Bassett Road machine gun murders

Although the weapon was set to single and not rapid-fire for the killings, word spread quickly of a "Chicago-style" gang murder previously unheard of in New Zealand.

Frederick George Walker, a 38-year-old commercial traveller, and Kevin James Speight, a 26-year-old seaman, were found shot several times with large calibre bullets at the Bassett Road house.

During this illicit period, beerhouses served as a meeting place for beatnik modernist poets and musicians, figures from the boxing and rugby league sporting community, affluent community members who "slummed" with the underworld, drug addicts, alcoholics, borderline or criminal practitioners of gambling in New Zealand, and hardened criminals.

At that time, New Zealand's firearms control legislation was lax, as many returned military personnel had residual weapons from their Second World War service period.

Two notable figures within the New Zealand criminal underworld, John Gillies and Ronald Jorgensen, were arrested on 31 December 1963 and stood trial starting 24 February 1964.

Born in Kaikōura on Upper Canterbury's eastern coast of the South Island to an authoritarian Danish father, Jorgensen had a history of assault and theft in Christchurch, New Zealand.

[citation needed] In 2010, an episode of TVNZ's The Missing directed by Tom Reilly[7] traced the life and disappearance of Jorgensen and uncovered several eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him in Perth, Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.