Speaker 1: Kiota.
Speaker 2: I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a
Speaker 2: daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. The nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight deaths of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope remain
Speaker 2: one of New Zealand's most talked about cases. Scott Watson
Speaker 2: has spent the last twenty five years behind bars after
Speaker 2: being convicted of murdering them, despite no bodies ever being found. Now,
Speaker 2: Watson is heading back to the courtroom, four years after
Speaker 2: his case was referred back to the Court of Appeal
Speaker 2: in what is his last shot at clearing his name.
Speaker 2: Today on the Front Page, we'll talk to senior NZED
Speaker 2: Herald journalist David Fisher about the evidence that will be
Speaker 2: debated during this week long hearing. But first we're going
Speaker 2: back to nineteen ninety nine with enzed Herold's senior journalist
Speaker 2: Carolyn Menyee and editorial leader Oscar Ali, who covered Watson's
Speaker 2: first trial. First off, do you both remember when the
Speaker 2: news came in that Ben and Olivia had gone missing?
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. Yes, it was extraordinary really for a
Speaker 1: number of reasons, because, i mean, let's face it, most
Speaker 1: people remember New Year's Eve nights and going out and partying,
Speaker 1: and no one would ever think two young kids would
Speaker 1: never come home to their families and are still missing.
Speaker 3: It was massive from the start, and you've got to
Speaker 3: remember too that it was New Year's Day they were missing,
Speaker 3: very quiet time for the news. So sometimes stories become
Speaker 3: bigger faster because it's not a lot happening in the country,
Speaker 3: but you know, a couple of really attractive kids doing
Speaker 3: what a lot of kids of that age did, which
Speaker 3: is their first holidays with their friends, not their family.
Speaker 3: And also to be fair to their parents, they were
Speaker 3: very vocal very quickly that you could see the concern,
Speaker 3: and obviously as the days went on it just got
Speaker 3: grimmer and grimmar.
Speaker 1: Not to mention their surnames, Hope, and you know, they
Speaker 1: were the perfect set of white middle class kids, beautiful, intelligent,
Speaker 1: their whole lives ahead of them, and I think that's
Speaker 1: what capitivated the country too, because I think if it was,
Speaker 1: you know, as some different people in a small town
Speaker 1: for example, there wouldn't have been such a huge kind
Speaker 1: of interest.
Speaker 3: So you've got to remember too, this is ninety seven,
Speaker 3: ninety eight, no cell phones. We all carry GPS devices
Speaker 3: now called smartphones. People didn't go missing rarely in this
Speaker 3: country back then, and you were as a kid growing up,
Speaker 3: you went out for a day and your parents know
Speaker 3: where you were. There was no phone to ring you on.
Speaker 3: There wasn't necessarily a payphone, so it was a very
Speaker 3: different age. It's more than twenty five years ago. It'd
Speaker 3: be hard to think that people going missing like that nowadays,
Speaker 3: with all the technology that we have, cell phones, pinging towers,
Speaker 3: But back in ninety seven ninety eight, it was very
Speaker 3: rare for people to just disappear, especially at such a
Speaker 3: busy three thousand people at that party, it just didn't happen.
Speaker 2: It took about six months for Scott Watson to be
Speaker 2: arrested in ch arged with the case. Now, how was
Speaker 2: he portrayed in the public eye over that time.
Speaker 1: Well, in my opinion, I think he was portrayed as
Speaker 1: quite a villain from the outset and certainly from the
Speaker 1: police's perspective at the time. There was such a huge
Speaker 1: pressure for the police to convict someone for these two
Speaker 1: kids going missing, and Scott, given his background as a
Speaker 1: young teenager, was always in trouble. He was actually in
Speaker 1: Ballstal and from memory when he was in bull stall.
Speaker 1: As a teenager, he recovered a story at the time
Speaker 1: for sixty minutes, stabbed the padre and the eye with
Speaker 1: a big spike. So he was a bad egg from
Speaker 1: a young age. But to be honest, I think that
Speaker 1: he was probably unfairly maligned at the artset. He was
Speaker 1: on his own at the time. At the party, he
Speaker 1: was very drunk, very obnoxious, hitting on woman, being really inappropriate,
Speaker 1: So he didn't portray himself in very good light in
Speaker 1: those circumstances.
Speaker 3: I think it's been pretty well established now that police
Speaker 3: were leaky and while it took six months to a
Speaker 3: Scott Watson, they pulled his boat the Blade, out of
Speaker 3: the water on January the twelfth, and every TV camera
Speaker 3: and newspaper photographer knew to be there for that. And
Speaker 3: once that happened in broad daylight with an audience of media,
Speaker 3: it was pretty obvious that Watson was a significant person
Speaker 3: of interest. It got reported that he had forty eight
Speaker 3: previous criminal convictions, and you've got to understand when there's
Speaker 3: a six month gap between people going missing and someone
Speaker 3: being charged, it's a long period of time where the
Speaker 3: media can report about people there's no subject to say
Speaker 3: because no charges are being laid or are about to
Speaker 3: be laid, and that had a lot of consequences when
Speaker 3: it came time for the trial and people giving evidence
Speaker 3: as witnesses in the High Court, who've been interviewed by
Speaker 3: media days after it happened. It caused a lot of complications.
Speaker 4: And there are a lot of people who are happy
Speaker 4: to say, and you heard this so much at the time,
Speaker 4: you know, well, we're maybe a little unsure whether he
Speaker 4: did it or not, but he's not a very nice guy.
Speaker 4: It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 5: It matters a lot.
Speaker 4: Because if we can do that for him, we could
Speaker 4: do it for anybody.
Speaker 2: Going forwards to nineteen ninety nine, that trial went on
Speaker 2: for about three months. Like you say, it would have
Speaker 2: been quite hard to find a jury who didn't know
Speaker 2: anything about this case.
Speaker 3: Hey, that's right, and that's one of the reasons why
Speaker 3: it was shifted Dwellington. And also you could remember in
Speaker 3: those days there was no social media that's on Facebook,
Speaker 3: There was barely cell phones. Everyone consumed mainstream media through
Speaker 3: television and newspapers. News websites were just sort of starting,
Speaker 3: and there was so much information about this case. It
Speaker 3: took eighteen months to get to trial that already been
Speaker 3: what's called a deposition's hearing and Blenham and we don't
Speaker 3: do that anymore, but that's basically a dry run of
Speaker 3: the key bits of the evidence for a judge to
Speaker 3: decide if there's enough evidence to stand trial. So everyone
Speaker 3: had already heard most of the evidence against Scott Watson
Speaker 3: by that case, not all of it, And there were
Speaker 3: certainly a lot of dramatic revelations at the trial. But
Speaker 3: the whole country was talking about this like it sounds
Speaker 3: not very nice to say, but this case was New
Speaker 3: Zealand's ij Simpson case. Justice case that just captivated the
Speaker 3: country for eighteen months.
Speaker 1: For a lot of reasons too, because of police procedure
Speaker 1: or their lack of it, or their lack of transparency
Speaker 1: in terms of evidence, in terms of like using his
Speaker 1: photographs and showing witnesses different photographs of him looking into
Speaker 1: several who looked nothing like that on the night, even
Speaker 1: drawings m of the drawing of him looking scruffy. So
Speaker 1: people kind of already made up their minds in a way,
Speaker 1: I feel, and early.
Speaker 2: On as well, Ben and Olivia's parents were quite vocal
Speaker 2: in the media, Hey, how do you think that helped
Speaker 2: or perhaps hindered the case in those early days, because
Speaker 2: now they don't speak at all.
Speaker 1: No, Well, I think Gerald Hope was very vocal, and
Speaker 1: he obviously and then you know later became the mayor
Speaker 1: of Blenham. But also because they were very credible. I
Speaker 1: think people were captured by these families. The Smart family
Speaker 1: were less vocal, but Gerald certainly, he was pretty much
Speaker 1: a spokesperson for both families. And you're right like I
Speaker 1: think like nowadays you would really subdue to say anyway
Speaker 1: to talk before a trial, but he was very vocal
Speaker 1: from the out.
Speaker 2: Yet the case has become pretty notorious as one of
Speaker 2: New Zealand's most controversial cases. Was there that feeling during
Speaker 2: the trial that this was going to be quite contentious?
Speaker 3: There were certainly some big surprises at the trial. The
Speaker 3: whole country was watching, so I was covering it for
Speaker 3: the Dominion newspaper and we set aside whole pages with
Speaker 3: no ads for all of the evidence every day, and
Speaker 3: I was there for every day of three months. The
Speaker 3: interest was enormous. It just led TV news every night.
Speaker 3: People just couldn't get enough information.
Speaker 5: And I think.
Speaker 3: Chelsea, you could feel the pressure, You could feel the
Speaker 3: pressure on everyone, the jury, the judged, the lawyers. And
Speaker 3: this might sound really silly, the media, we felt it too,
Speaker 3: because your bylines on the story, people realize who you are,
Speaker 3: and every party or social interaction you have they're talking
Speaker 3: about this case. That's what I make the OJ comparison.
Speaker 3: It just captivated the whole country, and I think Carra
Speaker 3: is right. People had actually made up their mind about
Speaker 3: Scott Waltson and in terms of the justice system, it's
Speaker 3: twenty five years and we're still talking about this and
Speaker 3: I look at these things and I think, what if
Speaker 3: he didn't do it, what if he's been in prison
Speaker 3: for all this time. I don't lose any sleep about
Speaker 3: the verdict, and I haven't followed really closely the appeal stuff,
Speaker 3: but what I would say is that Scott Watson had
Speaker 3: two excellent defense lawyers for his trial, Bruce Davidson who's
Speaker 3: now a judge, and Mike and Tanovic. They really believed
Speaker 3: in his innocence. They fought tooth and nail, and a
Speaker 3: lot of what the appeals is now considering is the
Speaker 3: great work that they did at trial, probing witnesses, finding
Speaker 3: out about problems with evidence that the appeal as stands
Speaker 3: on the shoulders of the work those two did at
Speaker 3: the trial.
Speaker 2: I think it's pretty well established that a lot of
Speaker 2: this evidence in the case is circumstantial.
Speaker 3: Hey, DNA was brand new in ninety nine. You know,
Speaker 3: it's very hard because there was so much publicity of
Speaker 3: this before I got the trial and everything that's happening
Speaker 3: now be really clear. This was a big deal in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine. This was contentious.
Speaker 5: Then.
Speaker 3: The ESA evidence about supposedly Olivia's heirs on the blanket
Speaker 3: on Scott Watson's boat. That was absolutely damning at the
Speaker 3: time because there was no evidence that they'd met, unless
Speaker 3: you believe he was in the water taxi and offered
Speaker 3: for bedding Olivia to sleep on their boat. But there
Speaker 3: was no sightings of them together. So for a jury
Speaker 3: and for the public, how do hears get on someone's
Speaker 3: boat of someone you've never met? And there was all
Speaker 3: this evidence about secondary transfer and you're at a party
Speaker 3: and you bump into someone and here goes on you,
Speaker 3: and they bump into someone else, and here goes on
Speaker 3: someone else. Quite far fetched but powerful evidence, right, And
Speaker 3: this is what the appeal is about now, is Yeah,
Speaker 3: there were serious problems with the way that evidence was
Speaker 3: tested and collected. That happened at the time that ESR
Speaker 3: scientist got absolutely grilled on the stand Erarors were made
Speaker 3: not to mention.
Speaker 1: What is it called the hatch there was on his boat.
Speaker 1: Now that was proven, that was false. And I've actually
Speaker 1: been on the blade twice. Not long after the trial
Speaker 1: ended and the verdict, we interviewed Watson's family, his mother
Speaker 1: Bev and dad Chris, and we actually went sailing on
Speaker 1: the blade and we went back again sailing for the
Speaker 1: twenty year podcast. And it was quite chilling actually being
Speaker 1: on the blade because it was so tiny. It's really noisy,
Speaker 1: and all I could think about was at the time
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, imagine if they were there,
Speaker 1: you know, they could look out, but no one could
Speaker 1: look in. And if they were actually in there, tripped
Speaker 1: in there, I just thought, God, how terrifying those wool
Speaker 1: kids must have felt.
Speaker 5: So at the trial that was very powerful evidence.
Speaker 3: The crown case was that Olivia was fighting for her
Speaker 3: life to get out of the boat, and that's powerful evidence.
Speaker 3: And when it's presented in the context of Olivia's hairs
Speaker 3: were on the blanket on the boat and then a
Speaker 3: lot was made of Scott Watson's behavior after the kids
Speaker 3: went missing. The entire boat had been washed down, cassette
Speaker 3: tapes had been.
Speaker 5: White wiped well.
Speaker 1: He painted the bar and made.
Speaker 5: A big deal of that.
Speaker 3: The defense explained nearly all of that. There'd been water
Speaker 3: on board, rough sailing, crossing cooks straight. That's why things
Speaker 3: have been cleaned, because saltwater gets in a damage things.
Speaker 3: Much was made of Scott Watson painting his boat in
Speaker 3: the following days. He ordered the paint weeks earlier, so
Speaker 3: it all looked sinister. And they talk in criminal trials
Speaker 3: about each piece of evidence to strand, and the strand
Speaker 3: builds a rope.
Speaker 5: That's the way judges explained it.
Speaker 3: There were a lot of strands that knotted together and
Speaker 3: made quite a strong rope. But the jury were made
Speaker 3: to ask some quite big leaps of faith in the
Speaker 3: crown case.
Speaker 2: What do you think swayed the jury in.
Speaker 3: The end, what I learned from this trial, Chelsea, was
Speaker 3: the pressure on juries to come up with verdicts is enormous.
Speaker 3: What swayed the jury theirs. The two prison witnesses who
Speaker 3: claimed that Scott Watson confessed to them that was a
Speaker 3: truly horrific day. And what the jury didn't know was
Speaker 3: both of those guys had to come and give evidence
Speaker 3: in front of the judge with no jury present, because
Speaker 3: the judge had to make a rolling on whether what
Speaker 3: they were going to say would be admissible. So we
Speaker 3: were in court for that, the jury weren't, so we
Speaker 3: actually saw two runs of that evidence that was very powerful.
Speaker 5: The other thing, too, is Scott Watson is guilty.
Speaker 3: Of being a drunken asshole that night and heading on anyone,
Speaker 3: particularly blondes. He was very badly behaved and a lot
Speaker 3: of people remembered. He made one horrific comment to a
Speaker 3: young girl and she gave evidence and they were talking
Speaker 3: and she explained that I think a relative had cancer
Speaker 3: and Watson seat of had a cracker area and she
Speaker 3: rejected him, and he just looked at her and said,
Speaker 3: I hope your mother dies of cancer. And the jury
Speaker 3: gasped in the public gallery gust He's a very introverted,
Speaker 3: hard to read kind of guy, and like I say,
Speaker 3: the strands just kept building.
Speaker 2: Well, the fact of the matter is you can be
Speaker 2: an asshole, but that doesn't make you a murder.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 2: Was that a real issue here?
Speaker 1: Well, because he was a dodgy character by nature, and
Speaker 1: I think and also just his previous convictions, which were,
Speaker 1: as Oscar said, you know, forty eight convictions, so already
Speaker 1: in the public's mind, he was guilty in my opinion,
Speaker 1: because his parents weren't like Hopes and Smarts. They weren't
Speaker 1: middle class people. They were working class people. His father
Speaker 1: was a boat builder, his mother worked at the pub
Speaker 1: behind the Bard. Kind of when you build that picture
Speaker 1: of Scott Watson and the fact that borstal all, you
Speaker 1: know his antisocial behavior, you know, you are building a picture.
Speaker 1: The one thing we haven't talked about too, Oscar is
Speaker 1: Guy Wallace, you know, because he was a crucial witness
Speaker 1: to the connection and then he changed his mind. And
Speaker 1: when we interviewed him, what four years ago, he regrets
Speaker 1: that he feels very guilty. Sadly he's no longer with us.
Speaker 1: But there was a lot of pressure I think the
Speaker 1: police placed, in my personal opinion, police placed a lot
Speaker 1: of pressure on people and witnesses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And when you talk about pressure, so many lives
Speaker 3: have been damaged or destroyed by this case, and not
Speaker 3: just Ben and not just Olivia. But the trial opened
Speaker 3: with evidence from Ben and Livery's parents, and it was
Speaker 3: just horrific because it was they were fun, loving and
Speaker 3: what were they doing and it's one of their first
Speaker 3: holidays away with their friends of their parents, and it
Speaker 3: was very.
Speaker 5: Powerful from the crowd.
Speaker 3: It really created these wonderful, well behaved, achieving young people
Speaker 3: who would never do anything silly. And it was hard
Speaker 3: to watch, was hard to be in court. They were
Speaker 3: just nice kids and there was thousands of nice kids
Speaker 3: at that party that night. It was a pretty out
Speaker 3: of control party. It was a very powerful way to
Speaker 3: open the case. And when I say, you know, other
Speaker 3: lives damaged, Guy Wallace life never recovered from this. In
Speaker 3: the guilt that he feels about being the person who
Speaker 3: dropping these kids off at this mystery person's ketch. You know,
Speaker 3: not everyone's alive in this case anymore. And what I
Speaker 3: would say about the Hopes and the Smarts, they were
Speaker 3: lovely people. Grief was just etched on their face at
Speaker 3: the trial, you could see it. And they sat there
Speaker 3: in the front row every day and listened to everything
Speaker 3: and sometimes you'd hear the sobs and that would be
Speaker 3: Olivia's mum or Ben's mum. They were lovely people and
Speaker 3: to be fair to Chris Watson, Scott's father. He's a
Speaker 3: really nice guy too, and he is quite convinced his
Speaker 3: son didn't do it. And at the trial you'd have
Speaker 3: these people coming and going in the media gathering, and
Speaker 3: Scott Watson's Dad's there every day like a prior outside
Speaker 3: the court during the breaks, no one went up to,
Speaker 3: no one want to talk to him. He'd roll a
Speaker 3: ciggi and just all the eyes boring on him. And
Speaker 3: he's been really unwell. The grief from this case and
Speaker 3: the tragedy and the pressure has taken a much bigger
Speaker 3: toll than two young people.
Speaker 6: And I don't believe that he has a venom to
Speaker 6: do that. But I'm not going to go down the
Speaker 6: track of being the emotional parent that's going to back
Speaker 6: his son no matter what.
Speaker 1: I have enormous admiration for Chris. I've known Chris all
Speaker 1: those years. I've kept in touch with him all these years.
Speaker 1: His wife, when I first approached her because part of
Speaker 1: my job was to tie up people for interviews, afterwards,
Speaker 1: spat at me and then I kind of befriended her
Speaker 1: because back in those days, they has to smoke cigarette,
Speaker 1: so I used to stand outside with her and with Chris,
Speaker 1: and then eventually we built up a report. But I
Speaker 1: cannot ever commend anyone more or actually has admiration for
Speaker 1: a father who has so much love for a son
Speaker 1: and such belief that a son is innocent. His whole
Speaker 1: life has been dedicated for that, you know, And as
Speaker 1: Oscar says, you know, Bev, she died of cancer a
Speaker 1: few years ago, never seeing justice for her son that
Speaker 1: she believed, of course he was innocent. But also, you know,
Speaker 1: for poor Mary Smart, because her husband John died and
Speaker 1: Mary Smart bumps into Chris Watson pretty much once sweet
Speaker 1: because they live and picked in really close to each other.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's a really chilling reminder because Chris has
Speaker 1: the blade Scott Sloop and the harbor, and Mary Smart
Speaker 1: lives right above the harbor, and the blade is a
Speaker 1: constant reminder of her son.
Speaker 2: And just finally we're still talking about it nearly twenty
Speaker 2: five years later. Kara, you've done a podcast, the Murder
Speaker 2: in the Sounds. Why do you think this case is
Speaker 2: still sparking this debate after all this time?
Speaker 1: Because there are two people missing, nobodies have ever been recovered,
Speaker 1: no one really knows what happened, you know, have died.
Speaker 1: Are older memories fade, but it's just I guess for me,
Speaker 1: those lasting impressions of those two young kids with the
Speaker 1: whole lives ahead of them just taken. I can still
Speaker 1: see that photograph that we used every night on the news,
Speaker 1: you know, on television, newspapers, there two of them together,
Speaker 1: Olivia and Ben, and you think, nah, they would be
Speaker 1: were in their forties. They should by rights be parents
Speaker 1: for their own children, you know, sending them off to
Speaker 1: a New Ye's Eve party.
Speaker 3: And we should acknowledge this is too long for the
Speaker 3: justice system to do its thing. And this partly reflects
Speaker 3: how Scott Watson is just going to keep fighting and
Speaker 3: fighting fighting, and you have to respect that. But this
Speaker 3: should have been resolved either way by now. It's been
Speaker 3: two course, it's been to the Privy Council, and I
Speaker 3: think the other issue here is that our parole system
Speaker 3: can't handle people who refuse to admit they did it.
Speaker 3: So Scott Watson was sentenced to a minimum non parole
Speaker 3: period of seventeen years.
Speaker 5: He could have potentially been released eight years ago.
Speaker 3: So if the judge considered that that's what the punishment
Speaker 3: should be for this crime. He's arguably done more than that.
Speaker 3: The reasons why no one liked him on the night
Speaker 3: are the reasons why he's not getting parole. He's got
Speaker 3: some issues, and I just think, if you're in prison
Speaker 3: for this long and you didn't do it, wouldn't it
Speaker 3: drive you crazy? And one thing for me, Chelsea about
Speaker 3: Scott is how we reacted when the jury came back
Speaker 3: and said guilty. And for me, it's the most single
Speaker 3: terrible memory of the trial was he just looked over
Speaker 3: at them and he just said, you're wrong, really cocky,
Speaker 3: really arrogant. And there was a lot of discussion right
Speaker 3: outside court after it because it was like, well, if
Speaker 3: I didn't do it, I'd be screaming buddy murder, or
Speaker 3: I'd be crying, or I'd be angry.
Speaker 5: But it was cold, cold hearted that didn't do many favors.
Speaker 3: But also, if you don't admit that you did it,
Speaker 3: how can you get parole. So other countries have laws
Speaker 3: now where if you say with the body is you
Speaker 3: get an automatic sentence discount. And I think for Ben
Speaker 3: Oliver's parents, so much of it was not really knowing
Speaker 3: the final moments, not knowing where they are not getting
Speaker 3: bodies back. What we talk about these days is closure,
Speaker 3: which I don't think was a thing twenty five years ago.
Speaker 3: But we understand the basic concept. But so why is
Speaker 3: it still in the news. Well, because it was massively
Speaker 3: controversial at the time. The crown that are closing that
Speaker 3: invited the jury to ignore parts of the narrative that
Speaker 3: didn't work, never explaining how he got back to shore
Speaker 3: the second time to be in the water.
Speaker 5: Taxi has been a liverit.
Speaker 3: It was massively controversial then and it's a sense of
Speaker 3: fascination now.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us, Karen Oscar and you can listen
Speaker 2: to Murdering the Sound on the Chasing Ghosts podcast feed
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts. Two key pieces of evidence
Speaker 2: will be focused on during this appeal process. As at
Speaker 2: Herald's senior reporter, David Fisher has been following this case
Speaker 2: for much of the last twenty five years. He joins
Speaker 2: us now to discuss what is being brought to the
Speaker 2: table for the first time in the way of evidence. David,
Speaker 2: the piece of evidence that led to Watson's appear he
Speaker 2: revolves around the DNA evidence from two hairs found in
Speaker 2: the boat. Hey, what can you tell us about that.
Speaker 7: So the hair evidence was really interesting for a number
Speaker 7: of reasons. One of those reasons was that police search
Speaker 7: blade from top to tail and they fit a blanket
Speaker 7: on the yacht. From that blanket, ESR retrieved about four
Speaker 7: hundred hairs, and of those four hundred hairs, two of
Speaker 7: those matched up with Olivia Hope. So the difficulty is
Speaker 7: is that those hairs were being examined in the lab
Speaker 7: on the same day that Olivia's hair samples taken from
Speaker 7: a hair brush at her home were also being examined.
Speaker 7: Then later at trial, the sample bag that contained Olivia's
Speaker 7: hairs was found to have had one centimeter long slit
Speaker 7: in it, and so then there was this question, well,
Speaker 7: could it have been contaminated? Could the hair from one
Speaker 7: have fallen into the other bag, or for that matter,
Speaker 7: did the hair come from the hair brush and somehow
Speaker 7: make its way into the other bag. This is to
Speaker 7: point contention for quite some time, right down to whether
Speaker 7: or not the scientist that was doing the examination changed
Speaker 7: from one lab coat to another lab coat when working
Speaker 7: from one sample to another sample. It's been certainly for
Speaker 7: quite some time never really found as much traction as
Speaker 7: Watson supporters wanted it to until this Court of Appeal
Speaker 7: hearing a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: So for those who may not know, you get a
Speaker 2: few chances at appeal, but then you cut off. Then
Speaker 2: you have to go for what's called a royal prerogative
Speaker 2: of mercy, and in order to do that you do
Speaker 2: need new evidence. Are the hairs a part of why
Speaker 2: Watson was granted a royal prerogative of mercy?
Speaker 7: The case against Scott Watson has been challenged in a
Speaker 7: multitude of different way, so yes, they were the Court
Speaker 7: of Appeal hearings, There was an IPCA inquiry, There was
Speaker 7: his initial denial of a rural progative of mercy claim
Speaker 7: in twenty thirteen, and then again another one in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 7: I think that was accepted his that was a part
Speaker 7: of it. But back when the original case happened, when
Speaker 7: Paul Davison QC was summing up the case on behalf
Speaker 7: of the prosecution, he had said this case is a
Speaker 7: jigsaw made of many different pieces, sort of a similar
Speaker 7: analogy to circumstantial cases being talked about as being many
Speaker 7: strands of a rope, and so the hes were always
Speaker 7: one of those jigsaw puzzle pieces. There were a lot
Speaker 7: of pieces that went into that puzzle, and the argument
Speaker 7: has kind of been how many pieces of the puzzle
Speaker 7: do you need to knock out before the picture makes
Speaker 7: no sense?
Speaker 2: The Court of Appeal later ruled that Watson's team can
Speaker 2: also argue the so called blink photo that was used
Speaker 2: to identify him. Why has that being so controversial?
Speaker 7: So the IPCA in quiry in twenty ten that actually
Speaker 7: identified the blink photograph as being problematic, I think was
Speaker 7: the way that they praised it. They said it was
Speaker 7: highly undesirable the way that police went about showing photomone
Speaker 7: montages to people, and that it fell well short of
Speaker 7: best practice. However, it was never framed in such a
Speaker 7: way as to be the one single piece of evidence
Speaker 7: that was going to either convict Watson or get him
Speaker 7: off the hook. But with the Blink photograph, the difficulty
Speaker 7: here was that police forgiven a description of a man
Speaker 7: who was behaving in an odd fashion at Pernolodge that night,
Speaker 7: who had hooded eyes, and this was quite a distinctive
Speaker 7: physical characteristic. Scott Watson, in this photograph called the blink photograph,
Speaker 7: appeared to have hooded eyes, but that's because he was
Speaker 7: blinking when the photograph was taken. When you look at
Speaker 7: the other photographs set of the end, they're not hooded eyes.
Speaker 7: And so the photograph of Watson blinking with these hooded
Speaker 7: eyes was seen as highly prejudicial by supporters of Watson,
Speaker 7: who said that what in right it should have been allowed.
Speaker 7: As I said back that up fell well short of
Speaker 7: best practice, they said, highly undesirable. At what the Court
Speaker 7: of Appeal has said, Well, if that's enough to give
Speaker 7: a miscarriage of justice, that's for the Court of Appeal
Speaker 7: to decide of the new hearing, and they gave a
Speaker 7: green light for Watson to advance that.
Speaker 8: Nicholas Chisnel became Scott Watson's lead council last year.
Speaker 9: It is a case that invokes strong emotions and people,
Speaker 9: both those who supports Scott and also those who feel
Speaker 9: that he's to be criticized for wanting to have his
Speaker 9: stay in court again.
Speaker 8: Chisnel says, who's spoken to Scott Watson, who is excited
Speaker 8: about the developments, although it is tempered by the fact
Speaker 8: it's taken authorities just over two decades to review his case.
Speaker 2: David Wilders isn't a part of the appeal. I understand
Speaker 2: you once tested the Crown case involving Watson's boat the blade.
Speaker 7: I'm really interested in this pieces of a puzzle thing
Speaker 7: because there were pieces that you could look at and
Speaker 7: knock out. And one of the things that have been
Speaker 7: talked about was the Crown delegation that Watson had dropped
Speaker 7: the body to the middle of the cook straight and
Speaker 7: then there was also evidence that was put forward in
Speaker 7: the trial that he was seen a period of time
Speaker 7: later back in Mulder Sounds, at somebody's house or tied
Speaker 7: up in a bay. The thing that captivated me about
Speaker 7: this I didn't realize and yachtes no, is that there's
Speaker 7: actually a scientific equation that says how fast a bok
Speaker 7: could go depending on his kill length. And when you
Speaker 7: got a measuring tape out, you applied it to a
Speaker 7: map and you measured the length of the blade's kill.
Speaker 7: You could see that and what's it going to happen?
Speaker 7: So Chris Watson, Scott Watson's dad, he agreed to let
Speaker 7: me test this out in the real world. So we
Speaker 7: took Blade out to the middle of the cook straight
Speaker 7: to the place where blade was apparently sighted, and we
Speaker 7: did it at the same tide as occurred at that time.
Speaker 7: It was a really carefully planned trip to try and
Speaker 7: match up the environmental conditions as closely as possible, and
Speaker 7: then we went hell for leather to this bay that
Speaker 7: Watson was apparently sighted and there's no way that you
Speaker 7: can make the journey. It just doesn't work. And it
Speaker 7: was fascinating to me because when Paul Davison summed up
Speaker 7: the case, and it was one heck of a summing up.
Speaker 7: It was thirty thousand words of closing argument. Five percent
Speaker 7: of that closing argument was about the bodies being done
Speaker 7: and from the work that I did, it seemed impossible
Speaker 7: that that could have happened.
Speaker 2: And what's made you so interested in this case over
Speaker 2: the years, David? Those pieces are the puzzle and seeing
Speaker 2: how many you can knock out.
Speaker 7: I think the thing about the Scott Watson case, well,
Speaker 7: one thing is that the bodies of Been and Olivia
Speaker 7: would never found and the greatest evidence that exists as
Speaker 7: to who their killer is is likely with those bodies.
Speaker 7: So it then becomes a very circumstantial case. And there
Speaker 7: were pieces of evidence put forward that police would argue,
Speaker 7: we're not circumstantial. The hairs on the boat. That's under question.
Speaker 7: I just testimony also somewhat under question. The main person
Speaker 7: that identified the blink photograph were caned and die not
Speaker 7: so long ago, saying that he didn't believe that Scott
Speaker 7: Watson was the person that he identified in that photograph.
Speaker 7: I think the thing for me that's really interesting about
Speaker 7: the case is so many unanswered questions, and it came
Speaker 7: during a time when we were as a public somewhat
Speaker 7: accustomed to questions coming from old cases. There was the
Speaker 7: murders of the Swedish jurists, of the coromandal for which
Speaker 7: David Tommyheaty was convicted. We go all the way back
Speaker 7: to the crew murders and that seat of doubt that
Speaker 7: was planted when police planted the Cartridge case. It sort
Speaker 7: of raised a question over the way that police would
Speaker 7: do their job at the time and in the decades
Speaker 7: going forward, and Watson case just became another one of those.
Speaker 7: I think one of the things that was really captivating
Speaker 7: about the case, and I somewhat missed this because it
Speaker 7: was out of the country for quite a number of
Speaker 7: years around the time of the murders and the following trial,
Speaker 7: was that they were kind of the perfect young summer couple.
Speaker 7: They were really lovely looking kids that came from a
Speaker 7: really nice home that we're having a New Year's Eve
Speaker 7: of the sort that you would hope would be the
Speaker 7: most memorable of their lives, which it turned out to
Speaker 7: be for all the wrong reasons.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us, David. For news from the Appeal
Speaker 2: as it comes through, head to enzidherld dot co dot
Speaker 2: enz and for more on the Scott Watson case, including
Speaker 2: his bids for parole, check out the links in our
Speaker 2: show notes. That's it for this episode of the Front Page.
Speaker 2: You can read more about today's stories and extensive news
Speaker 2: coverage at enzidherld dot co dot enz. The Front Page
Speaker 2: is produced by Ethan Sills and sound engineer Patty Fox.
Speaker 2: I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio
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Speaker 2: Monday for another look behind the headlines.