Kayaking courtesy of police
New Zealand police were so worried about Christopher Lewis’s threat to royalty, they sent him on a taxpayer-funded island holiday.
It has been 14 years since Christopher John Lewis took a shot at the Queen in Dunedin, when the teen terrorist-turned-Buddhist finds himself on a taxpayer-funded holiday.
He and his partner are fishing and kayaking on Great Barrier Island, with free accommodation, daily spending money and a 4WD – courtesy of the New Zealand police.
‘‘I started to feel like royalty,’’ Lewis writes in his memoir of the
10-day trip in November 1995. So great are police fears that the now 31-year-old will again try to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II, their solution is to exile him while the monarch and a swag of heads of states are in Auckland for the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) talks.
‘‘My name came up on a list which the police drew up, of suspected radicals with political ideals that had seen them (at some point or another) clash with the law,’’ Lewis writes.
While police later confirm that Lewis was sent to the island for security reasons, he is not under
24-hour surveillance.
Lewis writes: ‘‘All in all, I had a great holiday and wasn’t at all fazed to spend 10 days away from Auckland.
‘‘Of course, had I wanted to shoot someone from CHOGM it would have been a simple task to just fly back to Auckland and do so.’’
The truth?
Given how paranoid police were about Lewis’s threat to the Queen’s life in the 1990s, their subdued response to his 1981 assassination attempt in Dunedin was surprising.
Former Dunedin Detective Sergeant Tom Lewis, who is no relation of Christopher Lewis, has no doubt there was a police coverup.
‘‘You will never get a true file on that, it was reactivated, regurgitated, bits pulled off it, other false bits put on it ... they were in damage control so many times.’’
According to Tom Lewis, who was initially the officer assigned to the case, orders to cover up the assassination attempt came from the top – then prime minister Robert Muldoon.
It was feared New Zealand would never get another royal tour and that police would be the laughing stock of the British press.
Paul Taane, a childhood mate of Lewis who carried out several burglaries and arsons with him, said Lewis confided in him about the plot.
When asked if the assassination attempt was covered up by authorities, Taane replied ‘‘guaranteed’’.
‘‘You don’t hear about it. And they don’t want to talk about it.’’
On October 14, 1981, the day a shot was heard across Otago Museum Reserve as the Queen greeted thousands of Kiwi fans, police downplayed the incident, telling reporters the sound was merely a council sign falling over.
However, rumours persisted, fuelled by a tip to the British press from within the royal entourage.
Police later said it may have been a person letting off firecrackers near the Medical School Library.
Despite these public denials, Christopher Lewis was in police custody just over a week later.
Tom Lewis alleges the 17-yearold’s first statement to police was destroyed.
Under questioning, Christopher Lewis claimed he had the Queen lined up for a shot as the royal couple met fans, the former detective said.
‘‘He was just about to pull the trigger. He was just tightening the trigger, he could just see her hat and was lining up the hat.’’
Now based on the Gold Coast, Tom Lewis claimed a ‘‘very accurate’’ hand-drawn map recovered from the teenager’s bedroom showed how he planned to shoot from the Octagon.
But that plan was thwarted when two policemen walked in front of the teenager’s view.
The Adams Building, where Christopher Lewis let off a shot from his perch in a toilet cubicle on the fifth floor, was his ‘‘Plan B’’.
Tom Lewis said he was with the suspect when police re-enacted his assassination plans in the city’s Octagon, and later from the Adams Building.
And the teen got close. Very close. ‘‘If he had waited until she walked a wee bit closer ... it could have been less than 50 metres.’’
Tom Lewis wrote extensively about the cover-up in his book, Coverups And Copouts, published in 1998.
Some years earlier, the former cop had gone public, prompting top brass to deny allegations of a cover-up while claiming all details of the incident were made public.
The 1995 police statement said the case was widely reported at the time, with the incident referenced in the 1981 police annual report.
That report, obtained by Stuff, reads: ‘‘The discharge of a firearm during the visit of Her Majesty the Queen serves to remind us all of the potential risks to royalty, particularly during public walks.’’
Christopher Lewis, in his memoir Last Words, claimed that, while in custody, he was visited by ‘‘high-ranking police officers’’ from Wellington.
‘‘The Dunedin police were rocking from the pressure the ‘topbrass’ were putting on them from Wellington.
‘‘Many heads rolled because of this. And the cover-up did not stop there,’’ Lewis wrote.
Interviewed by senior New Zealand SIS officers, Lewis claimed he was offered a ‘‘new deal’’.
‘‘That if I was ever to mention the events surrounding my interviews or the organisation, or that I was in the building, or that I was shooting from it – that they would make sure I ‘suffered a fate worse than death’.’’
The charge
Police job sheets released to Stuff reveal that Christopher John Lewis initially faced a charge of treason, or attempted treason.
Tom Lewis, who was later taken off the case, said he was dumbfounded to learn the charge was downgraded.
Lewis’s former lawyer, Murray Hanan, said police did not want to hear any talk of his client shooting at the Queen. ‘‘They kept on saying ‘oh no, oh no’.’’
Hanan believed a message had come from ‘‘up-top, politically’’ to downplay the incident. ‘‘The fact an attempted assassination of the Queen had taken place in New Zealand with a nutcase who later said he was trying to establish a new IRA movement . . . it was just too politically hot to handle.’’
Hanan was puzzled as to why Lewis was never charged with treason, with capital punishment remaining on the government’s books until 1989.
‘‘I think the government took the view that he is a bit nutty and has had a hard upbringing, so it won’t be too harsh.’’
Hanan did not believe anyone else was involved in the assassination attempt, with Lewis ultimately claiming full responsibility. ‘‘That was typical Christopher.’’
On December 10, 1981 in the High Court at Dunedin, Christopher Lewis was sentenced to three years’ jail, after pleading guilty to 17 charges from his exploits in the months leading up to the royal visit. They included aggravated robbery, arson and burglary.
He was never charged with attempting to kill the Queen. Instead, it was possession of a firearm in a public place and discharging a firearm.
‘‘From their investigation, the police were satisfied that at no time could the accused have been close enough to the royal party to have been within effective range of any member of that party and, in fact, when he discharged that rifle, the royal party would not have been visible to him,’’ the official police summary said.
‘‘Subsequently, the accused admitted that he had in fact discharged the firearms directly into the ground.’’
Five days after his arrest, a confidential letter, obtained under the Official Information Act, was sent to the then commissioner of police about the incident. ‘‘Because of the lack of the physical evidence and Lewis’s psychiatric history, we may never know exactly what happened.’’
The release
‘FREED – The BOY GUERILLA’ screams the headline on The Truth in June 1984.
Christopher Lewis’s release from custody does not go unnoticed.
Having tried to escape youth prison and then finishing his sentence in a psychiatric hospital, his freedom sparks a flurry of official correspondence between government departments.
One letter, seen by Stuff, cites a visiting psychiatrist warning that the former teen terrorist has the ‘‘potential to plan and carry out criminal activities on a very large scale’’.
They are right to be worried. ‘‘I don’t think that anything before or after, has ever made me feel so happy as when I finally drove out the gate of the hospital and headed south to Dunedin,’’ Lewis writes in his memoir.
He is finally free but far from reformed.
A trained ninja, Christopher Lewis is still to rob a handful of banks, spark a major West Coast manhunt, fake a passport and ultimately, to murder. He will spend most of his 20s inside some of New Zealand’s harshest prisons. Does his ‘‘enlightenment’’ through Buddhism and yoga change his criminal course?
●➤ The Snowman And The Queen is a five-part Stuff series looking at the life and crimes of Christopher John Lewis, a self-styled teen terrorist and trained ‘‘ninja’’ whose bizarre criminal antics kept police busy from his school days until his strange suicide in prison at age 33. Follow the next chapter tomorrow.