How Scott Watson got another appeal in Marlborough Sounds murder mystery

Sunday, 9 June 2024

25 years after Scott Watson was found guilty of murdering friends Olivia Hope and Ben Smart, his highly controversial conviction returns to court this week. Mike White has followed the case since its grim start, and is the only journalist to have interviewed Watson. He explains how continuing uncertainty about the case has led to another appeal.

On the evening of June 14, 1998, a senior police officer picked up their phone and called a journalist.

Tomorrow, they said.

Tomorrow morning, we’re going to arrest him. Get your story ready to go.

Six months earlier, Olivia Hope, 17, and Ben Smart, 21, had vanished from a New Year’s party at Furneaux Lodge, deep in the Marlborough Sounds.

Their disappearance seized the country in a way few, if any, other cases ever have.

Within days, police had settled on their suspect, a single man, on his homebuilt yacht, with a record and a reputation.

Scott Watson.

So they investigated, and interviewed, and wiretapped, and tested.

Now, here police were, on the eve of moving against Watson, organising in secret, alerting the trusted few, preparing to let the axe of heavy suspicion fall, with cameras at the ready.

Nearly 26 years to the day after that arrest, Watson’s conviction is going back to court.

Why?

Well, Watson has always insisted he isn’t guilty, that he never met Ben and Olivia, and he certainly didn’t kill them.

And over the years, more evidence has been amassed that strongly questions whether Watson was the killer - and whether police got the right man that morning, at a rural house north of Christchurch, just as the sun was starting to thaw the morning’s frost.

After The Party

The first the public knew about Ben and Olivia’s disappearance was when media reports started surfacing on January 4.

The Marlborough friends had last been seen around 4am on New Year’s Day, getting off a yacht Olivia had helped charter, because there was no room to sleep, given so many others had crashed there.

So they climbed on to a water taxi driven by Furneaux Lodge staff member Guy Wallace, and sat on its pontoons along with three other people - another young couple, Hayden Morresey and Sarah Dyer, and a mystery man.

The mystery man invited Ben and Olivia to stay on his boat, and the final sighting was of them clambering from the water taxi on to a yacht with him.

When the sun and revellers rose later that morning, searches for Ben and Olivia turned up nothing.

It was an easy assumption they may have ended up astray in the post-party confusion. Or got another ride back to town. Or just decided to spend a bit more time together.

But none of this rang true with Olivia’s father, Gerald Hope, who knew it didn’t fit his daughter’s nature.

So, after contacting police, he went public, telling the media this wasn’t an innocent oversight or youthful tryst. Something was terribly wrong.

When Ben and Olivia still hadn’t arrived home, Blenheim police called in the big guns from Canterbury - Detective Inspector Rob Pope and his team of investigators.

That was on January 6.

Despite at least 1500 people being at Furneaux Lodge that New Year’s night, most of whom hadn’t been interviewed, police almost instantly focused on 26-year-old Scott Watson, someone local cops described as trouble.

Pope has never articulated exactly why Watson became their prime suspect, other than to say he began to “stick out like dogs’ balls”, and had “the right sort of agenda and pedigree”.

(Watson had numerous convictions when he was a teenager. None were for sexual offending. Only one was for assault. In the eight years before Ben and Olivia went missing, he’d only had one minor conviction.)

But by January 8, Pope had prepared a warrant to search Watson’s yacht, Blade, claiming there were, among other things, the “bodies or body parts of HOPE and SMART”.

Four days later, as Tom Fitzgerald grilled Watson in an interview room, police publicly hauled Blade from the water near Picton, and trucked it to an Air Force base for forensic examination, and raided the homes of Watson’s parents and sister.

As Pope later acknowledged, “really, our course was set from that day”.

But at that stage, there was virtually no evidence against Watson, just gut instinct and gossip.

In fact, the descriptions of the mystery man and yacht, by eyewitnesses like Guy Wallace, didn’t match Watson or Blade.

(As Wallace later remarked, the only similarity between Watson’s yacht and the boat he dropped Ben and Olivia off at, was that “they both float”.)

Moreover, key witnesses shown Watson’s photo didn’t identify him as the mystery man.

However, by the time they arrested Watson, police had an array of arguments and accusations.

At Watson’s trial the following year, they reeled out witnesses who said they saw Blade in places Watson claimed he hadn’t been; revealed he’d repainted his yacht’s cabin-sides in the days after New Year; had water-taxi driver Guy Wallace now say Watson was likely the man he delivered to the mystery yacht with Ben and Olivia; had two jailhouse snitches claim Watson confessed to the murders while in prison; pointed to mysterious scratches on a hatch on Watson’s yacht, mysterious marks on its hull, mysterious cleaning of cassettes on board.

But by far the most damning evidence was two hairs, found on a tiger-patterned blanket on Watson’s yacht, which had been linked by DNA to Olivia.

All these points were rebutted or called into question by Watson’s lawyers during his trial, but a jury found him guilty.

The only words Watson spoke during the three-month trial were to tell the jury after their verdict, “You’re wrong.”

But the Court of Appeal decided the conviction was safe.

The Privy Council declined to hear a further appeal.

And a last-gasp application to the Governor-General for the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, was declined in 2013.

Scott Watson stayed in jail.

Justice Richard Heron had sentenced Watson to life, and decreed he had to serve at least 17 years, one for each year of Olivia’s short life.

Twenty-six years since he was arrested, Watson is still in jail.

What’s The Appeal?

But in that time, much has happened, much has changed.

Five books have been written about the case, and numerous television programmes made.

Guy Wallace, the key eyewitness who put Watson with Ben and Olivia on the mystery yacht, soon insisted he was wrong, that Watson wasn’t the mystery man, and he felt he’d helped jail an innocent man.

Other witnesses recanted their evidence, including one of the jailhouse snitches (who then changed his mind again.)

Reconstructions pointed to the impossibility of the scenario police painted.

Sightings of the wooden, 40’, two-masted ketch with portholes, which Wallace had described as the mystery yacht - vastly different from Watson’s 26’, single-masted, steel, homebuilt sloop - continued to arise, only to be rebuffed by police who’d insisted from January 11, 1998, that the ketch simply didn’t exist.

Gerald Hope expressed concerns with the police inquiry, and uncertainty with the verdict.

In 2016, he met Watson in prison, and accepted faults with much of the investigation and evidence.

However, Hope later said Watson hadn’t been able to answer all his concerns, and still considered him guilty.

It’s a position shared by the other parents of Olivia and Ben, Jan Hope, and Mary and the late John Smart.

In 2017, one of Watson’s supporters, Brian McDonald, applied to the Governor-General to again consider Watson’s case, citing concerns with the forensic handling and testing of the crucial two hairs.

The Ministry of Justice asked retired High Court judge Sir Graham Panckhurst to review the application, and in 2020, he recommended Watson’s case be sent back to the Court of Appeal for reconsideration.

The fact it has taken four years to reach the court is a mark of how slowly the justice system works, and how hard the Crown and Watson’s lawyers have fought over what evidence can be presented at the appeal.

On Monday, that fight will continue, after the three judges have filed in and invited the lawyers to begin, in a hearing set down for five days.

Essentially, Watson is arguing his conviction is unsafe, on two crucial grounds.

Firstly, the way the two hairs were handled and tested at New Zealand’s ESR and elsewhere. The Crown tried to exclude the evidence of two international experts who wrote reports about this, but were unsuccessful.

Secondly, Watson’s lawyers will argue the identification of Watson as the mystery man, made by water-taxi driver Guy Wallace, is so unreliable it shouldn’t have been heard by the jury at Watson’s trial.

This stems from serious mistakes made by police when showing Wallace a photo montage, from which he picked Watson; and the extreme conditions at the time Ben and Olivia went missing, meaning accurate eyewitness identification was unlikely.

Again, the Crown is fighting to keep evidence from international experts about this from being heard at this week’s appeal.

As revealed by the Sunday Star-Times in March, not only is it wanting the report prepared for Watson by two eyewitness identification experts ruled inadmissible, it also wants to exclude the report of an expert it commissioned - who agrees with the serious concerns of Watson’s experts.

And that’s something the judges at this week’s hearing will have to rule on, before hearing other substantive arguments.

There are three possible outcomes for Watson’s appeal: The court could uphold Watson’s convictions and he will remain in jail; it could quash them, and order Watson stand trial again; or, as Watson’s lawyers are seeking, it could quash his convictions and not order a retrial, given so many witnesses, including Wallace, have died, and Watson has already served an extensive jail term.

Any decision by the Court of Appeal will be months away. In such complex and controversial cases, waits of a year before judgments are released have been known.

In the meantime, Watson’s fifth application for freedom has stalled, with the Parole Board requiring more discussion with psychologists to ascertain the level of risk he might pose, if released.

Until now, the Parole Board has been reluctant to release Watson, saying unless he admits killing Ben and Olivia, and shows remorse, he can’t prove he’s been rehabilitated sufficiently to be let out. This leaves Watson feeling he’s in a Catch-22 situation, where the only way to get out of jail is to lie, and say he’s guilty of a crime he’s always denied.

His father, Chris Watson, says despite having been dealt many blows by the justice system in the past, he hopes the Court of Appeal can view this week’s evidence with fresh eyes and objectivity.

He spoke with his son by phone recently, but seeing him is difficult, given Corrections’ very restrictive visiting hours.

“But, like me, he’s hoping that this is the end game.”

Chris Watson says the Crown is fighting Watson’s appeal extremely hard, and questions whether this is driven by an impulse to ensure finality and sustain convictions, even in the face of logic and new evidence.

“But people like us don’t go away.

I’m sure they’re waiting for us to die. I mean, his mother, grandmother, and grandfather have all died.

“And it’s taken us 20 years to get the case back in court.

“I sincerely hope we don’t have to wait another 20 years to get it back again, if this one fails.”

The parents of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart were contacted for this story.

Gerald Hope says there is nothing new to say.

“Let the appeal work its way through legal process, and we’ll then assess the final decision.”

Are We There Yet?

The officer who entered the Rangiora house that morning 26 years ago and arrested Scott Watson was Detective Tom Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald claimed Watson said, “About time”, when he confronted him in a hallway - something Watson has always insisted was a farcical fabrication by Fitzgerald.

For the victims’ families, this week’s hearing will see unwelcome resuscitation and spotlight on events that so tragically changed their lives.

But for others, there’s a sense that it is “about time” Watson’s conviction was re-examined.

Try as the authorities have to end speculation and suspicion about the case, it has never gone away.

Watson has always averred his innocence.

Ben and Olivia’s bodies have never been found.

It’s illogical to think the Court of Appeal’s judges can divine whether Watson is guilty of killing Ben and Olivia - and in fact, they’re not being asked to do so.

What they have to do is look at two very specific, but utterly crucial areas of the evidence against Watson, and decide if they are reliable, and if his conviction is safe.

The truth of what happened that New Year’s morning in bush-fringed and glass-calm Endeavour Inlet, is another, vastly larger issue.

However, the hope of all those involved, is that this week’s appeal may be a step towards that greater goal.