Slip of the tongue that undid a brutal killer.
An interesting interview with the former husband of the slain Mei Fan suddenly turned shocking for Sam Boyer.
ON MARCH 28 last year, almost five months after Chinese immigrant Mei Fan had been found stabbed to death in her Miramar home, I decided on a whim to call her former husband. Michael Edwin Preston, 60, answered the phone. After telling me for more than an hour that he was an innocent man, he let slip what I could only take to be an admission of guilt.
IHANG up and sit for a few moments, staring at my desk phone. In my notepad I’ve just scrawled three large question marks beside an asterisk, marking a quote of real significance.
A minute earlier I ended the last of three very cordial phone conversations with Preston, the prime suspect in the investigation into the brutal murder of Wellington woman Mei Fan.
Still shocked by what Preston had just said, I turn to my colleague: ‘‘I think he’s just confessed to me.’’
It’s about 4.30pm on a Friday and my heart is beating a little faster than it had at any other point in the day.
Earlier, another reporter had mentioned that maybe Preston would confess. ‘‘Every time I go into an interview with a suspect, I think ‘this could be the one who confesses to me’,’’ he said.
‘‘Yeah,’’ I replied. ‘‘Wouldn’t that be nice.’’
I’m replaying that conversation in my head as I plug my headphones into my dictaphone, because that is essentially what has just happened.
I skip ahead to around the 10-minute mark. I listen back. I turn the volume up as loud as it will go. It’s the quietest sentence spoken in the whole interview. But there it is, spoken clearly. He is telling me about a conversation he had shared with a Housing New Zealand tenancy manager when he drops the bomb.
The conversation took place, he says casually, ‘‘several weeks after I’d done it’’.
We had spoken on the phone for over an hour, exclusively about one thing – the stabbing death of his ex-wife in the laundry of her home.
We weren’t talking about other things he may or may not have done ‘‘several weeks’’ before the chat with his tenancy manager.
To my mind, the admission could mean only one thing: that he’d ‘‘done it’’, he’d killed Fan, stabbing her 38 times and leaving a carving knife through her neck. It’s said almost in passing. I take my headphones out. I’ve been a crime reporter at three newspapers, I’ve interviewed a lot of crooked people and been told some extraordinary things, but never have I finished an interview with the realisation I may have just caught out a killer.
His lawyers will later push the point – when I am in the witness box in the High Court at Wellington – that it was merely a slip of the tongue.
I couldn’t disagree. He clearly slipped up, he didn’t mean to tell me that, to tell me he’d done it.
The interview, to that point, had been interesting enough.
IRANG Preston the first time just before lunch. He is chirpy and expresses surprise that I’m the first reporter to contact him, almost five months since his former wife’s death.
In truth I had tried unsuccessfully to talk to him in the days immediately after Fan’s body was discovered with a 32-centimetre carving knife still embedded in her throat.
He had been arrested for breaching a protection order Fan had taken out against him, but was released without being charged over her murder.
I had been unable to track him down, and his family had not wanted to talk.
But he wants to talk to me, he says, to tell his side of the story.
He has theories, he says, about what might have happened and who might have killed her. ‘‘Let me call my lawyer and see if they will let me speak with you. Call me back in five minutes.’’
I call him back, this time recording the conversation through a digital dictaphone plugged into my desk phone.
He apologises. He wants to talk to me, but his lawyer says he can’t. Damn. He explains in detail what his lawyer has said, that there’s no way he should talk to me, that, according to his lawyer, it’s not worth it for him, it’s too great a risk.
Then he stays on the line for 50 minutes. Every time there’s a question he doesn’t like or he talks himself into a corner, it seems to me, he spontaneously bursts into stuttering tears, sobbing down the phone and changing the thread of conversation.
However, Preston does not want to get off the phone. He clearly likes talking – at times rambling, his thoughts and theories scattershot.
He’s the centre of attention. I’m a reporter, I’ve sought him out, I’m listening to him. I am a soapbox for him.
Fan – towards whom it is clear, to my mind, that he still harbours a lot of ill will – was most likely assassinated by Chinese hitmen sent to New Zealand under the command of a slighted military officer.
‘‘He put a contract out on her in China,’’ he tells me. ‘‘He’s got contacts, an old boys’ network. For him to have someone reach out in New Zealand, it’s just too easy.’’
Then there’s this ‘‘Maori woman’’, he says, who had visited Fan to buy some jewellery Fan sold through Trade Me from her home. Maybe she’d done it.
‘‘The police don’t have a clue what’s going on,’’ he says.
On and on he goes, often volunteering information without me asking for it, haphazardly segueing from one tangent to another.
His dead wife is a ‘‘career criminal’’ he alleges, she had been having affairs while they were married, she is a fraud, she was in the country illegally, she lies about her age, she drives without a licence, she was violent and had beaten him with a lamp, a broom, a beer bottle.
She would rub his nose in the fact she had a new boyfriend, he says.
He had used her passwords to access her computer and ‘‘found out that she had way more lovers than I ever thought . . . this woman just kept a catalogue of her conquests’’.
It was ‘‘unfortunate’’ he had got ‘‘embroiled into her little game’’, he tells me.
We wrap up the call, cordially. Preston is pleased he’s had the chance to talk to me, he says. He’s looking forward to the story in the newspaper the next day.
It’s an exclusive for me: the first interview with the person I assume to be the lead suspect in an unsolved homicide case.
IQUICKLY call the investigation head, Detective Senior Sergeant John van den Heuvel, for police comment. ‘‘Is Michael Preston the prime suspect?’’ I ask. I assume so, but van den Heuvel, cagey with comments as all police officers are, will only say that ‘‘the suspect list’’ has narrowed.
‘‘Suspects obviously include people known to Mei,’’ he says. ‘‘We’re still keeping an open mind as to who may have done this. I can’t be specific but, needless to say, our suspect list is now quite short.’’
I realise as I start typing up my story that I want to be able to call Preston the prime suspect. The police wording wasn’t strong enough, and I can’t editorialise that, so I call Preston back.
He answers. I just want a quick clarification: ‘‘Have the police ever told you that you’re the main suspect?’’
He says they have never said as much, but it was clear to him that police ‘‘believe it was me’’. He keeps talking. He likes to talk. His lawyer had told him he was an idiot for speaking with me the first time and had threatened to quit the case, he says. He laughs and keeps talking.
His dialogue turns to his wife again. He says something about her having ‘‘put up a fight’’.
He mentions her injuries and the mess at the scene.
This, remember, is a suspect who was arrested shortly after Fan’s body was discovered and should, by rights, have no knowledge of her injuries or the crime scene.
I ask how he knows about her wounds.
His response is the tale about hearing it secondhand from his and Fan’s shared Housing New Zealand tenancy manager.
She had described the scene to him during a casual chat ‘‘several weeks after I’d done it’’, he says.
Ten minutes into this second interview: asterisk, three large questions marks.
He’s quickly back to talking about her injuries – he had been allowed to see her bandaged body the day before cremation.
The way he tells it, he’d pretty well catalogued the full damage to her body.
She had black eyes and scratches on her forearms, there was a bandage around her neck, and ‘‘every single finger and thumb was cut. Their description of a brutal killing doesn’t do it justice’’, he says.
I don’t think he notices quite what he has just moments earlier said. He ends the conversation, saying we will talk again soon.
IPLAY the call back, grateful I decided to record the conversation as well as taking notes. I play it again and again, fully satisfied he did say what I heard. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue. As well as having recorded the interview myself, the police, I will learn at trial, had also recorded him. Preston’s phone was bugged and police produce our conversation as evidence.
As I tell the Crown prosecutor from the witness box, a slip of the tongue, to my mind, could be one of two things.
Either he just used a wrong word, or he accidentally told the truth when he wasn’t supposed to.
‘‘I am innocent,’’ Preston had said to me at one point during our afternoon chats. ‘‘I didn’t do it, of course not.’’
But I don’t get off the phone thinking, ‘‘this is an innocent man’’.
I turn to my desk mate. ‘‘I think he’s just confessed to me.’’