Bryan Bruce: poking round the criminal justice system.
Feature
Who killed Kayo?
by Fiona Rae
Documentary maker Bryan Bruce hopes his crime series will solve a long-neglected case.
Nine years ago, the decomposing body of young Japanese student Kayo Matsuzawa was found in a fire-alarm cupboard in the Centrecourt Building in downtown Auckland. She had been murdered – by whom, no one knows. It’s a case that is in sharp contrast to the recent coverage of the murder of Auckland mother An An Liu. Kayo’s case might have been solved long before now, Bryan Bruce believes, had it not been virtually ignored by the media.
“I asked Kayo’s best friend when I spoke to her in Tokyo, ‘Why do you think this did not get the kind of coverage that it should have done?’ and she said, ‘It’s because we’re Japanese.’” For Bruce, whose David Bain: a Question of Justice was the highest-rated documentary of 2005, that comment was the motivation to “do everything we can to try to vindicate the situation”.
Of the six cases profiled in his new crime series The Investigator, this is the one that has touched Bruce the most; and if there’s some movement in the case as a result of the episode, it would, he says, make the whole series worthwhile.
The Investigator features “unsolved or puzzling” cases, but it is also a poke around the criminal justice system, from police inquiry through to sentencing and release. Topics include the public’s right to know, paid police witnesses and the death penalty.
“I don’t choose a particular documentary topic just by chance,” says Bruce. “It’s because there is some underlying thing here that is of greater issue.”
He has been asking, probing, producing, directing and writing for more than 20 years, making documentaries that invite New Zealanders to take a good hard look at themselves.
One of his early forays into such territory was the series We’re Only Human, back in the old two-channel days, well before reality shows. Next came Just Testing, in which Bruce, “his near-vertical eyebrows flexing away like twin exclamation marks”, wrote Diana Wichtel in this magazine in 1988, “asks questions he has devised to reveal our deepest motivations and desires”.
Kiwis watched them in droves. He’s made some killer crime documentaries: In Cold Blood (comparing three serial killers, including David Gray), Trial by Ordeal (about the trial of John Barlow) and Murder They Said (about David Tamihere). Which isn’t to say that he has focused exclusively on crime. Among the list of more than 30 Bruce documentaries is The Lost Dinosaurs of New Zealand – a project for which he mortgaged his house – about dinosaur-fossil hunter Joan Wiffen.
The Investigator has been a two-year undertaking, during which Bruce has run the gamut from full police co-operation to brick wall.
“I got an email from the general manager of public relations saying that the commissioners were less than enthusiastic about some of the cases I had chosen,” he says. “C’mon – they’re unenthusiastic about solving crime? I was gobsmacked by that.”
However, he has faith in our justice system, which in his view, still “surprisingly, gets it more right than it does wrong – but it does get it wrong”. He advocates better checks and balances on police, and resourcing defence lawyers adequately. At the end of the day, though, he hopes the series will get us talking.
“I can’t fix New Zealand in 45 minutes of television and I’m not about that,” says Bruce. “But I think we can make analytical, thought-provoking programmes that encourage us to discuss the kind of society, the kind of place that we have here and whether this is New Zealand the way we want it.”
The Investigator, TV1, Wednesday, 9.30pm.
