Third of sex complaints false

Sunday Star Times
May 6 2007

Lundy toasted family he killed, cop reveals
by Lisa Bradley

Mark Lundy took a bottle of wine and two glasses with him to view the bodies of the wife and daughter he butchered, the family's victim liaison officer has revealed.

Lundy, sentenced to 20 years' jail in 2002 for the double murder of Christine, 38, and seven-year-old Amber, poured two glasses of wine and toasted his wife while he stood over the coffins the night before the pair were buried.

Palmerston North detective Liz Williams, who was assigned to be victim liaison officer to the Lundy family after the bodies were found in the Karamea Cres home on August 29, 2000, has revealed fresh details about the case in a new book.

Williams says although she initially had an open mind on Lundy's guilt, she saw him in a different light during the funeral parlour visit.

Lundy "slithered" along a wall, crying loudly as they entered the viewing room, she recalls. He looked "more like a performer in a B-grade movie" than a grieving husband and father as he made the toast to Christine.

"He talked loudly to her for a while, mentioning who had called on him offering condolences, the comments being made more for those listening perhaps as opposed to the dead."
Williams also reveals Lundy seemed "oddly removed" from his daughter.

"It was as if he was detached from her, and I thought he was strangely unemotional in his manner. He hardly looked at her."

Williams later accompanied Lundy to the family home where the murders took place. The detective recalls feeling "terrible" passing the bloodstained carpet where Amber was found, a spot Lundy "nonchalantly" walked over to get to the bed where his wife was discovered.

"'Where was she lying?' he asked. I looked at him in amazement. Like the floor he had just walked over, the whole left-hand side of the bed was also covered in blood stains and it was pretty obvious where she had lain."

The case was Williams' first homicide.

It is one of many crimes Williams covers in her memoir of 12 years in the force, Does This Make My Gun Look Big?, which is told, she says, "from a short female's perspective" - she is just 55kg and 1.6m tall.

Williams, 35, refuses to be drawn on police attitudes to women in the force and outside it - although she began writing the book in 2003, just before rape allegations surfaced against assistant commissioner Clint Rickards and former officers Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum.
"Policing is just as much fun now as it was when I joined 12 years ago. I've never experienced bad things."

But Williams does write about her dealings with false rape complainants, saying about one in three sex allegations she investigates is unsubstantiated or false.

"It angers me," says Williams. "It makes it difficult for the real victims."

Despite her size, Williams says there is nothing she would not do to help a colleague in trouble. Her lethal weapon is her mouth, she says, as well as an ability to talk situations into her favour.
"You learn to adapt to what you've got."

* Does This Make My Gun Look Big?, Hazard Press, $29.99