Crime Junkie - MURDERED: The Lundys Part 2

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

After Mark Lundy was convicted of viciously slaying his wife and daughter, another story started to emerge, leading many people in New Zealand to wonder…was the wrong man behind bars? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-the-lundys-part-two/ 

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett, and today we're back to tell you the second part of our story about Mark Lundy and his murdered family, his wife, Christine, and their seven-year-old daughter, Amber. Now, if you're just tuning in now and you haven't heard part one, you have to go back. Listen to part one first so you can be caught up. I don't want you to be lost. So, brief recap. Where we left off last episode, Mark had just been convicted of both murders and sentenced to life with a minimum of 17 years before he's eligible for parole. Both police and the crown prosecution in New Zealand were sure that he was the person responsible for the killings, and they were confident that Mark's sketchy behavior,

his over-the-top grief at the funeral, the time of death, Christine's DNA on his clothes, all proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mark was guilty. But we're learning that there are two sides to every story, and as experts, journalists, and Mark's defense team continue their fight to show his innocence, a much different story emerges, and many people all over New Zealand and beyond start to wonder, is the wrong man behind bars? Mark Lindy's defense team starts the appeals process almost as soon as he's found guilty. They're appealing on the grounds that the verdict was unreasonable and can't be supported by the evidence that was presented at trial. At the same time that they're trying to appeal the

actual conviction, the crown is actually appealing his sentencing. They want him to be in prison longer before he's eligible for parole. So he's got to serve 17 years, and then he's eligible. They want it to be 20. Based on what? Has he been breaking rules in prison or something? No, according to court documents, it's just due to the severity of the crimes, particularly because there was a child involved. So I guess they think three more years makes him pay more. I really don't understand the thinking behind these extra three years, but whatever. The case goes up before the New Zealand Court of Appeals in July of 2002, and four months later in November, the court not only finds that the guilty verdict was reasonable, but they also agree to add the extra three years

on to Mark's sentence, making him serve 20 years in prison, which was the longest non-prol period on life sentence in the nation's history. As time goes on, Mark Lindy starts to fade from the public consciousness. He is in jail, and that's that. Now, he's still pursuing all of his legal options to keep appealing, but the public honestly wants to just forget about him. There's this aura of disgust around the whole thing. Like, how could somebody be so depraved? How could they do this to their own family? And more than anything, like, how did we not see it coming? Yeah. I couldn't find a lot of information about what exactly his defense team is doing between November of 2002 and the beginning of 2009. But I do know that even while Palmishton North and

the greater New Zealand population are done thinking about the Lundy murders, there are still a handful of people, people who are like neutral, really with no skin in the game, like journalists, who aren't satisfied with the way Mark's story has been told. They think that he's been railroaded by a one-sided narrative designed to paint him as a monster, basically, and that this narrative was fueled by bad science. So fast forward to February 2009, North and South Magazine, which kind of looks to me like a cross between Vanity Fair and Time. Okay. They published this huge article called the Lundy murders, what the jury didn't hear. And in this article, reporter Mike White lays out some bombshell new findings that raises a whole host of new questions about how

the investigation was handled starting right from day one. For example, according to this article, we learn that it took the pathologist who was in charge of this case, Dr. Peng, seven hours to get to the crime scene and look at the bodies. Now, they don't give any context about why it took him so long to get out there. It just says that he learned about the murders at some time in the morning and then came later. And you got to think like this is a pretty time sensitive situation, right? Yeah. And looking back at our previous episode, assuming that they had died around seven the night before, you're looking at like a 20 hour window since the death, right? Yeah. And I mean, again, especially when we have such a tiny window of time already,

trying to nail down that time of death seems super important. But one of the other things we find out is that Dr. Peng only stayed when he finally comes to the scene seven hours later. He only stays for about a half an hour, and he doesn't do any of the tests that we think of as pretty standard. Like he's not checking body temperatures. He's not looking at rigor mortis levels like nothing like that. Does he ever explain why he didn't do any of these things? So according to this article, Dr. Peng says he didn't want to risk disturbing the bodies and possibly messing up the scene with all the forensic stuff, which part of me gets like let them take the pictures, let them catalog. I don't know. I mean, but they had seven hours to do that.

Yeah. I mean, he also says it's not standard practice to do these tests right there, which again, not an expert. I've got questions about that though. Same. Now there's nothing to indicate whether or not Dr. Peng did these tests later again, like body temperature. We know he has a time of death based on stomach contents, but I never actually was able to find anything that the time of death was related to other than the stomach contents. But here's the thing about the stomach contents. What we learned is Dr. Peng didn't weigh them or take any measurements. So when he recorded the stomachs as being full, there's no way to say what that means. Right. Our stomachs are kind of stretchy and elastic. They're designed to

expand to accommodate food when we eat and then shrink back down as it gets digested, right? Yeah. And I mean, even more than that, I think full is a pretty relative judgment. So we don't even have like a visual idea of what was in their stomachs. Yeah. So I don't know what he considers to be full. And this isn't even the only thing that's problematic with this. So Dr. Peng opened up the stomach, which is standard procedure in an autopsy. And here's the thing. He admits that he didn't fully open the small intestine. He only opened up the duodenum, which is the top part near where the small intestine connects to the stomach. So basically what he's saying is I opened up this very tippy top part

of the intestine near the stomach. I didn't see any food in there. So it's probably all empty. So why are you going further? Yeah. Now keep in mind, the small intestine can be anywhere from 20 to 30 feet long. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the duodenum makes up only about nine to 12 inches of that. So like just a teeny tiny portion of the intestine. Yeah. And he's taking that teeny tiny sample to say what's going on in the rest of their body. Definitively. Yeah. On top of this. So from the last episode, do you remember when I was talking about how

Dr. Pang was giving his testimony at trial and he said like, I didn't smell any of that gastric smell. Like that's why I don't think the food had been in there a long time and he's citing experts to back that up. Yeah. Well, the very same expert that he mentioned during the trial was this super well known internationally respected guy in their field named Dr. Bernard Knight. So basically at trial one, he's like, yeah, this guy Bernard Knight, he's done this stuff. He would totally back me up. There's no gastric smell. Then definitely they just ate. Well, this time around, Dr. Knight himself looks in and weighs in on this case. And not only does he disagree with Dr. Pang,

but Dr. Knight actually calls the conclusion that Pang came to the conclusion that they had just ate food because there was no smell. He calls it, and I quote, a little short of ludicrous. Oh, wow. Other experts both in this article and elsewhere in my research, like on the investigator all say that stomach contents are a notoriously unreliable way to determine time of death because you have to factor in all kinds of things. So it's not just what's in their intestine, but it's what was the person eating? What were they drinking? You have to know step about their own body's natural digestion speed, their stress levels. Like there are all of these variables that go into it. You can't just open up a stomach, say it doesn't smell, call it a day. Now getting an

accurate time of death is important in any case, but in a situation like this where the crown's prosecution's whole theory rests on that 15 minute time frame, it is critical. And if there's any doubt about the time of death, then their entire theory is shaky and doesn't make sense. And what we'll learn is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The next thing we learn is there's evidence to suggest that the crown prosecution's key witness may have gotten her time frames wrong. Last episode, I mentioned this woman named Margaret who told police, remember she sees that dark blue car, she sees this large man in a wig running around 7-7-15 in the time frame of the murders, right? Yeah, she's the one with the psychic powers too, right? You got it, yes. So according to North

and South Magazine, Margaret was the only person to see this runner. And she couldn't give a super detailed description of what his face looked like, even though she actually claimed during Mark's trial to have a photographic memory. It's funny how people with photographic memories seem to like never remember things. Not be able to make those photographic memories, yeah. Yeah, like right when you need them to. Anyways, as she told police, Margaret had choir practice on the night of the murders, so she was getting ready to leave at about 7 p.m. when a couple of her friends stopped by, which delayed her leaving about 10 or 15 minutes, she says. So again, we're like very well within the crown's timeline. But when police go to interview these two friends, they tell a totally

different story. They say that they went to this place called Tea Market Fresh. It's like a grocery store near Margaret's house right before they visited her. Problem is, that store closes at 6 p.m. This is an hour before Margaret says that her guest supposedly got to her house. And looking into this, the tea market is like 10 minutes away from Margaret's house. So even if like her friends leave right when the store is closing at 6, this puts them at her house at like 6, 10, 6, 15, 6, 20 at the absolute latest? Okay, if they were at her house for 10 or 15 minutes, like Margaret had testified, then that means that they would have been gone around 6.30, 6.35. Right. Yeah, so this woman couldn't have seen this man in a wig around 7 or 7.15. Because

per her own story, like right when her friends leaves, she leaves her choir practice. So it's not adding up. And if she did see what she says she saw, I'm not saying she's lying. I'm just wondering if it's even relevant to the case. Oh wait, is there any way the store stayed open a little later that night? Like these people were in their shopping. They aren't going to kick them out. Let's just stay open for an extra 10, 15 minutes. No. So I'm just trying to think of like any reason that it would be later than 6 p.m. I actually literally had the same thought. And we actually know that didn't happen. And clearly you and I aren't the only ones because they like looked into this. There was actually security footage from this store on the night of the

murders. And as Mike White details in his piece, it shows the owners of the store locking up and leaving the store at 6.37 p.m. So even this, even if they were like lock up with the people, which we know they didn't, the timeline still doesn't make sense. They would have had to have left the store long before it closed, long before they're locking up. So we know from the security footage that the story the friends are telling is real. Nothing about the timeline makes sense. Now the thing that I hate the most is we're finding all of this out later. If police had checked the store right at the time, this would have all fallen apart. But North and South Magazine reported that police didn't do this at the time. Police also didn't rule out all of their

suspects, remember before Mark's first trial. Now, not including Mark, they had apparently four suspects whose alibis didn't meet the police's standard, which in New Zealand, they're saying that all four of these people only had one alibi. Wait, so they have to have multiple? I've never really heard of that before. I didn't either. So here in the US, I mean, I think it's really what is your alibi, can it be corroborated and like how believable are you? I mean, there's a lot of factors that go in, but I would say like if you have one person saying that you were at a certain place at a certain time, that's great. If you can have 10 people say the same thing. Maybe that's what they

mean. It's better, but yeah, maybe it's one person vouching for you or corroborating it. But whatever it was, there's some kind of standard that they have and at least four people. And then we've got Mark, who's the fifth five people now don't meet the standard, but they're just looking at Mark. And we talked about it in the first episode, but it just leaves so many doors just like wide open to divert a possibility to. I just, I don't understand. Yeah, especially like again, when we're talking about such a small window that you have to cram, like everything has to fit perfectly for this to work. And here's a spoiler. I don't think it fits perfectly because what really raises the most amount of questions for me is the timeline of all of this. And particularly that

truth that Mark is alleged to have taken from his business trip in Petone where he's staying at the hotel, back to his house in Palmerston North and then back again. So just to recap for you, we know from Mark's phone records, he's in his motel at 5.30pm on August 29th. And at that time, he takes an eight minute call from his family. Under the crown theory, he leaves his motel as soon as this call is finished. So 5.38pm, which gave him at most one hour, 37 minutes to get to Palmerston North by 7.15 when Margaret says she saw him again. We know that she probably didn't, but 7.15 is the very end of their window of when they could have been murdered. Right. Now, we also know that Mark's phone records put him back in Petone by 8.28pm that same night.

So let me get this straight. After Mark gets to Palmerston North, he'd have to change his clothes, park his car, go to his house, slaughter his family, try to make it look like a burglary, mess with the computer to make it turn off later or look like it turned off later, hide the weapon, which again has never been found, right? Never, no. And bloody clothes and then drive all the way back to his motel and even less time than it took him to get there in the first place? Yep, that's it. This time frame seems minuscule to me, like so stinking tight. But after doing how many episodes now, I don't think anything's impossible. And you said before that the police were able to make this drive if they threw caution to the wind or whatever, right?

Well, they said that they were able to do it, period, and that you could probably do it faster to give him more time if they threw caution to the wind. But I'm not even sure that that's completely true. You see, the fastest recorded time by the police driving from his home to the hotel was actually one hour 33 minutes. And the officer who testified, like you said, believed that it could be done faster, but they hadn't actually done it any faster. And there's some discrepancy in the police records that didn't come up at trial. So according to the officer's job sheet, that one hour 33 minute trip was done at an average speed of 91.4 kilometers an hour. But their math doesn't quite add up because as the job sheets go on to say police

claim the trip was like 150.2 kilometers long. So if they're going at the rate that they're going that long, the trip would have taken even longer. It would have taken an hour and 39 minutes. And I know that it feels like I'm like picking things apart. But in a case where we've got a teeny tiny window, literally minutes that he's doing all of this, I think every minute matters. Now, the only way the time doesn't matter is if Christine and Amber were killed later, but then you can't say that Mark is your guy. But I think there's a lot of evidence to point to the fact that they may have been killed later. You know, one important thing that this article I've been referencing brings up is Christine and Amber's normal evening routines. So if you

remember the night of the murder at trial, the prosecution is saying that they had like an early night. Christine Lundy went to bed early and she's murdered naked in her bed at like 7.715, right? Yeah. So I love going to bed early. It's like my MO. But even seven seems pretty early to be going to bed. Yeah. Especially when you think about the fact that we know Christine took a call just a few minutes before at 6.56. So 6.36, she's on this phone for 17 seconds. And then in a couple of minutes, it's like rolls over and falls asleep. Yeah. Yeah. Well, according to multiple sources, that actually would have been, I think it's out of the routine for everyone, but it would have been super big departure from Christine's usual routine. According to Steve

Braunius's reporting for the New Zealand Herald, Christine and Amber both loved the show Shortland Street, which came on every night at 7. They never missed an episode. It's like a soap opera, I guess, there. It's still on the air, by the way, which is like bananas. But normally, Amber would head to bed around 7.30 and she'd be asleep by 8. And Christine was in the habit of staying up to go over the book's remarks business. Then she would read or maybe play card games on the computer. No, it's like mom alone time. That's what you do when the kids go to bed. Exactly. I say that like I know. I'm like, Oh, Charlie went to bed. So anyways, remember, we know that the computer was turned off at like 10. 52. Again, maybe 10.

56 that night. That's in line with what she would normally do. And there was a witness who reported seeing lights on in the Lundy's home around 11 p.m. So the computer being turned off at 10. 52, a light still being on at 11. All of that matches with what it would be normal for Christine. I have to ask, did any of this come up in the first trial? Because I don't think I've ever heard any of this. So they tried the crown did to try to explain it away. Under their theory, what they say happened is that 5.38 call that Mark and Christine have together. Mark tells Christine to go to bed early because he's going to come home that night so they can have sex together and then he's going to drive back. And they're saying like he used this as a ruse to like get

her in bed and get her naked so he could come kill them. And then again, they're saying that like at this time that he alters the computer and like kind of sets everything up. I mean, just from a logistical standpoint, that theory doesn't make any sense to me. He was away on business, yes, but just overnight. And we even said that he said their sex life was pretty much non-existent. I think the term was dried up. Yeah. And he was with a sex worker later that same night. Like none of this makes sense. Yeah. I mean, that is such a good point that if he's telling police, I get we never are intimate anymore. But also we were going to have sex that night. But yeah, but we like needed each other so bad that like the one night I'm away, I'm going to drive hours

home. It doesn't add up, right? Not at all. And honestly, even the whole idea of him tampering with the computer, that whole thing totally falls apart when you really dive into it. Now, this is a little wonky, slightly hard for me to wrap my brain around. But you guys are all smarter than me. So you guys are probably going to get onto it super fast. But I had to like read and reread all these reports to understand what was being said. And here's where I landed. So since the very beginning of the trial, the forensic experts knew that the computer was turned off at like 1052. Now that's problematic again, because it blows away the crown theory about when Christine and Amber would have died. Again, we know Mark is back at his hotel, right? So who the heck is on

the computer? Right. So at trial, they really pushed forward this idea that Mark tampered with the computer files to alter the time. And again, if you remember, it's not just something that threw out there in their opening and closing, they had an expert who came on the stand to support this. According to TVNZ.com, the crowns computer expert testified at the first trial that quote, extensive manipulation had taken place on this machine end quote, which made it seem like he tampered with it. But it comes out later that he was a little shifty with the way that he phrased it in court. Basically, all that was found was that the files from the computer were out of order, but they didn't actually have altered times. From reading the NZTV article and the

North-South article, they said that this can basically happen two ways. You either have to be like mad skilled and have practiced moving files around. But again, this is moving the files, not actually changing like the hard coded data, which again, we know Mark wasn't super capable of that. And even if he was doesn't actually help him to just shift the files around, right? Or you have to have a computer virus. And wouldn't you stinking know it when an expert spends hundreds of hours reviewing the files? There's a virus. So there's no other way to cut it in my opinion. That computer was turned off at 1052. So tell me how that's possible. Like it reminded me so much of Lacey Peterson, who was looking at those freaking sunflower umbrellas if Scott is throwing

her over the boat. Oh, yeah. But I digress. So, okay, clearly, I think there are huge questions around the crown's proposed timeline. But what about Mark's motive? So again, this is what everyone comes back to he owed over $2 million. He's in serious financial trouble. That's a fact like on both sides. The crown argue that he killed Christine to get her life insurance payout, which just so happened, they just increased it to $500,000. But there's one very important detail about that increase. It hadn't actually happened yet. Wait, what? Yeah. According to court documents, while Mark and Christine had indeed upped their payouts, their policy change hadn't gone into effect at the time of Christine's murder. So he was never going to get that $500,000. Okay. But

you can also make the argument that Mark clearly wasn't the greatest with money. And he might not have even known that. Just assume that you sign the paper and boom, it happens right away. Oh, I agree. And my God, can you, I was going to say, can you imagine if you had done that for $500,000 and then you didn't get the money? But I guess anyone who could do that period, they probably don't give a crap anyways. I can't imagine any of this story. So no. So I don't know whether he knew it wasn't an effect if he didn't know. But the point is he wasn't going to get the money. And so at some point, at least poke some holes in this whole idea of motive. Right. So we got a lot of circumstantial stuff here, right? And we know that the initial case was made a lot on circumstantial

evidence. We have holes in every single thing. And it turns out the circumstantial stuff is only the beginning because even the forensics have their own stories to tell. Without a murder weapon, police and the crown prosecution relied pretty heavily on two big sections of forensic evidence to prove Mark's guilt, starting with the paint chips found on Christine and Amber's bodies. As the New Zealand Herald first reported during Mark's pre-trial deposition hearings, these were these like blue and orange paint flakes that were presented to the court as matching the paint that Mark used on his tools. But according to North and South, the scientists analyzing this paint, they actually started out with 47 samples from both Amber and

Christine. Out of those 47, only 18 of them were described as being quote, indistinguishable from the paint on Mark's tools. But they were presented as matching, right? Yeah. Well, it's even worse than that, though, because as this article goes on to say of these 18 so-called indistinguishable samples, all but two of them had been contaminated. So it was actually impossible to do a detailed chemical analysis to prove on like an actual scientific level that they came from the same thing. So what about these two that aren't contaminated? It's a little hard to tell what they got off of them. Let me just read you what it says, because honestly, it's a little hard to wrap my brain around. It says, quote, in 16 of these 18

samples, the scientist noted that there was contamination and the chemical match wasn't described or provided to the defense, end quote. What? So I think the two likely were too small to do anything definitive with. All I'm saying is, again, reasonable doubt through the wazoo. You can't say that they match samples when they're contaminated, they're inconsistent, they're indistinguishable. I don't know what that means. Yeah. I mean, thinking an entire case on these elements of forensics seems like a very bad idea. Right. Now, aside from the paint chips, the other huge piece of forensic evidence presented at Mark's trial was his shirt. Remember, the one with Amber's DNA that they said had to have come from blood, and then more importantly,

that piece of tissue that they say likely came from Christine's brain or spinal cord. Mm-hmm. As far as the crown prosecution was concerned, this is what proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mark was their killer. But what if the piece of material wasn't brain tissue? Then what was it? So this right here is one of the things that as soon as I read about it, this was the thing that made me start questioning everything I thought I knew about the case. According to the investigator episode, this piece of tissue is tiny, smaller than a grain of rice, teeny tiny. And even though police found the shirt in the back of Mark's car really early on in the investigation, they actually didn't test it for any forensics until November. This is

almost two months after the murders. The sample investigators managed to pull off Mark's shirt isn't in all that great of shape. And so even though the basic test showed high odds of these samples containing Christine Lundy's DNA, it was hard to say exactly where it came from. You see, there's certain types of cells that are only found in a human brain and spinal cord. But remember, this sample was small. It was shriveled. Like it was basically less than ideal for trying to definitively test. What we learned is that pathologists said that the sample was so degraded that they wouldn't testify in court about it. And what we learned is that the investigator in charge of the Lundy case, this guy named Detective Sergeant Ross Gratham actually

turned to the international law enforcement community as a whole to see if anyone could help. So basically, the guy they normally go to gives them like not the answer they want. So then Ross reaches out to a bunch of different agencies to see if any of them can ID this sample as being brain matter. He asked the UK's home office. He asked the FBI. And the answer was coming back the same every single time. Nobody is saying, nobody reputable is saying like we can test this. Like it's too small. We wouldn't feel comfortable doing tests and then testifying in court. But just when it looks hopeless for Ross, he found a way to keep the investigation going. In August of 2000, this is just three days before Amber and Christine Lundy were murdered.

This pathologist from Dallas, Texas named Rodney Miller had given a guest lecture in Palmerston North about a procedure that he used in some like cancer diagnosis. And so when Detective Sergeant Ross was looking for an expert, this guy's name was already kind of being floated around in the medical circles in town. And Ross gets in touch with him and Roddy's like, you know what? I think I can help with this. And I'm not going to go too deep in the weeds here because I, you know, studied science in college, but it was a long time ago. And I don't want to get the details wrong. But as I understand it, from Jessica Piszczko's reporting in D magazine, Rodney tested the sample with a procedure called immunohistochemistry or IHC. And using this test,

he claims to have detected brain tissue. But IHC has a reputation for being what the FDA calls subjective and variable. So we could call this procedure controversial. Well, even more than that, the test isn't designed to detect brain cells. What? Yeah. And brain cells actually break down super fast, apparently, when they're outside of the human body, like literally within seconds, unless they're preserved carefully. But when you think about it, like the samples from Mark's shirt weren't found and tested, remember, like 58 days. And they're certainly not tested by Rodney until months later. So the odds of brain cells surviving that long is pretty stinking small. Adding to that, as D magazine points out,

the IHC test itself had never been used on a tissue sample that was on fabric, like say a polo shirt. So we're talking about something that's completely experimental, experimental being that it's on a polo shirt. You've never done that before. Right. You have no idea, like, if there is an absorption rate that you're missing, stuff like that. Yeah. It's months later after brain cells probably aren't even still around. And the test wasn't made for brain cells. But this is the evidence you're using to convict this man of murder. So had this procedure, this IHC, had it ever been used in court before? I couldn't find anything. And the D magazine article says no. Okay. So there are a lot of doubts in my mind, at least around the spring tissue from Christine. But didn't you say

that Amber's blood was on Mark's shirt too? Yeah. So Mike White actually talks about that in his piece too. So the bits of red substance found on Mark's shirt were so small that it was hard to test them. And apparently of the test that they did, only one came back, like one of these spots as being positive for blood. The scientist who did the initial testing found that it was probable that blood was present, not conclusive. Now further testing showed there was a good chance of Amber's DNA being present. But again, that's DNA. And this is what we can explain the same way with Christine's, right? If we're not talking blood, we're not talking brain matter. If it's just DNA cells saying that your wife and your daughter's DNA is on your polo shirt,

my DNA is on my husband's shirt. Like your kid's DNA is on your husband's shirt. I was thinking, like, especially if he's going away on business, my dad used to travel some for business. I know I think your dad did too. You would hug him before he left. Yeah. You would say goodbye, like even in that very simple transaction, DNA transfers. Right. So a lot of holes, right? Yeah. This article comes out in February 2009. It gets a ton of publicity. And more than even just poking holes in the big points that got brought up at trial, there's also like random stuff mentioned in kind of like these one offs like get this up until this point, the public and more importantly, the jury never heard this. But there were actually seven unidentified fingerprints and a palm print

that police found in the Lundy's house. What? And like they never like hunt down or find out who they belong to? Not as far as I can tell. So even though this feels explosive, without anything pointing in like a real and solid new direction, honestly, even the buzz from this article kind of dies down and the news moves on. So Mark remains this polarizing figure with some convinced he's innocent, others just as convinced of his guilt and three more years go by. And then in November of 2012, Mark's defense team tries something different. According to Matthew Thunissen's reporting in the New Zealand Herald, they take Mark's case to the judicial committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom. I'd never heard of this before I started researching for

this case. So let me give you a little background. Basically, New Zealand used to be part of the British Empire and they still have Queen Elizabeth II as their head of state. They didn't have their own Supreme Court until 2004. So since Mark's appeal was turned down in 2002, his case is still eligible to go to the Privy Council. Because it was before the Supreme Court was actually in existence. Got it. Yeah. Stuff New Zealand reported on Valentine's Day of 2013 that the Privy Council agrees to hear Mark's case with a hearing that will be scheduled for June. And from there, the council will do one of two things. It'll either uphold Mark's conviction or it'll quash it and send the case back to square one. Half a world away from London where

the decisions being made, all of New Zealand waits to hear the fate of Mark Lundy. On October 8th, 2013, 13 years after Amber and Christine Lundy were murdered, the Privy Council quashes Mark's conviction and orders that he get a new trial as soon as possible. According to Jimmy Ellingham's piece for Stuff New Zealand, the council is disturbed by the integrity of some of the original evidence that convicted Mark in the first place, like the stomach contents and the brain tissue. And they're also concerned that evidence might have been purposefully suppressed at the original trial. Wait, what do you mean might have been? Yeah. So remember how I told you about the detective that was basically shopping around

looking for pathologists who would give the result that he wanted? Yeah. And everyone told him that the samples were way too small. Right. But turns out that's not all they told him. As documented in police reports, one pathologist explicitly told Ross that Mark shouldn't be convicted just on the evidence of this material. And this seems like something a defense team would have maybe wanted to be aware of, right? Like, yeah, this is huge. Yeah, that's a huge error. Like in their corner, that they can shoot at this entire case. Yeah. Problem is, Mark's defense team didn't get this report until 2012. Oh my God. Now, you know, for their part, the police argue, oh,

this report was in the investigator's notebooks, which the defense had access to during the original trial. So it's kind of like pitting one word against another. You looked, you didn't look, you didn't look good enough. But it doesn't matter. At this point, the privy council has made their decision. After spending 12 years in prison, Mark is released on bail on October 11th, 2013. According to one news, he's ordered to live at a court-approved address. He can't contact any of the witnesses from his first trial. And he has to report to the police once a week. After he's released, Mark moves in with his sister and brother-in-law in Topah, which is like in the center of North Island. It's about three hours away from where he used to live. And the next two

years honestly pass kind of quietly until February of 2015, when once again, Mark goes to trial for the murders of Amber and Christine. What's interesting is this time around, the crown prosecution presents a pretty different case. For example, as Radio New Zealand reported, they're no longer claiming that Amber and Christine were killed around 7 p.m. Now they're saying that they died in the early morning on August 30th. They're also looking at Mark's fuel consumption, again the car mileage, which both have inconsistencies that still Mark cannot answer for. And Mark can't account for the inconsistencies in his cell phone records either. You see, we learn that his phone was turned off not just in that three-hour span from 5.30 to 8.30-ish. When they alleged that

the murder happened in the first trial, now we learn that it was also turned off from around 1 a.m. until the next morning. So before we kind of always thought, okay, he's back at 8.30. We know we have this sex worker who comes to see him around 11. She leaves at 1. You know, the assumption I think has always been, okay, well, then he went to bed. We never had to think about it. But now from 1 a.m. on, we don't know where he is. Now, when he's asked about this, he claims that the woman he hired that night turned his phone off. And he says that's why it was off till the next morning, which I'm like definitely side-eyeing. There's a lot of holes in the prosecution's theory, but I don't feel like Mark's doing himself any favors by like anything that happened that

night. Yeah. I mean, can they ask the sex worker about this? Well, so they do, right? Like, so she does testify at the second trial, but she tells the court that she used Mark's phone to call her driver. And then she left his motel at 12.48. So she's like, I don't know what he did after that, but I don't think I turned off his phone. Now, another person who takes the stand at the second trial is Mark's brother-in-law, Glenn, who if you'll remember, this is Christine's brother. He's the one who found Amber and Christine that morning, like all those years ago. Glenn testified back at Mark's first trial, but this time, Mark's defense team actually takes a different tactic. They, in the second trial, try to turn the tables and put suspicion on him as possibly being the real

killer. Yeah. If you'll remember, you had asked in the first episode, why is no one talking about Glenn and no one really was, but now they're like, hang on, like, let's really evaluate everyone who was there that day. And according to Steph New Zealand, police actually were suspicious of Glenn back in 2000, in part because he, I guess, had a cut on his nose the day that he found Amber and Christine, you know, Christine with all of her defensive wounds. Right. So their logic was then maybe she had scratched him. That's exactly what they're thinking. So of course, the defense asked Glenn, like, hey, you had a scratch back then, like, what the heck happened to your nose? And Glenn says he can't remember. He says maybe it was a cat scratch or a pimple, which like,

sure could have happened. But the problem is there's like some other fishy stuff. Like, again, if you want to build a circumstantial case against Mark, Glenn's old roommate also testifies later on at trial. And she tells the court that she found some blood on a towel in their bathroom on the morning that Amber and Christine's bodies were found. Okay, but whose blood was it? Well, that's a great question. That's the same question I had. The same question I think anyone who's ever watched an episode of Dateline would have. But I couldn't find any solid answer on even whether or not it's been tested. Oh my God. Which again, you want to talk about leaving doors open and questions like,

how, how do you, how, how? Yeah. And the same roommate, I guess, also told police that her partner had his own reservations about Glenn to the point that on that same day, her partner took it upon himself to search through Glenn's clothes, looking for any evidence that he was involved in the murders. I feel like that's very much something I would do though. Oh, for sure. And obviously, like they had to have come forward to police if in the early days police were suspecting this. So you can just see again, this is where in my mind, if we had closed those doors, if we had tested the towel and we're like, oh, he cut his note. Yeah, it was, it was Glenn's blood. And he did have a cat scratch. But if you're going to leave all these

questions so many years later, you have to understand why people are picking it apart. Yeah, for sure. Now, as the public hears in court, police kept looking closer at Glenn. I mean, they went so far as to search his house and his car with a luminol. And both his house and the trunk of his car tested positive for blood. And Glenn had really no explanation of how it got there. And here's where things get interesting. When you want to talk about the forensic evidence that was used to convict Mark, there's still forensic evidence in Glenn's case. So I don't know what happened with the towel, but I know that they do test the traces of blood in Glenn's house, at least according to the New Zealand Herald. And the blood in his house comes back as being

an 83% match for Christine's DNA and an 88% match for Ambers, which he's related to them too. I was going to say, like, they would have some crossover DNA just because they're family members. Yeah. And I also don't know like 83% and 88. Usually when we're talking about DNA, it's like, it's like a one in a bazillion chance it's there. So I don't even know that 88 and 83 is strong. Right. But again, it also, it's certainly no weaker than finding the one pathologist in the entire world who would say exactly what you want him to say with testing methods that are not proven. Right. Now, I read in court documents that Glenn was crossed off of police's list pretty early on in the investigation. He was never charged with anything related to the murders.

Okay. But I still have so many questions. Girl, same. I don't know why he was crossed off. It was he crossed off only because they really started looking at Mark or is there a reason we can say without a shadow of a doubt, Glenn's off our list? There's another big question and I think potentially the most important question that the defense brings up at Mark's second trial. They bring up the fact that there was unknown male DNA under both Amber and Christine's fingernails. It's not Mark's. I don't think it's Glenn's. So here's a good question. Who the heck does that belong to? Yeah. The jury at Mark's first trial didn't hear about this because according to court records, the samples weren't analyzed until 2014. Wait, you told me that all the forensic evidence

had been tested by the time his first trial rolled around. What was this hold up? Court records don't specify. But again, this is where in this case, I have a thousand unanswered questions about all of the forensic and the physical evidence. They also make a point to come back to the DNA that was found on Mark's polo, right? So like that article kind of eviscerated it in my mind. Yeah, for sure. But what we've seen obviously with other cases that span years and years is advances in science and how that can alter how evidence is examined and perceived. So this time the crown calls an expert from the Netherlands who tells the court that she extracted RNA from the DNA on the Lundy sample and that her results show the substance was most likely human in origin.

And the defense is arguing that the science isn't developed enough for forensics. So even though it has developed and you know, we're years and years on, we're still not close enough to make it definitive. Yes. And I don't want to get into the scientific weeds because again, this is really complex and I don't want to give you wrong information. But basically at the trial, there's just all this expert back and forth about the test results, what they mean, if they're reliable. In the end, the trial lasts for seven weeks this time before the jury goes to deliberation. And this time, they're there for 16 hours. On April 1st, 2015, they announced their verdict. Mark Lundy is once again guilty of two counts of murder and he goes back to prison. Oh my God. But the story's not

over yet because once again, Mark appeals. As John O'Galuska reports for Stuff New Zealand, Mark's team focuses on the main points that we've seen through this whole messy story. Time in the murders, the fact that the crown all of a sudden had a whole different time of death the second trial, which I could go on a spiral about this. I think that's totally unfair when prosecutions do this. You had a story and you stuck by that story until you had to come up with a new one like doesn't seem on the up and up to me. And then all of a sudden a new one just materializes out of nothing. Yeah. They're also hitting hard on the tissue on Mark's shirt, the evidence around Mark's car, and finally if Mark was judged based on that infamous funeral

picture. Oh yeah. In December of 2019, this is pretty recent, the Supreme Court of New Zealand dismisses Mark's last appeal. As of 2021, his team is planning to apply to the Criminal Case Review Commission, which looks into wrongful convictions, but no date has been set as to like if and when that's happening as of this recording. Even though he remains guilty in the eyes of the law, to this day, Mark Lundy maintains he is innocent of murdering his wife and their daughter Amber. The murder weapon has never been found. The blonde wig that Margaret alleged Mark was wearing has never been found. The clothes that he would have been wearing when this happened never been found. And the unknown fingerprints from Lundy's house and the DNA

under Amber and Christine's fingernails has never been identified. So my question is, what are we scared of with the DNA? Because if Mark didn't kill them, who did? Yeah. I mean, that's arguably the biggest question around his possible innocence, right? Like give me an alternative. And one theory is that one of the people Mark owed money to maybe came over to the house, you know, to scare them, things got out of hand. According to the New Zealand Herald, there's another theory about a former co-worker of Christine's who allegedly had issues with her. Now, due to court suppression laws, I can't tell you this man's name or really much of anything about him other than the fact that he refused to hand over his DNA to police and he had a violent

criminal history. Okay, but I mean, can we get a subpoena over here or something? I mean, think, right? Like I don't know if this is due to how the New Zealand legal system works that they can't. Or again, like they have their guy, so they're not going to test anything else. Or maybe this speaks to police's singular focus on Mark. But why can't we rule this guy out again? Close that door. Yeah. If there is unknown DNA under anyone's nails, like we got a whole new way to test that these days, we don't need to like compare one on one. What are we waiting for? Yeah, seriously. To this day, Mark still has his supporters who believe with every fiber of their being that justice has been miscarried. Whatever the truth is, whether it's Mark or someone else who's

responsible for these heinous crimes, the fact will always remain that two innocent people had their lives cruelly stolen from them. And they do deserve justice in whatever form that may be. If they were still alive today, Amber Lundy would be getting near her 28th birthday, while Christine might even be thinking about retirement. But the world will never know what their lives might have looked like. And Mark Lundy will be eligible for parole in 2022. To see all of our source material for this episode, you can find that on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?