Lundy murders

Christine Marie Lundy, 38, and her 7-year-old daughter Amber Grace Lundy were murdered in Palmerston North, New Zealand, on 29 or 30 August 2000. The bodies were found by Christine’s brother, Glenn Weggery who went to the Lundy home around 9.00am on the 30th to see Christine about his GST returns. Both had been attacked with a tomahawk like implement (which was never found) leaving blood and tissue splattered on the ceiling and walls. Twenty-one hairs, presumably belonging to the attacker, were found under Christine Lundy's fingernails, but were never tested or analysed for DNA. 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, and in 2002, he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years.

At his first trial, the prosecution argued that a tiny mark found on Lundy's shirt was Christine's brain tissue. They claimed he left Petone immediately after making a phone call to his wife at 5:30, drove to Palmerston North, killed his wife and daughter at about 7:00 pm, disposed of his bloody clothes and the murder weapon, altered the timing on the family computer to suggest they were still alive at 7:00 pm, and drove the same 134 kilometres back to Petone by 8:28 pm. Lundy's defence maintained that travelling to Palmerston North and back in three hours was implausible.

For more than 20 years, Lundy has claimed he is innocent. In 2002, he unsuccessfully took his case to the New Zealand Court of Appeal, and in 2013 appealed to the Privy Council in Britain. 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.

At the retrial in 2015, the prosecution presented an entirely different version of events. 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. They also presented the results of different tests, this time based on mRNA, conducted on the spots on Lundy's shirt. In April 2015, he was found guilty again. The mRNA evidence was subsequently ruled inadmissible, but the jury had already heard it. In 2017, Lundy took this issue to the Court of Appeal. The appeal was dismissed, as the court decided all the other evidence still proved he was guilty.

In 2022, the new Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) agreed to investigate his case. He was granted parole in April 2025 and is set to be released in May after serving 23 years in prison. His case is still being investigated by the CCRC and his supporters said they would continue the fight to prove he was innocent. Provided by Wikipedia