Martin van Beynen
The writer of the international hit Black Hands is back with another Stuff podcast. has teamed up with fellow investigative journalist Blair Ensor to produce Heavy Metal about the brutal murder of Christchurch scrap-dealer John Reynolds in 1996. As van Be
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 hardcase, 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 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. They’d had coffee that morning in Reynolds’ messy office but now he could be anywhere.
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. Michael knelt beside him and instinctively put his hand on his back.
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.’’
He would sometimes send her out to the dairy to buy some cigars as he couldn’t leave the scrapyard.
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 5 foot 10 or 5.11 but The scrap-metal industry suited Reynolds’ collecting instincts and his bargaining skills. ‘‘He was always there [at Garden City Scrap]. He liked nothing better than to be at work,’’ Frances Muir says.
‘‘He was always doing something. He was a great gardener. He had a big walnut tree, potatoes, corn, the rest of it. He would spend hours out there ... He could never sit still, even as a young fella.’’
Frances Muir
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, says Muir, now 75.
‘‘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.’’
Sport didn’t figure among his hobbies. Her brother, she says, loved collecting – bottles, stamps, coins, china, anything. Part of the attraction was finding a bargain and turning a find into cash.
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. ‘‘It would have floored anybody else.’’
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 phonebooks 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 former 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 Ma¯ ori woman who was eight years’ younger and who worked in a dairy that Reynolds frequented for his banana-flavoured milkshakes.
The marriage produced two children and Reynolds liked to keep some distance between his rough and tumble work life and domesticity.
‘‘After work, he went home to his wife. He never went to the hotel. He wasn’t a drinker, he would go home,’’ Muir says.
His collecting continued. ‘‘He would drive you insane with his bottles. How much this one was worth and how old this one was. I would pretend to be interested.’’
Muir says if he had his own way, the house would have been ‘‘full of crap’’ but his wife kept it immaculate.
‘‘He wouldn’t have been an easy person to live with. You couldn’t change John. It was just the way he was.
‘‘He was always doing something. He was a great gardener. He had a big walnut tree, potatoes, corn, the rest of it. He would spend hours out there. One year, he said ‘I’m going to make some wine’. O my God. I think it was plum wine. It was absolutely hideous and we all had to sit around and drink it. He also made beer. He could never sit still, even as a young fella.’’
Reynolds was made redundant from his railways job in 1990 after which he went into the scrap-metal industry. It suited his collecting instincts and his bargaining skills. Within a short time, he had invested in a building and Garden City Scrap Co was born.
After the killing, Muir got regular updates about the police 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 that 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.
‘‘Probably looking for a bargain knowing John,’’ Muir says.
Another photo shows him as a toddler. Muir thinks he looks like a pixie.
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.
She was the sister who Reynolds defended from bullying remarks from people who made fun of her thick glasses.
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.
Heavy Metal is a three-part podcast series. You can listen to all episodes now on iTunes and Stitcher.
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