HOUSE OF HORRORS
Re-examining the Bain shootings
In June 1994, five members of the middle-class Bain family were murdered in their Dunedin home. David Bain was jailed for these deaths in 1995 but never stopped claiming he was innocent. In 2009, he was acquitted in a second trial. In a 10-part podcast series starting today, Martin van Beynen re-examines the evidence and possible motives for the shootings. Here, he describes the family at the centre of one of New Zealand’s greatest murder mysteries.
The murder scene police discovered at 65 Every St, Dunedin on June 20, 1994 was a house of horrors in more ways than one. Weatherboards were rotten, windows had jammed, daylight could be seen through some of the walls, and maggots crawled in the bathroom.
The Bain family that inhabited the Andersons Bay home were hoarders and collectors so the grounds resembled a dump. Rooms were piled up with household goods and bric-a-brac, though many held interesting souvenirs from their time in Papua New Guinea.
Only the front room, just inside the front door, was kept reasonably tidy. It was used for family meetings and to receive visitors.
By the time the family was killed, housework had slipped even more than usual and the home had a bad smell.
Visitors approached the property along a path to the front door.
Built around 1850, the once handsome but gloomy villa was already way past its best when the Bains bought it in 1974. When they returned to New Zealand in 1988, it was almost beyond repair.
The first police on the scene still remember the uncertainty of that morning as they approached the house.
Geoff Wyllie had been a police officer for 31⁄2-years when he and his partner Kim Stephenson, who had been on the force for five years, got the call on June 20, 1994.
The constables, whose patch was South Dunedin, were on the 7am shift. ‘‘I was making the coffee and Kim wasn’t feeling very well and thinking about going home again and then the call came over the phone,’’ Wyllie says.
‘‘We had very little information – just to go to 65 Every St and the whole family is dead. We couldn’t get any more information immediately. So many times you get called to these things and it sounds horrendous and there’s nothing. But we didn’t take it lightly either.’’
When they arrived at Every St, an ambulance was waiting outside No 65.
Stephenson says he thought the call might be about a gas leak but the sight of people taking cover behind the ambulance suggested otherwise.
As the officers came up the path in the dark, they saw a head and shoulders in a window by the front door. This would turn out to be David Bain.
Both constables were worried the figure might start shooting so they turned off their torches. ‘‘We hopped into the flax and watched for 20 seconds. Afterwards, I said to Kim we were lucky it was David Bain, not David Gray.’’
Gray fatally shot 13 people, including police officer Stewart Guthrie in Aramoana, about 20km northeast of Dunedin, in 1990. Stephenson, who was a cop in Dunedin at the time of the Aramoana shootings, says the Gray killings didn’t even occur to him.
Back at the Bain house, from his position to the right of the front door, Wyllie looked through a window, seeing a gap in some long curtains. ‘‘I could see a firearm on the floor and I could see a hand.’’
Wyllie and Stephenson were joined by Constable Les Andrew and Sergeant Murray Stapp. They armed themselves with .38 police revolvers and tried again to get David to open the door.
Wyllie, who stayed with the force until 2015, says he went to the window where Bain was sitting on his bedroom floor. ‘‘I remember asking him to open the door and he said ‘no’. I asked him, ‘Where’s your father?’ Often, it’s the father in these matters and he just pointed to the room across the hallway.’’
With the gun accounted for, Wyllie thought they were probably dealing with a murder-suicide. ‘‘But you don’t take anything for granted. This was clearly a serious homicide and the adrenaline was running a bit.’’
Their first job was to clear the house and to administer first aid to anybody who needed it.
‘‘All the training you get is that in a scene like that you don’t touch anything and you don’t go anywhere where you’re not required. All that stuff is on your mind especially when you’ve only been in the job 31⁄2-years and you don’t want to do anything wrong.’’
Wyllie helped to find each of the five bodies. The most haunting find was Arawa, who appeared to have pleaded on her knees before being shot. ‘‘I remember thinking that was horrendous. Looking at Stephen, he fought for his life, you think about that afterwards.’’
Stephen’s room was used as a storeroom for household items. Dozens of small arrows, posted by police, indicated blood-spatter marks.
Stephenson says the Bain house with all its bodies was not the worst scene he attended in his 18 years with the police.
‘‘Gun shots, by comparison to car accidents, are fairly clean. I just went in there and did my job. I always found motor vehicle accidents more upsetting because there was carnage and there would be people alive who needed your help and you want to help. I found them worse to deal with than that scene.’’
Stephenson stayed in the hallway to cover Wyllie and Stapp after going into the lounge to find Robin dead on the floor. ‘‘I was immediately struck by the magazine on its narrow edge right next to Mr Bain’s hand. Right away, I thought something wasn’t right. When I think about the case, that’s what I think of.’’
David’s ‘‘weeping and wailing’’ also made him suspicious, he says.
Wyllie says he followed the case over the years and has often seen how polarising it could be. ‘‘People start talking about the case and I think ‘you don’t know what you are talking about’.
‘‘I can’t for the life of me fathom how people have come to the view David didn’t do it. They haven’t looked at the facts. That’s my view.’’
After the bodies were checked, the first job for investigators was to secure and record the scene before bedclothes and other items were moved to access the bodies.
As the rooms were so cluttered, it was hard to move the deceased relatives without disturbing surrounding articles.
The main recording job fell to Trevor Gardener, a Dunedin senior constable and senior photographic technician who arrived at the house about 10am. He left the police soon afterwards. He was armed with a video and stills camera, and began by taking video footage of the exterior of the house. He was then called inside to video and then photograph the individual scenes where the five bodies were found.
The video, taken little more than three hours after the five murders, provided the most valuable footage because it showed the various interior scenes virtually untouched.
Gardener would be later criticised for not turning on the time and date device on the video camera, nor taking notes about his images. He would reply that wasn’t his job.
This failure caused problems because Gardener couldn’t tell which were the original scene photos without looking at the negatives. Fortunately, police had his comprehensive video footage.
The photographs would show in graphic detail how the Bain family lost their lives. Unfortunately, they could not reveal who the killer was.