Why Scott Watson still matters
Scott Watson murders: Supreme Court to review witness evidence
NZ Herald
This week, the Supreme Court of NZ reopened the Scott Watson murder case and will consider submissions regarding the reliability of witness Guy Wallace, who identified Watson as having been with the young couple on a water taxi the last time they were seen alive.
The 1998 murder of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds is one of NZ most notorious double homicides and one of our most questionable convictions.
There have always been enormous question marks over this case and it is right for the Supreme Court to review it because this could be a cruel miscarriage of justice.
For me it never sat right that boat people saw a double masted Ketch and not the single masted boat Watson had.
The convenient finding of hairs belonging to Olivia used to frame Scott Watson.
The use of prison narks to frame Watson and most disturbingly, the fact that Police OffIcers involved in the Scott Watson case later went on to develop interview programs for the NZ Police that were found to be incredibly unsafe and produced false confessions.
There’s a war on, the economy is melting down and we have run away climate change to worry about, but if Scott Watson is not guilty, we have kept an innocent man in jail for 27 years for two murders he didn’t commit.
We need to give a damn about that.
Yes, Martyn, right behind you on all the victims of insecure police atrocities. The NZ police seem to be driven by ‘simply getting a result irrespective of whether it is safe or suspect’. It would have helped had NZ convicted and jailed the shonky police. We need to force fairness and engage better quality police who are accountable. The NZ public are well aware of the flimsiness of these cases and more!
The so called ‘evidence’ is very flimsy, to say the least…and even that’s being generous.
Guy Wallaces’s first statement said the person with Olivia and Ben was definitely not Scott Watson and that there was a double mastered ketch with round portholes, much bigger than Watson’s small boat, that a scruffy individual on the water taxi appeared to be associated with.
The police also used an old id photo of Watson that looked nothing like how he looked on the night of the party.
The police never provided any evidence as how Watson, a smallish man, managed to overpower two young strong adults , Ben being a strong athletic build, who would have been in fight or flight mode if their life depended on it, and yet leave no trace of a struggle, or blood, saliva, bits of flesh…nothing.
They came up with a very weak theory….supposedly a few scratch marks on polystyrene insulation on the underside of a hatch which they reckoned indicated Olivia struggling to get away…Where was Ben when all this was going on?…the police have never provided an answer. Did Watson shoot or stab him?…but no blood found…
Did he drug him, but not Olivia..what drugs did he use and where did he purchase them?..
Was Watson an opportunist who had guns, knives and drugs readily at his disposal because he thought he might find someone to murder that night.
What was the motive?
There’s so many holes in the case it’s just ridiculous.
I’ll bet, if it was one the investigators own children, who was being accused of murder, they would be fighting inch and nail for more evidence than 2, possibly contaminated hairs , which could easily have been transferred during the party considering the crushed conditions, and some scratch marks on a polystyrene hatch…
No way is that … ‘beyond reasonable doubt’!
Arthur Alan Thomas,Tana Pora, Peter Ellis, David Bain … the list goes on and on…poorly executed corrupt investigations…
This is yet another!
Yes we need to care, there was more than one witness regarding the double masted Ketch yet the police refused to listen to any of them as they work on the basis of finding a suspect then making the evidence convict them instead of finding all the evidence then using that to find who is guilty.