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Hope, Olivia Jan 1 1998; Marlborough Sounds 17 YO
Topic Started: Oct 15 2009, 10:51 PM (478 Views)
monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2969181/Da...re-son-vanished
Dad's memorial where son vanished
By KATIE CHAPMAN - The Dominion Post Last updated 05:00 16/10/2009SharePrint Text Size Relevant offers
Eleven years after Ben Smart vanished in the Marlborough Sounds, a memorial for his father will face the same stretch of water.

A memorial bench is to be placed on the Picton foreshore for John Smart, who died on Sunday, aged 70, at Hospice Marlborough in Blenheim after a brief battle with melanoma.

It will be put there by his engineering firm and Port Marlborough to mark his work as a harbour and coastal engineer.

Mr Smart entered the public eye when his son Ben, 21, along with friend Olivia Hope, 17, disappeared on New Year's Day 1998, after celebrating at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds. Their bodies were never found and lone yachtsman Scott Watson was later convicted of their murder.

Since the trial, documentaries and books have questioned the case against Watson, who has had appeals through the courts and the Privy Council denied.

During that time Mr Smart maintained his belief in Watson's guilt, saying anyone who viewed the evidence could be in no doubt.

His sister-in-law, Veronica Reed, said the way in which Mr Smart handled himself during that difficult time was a testimony to the way he lived. "He was just so calm, so unflustered about everything.

"What you saw of John during that terrible time was what we all saw of him."

He was content to let the police get on with their job, she said.

Olivia's father, Gerald Hope, said the two families were brought together in "difficult and tragic circumstances". Throughout that period Mr Smart had handled himself very well.

"I grew to understand John as being an incredibly polite and measured man. He was always calm and always showed absolute respect for other people and the judicial processes."

He wished Mr Smart could have had more peace in his final years. "I find it so desperately sad that the last 11 1/2 years of his life have been shadowed by the loss of his son Ben."

Mr Smart was a successful civil, coastal and marine engineer, and was co-director of the company Smart Alliances.

Fellow director Paul Williams said Mr Smart had not let the tragedy of losing his son affect his daily life. "He didn't change his essential character."

The memorial bench was a mark of respect for Mr Smart, he said.

Mr Smart is survived by his wife, Mary, and two daughters. His funeral will be held today in Blenheim.
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightAust...p?showtopic=821
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Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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monkalup
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http://texdogg13.tripod.com/ben_olivia.html
Operation Tam: The Disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope




VICTIMS: Ben Smart (21), Olivia Hope (17)

LOCATION: Endeavour Inlet, Marlborough Sounds

CRIME: Suspected Kidnapping/Murder, 2 counts

DATE: January 1, 1998

TIME: Approx 3.30am

WEAPON(S): Unknown


Crime.co.nz story

Scott Watson supporters site



When police began to investigate Scott Watson, I wonder if they ever thought about the psychological evidence before deciding to undertake that avenue of inquiry?

Guy Wallace, an unwilling star witness in a drama that grips the entire nation. The simple fact is, he dropped Ben and Olivia off with a 'mystery man' at a 'mystery ketch'. Guy Wallace was there that night. He has two other witnesses who saw the incident. He had no reason to state anything other than what he saw. Scott Watson was not the man he had on his water taxi, and Blade was not the vessel he dropped Ben, Olivia, and the mystery man off to. End of story. Or is it? The police can't believe Guy's statement about the mystery man because too few people actually remember seeing him there. And they can't comprehend that the boat Guy saw was a two masted ketch becasue not enough other people saw it.

And that, my friends, is the most comprehensive piece of psychological evidence that points to a stranger to the area that night abducting Ben and Olivia.

If criminal behaviour is your intent, do you put yourself about like a lunatic, or do you make yourself inconspicuous, hard to identify, therefore increasing your chances of flight?

If Scott Watson went out on December 31, 1998 to committ a crime, come rain or shine, he certainly entertained the dumbest possible lead-up and post-crime behaviour perhaps in the history of criminal investigation. But if the mystery man had that same motive apparant in his mind, he pulled it off pretty much the way a man capable of such a cruel act would. By not attracting attention to himself.

Plenty of people can place Scott Watson at Furneaux Lodge that night. But very few remember seeing anyone that resembles the 'mystery man'. What does that tell you? To the Keystone Kops that investigated the case, it meant that the mystery man just simply didn't exist. That it was a fabrication. Scott Watson, however, was right out there. He was drunk, and trying his hardest to get laid. Everyone remembers him there, and his sexual advances to many females. Olivia Hope may have been one of the unlucky targets for his intangible stalking sessions that night (which may also explain the hairs, via the secondary transfer method). So police felt that he was an obvious choice of suspect because of his behaviour. All the while, our mystery man sits at the bar, sipping his bourbons, and remaining, for the best part, unobtrusive.

The reality of the situation is that the mystery man has to exist. Guy Wallace saw him, heck he dropped him off at his boat! Roz McNeilly also served the mystery man. Neither of them were Scott Watson (despite police manipulating Roz McNeilly's photo line-up evidence to make it sound like she had picked him out, just another desperate measure by desperate investigators). Many others possibly saw this man, but how the hell are they supposed to recall a random stranger sitting at the bar, amongst 2000 other party goers, most of them topped up with alcohol, and with no reason to identify anybody in there they didn't know? Watson was easy to identify, he was out there all night. The mystery man wasn't.

The fact he wasn't a local man worked in his favour. He did not reveal any personal information to anybody that night that we know of. He remained in the shadow of the nights celebrations. He could easily have trolled for victims as he wished with no fear of being identified. He knew nobody could trace his boat because no one had seen it before. Would Scott Watson really be dumb enough to take two young people onto his boat in the full view of three witnesses and then murder them, knowing he would be easily identified? The police obviously thought so.

The police decided, that because they could not find the mystery man, or the vessel described by crucial witnesses, that they should simply implicate a known sexual predator. Instead of believing the crucial witnesses, they simply employed hundreds of witnesses that saw Scott Watson using 'inappropriate behaviour'. They then attacked the credibility of the crucial witnesses, and manipulated their stories to make Scott Watson fit into the puzzle.

And still, we have no murder weapon. No bodies. No defined motive. No credible evidence. Absolutely nothing. Nobody can place a weapon in Scott Watsons hands. Nobody can place Ben and Olivia on Scott Watsons boat 'Blade'. Every piece of circumstancial evidence against Scott Watson is, at best, highly questionable. As is the psychological evidence.

The very nature of this crime points more to an organised offender, someone familiar enough with boats and the general boatie scene to be able to 'blend in' without being noticed. The known movements (which indeed are few) of the 'mystery man' are certainly a lot more conducive to motivation for whatever crime took place that night. Scott Watson is guilty of one thing - being in the wrong place at the right time for police investigators desperate for a conviction. Unable to avoid media spotlight, and with the pressure on from the families of the missing, police simply had to put someone away, rather than concede they had no idea who they were looking for, and had no credible evidence that pointed to any known suspect.

Perhaps if Scott had only planned to paint his boat on another day.....




Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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'High probability' bodies of Ben and Olivia found: report
6:08AM Friday Jun 22, 2001



Ben Smart, Olivia HopeSounds murders
Watson has his protest down to a fine art
Hurricane power for Watson
.3.15 pm

Police who led the Olivia Hope and Ben Smart murder inquiry say there is a "high probability" that objects found on the floor of Cook Strait are the bodies of the murdered Blenheim friends, according to a report in today’s Evening Post newspaper.

But the newspaper says Assistant Police Commissioner Paul Fitzharris refused to approve funds for "what is essentially a very speculative search".

Ben and Olivia disappeared on January 1 1998 after celebrating New Year's Eve in the Marlborough sounds.

Scott Watson was convicted of their murder in 1999 and was sentenced to life in prison.

Documents obtained by the Evening Post under the Official Information Act (OIA) reveal Detective Inspector Rob Pope and Detective Senior Sergeant John Rae wrote to the deputy commissioner for operations seeking approval for a more detailed search of the Cook Strait floor near the Tory channel.

A Navy sonar search of the area revealed two distinct "targets" out of the approximately 50 that they found.

The confidential Navy report was quoted as saying: "These [two] targets could possibly be linked to each other at a distance apart of approximately 20m. An associated drag mark provides a possible link between the targets.

"It has been concluded that the targets are unlikely to be a natural event. The targets are surrounded by mud or a semi-hard surface and appear to be depressions created by a man-made event."

However, there was nothing in the report to confirm the targets were bodies and the Navy recommended that the search be suspended.

In his letter asking for approval for a further search Mr Pope wrote: "Sufficient information exists, in conjunction with the navy report, to conclude that there is a high probability that the remains of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope are at or within proximity of the contact points identified by the navy."

His colleague Mr Rae wrote that the estimated size of the targets from the sonar could indicate that one is a weight attached to another larger object.

While the larger object was regarded as too small to be two bodies - "perhaps in a sail or sleeping bag" - it was unknown whether the "package" was embedded in the sea bed, he said.

Olivia Hope's sleeping bag was never recovered. Nor were the weights and anchor chain believed to be on Watson's boat Blade.

The newspaper report said the Navy search was sparked by witnesses' accounts of Watson's boat movements.

Two ferry passengers spotted his yacht off the Tory Channel mouth about 4.45 pm, January 1, when Watson claimed to be elsewhere.

The families of Ben and Olivia were understood to have been told that a private recovery would cost between $15,000 and $20,000.

Feature: The Sounds murders
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sounds-murders/n...objectid=196323
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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Who killed Ben and Olivia?
Sunday Star Times Last updated 04:56 17/02/2008SharePrint Text Size Relevant offers
Ten years after the Sounds murder, rival publications have printed polarised, contradictory accounts of the case. So is Scott Watson guilty or innocent? Anthony Hubbard attempts a dispassionate analysis of the evidence.

1: THE IDENTIFICATION OF SCOTT WATSON

There were always problems with this. A police identikit picture of the "mystery man" suspected of the murders was done for Wallace only a week after the disappearance. It shows a man with lots of stubble and bushy, longish hair. But this did not match Scott Watson's appearance on New Year's Eve. Photographs of him on that day, taken aboard the yacht Mina Cornelia in Endeavour Inlet and by a Picton supermarket security camera, show him as clean-shaven with short hair.

An identikit picture produced for bar manager Roz McNeilly was an equally poor match. It showed a man with stubble and shoulder-length hair.

At about the same time police showed Wallace photographs of Watson. He did not recognise him. A month later he was shown a montage including a photo of Watson with his eyes half-closed. This time Wallace did pick Watson out, saying the eyes were correct but that the hair was too short and he looked too tidy. McNeilly made the same identification but with the same qualifications.

At the trial, Wallace told prosecutor Paul Davison QC he was "pretty definite" that the man in the montage was the same person he had served at the bar at Furneaux Lodge and had later dropped off at a yacht. But he also agreed with defence counsel Mike Antunovic that at a depositions hearing earlier he ruled out Watson as not matching the photo taken on the Mina Cornelia.

If this seems a somewhat confused identification, Wallace has now disowned it entirely. Scott Watson was "definitely not" the man he took in the water taxi that night, he told Keith Hunter, maker of the 2003 television documentary Murder on the Blade.

This recantation McNeilly has similarly changed her mind is very damaging for the prosecution case. The Court of Appeal, which rejected Watson's appeal in May 2000, noted: "It is beyond question that the case against him [Watson] depended substantially on the correctness of those identifications [by Wallace], because if they were incorrect the Crown case was seriously undermined."

The recantation of Secret Witness A, who claimed that Watson confessed to him in jail, is hardly of the same significance. All jailhouse confessions are suspect: the people who allegedly heard them are criminals whose motives are suspect. But this too represents a minor unravelling.

So what does the Crown say now? The short answer is that we don't know. Crown prosecutor Paul Davison QC, in a long interview in the Listener last month, did not refer at all to the fact that his main witness, and a couple of others, had recanted. He simply restated the Crown case made at the trial. Davison has not answered phone calls from the Sunday Star-Times. And Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope, the policeman who headed the Sounds inquiry, has not responded to an interview request.

Ad Feedback 2: THE MYSTERY YACHT

Guy Wallace says he dropped his passengers off at a two-masted ketch, not at the single-masted sloop Blade. He gave a detailed description of a yacht much longer and higher than the Blade, with ropes draped about the stern and a distinctive blue stripe along the hull with large brass portholes.

Two other passengers, Hayden Morresey and Sarah Dyer, also testified the taxi had not gone to the Blade, but another, much bigger yacht. And Ted and Eyvonne Walsh, two experienced boaties, described seeing a similarly large yacht in Endeavour Inlet on New Year's Eve. They too talked about the blue stripe, and the ropes. Bruce O'Malley gave a similar description.

And the Walshes saw the ketch in Queen Charlotte Sound the day after Ben and Olivia disappeared. Edward reported seeing a "youngish Caucasian female with long blonde hair" sitting next to a young man with short-cropped hair.

Auckland yachtie Mike Kalaugher, in his 2001 book The Marlborough Mystery, says the Blade could not be confused with the big ketch identified by witnesses. "This is equivalent to confusing a truck with a Mini." And journalist Keith Hunter, author of the 2007 book Trial by Trickery, a detailed critique of the Crown case, said prosecutors considered Wallace, Morresey and Dyer had been mistaken about the yacht's "length, height, freeboard, colour, shape, design, rigging, masts, construction material and visual condition. As far as the Crown was concerned they had been mistaken about everything it was possible to be mistaken about except the fact it was a boat".

3: THE TIMING AND THE "TWO-TRIP THEORY"

Another water taxi driver, Donald Anderson, says he took Scott Watson to his boat in the early hours of New Year's Day. Watson, who does not wear a watch, told police he thought it was "about 2am. I'm not exactly sure". Anderson was vague about the timing and other aspects of the trip.

The trip is a crucial issue. If Watson was back on his boat and did not return to shore, he could not have been the man whom Guy Wallace took, with Ben and Olivia, to a yacht at 3.30 or 4am. So he could not be the murderer.

The Crown took Watson's hazy estimate of the time 2am as an accurate one.

However, Watson was definitely ashore at about 3am, because he was involved in an ugly incident at that time with 17-year-old Ollie Perkins, who was wearing his sister's necklace. Watson's presence on shore at this time is not disputed.

This suggests two possibilities. Either Watson's guess of 2am was much too early and he in fact returned to his boat after the 3am altercation. Or he indeed returned to the boat at 2am but returned to shore between then and 3am.

Prosecutor Davison argued in his summing-up to the jury that Watson must have returned to shore after his earlier trip to the Blade. How he did so was not important. It was "a short row" to shore. "Does it matter?"

The critics say it matters very much, and that Davison's last-minute floating of the two-trip theory was unfair. Because the two-trip theory was not stated explicitly during the trial, it could not be tested. The hundreds of witnesses who were asked about their movements that night were not asked whether they had seen Watson making his way ashore.

Journalist Keith Hunter, however, says Watson could not have been on the Blade at the earlier time. The yachts Mina Cornelia and Bianca were moored alongside the Blade. When the drunken Watson returned to his boat he clambered across to both boats and made a nuisance of himself, wanting to party. One woman on the Mina Cornelia was awake until about 2.45am and says she heard nothing. So Watson's noisy return to his boat must have happened some time after this. Another woman on the Bianca remembers being woken by the ruckus Watson caused and not going back to sleep for half an hour afterwards. It was a quiet night and the boats were next to each other. "Had Watson gone back to shore she could not have failed to hear it," Hunter writes.

This would mean that by 3.30am there was still no sign of Watson on his boat. And witnesses agree that by now he was involved in the altercation on shore with Perkins. So his trip to the Blade must have been later.

Hunter believes this proves that Watson is innocent. He could not have made two trips; he must have gone to the Blade after 3.30am; and he could not have been the man on Guy Wallace's water taxi.

Certainly this raises big questions about the Crown theory, but they may not be decisive. The theory relies on some fairly exact recollections of the time by people who had been partying till late. Journalists Jayson Rhodes and Ian Wishart, in Ben and Olivia: What Really Happened, a book published just after the trial, show the dangers of this. One witness "was hazy about times when he was giving evidence. [Prosecutor] Nicola Crutchley asked him what time he got up on New Year's Day. His response? `I'm buggered if I know haven't you been to a New Year's party?"'

4: THE TRIP TO ERIE BAY

On New Year's Day Watson sailed the Blade to Erie Bay in Queen Charlotte Sound, where he stayed with an acquaintance who was the caretaker of a property there, and his two children. The man, whose name was suppressed, told the court Watson arrived some time after 5pm.

The Crown argued that this gave Watson time to have disposed of the two bodies in Cook Strait. Two men on board the interisland ferry said they had seen the Blade in the strait at about 4.30pm.

The critics find various flaws in this. They point out the caretaker had earlier told police that Watson arrived at between 10am and midday. Watson had made the same statement. Why did the caretaker change his mind? "An honest mistake," the man said.

But the change had the effect of strengthening the Crown case, giving Watson more time to dispose of the incriminating evidence. And the caretaker had reason to try to please the prosecution: police had found 250 cannabis plants on his land. Critics wonder if he changed his evidence in exchange for a lighter charge (he was charged with cultivation rather than the more serious charge of possession for supply).

And Hunter says Watson could not have been sighted in Cook Strait at 4.30pm. It was physically impossible, given the tides and Blade's speed, to get from Cook Strait to Erie Bay in less than two-and-a-half hours. Hunter replicated the trip on the Blade to prove the point.

The Sunday Star-Times, in an effort to clear up the timing issue, tried to contact the caretaker and found he died in a car crash in March 2003. The coroner was told that he had excess blood alcohol and the car was mechanically sound. His daughter, 14 at the time of the trial and now a teacher in Japan, told the Star-Times that it was she and her brother who had persuaded their father he had made a mistake about the timing. They were present that day, and based on their recollection of certain horse races televised that afternoon, they convinced their father his 10am estimate must have been wrong. "He had a terrible short-term memory," she explained. He had a candid relationship with his children they knew he used dope and never mentioned any "deal" with the police.

Some serious questions remain about the timing of Watson's trip to Erie Bay, but they are hardly decisive. If the 4.30pm sighting was wrong, this could cut both ways. Watson would still have most of the day to get to Cook Strait and then Erie Bay by 5pm or 6pm. Hunter replies that the tides in Tory Channel would have been against him for most of that time and that nobody in the crowded waters of the Sounds saw him.

Doubts remain.

5: OLIVIA'S HAIR

The defence still has to explain how two hairs, one identified as very likely to be Olivia's, ended up on a rug on Watson's yacht. This is certainly one of the most important strands in the rope of the Crown's case. DNA analysis found that one hair was 28,000 times more likely to have come from Olivia than an unrelated blonde female chosen randomly from the population. The other could have come from Olivia or her sister, mother, or anyone descended from the same female line.

The defence says one possible innocent explanation is that in the crowded partying of Furneaux Lodge, Olivia's hair was transferred to Watson directly or even via a third person, and then left on the rug. While there have been documented cases of such transfer, even Hunter agrees that it would be extraordinarily unlucky for an innocent Watson to have had this happen.

Perhaps there was a mix-up of the hairs at the ESR laboratory? ESR's record is not unblemished, and there was an unexplained 1cm-long cut in the plastic bag that contained hairs taken as reference samples from Olivia's bedroom. Perhaps the reference hairs from Olivia's hairbrush became the incriminating hairs supposedly found on the rug.

Finally, there is the possibility that the hairs were planted. Again, this has happened before an incriminating cartridge was famously planted in the Crewe murder case. And when the ESR scientist first examined the hairs, including hundreds of dark ones, she did not find the blonde ones. She found them only during a second inspection seven weeks later.

Planting of evidence is obviously a serious crime, and as Auckland law lecturer Scott Optican points out, allegations of planting of evidence are rare in New Zealand. The question remains. Do the hairs show that Watson did take Olivia aboard his yacht? Or is there some other explanation?

THE FLAWS in the Crown case, then, are certainly enough to warrant a new investigation but they do not by themselves prove that Watson is innocent. It is also an unfortunate fact that Watson is not an ideal pin-up boy for the defence. His threats to kill women a female witness told the court about a conversation with Watson where "he seemed to have a lot of hatred in him about women" and he had said "one day he would kill them" reveal at the very least an unpleasant side to his character.

Whether they are evidence of a serious motive for killing, or merely drunken ranting, is a matter for judgement. Prison sources say he has been involved in many fights in jail. Even Hunter agrees that when Watson was drunk "he was a bit of a pillock".

These facts no doubt explain why people commonly have divided feelings about the case. The trial was seriously flawed but Watson was not an appealing character.

Perhaps the most sensible conclusion is that of Olivia's father, Gerald Hope. He too has developed doubts about the case.

"I'm not saying [Watson] is not guilty. What I'm saying is, let's clear up the doubt."

THE SOUNDS MURDERS

December 31, 1997: Ben Smart, Olivia Hope, Scott Watson and hundreds of others are partying at Furneaux Lodge in Endeavour Inlet in the Sounds. Dozens of yachts float in the bay.

Early hours of January 1, 1998. A water taxi drops Olivia, Ben and a man at a yacht in the inlet. The pair disappear.

January 2: Gerald Hope tells police his daughter is missing. Police investigate.

January 4: Media discover story and massive coverage follows.

June 15, 1998: Scott Watson arrested.

June-September 1999: Trial of Watson at Wellington High Court. On September 11 he is found guilty. Watson's response: "You're wrong." Sentenced to 17 years' jail in November.

Late 1999: Ben and Olivia: What Really Happened, a book by journalists Jayson Rhodes and Ian Wishart, offers a detailed critique of the trial. It concludes "it would be a brave person who believes guilt has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt".

2000: Silent Evidence: Inside the Police Search for Ben and Olivia, a book by journalist John Goulter, concludes Watson did it. Police inquiry head Rob Pope contributes a foreword.

May 8, 2000: Court of Appeal rejects Watson's appeal.

The Marlborough Mystery, by Auckland yachtie Mike Kalaugher, concludes that "the mystery of Ben and Olivia has not been solved".

November 7, 2003: Keith Hunter's TV documentary, Murder on the Blade? criticises the Crown case. Key Crown witness, water taxi driver Guy Wallace, tells Hunter he no longer believes Watson is the man he dropped off at a yacht on New Year's Day. The Privy Council declines to hear a further appeal from Watson.

March 2007: Hunter's book, Trial by Trickery: Scott Watson, the Sounds Murders and the Game of Law, provides a detailed critique of the Crown case and the police investigation.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/272881
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
[ *  *  * ]
NEW CLUE IN SOUNDS MURDERS


By Simon Bradwell


A skull recovered from the sea may be that of murdered teenager Olivia Hope.



It was pulled up by a fishing trawler at the mouth of the Waimakariri River, near Christchurch.



Tests have showed it was from a Pakeha woman in her late teens or early 20s.



Olivia’s dad Gerald Hope said he wanted DNA tests on the skull. "Let's use the science" he said.



And Chris Watson, the father of Scott Watson - convicted of killing Olivia, 17 and her friend Ben smart, 21 - has backed the call.



"If the skull is Olivia’s, it would be powerful evidence Ben and Olivia were on a boat other than. Scott’s Blade when they went missing," Watson's said.



"That would basically prove Scott didn’t kill them".



When the skull was found three years ago police thought it belong to a missing fisherman.



But Sunday News can reveal tests showed it belonged to woman about Olivia’s age.



The skull was sent to skeletal anatomist John Dennison at Otago University two months ago.



He told Sunday News there were no teeth to compare with Olivia’s records.



It was not clear how the person died, Dennison said. But the skull would be tested to see how long it had been in the water.



The head of the police enquiry, superintendent Rob Pope, said more tests would be done to see if the skull was Olivia’s.



Now you’ve raised it with me, I'll certainly organize for it to be looked at to see if there is a connection, he said.



"The police have an obligation to identify any skeletal remains".



Ben and Olivia were last seen boarding a yacht in the Marlborough sounds early on January 1, 1998, their bodies were never found.



Scott Watson was convicted the next year for both murders and sentenced to 17 years without parole. He has always maintained his innocence.



Chris Watson said a ketch was seen leaving the sounds on January 1.

"Ben and Olivia it could have been aboard" he said.



"Once out of the sounds this boat could have gone almost anywhere and the skull was found only twenty four hours sail away."



Chris said police should have investigated this skull fully when it was discovered.



"In a proper investigation, every stone needs to be picked up, turned over, weighed in looked under." he said.



Gerald Hope there was angry he learned about the skull from Sunday News and not from the police. "It's disappointing that we hear about this from the media" he said.







CHRONICLE OF A TRAGIC MYSTERY


January 1,1998: Ben and Olivia our last seen boarding a yacht after celebrating New Year at Furneaux lodge.



May 16, 1998: Ben and Olivia’s parents fear a large item pulled from the Sounds seabed is a body, but it is un-connected to the case.



June 15, 1998: Picton yachtie Scott Watson charged the pair’s murder.



October 10,1998: Olivia’s father, Gerald wins the Marlborough mayoralty and dedicates victory to Olivia



September 11,1999: Watson convicted, sentenced to 17 years jail without parole



May at 8,2000: The Court of appeal dismisses Watson's appeal. His lawyers say they'll go to the Privy Council



August 2000: A Navy vessel detects two objects of interest on the Tory channel seabed but it's too expensive to recover them



May 5, 2002: Gerald Hope tells Sunday News he isn't sure Watson was Olivia’s killer



September 1, 2002: Enquiry Head Rob pope orders analysis of the skull found off the Canterbury coast to see if it is Olivia’s





Sunday News September 1, 2002
http://trudyandtom.tripod.com/new_clue_in_sounds_murders.htm
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3530/featu..._they_said.html
Cover Murder

by Joanne Black

Ten years have passed since the nation was gripped by the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope from Endeavour Inlet in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1998. As questions are raised publicly about whether Scott Watson really did murder them, two men who know the case inside out have no doubt at all that the right man is behind bars.
At a long desk in his downtown Auckland chambers, Queen’s Counsel Paul Davison is telling a story. There are no theatrics. He raises neither his voice nor his arms. His tone is neither hectoring nor pleading. He uses no legal terms that need elaboration or explanation. He is calm and articulate and speaks with the assurance of a man who knows exactly what he is talking about. And on this subject he does, because it was Davison who led the Crown case that, nearly two years after the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, culminated in Scott Watson’s conviction for their murders.

Davison’s closing address at the end of the 11-week trial lasted a day and a half. A transcript of it takes 109 pages and yet much of it was off the cuff. “It was very impressive,” says Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope who, 10 years ago, was the detective inspector in charge of the search for the missing pair.

The salient points are well known to anyone who was in New Zealand that summer and autumn. January is normally a quiet time for news, so the mysterious disappearance of two such promising and attractive young people captured the country’s attention. For a brief moment, there were theories about elopement: the summer love that began with the previous New Year’s celebrations at Furneaux Lodge had faded but the couple were again seen in each other’s arms at the lodge’s jetty, as revellers counted in the New Year of 1998. Later, about 1.30am, near the garden bar, they shared a kiss.

But the popular 20-year-old Ben, a former prefect at Christ’s College in Christchurch, and 17-year-old Olivia, a talented pianist who had just passed her Trinity College exams, were just not the sorts to take off together without telling their families. And, soon, there came the disturbing reports of their having boarded a ketch with a male stranger, a lone yachtsman. He had offered them a place to sleep on his yacht after the vessel chartered by Olivia’s group had become so crowded with tired partygoers that there was no place for her and Ben.

Who was the stranger? Where had the ketch gone? And the question that, 10 years later, remains unanswered: what happened to Ben and Olivia?

In seeking to answer those questions, Davison’s closing address left no stone unturned. No difficulty in the Crown evidence was glossed over. He painstakingly built a case so tight that in the end – even without the bodies and even with no single witness saying that they saw Hope and Smart get on Watson’s sloop with him – it left room for only one rational explanation for the pair’s disappearance: Watson had murdered them. The jury found that to be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

Watson appealed against the verdict, but in its judgment eight months later, the Court of Appeal said it “would be wrong to describe the case as one which was finely balanced. It was proved to the jury’s satisfaction beyond reasonable doubt, and that finding is not under challenge.”


Indeed, what is telling is that Watson’s appeal did not suggest there had been insufficient evidence to convict him, rather that there had been trial errors that, when taken cumulatively, led to a miscarriage of justice. The court dismissed that appeal, saying it was satisfied that no miscarriage of justice had been demonstrated; nor was it able to see “anything unfair in the way in which the Crown case was finally presented to the jury”.

Yet, 10 years after the disappearance of Hope and Smart, the voices of the doubters are growing louder. The Herald on Sunday, North & South and a book published early last year, Trial by Trickery, by Keith Hunter, have all expressed concern about Watson’s convictions, with a common theme being that the police had “tunnel vision” and that once they had Watson in their frame, they focused on him to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

Pope has not the read the book. Davison has read some of it.

“I’ve read the parts of it in which I think he has directed his criticisms against me,” says Davison, “in suggesting that the Crown and the police had deliberately misled and tricked Mr Watson’s defence. That is total nonsense and I have responded to Mr Hunter in those terms. But it illustrates that Mr Hunter and others who adopt that type of journalism really have not gone to the trouble of getting into the detail of the case or, if anything, have adopted the tunnel vision that the Crown or police have been criticised for adopting.”

For his part, Pope thinks that some of the questions about the case now are a legacy of the unprecedented media interest at the time, and he still bristles slightly at the suggestion, made by some critics, that the media were mishandled.

“It’s not the police’s fault that the murder scene was a boat,” retorts Pope, “and it’s not the police’s fault that we couldn’t quietly remove it from the harbour without the public commenting on it … Many of the allegations of tunnel vision around Watson were fuelled by speculative media comment early in the piece.”


Davison does not seem angry about the stories and speculation that, in effect, impugn his professional integrity.
“I just find it rather sad that our community is so unsophisticated both in terms of its fourth estate journalism abilities, and in terms of its ability to be manipulated or influenced; and that bandwagons are jumped on readily without any real appreciation of the case. And the sort of notoriety one gets from championing these causes is, in itself, something that is a factor.

“I don’t for a moment criticise someone like Joe Karam and his campaign in relation to the Bain case, for example. It’s a healthy aspect of our society that a citizen can challenge a conviction, and convictions from time to time need to be challenged. There are instances of people being wrongly convicted – but not every conviction is of that ilk.

“Because this was a notoriously public case, it received intense media coverage and this is fertile ground for being pored over again, but to my knowledge you [the Listener] are the first people to come and say, ‘Perhaps you could tell us about the detail of the case again.’ Mr Hunter never did. No one else has, and you would find it difficult to discern this general overview without reading a whole lot of material – not just the evidence but the Crown analysis of it, brought together in a coherent way and which I would say made the case very compelling.”

“Nonsense” is about as strong as Davison gets in condemning his critics. It is also how he describes the implications of a North & South article that canvasses, among other aspects, the fact that water-taxi driver Donald Anderson recalls taking Watson back to his boat at about 2.00am. The implication here is that since Watson was back at his boat at that time, he cannot have been the man who was taken from the shore by another water-taxi driver, Guy Wallace, at about 4.00am – and who, while a passenger on that trip, offered Smart and Hope somewhere to sleep. Or, if he was that man, he had to have got back to shore somehow in between times in order to be taken out to his boat again. That is the so-called “two-trip theory” that is much maligned by critics of the Crown case.

In questioning Watson’s second trip to shore, North & South says it seems “bizarre that such a crucial piece of evidence about Watson’s movements wasn’t thoroughly canvassed during the trial. Despite there being 1500 potential witnesses that night, absolutely nobody saw him return to shore …”

North & South continues: “Davison put it to the jury in his closing address thus: ‘Was it just hitching a ride with a passing boat? Who knows? There was a dinghy attached to the back of his boat. There were other dinghies around. It was a short row. It was a short trip in any boat. Does it matter?’ For those who value certainty when someone is accused of something as serious as murder, Davison’s words to the jury are little short of chilling.”

“That’s nonsense,” says Davison. “It’s absolute nonsense. In the nature of criminal activity, a great deal is done by people who wish to avoid detection. They seldom do it in the face of a video camera or under the nose of others if they think there might be some comeback.

“I’m not suggesting Mr Watson made his way to shore in some secretive way – who knows? But the Crown case is based, as of necessity it must be, on the evidence that happens to be available, and there was not a witness who could account for Mr Watson returning to shore. In all these cases there are gaps in the mosaic of the picture you create.”

In any case, says Davison, there is cogent evidence that Watson was ashore at about 3.00-3.30am, because around that time he was involved in an altercation with a man who was wearing his sister’s necklace. Watson himself described the altercation in one of his statements. Davison says how Watson got back to shore is not crucial to the case – what is crucial is that he was ashore, which adds weight, along with Wallace’s identification, to Watson’s being in the water taxi when it left about 4.00am, picking up Smart and Hope on the way.

Guy Wallace claimed, however, that he dropped Smart and Hope (identified by Olivia’s older sister, Amelia, as being the two young people in Wallace’s water taxi) and the man he identified as Watson at a double-masted ketch – a claim that seems destined to haunt the Watson case forever, despite the Crown’s insistence that the ketch simply did not exist. Scott Watson’s yacht, Blade, was a single-masted sloop. Pointing out that Wallace’s description of the ketch became more elaborate each time he was interviewed, the Crown argued that he was confused in the dark.

“Our proposition was that Wallace was right about the man and wrong about the boat,” says Davison. “And people say, ‘That’s cute; the witness is being relied upon when it suits and disregarded when it doesn’t.’ But that’s where one needs to start getting careful about witnesses and approaching witness evidence not simply at face value but looking for confirmation.
“If you look at Mr Wallace’s statements, he first started off drawing a little pencil sketch of the two-masted yacht, and wrote the word ‘ketch’ with a question mark. But in the days following there came a huge amount of media interest in the disappearance of Ben and Olivia and his role, as one of the last people to see them, was central and he was on television and he seemed to develop his description so that the statements requested of him in subsequent days became more and more detailed.

“I’m not critical of Mr Wallace in terms of his reliability and honesty – this is human nature. Witnesses want to remember. Mr Wallace was in this invidious situation of being central to all of this and wanting to help, and it’s natural to try to recollect as much as one can.

“But as the courts frequently remind juries, honest witnesses can be unreliable. And one needs to be careful about that. His recognition of Watson on that night was supported in a number of respects by a number of other witnesses, but not to the same extent. The other descriptions were consistent with the appearance of Mr Watson. All of that was an important part of the case.”

Davison says it is also salient that Watson himself never described seeing a ketch even though his own boat was moored almost exactly where Wallace said he dropped off Hope, Smart and the man he identified as being Watson. Because New Year’s Eve had been a beautiful day, and about 200 boats were moored off Furneaux Lodge, creating a fine spectacle, many people took photographs. The police made them into montages and, for various times of the day, identified every single boat. None shows a ketch in the area where Wallace says he dropped off the three people. But Blade is there.

“You can look at it like this,” offers Davison. “This is one of very few cases in which the police can throw a net, in a metaphorical sense, over a group of people which contains the murderer. So, you take out all the people moored off Furneaux Lodge that night in the boats which couldn’t have been the boat where Ben and Olivia were dropped off, because they were in the wrong place, or they were launches, or they had groups of people who were able to account for one another and all those sorts of things. I think there was only one man on a ketch who was alone and he had a beard and he was way up the other end of the mooring area.

“So, if you start eliminating people, you get down to a smaller group and then you ask yourself the question – it’s just an application of logic. Leaving aside identification, look at those who were acting in a certain way and you get down to Mr Watson being identified as offering them a place on his boat, and you’ve got the hair from Olivia on his boat.”

Davison says when you add in the evidence of Watson’s sexually aggressive behaviour towards women on the night – one woman said she went and hid in the toilets because she was so disturbed by his approach to her – plus his statements before New Year that he wanted to kill, and his actions afterwards in changing the appearance of his boat and thoroughly cleaning it, the case becomes compelling.

“And I think that’s what the Crown case did in the end. We told the jury, ‘Don’t get too distracted by the “mystery ketch”,’ (which was the phrase used ad nauseam by the defence). ‘Because look at all the rest of the evidence which is actual and compelling and which you can evaluate and which presents a very powerful case against Mr Watson.’”

Pope says the Crown’s critics also gloss over the thousands of hours of painstaking investigation that went into the case.

“Right from the outset we were quite clear that this was a circumstantial case that involved a massive exercise in eliminating every potential other possibility of a non-criminal disappearance of the pair – and, then, also identifying through painstaking police work who may have been responsible for their deaths.

“And that’s the way it unfolded. You were down to Ben and Olivia being alive on a tiny part of Endeavour Inlet that morning, so you were down to quite a small group of people who could be responsible for their deaths. At the end of the day, the inquiry gathered a massive amount of information and through a process of exclusion the police case was that Scott Watson was the only possible person responsible.

“There were thousands of movements of people at Furneaux that night, tracked from where they were at particular points in time, when they were on boats, when they were on shore, who they were with. That doesn’t make good TV or print copy, but it’s the reality of police investigations. It took thousands of man-hours of work to trace everybody’s movements. I’ve publicly said before that we had 130 loosely described suspects and each and every one of those people were enquired into in terms of establishing whether they could or could not have had some sort of involvement with Ben and Olivia.”
Like Davison, Pope is unswayed by the doubters. He has seen nothing to make him doubt the convictions.

And, as Davison says, a national referendum could come up with 100 percent of people who doubt the verdicts, but the only opinions that matter are those of the 12 jurors who sat through the 11 weeks of evidence, with the opportunity to evaluate each witness on every piece of it. They represented the community, says Davison: “The opinions of those who did not hear the evidence are of no real significance.”

Even his own opinion doesn’t matter, he says, but, for the record, he, too, has seen nothing since the trial to cause him any doubts.

“The sort of media attention the case has been receiving lately is superficial in the extreme and somewhat sensationalist and panders to that level of journalism which seems to attract and excite attention without really having covered the detail and undertaken any sort of analysis at all.

“That’s part of our New Zealand psyche, really. There’s no controversial story in the right man having been dealt with by the system; the only controversial story New Zealanders seem to be interested in is if the wrong person has been convicted. And so we’ve had a series of reports and articles, comments from people claiming to have some knowledge or information that leads them to conclude that the only fair thing to do is to have a retrial. None of them, to my knowledge, has taken the time to actually look at the case against Mr Watson.”

Pope is similarly unmoved by the recent commentaries.

“Every time this case resurfaces, we get a flurry of people commenting on certain things they saw or didn’t see and we record this information and check it against the main file. But nothing has eventuated that changes the facts of the case. Nor do they provide the police team with what we would dearly love, which would be to find the remains of Ben and Olivia.”
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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10 Years Since Ben and Olivia Went Missing
Monday, 12 November 2007, 10:34 am
Press Release: North and South magazine
It’s 10 Years Since Ben and Olivia Went Missing – Did We Get It Wrong?

That’s the question explored in the hard-hitting cover story of the latest North & South magazine.

Written by Mike White – who was a reporter on the The Marlborough Express during that drought scarred summer of 1997-8 when Ben Smart and Olivia Hope disappeared from the Marlborough Sounds – the North & South story reports growing doubts among some key witnesses, and even the father of one of the victims, about whether the police got the right man when Scott Watson was arrested in June 1998, and later convicted of murder.

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The 12-page story looks in detail at key evidence gathered and the investigative methods used in the case. In the story, Mike White himself remembers when the guilty verdict came through he walked around his lounge punching the air in triumph, but says “In the eight years since, [the conviction] I’ve learnt more about the case than I ever knew at the time. And as I have, I’ve grown increasingly uneasy about the way Watson was investigated, the paucity of evidence against him and the eventual verdict.”

The North & South story looks again at some of the key pieces of Crown evidence which members of the public remember from news reports at the time. These include the repainting and extensive cleaning of Watson’s yacht; the evidence of secret witnesses; the discovery of Olivia’s hairs on Watson’s boat; the identification of Watson by crucial witnesses; and the supposed dumping of Ben and Olivia’s bodies in Cook Strait.

The story also interviews a number of people associated with the case who express their doubts about Watson’s guilt, most importantly Gerald Hope, Olivia’s father, who tells North&South: “The one thing that always remains is that we never found the truth. We thought we would. We thought the process we were going through would actually be the truth. But it hasn’t been. That’s the hardest part.”

The December issue of North & South is on sale in some Auckland stores from Sunday December 11, and throughout the rest of the country from Monday, December 12.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU0711/S00208.htm
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17257428.html
PRIVATE detectives say an anonymous letter they handed to police could be a major breakthrough in the Ben Smart and Olivia Hope case.

One of the investigators, former Wellington CIB head Quentin Doig, said the letter purported to identify the person responsible for the disappearance of the Blenheim pair.

"I consider it has the potential of being a significant lead," he said. Mr Doig, along with former Wellington Police Crime Control Unit head Carl Berryman, is investigating the case on behalf of Scott Watson, the owner of a seized sloop. The note, made up of letters clipped from a newspaper, was handed to police a few days ago, after the detectives received it from the Wellington lawyer acting for Mr Watson. Police are downplaying the significance of the letter. Inquiry head Detective Inspector Rob Pope said the letter did not claim to have solved what had happened to Ben and Olivia. Olivia Hope's family are also sceptical and doubt the letter represents a major breakthrough. Mr Pope said a number of people were named in the letter but police had yet to speak to them. The Sunday Star-Times understands the letter alleges police have ignored tips about who took Ben and Olivia and names several people, including a gang associate and a yacht. It also mentions drugs.
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17404147.html
Olivia Hope 'cheerful' at start of party
Article from:The Press Article date:July 8, 1999More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

WELLINGTON -- Olivia Hope was her usual outgoing and cheerful self during the first part of a New Year party at Furneaux Lodge on the night she disappeared, a close friend testified in the High Court in Wellington.

Blenheim paua diver Hamish Rose said yesterday that in the three hours he was with her at the Marlborough Sounds lodge, Miss Hope talked about her life and told him she was looking forward to going to Otago University in the coming year.

There was no indication she was planning to do anything else but return home the next day and continue to work at her holiday job at the Wairau Winery, he said. Mr Rose's evidence was given on the 16th day of former Picton man Scott Watson's trial on charges of murdering Miss Hope and her friend Ben Smart on or about January 1, 1998 after the Furneaux Lodge party. Watson, 28, has pleaded not guilty and his trial before Justice Heron and a jury of five women and seven men is scheduled to take 60 days. Among more than 20 young witnesses who gave evidence yesterday about Mr Smart's and Miss Hope's movements in the days before they disappeared was Andrew Pratt, who was staying with Mr Smart at Vercoe's bach at Punga Cove before the party. In answer to questions from Justice Heron, Mr Pratt said he was quite a close friend of Mr Smart and that Mr Smart and Miss Hope had been boyfriend and girlfriend during the previous year. Victoria University student Hamish Wilson, who was also staying at Vercoe's bach, said that when he saw Mr Smart and Miss Hope in Furneaux Lodge's garden bar about 1.30am they were kissing. Mr Rose said he was camping at the lodge on New Year's eve and met Miss Hope on the path between the camping area and the lodge around 6.30pm. They chatted for a while before going back to join others at his campsite. Miss Hope had been wearing long pants, a black top, a jacket and had a greenstone pendant round her neck. He said he and Miss Hope had been "reasonably close friends" in the past and she had stayed chatting at his camp site for about an hour. She had drunk some beer and seemed to be bright, enjoying herself, and looking forward to the night. They had then gone to the lodge where they wandered round the lawn by the bar entrance, at one stage going into the bar to buy drinks which they took outside. After Miss Hope met up with friends he had returned to his camp to change and rejoined them about half an hour later. They went to the wharf to see if they could recover some liquor that had been confiscated from Miss Hope when she arrived, but had been unsuccessful. After further wandering around the lodge grounds and another trip back to his camp to get a jersey for Miss Hope, they had gone their separate ways and he had not seen Miss Hope again. Mr Rose said he was with other friends until he went back to his camp to bed about 2.30am. Though he knew Mr Smart he had not seen him at all during the evening. Mr Rose agreed with defence lawyer Bruce Davidson's proposition that when he went back to his camp to get warmer clothes Miss Hope had given him her watch to ensure he would return to her and she would not be left alone. Alice Louise Hyndman, who went to school with Miss Hope, said she saw her twice that night and she appeared upset on the second occasion. Miss Hope was her usual happy self when she first saw her, but when Ms Hyndman saw her again about 1am she was clearly distressed. "She was not happy at all," Ms Hyndman said. "She just seemed ... yeah, not very happy." Ms Hyndman said she knew Miss Hope reasonably well and had met Mr Smart for the first time that evening.--NZPA Supplied by New Zealand Press Association
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17399217.html
Witnesses tell of spotting mystery ketch moored off Furneaux Lodge
Article from:The Press Article date:August 4, 1999More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

WELLINGTON -- Evidence of a mystery ketch moored off Furneaux Lodge the night Olivia Hope and Ben Smart went missing has been given for the first time in the High Court at Wellington.

The prosecution has claimed the friends went missing on January 1 last year after boarding murder-accused Scott Watson's single-masted yacht Blade.

But water taxi driver Guy Wallace has given evidence that the friends and Watson boarded a ketch.

Yesterday, Eyvonne Walsh, who was working on the Furneaux Lodge jetty during the New Year's Eve party, said she first saw a distinctive yacht, moored to the left of the lodge jetty, about 9.30pm.

It was on the outer edge of more than 100 craft moored in Endeavour Inlet off Furneaux Lodge and was remarkable for its distinctive rope work.

This yacht is not on the list of boats and their skippers that prosecution has put before the court.

The prosecution alleges Watson, 28, murdered Miss Hope, 17, and Mr Smart, 21, by luring them on to his yacht by offering a place to sleep. He wanted Miss Hope for sex, and killing her friend Mr Smart was incidental, the prosecution alleges.

Watson has pleaded not guilty.

Mrs Walsh said the yacht was a ketch with two masts, distinctive rope work, a dark stripe round it and portholes. It generally had a Chinese junk look because of the height of a structure at its stern, she said.

After helping passengers that her husband, Ted, carried to and from Furneaux Lodge, she and her husband left the lodge at 3am but she did not notice the distinctive craft as they left.

On January 2 she went on a fishing trip on their launch Sweet Release with her husband, son and about 20 friends, young and old, Mrs Walsh said. They were diving at Cannibal Cove at the entrance to Queen Charlotte Sound when her husband showed her the distinctive craft she had seen off Furneaux.

She noticed it was clearly an ocean-going craft more than 40ft long with big round brass portholes.

She waved to those on board but couldn't say if they waved back. She sketched the yacht later and faxed it to police after she heard Miss Hope and Mr Smart were missing.

Mr Walsh, who has been managing Furneaux Lodge since March, said he first saw the mystery ketch on the afternoon of New Year's Eve as he went south from Endeavour Inlet to Gem Resort to get fuel.

Many boats were heading for Furneaux but he noticed a yacht with so many young people aboard it may have been overloaded, and a distinctive white yacht with a blue stripe round the top of its hull, portholes and unique rope work.

He assumed it had two masts but did not really notice.

He later learned the yacht with young people was the scow Alliance. The mystery ketch had come within 50m of his boat at Cannibal Cove on January 2 and he saw people on board for the first time. There was a man and a blonde young woman sitting close together in the boat's cockpit and another man doing something on the boat.

He had waved but none of the people on board waved back.--NZPA

Supplied by New Zealand Press Association
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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Witness sure missing pair boarded mystery ketch; Witness sure about ketch
Article from:The Press Article date:January 16, 1998Author:BROMBY, Jocelyn More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

The man who last saw the missing Blenheim couple in Endeavour Inlet on New Year's Day is adamant that the vessel they boarded was a ketch.

In the last couple of days police have switched their attention from searching for the mystery 12m ketch that Furneaux Lodge water taxi driver Guy Wallace described to the 8.6m sloop belonging to a Picton man that was seized on Monday in Shakespeare Bay.

Mr Wallace is certain that the vessel that Olivia Hope, 17, and Ben Smart, 21, climbed aboard between 4.30am and 5am on New Year's Day was a two-masted ketch. He says it had a white wooden hull, a blue strip, and round portholes. Mr Wallace, 32, is even more adamant the seized sloop is not the boat he saw Miss Hope and Mr Smart board. ``It definitely was not the boat I delivered the pair to. Mind you it (the ketch) could have been rafted up against others. I never saw them go down the hatch of the ketch.'' Mr Wallace, in hiding to escape the media, has spoken to only one reporter regularly since January 5, Tessa Nicholson of the Marlborough Express. She said he had never changed his story. He told her he had done a lot of boating and had a fair knowledge of boats. Conditions at the time were clear and there was lighting from the boatsheds. He was tired but sober because the Furneaux Lodge staff were too busy to party. Ms Nicholson said Mr Wallace was very upset at the media attention to his family. ``He wants people to stop pestering his father,'' she said. Mr Wallace saw the missing pair board the ketch with a mystery man, a passenger in the water taxi, who offered them accommodation. Police had not yet identified the man or a man seen approaching women in the bar at Furneaux Lodge, officer in charge of the inquiry Detective Inspector Rob Pope said. Police could not comment on the person or people who might have been on board the sloop or its movements because they had still to be established. To page 2 From page 1 Detective Inspector Pope has said the ketch as described by Mr Wallace did not exist. ``All we're saying is that we believe that person's description of the vessel is genuinely mistaken,'' he said. Mr Wallace was the only witness located who had seen the ketch, he said. The police were still interested in sightings of the ketch because that phase of the operation could not be discounted. Ongoing inquiries were still being made to eliminate the remainder of 300 sightings of ketches. The police were re-interviewing many witnesses, he said. Inspector Pope said the focus had changed to the sloop as a result of ``some extremely helpful information from the public identifying all the boats in Endeavour Inlet''. As time developed police attention might focus elsewhere. Marine radio broadcasts were asking for sightings of the sloop and ketch. Every possible medium was also being used to find out about its movements over the New Year period, he said. A photograph of the sloop taken at Endeavour Inlet at 4pm on New Year's Eve shows a reddish-brown cabin and trim. It has not been confirmed when it arrived or left the inlet. When the boat was seized its cabin sides and trim had been painted dark blue. Forensic testing on the sloop held at Base Woodbourne was ``substantially completed'' yesterday. Results would take time, Detective Inspector Pope said. Nothing of significance was found in the search of about 63 baches in Endeavour Inlet yesterday. The ground search of the area ended yesterday. Assistant Commissioner of Police Ian Holyoake visited the headquarters of the inquiry, Operation Tam, yesterday. --------------------
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17336196.html
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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Never-ending nightmare
Article from:Sunday Star-Times Article date:May 17, 1998Author:TAYLOR, Phil More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

Missing pair's parents cling to 1% of hope for Ben and Olivia

--------------------

The search for Ben Smart and Olivia Hope began 19 weeks ago. In the early hours of the New Year the friends stepped aboard a boat in Endeavour Inlet and were seemingly swallowed by the deep water of the Marlborough Sounds. PHIL TAYLOR backgrounds the inquiry -------------------- FOR THE parents, it is a story without an ending. That's why, when a television documentary was made about the disappearance, Mary Smart, mother of only son Ben, decided not to appear. Without that finality there seemed no point. There would be only the pain to share. "Nobody understands what you are going through. You couldn't know. It's like if you have cancer, only people with cancer know what it's like. At least with there being four of us, we know exactly how each other feels." That was in March and even then the parents -- Mary and John Smart and Jan and Gerald Hope -- knew that Ben (21) and Olivia (17) were almost certainly dead. It was that 1% chance they clung to. Had their children died in a car accident they would know the cause, had the funeral and begun grieving. All that's on hold. Instead they have endured a steady stream of rumour and innuendo. Suggestions such as that a particular freshly-dug patch of coast be checked are routinely made to the parents, often by well-meaning strangers. Psychics called regularly, usually with vague information. Sometimes it might offer a landmark such as a beacon. "So you go to your maps to try to work it out," says Mr Smart. "Finally, you have to accept it could be any of a number of beacons and the position could fall anywhere in a 360 degrees radius." He didn't consider it wearying because "one day, one piece of information may lead to an answer". The police inquiry is now concentrating on an area of seabed around the head of Endeavour Inlet, a short boat trip from Furneaux Lodge where the last reported sighting of the pair was of them boarding a boat with a man between 4am and 5am on New Year's Day. The area of the search -- using sonar and divers to detect and explore objects -- has been plotted by police over weeks and presumably is based on sightings of the boat at the centre of the inquiry. Land, sea and air searches were carried out in the days after their disappearance. Initially, a ketch (a two-masted yacht) became the focus but on January 12 a single-mast sloop was taken from Waikawa Bay, near Picton, by police for forensic examination. And within a week the spotlight fell on one man among 1000 people seeing in the New Year at Furneaux Lodge. Variously described as "sleazy" and "creepy" the police inquiry settled on describing him as the "mystery man". On January 9, two sketches, based on witnesses' recollections, were released. One was of the man at the lodge, the other of the man whose yacht the couple boarded. The sketches both show men with dark, dishevelled hair covering their ears. According to people at the lodge the "mystery man" was drunk and leered at women, a few of whom he offered to take aboard his boat. A holidaying Australian police officer, who didn't want to be named, had vivid memories. "This fellow was quite inebriated," he said. "He was a bit of a sleazy fellow, with heaps of sexual overtones to his conversation." He told the policeman he was on his own, asked for drugs "and got quite agitated when I said I didn't have any." The police believe the "mystery man" was involved in one or more of 24 fights they say occurred that night, in particular the assault of a young woman about 2am on the lodge's jetty. Despite appeals through the media the woman has not been identified. Whether the mystery man is the same one whose boat the couple boarded is no more than speculation, police say. Inquiry head Detective Inspector Rob Pope has followed a cautious approach, revealing little and confirming less. It's this lack of hard information that has fuelled the rumour and speculation that circulates Marlborough and Christchurch. Police say such reticence is necessary. Very little information "has whacked us between the eyes", says Mr Pope. Rather it had been a painstaking trawl. The first eight weeks were spent building a framework for the investigation: Identifying and finding the 157 boats and 1650 people in the inlet that night. The work since has involved steadily narrowing the focus. Not surprisingly there is no comment as to why the sloop belonging to Scott Watson was seized. Mr Watson's lawyers have confirmed he has made "comprehensive" written statements to police and voluntarily given blood samples. His sloop left Endeavour Inlet on New Year's Day, and went to Erie Bay, off Tory Channel, on the other side of the sound. But the time frame for this trip has changed as the investigation went on. Police now believe it didn't arrive in Erie Bay until 5pm -- six hours later than initially thought. It was here that Mr Watson painted his sloop blue and white. The colour of the boat, like the conflict over whether it was a ketch or a sloop, is an enduring puzzle. Witnesses had told police the couple boarded a ketch, which they believe to be blue and white. Yet on December 31, Mr Watson's sloop had a white hull and a reddish-brown cabin and trim. Asked in March about the apparent colour discrepancy, Mr Pope says there is an explanation. But he'd say only the boat was seized under warrant, which requires police to show they have "reasonable grounds". What about the emphatic and consistent story of Guy Wallace, who drove the water taxi, that Ben and Olivia boarded a ketch? A total of 400 ketches had been located throughout the country and none fitted the description, nor did the four ketches police established were in the inlet. Mr Pope: "Unfortunately for some people they have, at some time, to accept that their information is incorrect." The focus has now narrowed to the sea floor near the mouth of Endeavour Inlet. Officially they are looking for anything that will provide a clue to the fate of Ben and Olivia. Perhaps the best clue that the inquiry is on track is that Inspector Pope (41) who has been able to visit his wife and infant daughter in Christchurch just twice since Operation Tam began, remains stubbornly optimistic. And that his superiors are sufficiently satisfied to keep funding an inquiry that, at peak, had 44 staff and has cost more than $2 million. --------------------
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17259731.html
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
[ *  *  * ]
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-15013176.html
QC rubbishes Watson claims; Sounds inquiry head: we got the right man
Article from:Sunday Star-Times Article date:December 30, 2007More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

THE QUEEN'S Counsel who led the Crown prosecution against Scott Watson has broken his silence, saying he has no doubt the right man is behind bars for the murders of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart 10 years ago this week.

In an article to be published in The Listener yesterday, Paul Davison labels Auckland journalist Keith Hunter's Trial by Trickery, a book-length interrogation of the police case against Watson, as "nonsense", and criticises recent media coverage which questions Watson's convictions as "superficial in the extreme and somewhat sensationalist". "(It) panders to that level of journalism which seems to attract and excite attention without really having covered the detail and undertaken any sort of analysis at all," he said.

Deputy police commissioner Rob Pope, who led the Operation Tam inquiry into the disappearance of Hope, 17, and Smart, 20, from a New Year's Eve function at Endeavour Inlet in the Marlborough Sounds, has also spoken out, saying he has seen nothing to make him doubt the convictions.

In the article, Davison defended the so-called "two-trip theory" - the hypothesis that, after Watson was taken to his boat by water- taxi at about 2am that night, he returned to the celebrations at Furneaux Lodge and was later taken by water-taxi driver Guy Wallace to his boat, along with Hope and Smart, about 4am.

Critics of the Crown case point out there were no witnesses to Watson having returned to shore after water-taxi driver Donald Anderson recalled having taken him to his boat at about 2am.

But Davison said how Watson got there was not crucial because there was evidence he had been ashore at about 3-3.30am.

He also suggested Wallace's descriptions of the boat he had dropped Smart and Hope at had developed over time. Wallace said it was a double-masted ketch - a boat the Crown has insisted did not exist, and which he had confused in the dark with Watson's single- masted sloop.

In his first statements, he wrote the word ketch with a question mark.' Davison said it was significant that Watson himself never described seeing a ketch despite his boat being moored almost exactly where Wallace said he dropped the trio.

Montages made of photographs taken that day show no ketch in the area identified by Wallace, but do show Watson's sloop.

When combined with the evidence of Watson's sexually aggressive behaviour on the night, his earlier statements that he wanted to kill, and his subsequent actions in cleaning and changing the appearance of his boat, the case was compelling, he said.

Pope told The Listener: "The inquiry gathered a massive amount of information and through a process of exclusion the police case was that Scott Watson was the only person responsible."

The Listener is owned by APN, publisher of the Herald on Sunday, which has questioned the validity of Watson's conviction, placing the two publications from the same stable on opposite sides of the fence.

Meanwhile, Watson has gained another high-profile supporter in Dunedin author Lynley Hood, who wrote a book about the convictions of former creche worker Peter Ellis on child sex allegations.

Hood said yesterday the case raised concerns the justice system had failed by convicting Watson without the charges being proven beyond reasonable doubt. "When that happens, everybody's at risk. Anyone can be accused, and when police stitch up the case without regard to reliable evidence and due process, then nobody's safe."
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17401610.html
Hair 'more likely' Olivia Hope's
Article from:The Press Article date:August 17, 1999More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

WELLINGTON -- A hair found on a blanket on Scott Watson's boat was 28,000 times more likely to have come from Olivia Hope than any other fair-haired woman in New Zealand, a forensic scientist told the Sounds murder trial jury in Wellington.

The hair was one of two found on a tiger- patterned blanket on Scott Watson's boat.

Watson has denied murdering Miss Hope and her friend Ben Smart after a New Year's Eve party at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds in 1997.

"What that number means is that in my opinion the DNA results strongly support the proposition that the hair was Olivia's," forensic scientist Kathleen Vintiner told the High Court in Wellington yesterday. She had found a 15cm hair that had the same unusual reddish gold colour of Ms Hope's hair but had been unable to extract any DNA from it.

Ms Vintiner said two high-powered microscope examinations showed the two hairs, which almost certainly came from the same source, could have come from Miss Hope but it was not possible from the examination to say "yes" or "no" definitively.

A small hole in the corner of a plastic bag containing hair samples from Ms Hope could not be explained by Ms Vintiner.

Ms Vintiner had earlier said as a precaution against cross- contamination the only way she removed hairs from the bag was by using fine tweezers to draw individual hairs through tiny scalpel incisions.

The only explanation she could give for a 1cm cut in the bag's corner was that she might have made it inadvertently when cutting open an envelope containing the bag.

Initials on the bag seal indicated she was the only person who had opened it.

But Ms Vintiner also conceded to Bruce Davidson, one of the lawyers defending Watson on murder charges, that the cut could have been made before the bag reached her.

Asked if Watson could have picked up Ms Hope's hair by brushing against her during the Furneaux Lodge party, Ms Vintiner said this was a question the jury would have to consider.

Ms Vintiner agreed she had made a mistake when saying DNA tests on some hairs from a tiger-printed blanket taken from Watson's yacht Blade had shown they came from Watson.

These DNA tests had in fact been done on bloodstains from the rug and in three instances gave results that matched Watson's DNA and in the fourth instance gave a result that partly supported the blood being Watson's.

Mr Davidson then asked if it was possible for hair to be unwittingly transferred from one person to another and later be deposited elsewhere. Ms Vintiner said it was possible and was referred to as a "secondary transfer". --NZPA
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17375479.html
Friend recalls last hours with Olivia Hope
Article from:The Press Article date:December 2, 1998Author:WELLWOOD, Elinore More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

A Wellington student says she was supposed to be on the water taxi that carried her best friend Olivia Hope into the night.

In the Blenheim District Court yesterday, the depositions hearing continued for Scott Watson, 27, who is charged with murdering Blenheim friends Ms Hope, 17, and Ben Smart, 21, in the Marlborough Sounds. The pair disappeared after celebrating New Year's Eve with friends at Furneaux Lodge.

Police are continuing to reveal their evidence for charging Watson. After the hearing, Judge Peter McAloon will decide whether to commit Watson for trial. Ms Hope's friend, whose name was suppressed, recounted the last days they spent together in the Sounds. They were among a group of young people who had chartered the yacht Tamarack. On New Year's Eve they picked up friends from Picton and went to Furneaux Lodge. The friend recalled how Ms Hope was upset, and sat beside her crying because she was annoyed about something involving a person in Christchurch. The dancers at Furneaux Lodge had thinned out, so they decided to go to Punga Cove to stay with her boyfriend, where Mr Smart was also staying, she said. When the trio went to the Tamarack to pick up the girls' gear, they found people sleeping throughout the cockpit and cabin, the friend said. They hailed a water taxi so they could go ashore to find somewhere else to sleep. The friend turned back to leave her bag behind, and heard the water taxi leaving without her. Ms Hope yelled out her name, but she told the pair to go on without her.
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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monkalup
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-17364068.html
Birthday for Ben marked by mourning
Article from:The Press Article date:August 24, 1998Author:More results for:Ben Smart and Olivia Hope

Missing Blenheim man Ben Smart should have been celebrating his 22nd birthday with his family and friends today.

This year, Ben's family will spend his birthday quietly grieving for their bright, outgoing son and brother.

Ben disappeared with Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds early on New Year's Day. The pair were never found and a former Picton man, Scott Watson, has been charged with their murders.

For the family, the birthday is another milestone on the long list of what should have been. Ben should have been part of a big family celebration today. He should have started work at his father John's engineering firm in January after completing a two-year polytechnic course in civil engineering.

The Smarts plan to stay in Wellington for Ben's birthday and spend a quiet day together as a family after attending a concert in Ben and Olivia's honour last night.

Mary Smart said the first birthday without Ben was going to be hard for the family. They had nothing particular planned for the day.

The Hope family also attended the Spirit of Youth Trust concert which was held to commemorate the lives of the young friends. Gerald Hope said many of Ben and Olivia's friends had also attended the Spirit of Youth Trust concert. Ben and Olivia had shared a love of music which had led them to become friends, he said.

The concert's highlight was a piece of music composed in the missing couple's memory by Auckland composer Chris Marshall.

The piece includes music written by Olivia Hope last year while she was in the seventh form.

Mr Hope said the concert and the music were a great tribute to the pair.
Lauran

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente.


In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
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