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