Other men allegedly attacked
In the years before Sandy Graham shot Dale Watene and had his body buried, the convicted murderer is believed to have tried to stab a former partner and throttled another. Blair Ensor reports.
Convicted murderer Sandy Graham was known to fly into a rage and is believed to have attacked at least two men in the years before she shot her partner dead and had him buried in a forest.
The 32-year-old mother-of-two allegedly tried to stab one of the men and throttled another.
She also had to be stripped of a gun she ran off with when she got angry while on a trip with friends.
Graham shot her partner, Dale Watene, 40, during a domestic dispute at her home in Otautau, western Southland, in April 2020.
She then tried to cover up what she had done and, with the help of her best friend, George Hyde, Watene’s body was buried in a shallow grave, deep in Longwood Forest.
On Thursday, after a lengthy trial in the High Court at Invercargill, Graham was found guilty of murder. Hyde, 25, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact to manslaughter.
The verdict, in Hyde’s case, meant the jury was unable to establish beyond reasonable doubt that he knew Graham had murdered Watene when he helped conceal his body.
During the trial, the jury was told Graham throttled a former partner while he slept on a couch, and that she threw a beer bottle at Watene’s head after she crashed his car while driving drunk.
Stuff has learned they were not the only occasions she was allegedly violent towards men prior to the 2020 killing.
During their homicide investigation, police were told Graham tried to stab another former partner with a kitchen knife during a drunken domestic dispute.
They also learned she got angry and ran off with a rifle while on a trip away with friends in a remote part of Southland.
Those in attendance gave chase and wrested the gun from her. It is believed she did not threaten anyone directly with the weapon.
The jury was not told of the incidents for legal reasons and neither resulted in convictions for Graham.
‘‘During the course of the investigation [into Dale Watene’s death] we received a lot of information, some of which was not used during the court process,’’ Detective Inspector Stu Harvey said on Friday.
He declined to comment further.
Brendon Phillips, one of Watene’s good friends, said Graham was the ‘‘most psychotic bitch I have seen in my whole life’’. She could be nice one minute, and the next she would ‘‘flick the switch and become a totally different person’’.
In January 2020, Watene called Phillips and asked for his help after Graham crashed Watene’s 4-wheel-drive into a ditch.
When he turned up, Graham ‘‘snapped’’ and smashed a beer bottle over Watene’s head as he tried to hook a tow-rope to the vehicle.
‘‘I think she might have heard him say to me: ‘The stupid bitch drove into the bank’,’’ Phillips said.
Watene tried to calm Graham down but she stormed off in the direction of Otautau.
When a stranger pulled over to see if she was all right, she kicked their vehicle.
Phillips said he was shocked by Graham’s behaviour. ‘‘She was crazy.
‘‘I was taken aback that someone could do that.’’
He told Watene that if he continued to see her, he could no longer be his friend.
‘‘I said: She will put you in jail, or worse.’’
When Watene disappeared several months later, ‘‘I knew that Sandy had done something, which is what I told the police’’.
Phillips said he was ‘‘disgusted’’ by some of the rumours Graham had spread about Watene, father of a primary school aged boy, after she killed him.
‘‘Nobody is perfect. He might have dabbled in things he wasn’t supposed to but that didn’t change how he was.
‘‘He was one of the most genuine people I have known.
‘‘He was just a happy-go-lucky guy, who loved his son.
‘‘I knew that Sandy had done something, which is what I told the police.’’ Brendon Phillips
‘‘There wasn’t very often he didn’t have a smile on his face.’’
Watene’s on-off relationship with Graham was volatile and spanned about six months
Twice in 2020, Watene was thrown, drunk, from Graham’s home and barred from returning for five days by police.
He became increasingly suspicious she was cheating on him.
During the trial, Graham gave evidence that during a domestic dispute, which erupted after she received a ‘‘dick pic’’ from another man, she got a .22 calibre rifle from behind a mirror and used it to try and force Watene out of her house.
As the pair struggled over the gun, it went off.
Graham said she did not think the gun was loaded and that Watene’s death was a tragic accident, not murder.
She tried to cover up what had happened because she did not have a firearms licence and was scared she would lose her children. However, the Crown countered her story with evidence it said proved she knew the gun was loaded. The Crown also called an expert who said Watene was shot from at least 80 centimetres away, meaning he could not have had his hands on the rifle when he was shot.
Stuff previously reported Graham’s chequered criminal history, which includes a drinkdriving incident where she dragged a police officer behind her car, badly injuring him.
A court later heard that her mother had described her as ‘‘the world’s best liar who always has a plan’’.