Kay Sinclair

David Bain seemed zombie-like, emotionless - "probably in deep shock" - during discussions about funeral arrangements for his family, a retired Dunedin funeral director said yesterday.

Margaret Bain told a psychologist friend a year before she was murdered, that things at home were "terrible" and she would like to shoot her husband, the High Court at Christchurch heard yesterday.

A former Otago ERO reviewer yesterday described Robin Bain as "a walking cadaver" whose responses were "robotic" during an assessment of his school in September 1993.

Although David Bain told police he saw only the bodies of his parents the morning five of his family were shot, he later told a Dunedin High Court jury he had remembered seeing the others.

Photographic expert Simon Schollum has given evidence the photographic evidence doesn't support the defence allegation of police tampering with the scene in Stephen Bain's bedroom.

If fingerprints he found on David Bain's rifle had been put there six months before the gun was used to shoot the Bain family on June 20, 1994, they would have been destroyed by the way the weapon was handled that day, police fingerprint expert Kim Jones told the High Court at Christchurch yesterday.

Less than four months after an unfavourable Education Review Office (ERO) report on the Taieri Beach School, 15 of the 16 areas had been brought up to compliance standard, the High Court at Christchurch heard yesterday.

On the morning he was arrested, David Bain told his uncle: ''I'll be glad when this is sorted out and I can live my life''.