A stupid killer

A fascinating article by Sam Boyer, who details his conversations with Michael Preston, now convicted of killing Mei Fan.

The key extract is this:

I turn the volume up as loud as it will go. It’s the quietest sentence spoken in the whole interview.

But there it is, spoken clearly.

He is telling me about a conversation he shared with a Housing New Zealand tenancy manager when he drops the bomb.

The conversation took place, he says casually, “several weeks after I’d done it”.

We had spoken on the phone for over an hour, exclusively about one thing – the horrific stabbing death of his ex-wife in the laundry of her Miramar home.

We weren’t talking about other things he may or may not have done “several weeks” before the chat with his tenancy manager.

To my mind the admission could mean only one thing: that he’d “done it”, he’d killed Fan, stabbing her 38 times and leaving a carving knife through her neck.

He accidentally confessed to a reporter.

But you see he also gave away lots of other stuff:

But he wants to talk to me, he says, to tell his side of the story. 

He has theories, he says, about what might have happened and who might have killed her.

“Let me call my lawyer and see if they will let me speak with you. Call me back in five minutes.”

I call him back, this time recording the conversation through a digital dictaphone plugged into my desk phone.

He apologises. He wants to talk to me, but his lawyer says he can’t.

Damn.

He explains in detail what his lawyer has said, that there’s no way he should talk to me, that according to his lawyer it’s not worth it for him, it’s too great a risk.

Then he stays on the line for 50 minutes.

If he had listened to his lawyer, he may have got off. I’m glad he was so stupid he didn’t.

His ex-wife – towards whom it is clear, to my mind, he still harbours a lot of ill will – was most likely assassinated by Chinese hitmen sent to New Zealand under the command of a slighted military officer.

“He put a contract out on her in China,” he tells me.

“He’s got contacts, an old boys’ network. For him to have someone reach out in New Zealand, it’s just too easy.”

Then there’s this “Maori woman”, he says, who had visited Fan to buy some jewellery Fan sold through Trade Me from her home in Miramar. Maybe she’d done it.

Maybe it was OJ?

His dead wife is a “career criminal” he alleges, she had been having affairs while they were married, she is a fraud, she was in the country illegally, she lies about her age, she drives without a licence, she was violent and had beaten him with a lamp, a broom, a beer bottle.

She would rub his nose in the fact she had a new boyfriend, he says.

He had used her passwords to access her computer and “found out that she had way more lovers than I ever thought … this woman just kept a catalogue of her conquests”.

I didn’t do it, but I hated her and this is why.

His dialogue turns to his wife again. He says something about her having “put up a fight”.

He mentions her injuries and the mess at the scene.

This, remember, is a suspect who was arrested shortly after Fan’s body was discovered and should, by rights, have no knowledge of her injuries or the crime scene.

I ask how he knows about her wounds.

His response is the tale about hearing it secondhand from his and Fan’s shared Housing New Zealand tenancy manager.

An allegation easy to check out. He really is a dumb killer. Well done the Police on a good result.