Joe Karam has another book out on the Bain murders. And this time it's about guilt, not innocence, Mark Price reports.
The main problem with Joe Karam's new book, The Prosecutions of David Bain, Trial By Ambush, is that it is written by Joe Karam.
After all, he has been David Bain's staunchest ally for 16 years and is in no way an impartial observer.
But, if those who read Karam's book put aside that problem, they will find a thoroughly convincing argument.
In 1995 Bain was found guilty in the Dunedin High Court of murdering the five members of his family in their Every St home the previous year.
He served 13 years in jail while Karam fought to have him freed.
Then, in 2009 the case was reheard in the High Court at Christchurch and the jury, this time, found him not guilty.
However, a degree of public scepticism of Bain's innocence has lingered.
Trial By Ambush sets out to address that scepticism by systematically undermining every piece of police and expert evidence presented to the two juries.
How can anyone, for instance, argue with the evidence laid out by Karam that the killer turned on the computer in the Bain house at 6.42am - so as to type a suicide note - three minutes before David Bain was seen arriving home from his paper round?
The retrial jury was convinced there was "reasonable doubt" and now the 448-page Karam book, with its fastidious dissection of the evidence, suggests a wider audience should come to the same conclusion.
Another writer may yet take a fine-tooth comb to the evidence and come up with a different interpretation, but history, it is said, is written by the victor - and with David Bain's acquittal, Karam will forever hold that title.
For that reason, Trial by Ambush is likely to stand as, if not the official version, then at least as the popularly accepted version of the Bain casebook.
To accept Karam's version - not to mention the retrial jury's verdict - it is also necessary to accept incompetence by some members of the "Operation Every" police team.
Karam writes of a "bungled" investigation with evidence being "cherry-picked" to suit the police "mind-set" that Bain was guilty, and "omissions and failures" that were detrimental to him.
He suggests the police did too little investigating before arresting Bain.
The Bain family - parents Robin and Margaret, daughters Arawa and Laniet and son Stephen - died on Monday, June 20, 1994.
Each was shot in the head with David Bain's .22 rifle.
Initially, police considered the possibility Robin Bain shot his family then shot himself - deciding to spare David.
But four days after the shootings - on Friday, June 24, 1994 - David Bain was charged.
Karam's book lists the 11 initial allegations put to Bain by police and three other "factors" he considers "dominated" the detectives' initial belief he was guilty:
"The first was that David had said to the 111 operator: 'They are all dead - I came home and they're all dead', and yet he told [Dt Sgt Greg] Dunn that he had only seen his mother and father dead. This was construed as a lie, a belated attempt to cover up the deed ...
"The second point relates to the 'missing 20 minutes', the period of time between when David got home and when he called 111.
It was believed that this was when David committed the killings, and that again he was lying or had a blackout and couldn't remember doing it ...
"The third crucial aspect that caused the detectives to be so sure was to do with blood [and where it was found]."
Through the course of the book Karam explains why none of the allegations and beliefs were either true or proved Bain was the killer.
At the Christchurch retrial, Detective Senior Sergeant Jim Doyle took most of the heat for the police inquiry team and Karam devotes 14 pages to Doyle being "hammered" by defence lawyer Michael Reed QC.
"Doyle had the good sense for the most part to 'fess up, as it were, when he realised that he was skating on thin ice.
"By the time he left the stand on the third day of the trial the defence was confident that the case for the Crown was irretrievable."
The defence's cross-examination of Doyle alleged many shortcomings in the investigation - including the failure to investigate the alleged incest by Robin Bain of his daughter Laniet and the part these allegations might have played in the killings.
Karam: "Doyle claimed he knew of no motive for Robin, but then in the next breath admitted to knowing of Laniet's background as a prostitute and to the fact that she had been telling people that her father had been having sex with her for years.
"Doyle's answer: 'This was a homicide investigation, Mr Reed, not an incest investigation, and that was our focus.'
"To which Michael Reed responded:'`Exactly, there's the problem, Mr Doyle, throughout.You weren't prepared and didn't want to investigate Robin, did you? That's the problem.'
"Doyle: 'If I can just clarify this. Detective Chief Inspector [Peter] Robinson was the one who was directing inquiries at that point in time. Now if he had felt he wanted to take it down that line then that was up to him."'
Robinson did give evidence at the retrial but, says Karam, the defence team decided after the "grilling" given to Doyle a long series of questions was "largely unnecessary".
"So much harm had been done to the Crown case through Doyle that another assault on Robinson - who by now had been retired for 14 years and was looking suitably like an elderly statesman - may have been seen as vindictive overkill."
Karam says in hindsight, it would have been interesting to have explored with Robinson two matters which Doyle had "passed off" as being Robinson's decisions.
"Firstly that the inquiry would not investigate the incest allegations and also that Robinson was ultimately responsible for the decision to charge and arrest."
Robinson told the ODT this week he had no comment to make on the book.
He had not seen a copy and did not think he would be buying one.
Aside from giving some small insight into the tactical manoeuvrings of the defence team, and a considerable amount of Karam's own analysis, Trial by Ambush adds little new information to the Bain debate.
The first 182 pages recap David Bain's original trial in Dunedin, before Karam became involved.
Karam fires a few shots at David Bain's first defence lawyer, Michael Guest, describing his decision to allow the defence to be filmed for a television documentary as "cavalier".
But he also credits Guest with introducing him to the case, to the miscarriage of justice Guest believed had occurred and to David Bain himself.
"I interrogated him [Bain] mercilessly, far more ruthlessly than the police could, due to Bill of Rights restrictions.
"I needed to make a decision whether to pursue the case any further, and I would not do so if I could not rely on David's word.
"My sessions with him were so intense that at times he collapsed to the floor in tearful anguish."
Retired Canadian supreme court judge Ian Binnie has now been given the task of deciding whether or not David Bain should be awarded compensation for wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
Legal experts have told the ODT Robin Bain needs to be found to have been responsible for killing his family if David Bain is to collect compensation for being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.
Towards the end of the 2009 retrial, Crown counsel Kieran Raftery told the jury there was "not the slightest shred of forensic evidence" linking Robin Bain to the murders.
In Trial by Ambush Karam sums up, in part, like this:
None of the professionals found any [psychological] disorder in David.
His normality in this regard is borne out in daily life.
Putting it bluntly, the evidence both from the trial and the hundreds of others with whom he worked in the prison, including prison staff, and those with whom he has worked and socialised both before June 1994 and since he got out of prison is quite to the contrary.
He is described as a very empathetic person, caring of the needs of others, a law-abiding citizen, cognisant and aware of the behaviour expected in any situation.
Does he have idiosyncrasies? Of course he does, as we all do.
But there is absolutely no doubt that he has no mental disorder or clinical mental illness.
The Crown case that David killed four people and then took his dog on a paper round before coming home to kill his father and then leave a false trail, along with the other planning and deception they say is involved, is totally incompatible with the person David was and is.
On the other hand, Robin, as we have seen from the empirical data, and putting it in plain language, is a dead ringer for the profile of a despairing-type perpetrator of familicide.
A proud man who sees himself as the head of the family, who has been rejected by his wife.
A man who is becoming angry and frustrated at not finding the standard of employment he feels he deserves.
A man suffering shame and ignominy from the lips of his own daughter; true or false as her stories may have been, the shame would be the same.
A man who applied for stress leave not long before the tragedy.
A man tidying up loose ends.
A man said by his peers to have lost the ability to act rationally.
A man who for years had been living in embarrassing conditions in a derelict van in a paddock with no ablution facilities.
A man who according to his very loyal brother was going back home to "face up to it all again", or words to that effect.
A man who had been a hunter and user of firearms all his life.
A man who had two books on his bedside table, each of which involved death as their main theme and the one he appeared to be reading entitled Death Comes as the End.
A man who had a pile of bullet shells fired by the murder weapon on his dresser.
A man who was a very experienced school teacher who sent out a school newsletter just days before the tragedy which included three stories written by his pupils about family slayings and prefaced them with the warning that they may disturb.
A man with a bruise and abrasion on his right fist that had been sustained in the hours before his death.
A man whose wife, 15 years earlier, told her close friend and confidant that she was extremely concerned about "Robin's depression".
A man who ultimately succumbed to the combination of factors that causes some men to take the ultimate revenge on life in the most inexplicable manner, by destroying his life and the lives of those he loves in an act of what we call familicide.
