A 30-YEAR WHODUNIT
Who killed Red Fox Tavern manager Chris Bush in 1987? 33 years on, we now know the answer.
New Zealand in 1987 was very different to today . There were no smartphones, no Google Maps and no CCTV – all the things that would be integral to a modern murder investigation.
When Christopher James Bush, 43, was shot dead in the Red Fox Tavern, in north Waikato, in front of his staff, police had only the accounts of those who survived to go on.
With no DNA, no forensic evidence and no witnesses who had seen the accused’s faces, the task of finding the killers was a monumental one that involved 100 police officers and investigations into more than 200 people of interest in a case that spanned three decades.
The victim
Born on Mother’s Day in 1944, Bush was the only child of Noeleen Bush. He was brought up in Lower Hutt and played rugby at school before rheumatic fever at the age of 15 ended his sporting days.
After school, he worked for a variety of accountancy firms before getting into the hotel and tavern business. He started as a barman in Taupo¯ , and worked in Wellington before moving on to hotels in Hastings and Palmerston North.
The Red Fox had been under Bush’s management for 41⁄2 years when he was killed in front of his staff. He’d recently won the efficiency award for hotel managers for cutting costs.
An avid racing fan, with a share in three horses, he was looking forward to seeing his horse Dark Lace compete at the Melbourne Cup, but he was killed just weeks before.
On the Saturday of Labour weekend, 1987, Bush had briefly returned home for a bath, and dinner with his family, at
7pm. His older daughter Jodie told the he had been in good spirits, despite being tired.
Just after 10.30pm, he was counting the night’s takings in his office while three other bar staff were closing up.
Sherryn Soppet, Stephanie Prisk and Bill Wilson were enjoying a drink at the bar when, about 11.30pm, two heavily disguised men burst into the tavern. One held a sawnoff shotgun, the other a bat.
Bush stood up and threw a glass at the man with the gun. He missed. At the same time the gunman fired. Three shots later, Bush fell face-forward on to the floor, where he died in a pool of his own blood.
The bar workers were ordered to the ground by the gunman, who yelled obscenities and kicked Bush.
The other intruder, Mark Joseph Hoggart, moved quickly to open the bar’s safe, and the pair made off with more than
$36,349, including 40 kilograms of coins. Bush left behind two daughters, Penny and Jodie, and his wife Gaye, who vowed to restore a happy atmosphere at the tavern.
‘‘It is very important to me that the tavern gets right back to the way Chris wanted,’’ she told the three weeks after he died. ‘‘There are not many bars where you could take your wife and have a really pleasant night out, but that’s how it was and I’m sure it will be the same again soon.’’
Five years later, she told the paper she’d not given up hope of finding her husband’s killers.
That resolution was one she maintained 33 years later as she went to
court to face Bush’s killers at their trial.
The investigation
The crime shocked the small drivethrough farming town of Maramarua, and the Red Fox Tavern became the epicentre of a nationwide manhunt for Bush’s killer.
At 12.20am on the night of the robbery, Sherryn called her husband Peter and said: ‘‘Peter, there’s been an armed holdup and Chris has been shot.’’ He rushed to the pub and entered to find Bush clearly dead.
He then had to break the news to Gaye that her husband had been killed.
Detective Gary Lendrum was one of the first police officers at the scene.
He found no footprints on the grass outside. Inside the pub, he collected the yellow rope used to tie up the bar staff, as well as the broken photo frame and a broken beer glass Bush had thrown at the gunman.
In the early days of the investigation,
230 people of interest were identified by police. Most were eliminated as they had alibis.
News reports at the time said between
80 and 100 police were working on the case, canvassing the area, speaking to witnesses and possible suspects.
A fortnight after the killing, that number was reduced to 45. Three months later it was down to 30, and six months on just 10 officers were left on the investigation.
Hoggart, now 60, and the other man, who has interim name suppression, first became of interest to police on Christmas Eve, 1987, when an associate, Philip Dunbier, told Auckland police he could help them with the investigation.
He agreed to wear a wire, and travelled with officers to Napier, where he claimed the unnamed defendant indicated he was involved in the murder as they smoked together.
‘‘We were talking about armos [armed robberies] and the Red Fox came up and I said, ‘Did you do it?’,’’ Dunbier told police. ‘‘ ‘Oh no, of course I didn’t, mate,’ and a bit of a wink and a nod, and that’s when I figured where he got his money for the bikes from,’’ Dunbier said.
Dunbier talked with the man about how two shotguns would have been better in such a robbery, but the man allegedly replied, ‘‘Nah, one and a bat was enough.’’ At the time, police did not believe that conversation was enough to make an arrest.
As well as a lack of plausible leads, police had the added complication of dealing with false ones.
In March 1988, William Raymond Grigsby, from Wyndham, in Southland, was jailed for giving false information to the inquiry. Reports at the time said Grigsby began to ‘‘weave a web of nonsense’’ that put police on the wrong track, including falsely claiming he had the money stolen from the tavern.
By mid-1988, police concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in relation to the killing. The case remained open but unsolved.
At the time, the investigation was led by John Gott. In 1992, he told the Sunday News that information linked to the case was often coming in. ‘‘Things pop up, things that look promising, and things fade away . . . but the file is still active . . .
‘‘Nobody would like to solve it as much as we would,’’ the Papakura-based detective said at the time. He died in 2017, after the defendants were arrested.
Almost two decades passed before the inquiry, called Operation Lion, was reopened in 2000 when new, but undisclosed, information came to light. But once again, police said there was not enough evidence to lay charges.
In 2016, Detective Senior Sergeant Michael Hayward, lead investigator in Operation Lion, inherited 100 paper files of witness and police statements and documents. After poring over them, police arrested Hoggart and the other man after an associate claimed the unnamed man had talked about planning a job that matched the description of the Red Fox Tavern robbery.
Charlie Ross committed a similar aggravated robbery with the man in the early 1980s, when the pair, wearing balaclavas, hid in the bushes before confronting a barman in eerily similar circumstances.
Ross hit the barman on the side of his face with the barrel of a shotgun before forcing him to re-enter the pub with the gun held to his back. A receptionist and the barman were forced to lie on the floor before being escorted at gunpoint to find the duty manager and the vault.
In his fear, the duty manager forgot the combination to the vault, causing Ross to strike him with the butt of the gun, firing a single shot into the ceiling of the office.
The pair and another man took off with $45,432. While the pair were in prison together for that robbery, Ross said a lot of inmates spoke about robbing the Red Fox Tavern.
‘‘I’ll probably do another [armed robbery] when we get out,’’ the unnamed defendant allegedly told Ross. ‘‘[The man] always seemed to be there when it was spoken about,’’ Ross said.
After the pair were released, they met up in Hastings and the other man spoke about ‘‘putting together an earn up north’’. The Red Fox murder was carried out 17 days after the man was freed.
After his release, he went to live with his sister and brother-in-law at a Napier vineyard, and linked back up with Ross. Together they practised firing Ross’ sawnoff shotgun. The Crown claimed that was the same gun used to kill Bush.
On the Thursday before the shooting, the other man met Hoggart in Taupo¯ before they drove to Hamilton in a faded green Vauxhall Victor. The next day, they were seen in Cambridge, and again at 8.45pm by Robyn Pyle, who worked at the Maramarua dairy and petrol station. The Vauxhall pulled up near the petrol pumps, apparently casing out the pub.
By 8am on Sunday, the unnamed man was back in Napier, looking tired, his brother-in-law said.
When news of the Red Fox Tavern came on the radio, a family member asked the man if he had anything to do with it. ‘‘No, that’s bloody lovely,’’ he allegedly replied.
He later told his brother-in-law about needing to get rid of the sawn-off shotgun.
After the robbery, associates of Hoggart and the other man noticed they had more money and ‘‘cash to burn’’, with both buying new motorbikes.
When police caught up with the unnamed man in January, 1988, to question him about the robbery, he had trouble remembering his exact whereabouts. He denied any involvement, claiming he was being fitted up because of the similarity of the Red Fox robbery to the one for which he’d been jailed.
He admitted shooting birds with Ross on his brother-in-law’s vineyard about a week before. But when police asked where the sawnoff shotgun he had used was, he told them it was in the sea.
He said: ‘‘I just freaked out. I went and got the gun . . . that Charlie had given me . . . I threw the gun in the sea and then went over to Charlie’s. I told him cops would be turning us over because the Red Fox was like the [Auckland] job.’’
Police asked him what the rush was, if he wasn’t involved in the robbery. ‘‘F... man, I had just come out for doing an armo. I am a prohibited person. I knew you guys would be turning me and Charlie out.’’
Days later, Hoggart also denied being involved. ‘‘But I don’t know why you’re telling me this because I’m the wrong man. I had nothing to do with it,’’ he told police. ‘‘Not me, that’s not my line of work.’’
‘You’ve got the wrong guy’
During the trial, the unnamed man’s defence claimed a criminal named Lester Hamilton was guilty of the Red Fox killing.
A prison inmate claimed Hamilton confessed in the early 1990s at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo.
However, police eliminated Hamilton as a suspect because he was on bail for an armed robbery at the time, and had to report to Thames on the day of the attack.
At the same time, he was working with a lawyer on a morphine and heroin importation scheme from India, for which he was later jailed, and police concluded he couldn’t have committed both crimes.
The trial
On February 9, 2021, after a year-long adjournment, the murder trial finally got under way in the High Court at Auckland.
After two more halts for Covid-19 lockdowns, the jury returned unanimous verdicts on Monday, finding both accused guilty of murder and aggravated robbery.
They are due to be sentenced on May 7, and the unnamed man has gone to the Court of Appeal in an effort to keep his name secret.