May have been offal from a pie!

Stuff reports:

Everyone who sat through Mark Lundy’s retrial will have different opinions on his guilt or innocence – if he killed his wife Christine and 7-year-old daughter Amber in their Palmerston North home on the night of August 30, 2000.

But it is safe to say they will agree on one thing – the scientific evidence was extremely complicated.

Lundy was found guilty of the murders in 2002, but the Privy Council quashed the verdicts in 2013 and ordered a retrial, which took place in 2015. He was again found guilty and sent back to prison to continue serving his life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years.  His case is once again before the Court of Appeal this week, starting on Tuesday.

Like OJ Simpson, Mr Lundy is still looking for the burglar who killed his wife and daughter.

There was never dispute that one of Lundy’s shirts had stains containing central nervous system tissue. The stains also contained DNA from the victims.

The DNA being there is not surprising, considering the trio lived together. The tissue was the issue.

The Crown said it was probably human tissue from Lundy’s wife. Crown prosecutor Philip Morgan, QC, in his closing address at the retrial, let the jury know how bad that looked. “No man should have his wife’s brain on his shirt.” 

The defence, however, said the tissue could have come from a piece of offal in a pie or a neck chop Lundy may have cooked.

No-one at the trial gave evidence about Lundy eating neck chops. There was a pie wrapper in his car door console, but no pie maker in the witness stand saying exactly what goes into a pie.

It wasn’t brain tissue from my wife, it was offal from a pie! Ingenious.