Feature
A lonely death
by Peter Wells
The killer of David McNee is due to be sentenced this week. His trial raised uncomfortable questions about New Zealand attitudes.
Listening to a dead person being made responsible for their own violent death is an odd sensation. You can’t help but want to yell out. At the Auckland High Court, Phillip Layton Edwards was charged with the murder of David McNee, aged 54. In the media, McNee was called an “interior decorator”, “television celebrity” and a man with an “out of control sexual appetite”. The man charged with his murder was a young Maori, whom the media called “homeless”. This neat apposition – interior decorator and homeless man – set the stage for a theatre piece by which society could play out its values.
I was drawn to the court by some strange urge. I had been in my mid teens when a family friend had changed from the woman I knew into a “hunter lesbian”. She had been almost decapitated by her lesbian lover. The defence lawyer persuaded the jury to find the accused not guilty, even though she had been discovered with a blood-stained razor in her hand. I sensed the same forces at play in the McNee murder trial – voyeurism about homosexuality mixed with an unwillingness to place yourself in the shoes of the murdered person because you don’t share their sexual preference.
It is impossible in New Zealand – and many other countries – to murder a homosexual. It is possible to be found guilty of manslaughter. The underlying message is that any homosexual’s life is of little value. The (apparent) lack of biological family makes their disappearance less of a tragedy than a heterosexual’s violent death. Indeed, when the verdict was finally brought in the McNee murder trial, there were no interviews with his tearful relations. There was, instead, a sympathetic interview with the grandmother of the man who had just been found guilty of manslaughter. She did the decent thing of feeling sorrow and pain for the family of the dead man. Of McNee’s relations, friends or lovers we heard nothing.
The defence lawyer stated that for a long time Edwards had been prepared to be found guilty, refusing even to speak, because he felt such horror at having to expose his life as a part-time male prostitute catering for homosexual clients. Or, as Barbara Cleave in the NZ Herald said, “a homeless man prostituting himself so he could eat”. On the news, a spokesperson for the Male Prostitutes Collective said the case was a warning to gay men to be careful about cruising the streets and picking up unknown prostitutes. The implication was that McNee had got, perhaps unfortunately, what he deserved. A male prostitute off the street can always turn nasty. Or, as in Edwards’s case, go from performing a sex act naked with another naked man – to bashing him repeatedly in the face more than 40 times, leaving the man to choke on his own blood and vomit.
Edwards’s explanation was simple. His anus had been touched. McNee had tried to insert his fingers. Edwards explained to the court that this was not part of the agreed deal. It had tripped Edwards – just 12 days out of prison for another violent assault (this time on a woman) – into killing. Edwards later took McNee’s Audi and boasted to his street friends in a piece of rap about suffocation. He must have been in the house when McNee was choking to death. By that time, though, Edwards was looking for what he could steal and sell.
On 3 News, Alison Laurie said that if every female prostitute reacted with such violence to similar acts New Zealand would be full of corpses. But then they would be heterosexual corpses.
The male anus, in the patriarchy, is sacred. To have it breached is to be dishonoured. It is some kind of sacrificial death. And to revenge such a breaching, a violent death could be considered just. Such, it seemed to me, was the reasoning behind the McNee manslaughter verdict.
I felt a sense of muted horror and of wonder that Edwards, this young man, sitting so calmly in the box, had bashed someone to death in a paroxysm of rage, then left them to choke to death. Perhaps it was that he showed such an obvious lack of concern or interest. He leant back in his chair, as if he was only incidentally present in the courtroom. Motions of his head seemed to indicate he was listening to some internal rap music. During his questioning he displayed an air of arrogance, an assumed bravado.
I wondered what the jury were to make of exposure to a homosexual underworld. Edwards met McNee in a late-night bar on Karangahape Rd, a resort of prostitutes and street people. When Edwards was questioned about what he thought McNee was doing, gazing at him intently, Edwards said he thought “he was staunching me out”. Edwards said he thought McNee was possibly from another gang. Like the Headhunters.
Page 1 
