In February 2001, after a six-month investigation, Christine's husband and Amber's father, Mark Edward Lundy (then aged 43), was arrested and charged,[1] and in 2002, he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years.
His convictions were quashed because exculpatory evidence about the reliability of testing done on brain tissue (that had been withheld at the first trial) led to profound divisions between the experts, and a re-trial was ordered.
They now claimed that Lundy drove to Palmerston North and back in the middle of the night - after spending time with a sex worker in Petone.
The owners of the plots, Christopher Morrison and Douglas Twigg, told the court at Lundy's second trial that the sale went unconditional in early 2000.
Nevertheless, the Crown alleged that Mark Lundy killed her, intending to use the increased payout from her life insurance to cover his mounting debts.
[17] Mark Lundy's cell phone records showed he made a call from Petone to a business partner of his Hawke's Bay wine-making venture at 8:28 pm.
The police claimed Lundy drove up to Palmerston North and killed his wife and daughter, but presented an entirely different version of when this occurred at each of his two trials.
His dramatic "outpouring of grief" and collapse at the funeral was covered widely in the media and became the subject of extensive "comment and public debate focusing closely on Mr. Lundy's credibility".
Eaton believes the image became ingrained in people's minds, and that the constant replaying of scenes from the funeral inevitably affected the jury at both trials, and had a serious effect on the outcome.
Later reports and tests by other experts cast doubt upon the identification of the material as brain tissue,[31] and at Lundy's second trial, Miller later admitted that his laboratory was not accredited to do forensic work.
The police eventually recovered a tomahawk from among Lundy’s possessions, but it wasn’t marked with paint, and did not test positive for blood.
[33] The only person who claimed to have seen Lundy in Palmerston North at the time of the crime was Margaret Dance— a 60-year-old woman, who said she had "psychic powers and a photographic memory".
She lived about 500 metres from the Lundy home and said she had seen a man wearing a blond wig who "appeared to be trying to look like a woman" running on the street at about 7:15 pm.
However, in What the Jury Didn't Hear, Mike White wrote that Mark Lundy weighed 130kg, wore an orthotic aid in one shoe after an accident that required ankle surgery and struggled to do anything vaguely athletic.
[37] In 2009, North & South magazine published the results of an investigation into the case by Mike White titled The Lundy murders: what the jury didn't hear.
[15] Lundy would have had only three hours to make the return journey from Petone to Palmerston North, a round trip of approximately 290 km (180 mi), kill his wife and daughter, change his clothes and dispose of evidence; White contended that was not possible in such a short time frame.
[15] In 2012, documentary film maker, Bryan Bruce made an episode examining the Lundy case as part of his series The Investigator.
[39] In November 2012, Lundy applied to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council seeking permission to appeal his murder convictions.
A week before the hearing began, the Crown Law Office finally released a document to the defence team which had not been seen by any of Lundy's lawyers prior to the trial in 2002.
The document was written by the officer in charge of the original investigation, Detective Sergeant Ross Grantham, and contained a statement by neuropathologist, Dr Heng Teoh.
[41] Affidavits sworn by three other experts in immunohistochemistry, Professors Phillip Sheard, Helen Whitwell and Kevin Gatter, all concluded the tissue was poorly preserved.
They concluded the IHC procedure conducted by Texas pathologist, Dr Rodney Miller, was an "uncontrolled experiment" incapable of producing a reliable outcome.
[40] On 4 October 2013, the Privy Council quashed Lundy's convictions stating that "the divisions between the experts are so profound, they range over so many areas and they relate to matters which are so central to the guilt or innocence of the appellant, that the Board has concluded that they may only properly be resolved by the triers of fact in a (new) trial".
They no longer claimed that Lundy made a 300 km round trip from Petone to Palmerston North in less than three hours to commit the murders.
[53] Lundy was represented in the Court of Appeal by Jonathan Eaton QC, Julie-Anne Kincade, Jack Oliver-Hood and Helen Coutts.
It ruled that the Crown evidence about RNA (the alleged presence of brain tissue on Lundy's shirt and similar to DNA) in the retrial was inadmissible but decided the appeal should be dismissed "on the basis that no substantial miscarriage of justice has actually occurred.
In 2020, North & South journalist, Mike White, revealed that "crucial evidence that could have convicted or cleared Mark Lundy of murdering his wife and daughter was never tested, and then destroyed by police."
[70] At the retrial, defence counsel David Hislop, KC, suggested Christine's brother, Glenn Weggery, had been molesting Amber Lundy and accused him of the murders.
[72] Defence counsel Ross Burns, asked questions about DNA found in Christine and Amber's fingernail scrapings which came from two different men.
[74] In July 2009, and again in 2013, university students proposed races whereby teams of vehicles would travel from Petone to Palmerston North, in an attempt to recreate the journey Mark Lundy was alleged to have made in order to commit the murders within the timeline.