“UNTOLD MISERY”
The difficulty for police is keeping interest in a cold case alive. Repeated appeals for information and tugs at heartstrings can fall on deaf ears. It helps if the families of victims remind people of the impact of a pointless death. In one pithy phrase, John Reynolds’ younger sister, Frances Muir, talked to us about the “untold misery” caused by her brother’s death. She remembers Reynolds as a man who was “always looking for a bargain”. He was a good uncle to her sons.
With Heavy Metal, we have tried to show that families find it much more difficult to move on if the killer is not found. An answer is often more important than an arrest.
My partner in crime, Blair Ensor, deserves most of the credit for Heavy Metal. He drove the project with limitless energy and enthusiasm. For Blair, nothing was too difficult or too long ago. No detail was too insignificant and no interview subject too hard to find. Much of the work had to be squeezed in between his job as the chief news director in the Christchurch newsroom and his responsibilities as a new parent.
We could have chosen to focus on a number of major unsolved crimes, but the Reynolds murder – a well-known local mystery – seemed the ideal subject for a shorter crime podcast in the same vein as the more ambitious Black Hands podcast that I wrote last year. This case looked manageable and the police were keen to draw the public’s attention to the killing, which they still hope to solve.
The Reynolds murder lacks the attention-grabbing material of more high-profile murders, but it has many interesting details. Any murder is extraordinary in its own way. Intersecting lives and secrets are always exposed as the homicide investigation spreads out from the crime scene. That can never be dull.
My role was in writing the script, riding shotgun with Blair on some of the interviews and keeping his micro-management in check. After the 11-episode Black Hands, Heavy Metal should have been a doddle… but it had its own challenges.
The Bain family murder in Dunedin in 1994 – subject of the Black Hands podcast – was the most examined and analysed case in New Zealand history. It sparked bitter controversy and endless speculation.
The Reynolds murder case never made it to trial. The evidence was sketchy. The suspects were hard to pin down and tended to get lost in the conjecture. Nevertheless, the question was the same. Whodunnit?
Last week I sat down with John Reynolds’ widow, now in her late 60s, who in the podcast is called