a gardener at the then Sunnyside mental hospital in Hillmorton and after a couple of years he got a job at the railways workshop in Addington as a storeman.
Within two years he was married to a young Maori woman who was eight years younger and who worked in a dairy Reynolds frequented for his banana- flavoured milk shakes.
The marriage produced two children and Reynolds liked to keep some distance between his rough and tumble work life and domesticity. His collecting continued. Muir says if he had his own way the house would have been ‘‘full of crap’’ but his wife kept the house immaculate.
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. One is of her mother putting out the washing at their Melbourne home. Reynolds also features in the photograph, reading a newspaper.
While his killer remains undiscovered, the family can’t put the matter to rest, she says.
A long way from Kumara, another member of the Reynolds family is also looking for an end to the matter.
This is Reynolds’ sister Marjorie Collier who stayed in Bolton when her family moved to Australia. She was already married when the family left.
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.