Fifteen

A Brief Reconciliation

On Saturday, 21 January 2012, I received a Facebook message from my Auntie Lois. It said ‘April 23 is the day. There is to be a trial in Ch-Ch [Christchurch] where an anonymous person is charged with murdering an anonymous person’.

I rang Lois and she helped me find the article online. It was titled ‘Murder trial set for April’ and started ‘The trial of a 48-year-old woman charged with murder has been set for April 23 … She appeared at a pre-trial Christchurch District Court session today.’

I knew Helen had been in court the day before for a pre-trial call-over on the charges of perverting the course of justice relating to her text messages that had put Adam in jail, so I rang the reporter, asking her if she was even in the courtroom for Helen’s appearance. She claimed she was, so I told her that maybe she should have listened to the case before the judge instead of just recognising Helen and assuming it was the murder case. Surely she should have been aware that the setting of a trial date would be done in the High Court, not the District Court.

I was furious, and had to contact family to ensure they hadn’t been misinformed by the article. I also contacted the police, who called the reporter and made her remove the article from the internet. This screw-up caused added stress and cost me in excess of $100 in calls to sort it out.

At the pre-trial argument hearing on the perverting the course of justice charge, Helen’s lawyer further played at stringing things out, requesting the actual CCTV footage of Helen buying the phone, when the court had already been supplied with stills taken from the video. The judge saw this for what it was and gave her lawyer a few days to return to court with Helen’s plea. Helen ended up pleading guilty, after dragging the court process out for nearly two years. She was further remanded on bail until 9 August for sentencing, pending a pre-sentence report.

Helen had a pre-trial hearing on the murder and attempted murder charges set for 26 April. I flew over to attend but on last-minute advice from Greg Murton I didn’t go, as he said it could be seen as harassment and used against me at trial.

BECAUSE I WAS IN NEW Zealand, I chose to take the opportunity to pick up the lounge suite Coumbe, Helen’s lawyer, had notified the Public Trust lawyer was part of Phil’s estate, which needed to be collected from Coumbe’s mother’s home. I’d spoken to my sons’ father, Anthony, who still lived in Christchurch and who had a ute, about helping me pick it up. As this was one of the two couches in the house, there was a 50 per cent chance it was the place Helen had planted her butt while she waited for Phil to die!

I had no intention of keeping the couch and was thinking a ritual burning was called for, but as I had neither the time nor place to do so, Anthony planned to pass it on to someone in need.

The night before we had planned to pick up the couch, I met my sons and a couple of their friends and mine for drinks at a bar near my motel. Anthony called in on his way past and bought me a few drinks. The group whittled down, and when Lance and his mate Callum left it was just me and Anthony. As Lance walked out the door he yelled to the barmaid, ‘Don’t let my father go home with my mother!’ Maybe a better strategy would have been to take his father with him, as by the time the bar staff sent us on our way, Anthony was conveniently over the limit for driving and had to stay with me.

They say everything happens for a reason, and I think that’s true. I had always loved Anthony and always will, and at this point in time at all felt right; Anthony had been a part of my family for years, he knew Phil well and never judged me on my fight for justice. Since Phil’s death and my working out that Helen had murdered him, we had had many conversations about what was going on, and Anthony had always been there for me and supported me. He was a part of a lot of good memories of Phil and my family, and had been my partner at both Andrew’s and Phil’s weddings. Even though our relationship was more off than on over the five years from 1987 to 1992, he was my first true love and the father of my two sons.

That first night we spent together, Anthony swore he was never going to live with another female again and I was very much of the same view when it came to men. But the second night he stayed he asked me if I would shift back over to New Zealand to be with him. I laughed it off, but once I returned to Australia I found I really missed him and we started making plans for me to shift back. I knew I needed to be in New Zealand for the trial, so even if it didn’t work out I was going to be right where I needed to be.

There was a jury trial call-over on 25 May, at which time a proposed trial start date of 11 February 2013 was set. Up till this point it had been up in the air whether the trial would be held in Christchurch or Wellington, as the Christchurch courts were only due to reopen following the earthquakes at the start of 2013.

Anthony had been living up in the Marlborough Sounds. He shifted to a house with a bit of land and when we visited in the July holidays, the girls loved being on a farm — a total contrast from the Gold Coast.

Lance attended Helen’s sentencing on the perverting the course of justice charge on 9 August, where she was sentenced to two years, eight months’ imprisonment. This was the first and only time Barry attended court with her. He was sitting behind Lance and after Helen was taken out Lance could hear him angrily telling her lawyer and pointing at Lance ‘and that’s her [as in my] son’. Lance rang me straight from court with the good news: Helen was now off the streets and wouldn’t get out before the murder trial.

WE SHIFTED BACK TO NEW Zealand at the end of September, after meeting up with Anthony for 10 days in Fiji. Our arrival started on a happy note with Aaron, Rajon, Lacau and I travelling to Queenstown to meet up with my birth brother Grant, who was over from Townsville with his partner for an ice dive and a surprise marriage proposal. It was the best start to our time in New Zealand anyone could hope for. Grant’s mother and sister and her family were all there. The girls had their first real snow experience, learning to snowboard, followed by an awesome day in hot pools in Wanaka. We all enjoyed the get-togethers with Grant and his family.

We returned to Christchurch for a night before heading up to Marlborough to stay with Anthony on the farm. On the way to Marlborough we stopped in at Greta Valley to visit Karen. Unfortunately the visit was marred when one of the detectives gave me a call to do with the case and brought the mood down a bit.

Then it hailed, and Karen and Wayne tried to get us to stay the night but I knew Anthony had a roast cooking for dinner so we headed off. Not far down the road the car slid on the icy, wet road as I took a bend. I tried to correct it but we slid in the opposite direction. I then overcorrected back and we did a 180, ending in a ditch with the car on its side. I’d broken the windscreen with my head and Lacau had broken a side window with her shoulder. For a split second during the accident I feared I’d killed my daughters — it was the worst experience of my life.

Rajon and Lacau managed to get out of the car in the pouring rain and flag down help. We were taken by ambulance to the medical centre at Cheviot and Karen met us there, while Wayne and Ben retrieved our gear from the car.

We stayed the night at Karen’s and in a borrowed car headed up to the farm the next day.

Rajon and Lacau loved it up at the farm. Anthony had baby calves for the girls to bottle-feed and look after. When we had been over in the holidays they had helped Anthony build a giant chicken house, so there were chickens to feed every day and eggs to collect. The girls were happy to get up early to feed the calves and chickens before school.

The girls happily swapped their designer-brand clothes for Hunting & Fishing camo gear and Red Band gummies. Rajon recently said that the farm was the best place she had ever lived. They used to spend their days climbing the hills and around the creek, playing on a rope swing and riding their bikes — it was an effort to get them inside for dinner. When Anthony got them a beautiful baby girl kelpie they named Lily they couldn’t have been happier.

WHEN I HAD BEEN IN New Zealand in July 2011 after giving my statement, I had bought a book at Christchurch airport called Helen: The Helen Meads Tragedy written by David White, Helen’s father, about the death of the Matamata woman at the hands of her abusive husband. The book was so compelling I read over half of it on the plane. It was in David’s book that I became aware of the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST) and Garth McVicar, its founder. I tracked down Garth’s phone number and rang him. If only I’d known about SST right back at the start I would have had these wonderful people to help me navigate the muck-around I was getting from the police in the first investigation. Garth linked me to his wife Anne, who invited me to the annual Victims of Homicide Conference.

In late September, while the girls helped Anthony paint the chicken house, I headed to Napier for the weekend for the conference, with Karen as my support person. I met a lot of incredibly amazing people, people who were in the process of overcoming horrific loss and pain and were there supporting others in similar situations.

When I first found out I was having twins I didn’t know how I was going to cope or if I could do it, but we joined a multiple-birth support group and went along to family days and met other parents of multiples. There I got my reassurance that I could survive this, by seeing others who had — parents who had twins and triplets older than mine who had made it all achievable. So to see others who had gone through murder trials of their loved ones and come out the other side seemingly intact gave me hope that I could too.

I was absolutely terrified of the trial, as Greg had said on many occasions that the defence would try to rip me to bits using the strategy that I had got people to collaborate with me in a vindictive move against Helen, who I hadn’t liked. It was good to finally be surrounded by people who totally understood my loss and the situation of a trial ahead of me.

After the introductions, where everyone got up and introduced themselves and their loved one they’d lost and the circumstances surrounding that, I felt like I almost didn’t have the right to be there — that the others’ loved ones had suffered horrific, unspeakable deaths where Phil had merely gone to sleep one night thinking he was starting a new run at work the next day and dropping Ben’s hoodie to him. Phil never saw it coming. For him there was not the fear and the pain that others had suffered. I was grateful that Phil had a peaceful ending, and I felt for the other victims and for their loved ones who were not only hurt by losing them but dealing with the manner in which they died.

I LOVED BEING ON THE farm too but things weren’t working between Anthony and I, and it was time to move on. The girls and I shifted down to Christchurch, staying with Andrea initially for a month until we found a rental in North Beach, shifting in the week before Christmas. It was good to be settled in time for the holidays. Anthony chopped us down a real Christmas tree and joined us for Christmas lunch.

The main thought in my head was, bring on the New Year and the trial.

The painted chicken house.