There were two novel angles to the murder trial in 1951 of George Cecil Horry, an Auckland tailor, who was convicted by a jury nine years after the disappearance of his victim – his newly married wife. In the first place he used an imaginary post in the secret service to explain to the bride's family why they would probably not see or hear from her for several months; and in the second place a jury convicted him of murder without a body, and without any admission on his part; and the Court of Appeal upheld the verdict. Horry married his wife Eileen in July 1942 under the name of George Arthur Turner, secret service agent, although, as George Cecil Horry, he was employed as a tailor in a clothing factory in Auckland. On their wedding day his bride received from her solicitor a cheque for £687 6s. 8d., the proceeds of the sale of her house, and on the previous day she had taken £300 in savings from the bank. The last her family saw of her was when she left for the honeymoon at Helensville after the reception at which Horry banned photographers because of his “Secret Service” role. The following day the pair visited a friend of the bride at Titirangi, but she was never seen or heard of after that. On 12 December 1942 Horry married again, and a week later went to the home of his first wife's parents with the story that their daughter had been lost at sea when an entirely fictitious Empress of India was sunk by a submarine in the Atlantic. In the meantime he had employed a number of transparent devices to ensure a succession of letters to his “in-laws” from overseas, but they became suspicious and the police were called in. But they could do nothing, notwithstanding grave suspicions that Eileen Horry had been murdered. Eight years later, however, in June 1951, Horry was arrested. As no body had been found, there was only circumstantial evidence of the corpus delicti and Horry's connection with the crime. The police charged him with murder and secured a conviction, and he was sentenced to death. Horry appealed, but the Court of Appeal, upholding both conviction and sentence, held that the fact of death was provable by circumstantial evidence even in the absence of a body or any trace of it, and notwithstanding that the accused had made no confession. The final sentence was life imprisonment.

Pathology, physics, ballistics, and photography, plus perseverance and brilliant detection effort, all contributed to the vast accumulation of circumstantial evidence that sent William Alfred Bayly, a 28-year-old farmer of Ruawaro, near Huntly, in the Waikato district, to the scaffold in 1934 for the brutal murder of his neighbours, 47-year-old Samuel Pender Lakey and his wife Christabel. When another neighbour on an October morning in 1933 noticed that the Lakeys' cows had not been milked and went to investigate, he set in motion a painstaking and intensive investigation that created for New Zealand new standards in police thoroughness, patience, and skill. With 50 men under canvas on the murdered couple's farm, it took the police authorities seven months to bring the man whom they believed to be guilty to trial.

Bayly was found guilty of the murder both of husband and of wife. Even at the foot of the gallows in Auckland Prison his stark composure never deserted him, and his last words were a protestation of innocence and a criticism of the purely circumstantial testimony on which he had been condemned. He was executed in July 1934, nine months after the discovery of Mrs Lakey's body in the duckpond.

Nearly three decades after the Winton baby farming case, in 1923, a man and his wife faced a similar indictment in Wellington. This time the husband was hanged and the wife was acquitted. Daniel Richard Cooper, who posed as a “health specialist” in Lambton Quay, was charged with the murder of an infant child after police excavations on his smallholding at Newlands had unearthed three bodies of newly born children. Cooper was already facing 10 charges of criminal abortion when official attention was attracted to his activities after the discovery of a child's body in the sand at Lyall Bay, Wellington. A fortuitous production of a letter found in the street sealed his doom. This communication referred to the Lyall Bay “find” and added, “It looks as if Cooper has been up to his tricks”. It was months before all the necessary evidence could be collected, but public reaction to the crimes was such that when Cooper and his wife appeared in the dock, the proceedings became a genuine cause célbre. Mr Justice F. R. Chapman was the trial Judge, and one of the features of the trial was the defence of Mrs Cooper on the grounds of domination by her spouse. The jury were apparently convinced that any complicity of which she may have been guilty was involuntary and acquitted her, but Cooper was found guilty and hanged. The trial Judge in this case had the unenviable distinction of having presided at the indictment of some of the most sensational murderers in the long period of his tenure of office.

A special distinction attaches to the trial of Dennis Gunn in 1920 for the murder of the postmaster at Ponsonby, Auckland (Augustus Edward Braithwaite), by reason of the fact that the verdict finally disposed of all attempts in New Zealand to discredit the conclusiveness of fingerprint evidence in the detection of crime. From then on there was judicial and official recognition of the dictum of Sir Samuel Griffith, Chief Justice of Australia, who said, “He who leaves a finger-print behind him, leaves an unforgetable signature”. The reliability of fingerprint identification was relentlessly challenged by the defence throughout the trial, but both the jury and Sir Frederick Chapman, on the Bench, accepted it completely in Gunn's case. Gunn waylaid his victim at his home in the evening, stole his keys after shooting him, and robbed the post office. His reward was £67 14s. 5 d., but in the process he left his fingerprints on several cashboxes, and also on a revolver that was later found in a nearby gully, together with a collection of 229 pennies. The evidence showed that the police relied almost entirely on fingerprints to find their man. The prints of more than a score of suspects were handled in the early stages of the investigation, but none was found to coincide with those in this case. Then the files were searched and duplicate prints were discovered; they belonged to a man named Gunn from whom they had been taken some years before when he was in trouble for evading military service. Gunn was arrested, stood his trial, and was sentenced to death. He was hanged in Mount Eden Prison, Auckland.

It could be said of the case of Amy Bock, the Dunedin masquerader and general delinquent, that it has no real place in a chronicle of notable trials since, when she was laid by the heels for the last time, she pleaded guilty to everything charged against her. There was no trial. After a remand she appeared in the Magistrates' Court and was committed for sentence to the Supreme Court. Her sins were legion – impersonation, fraud, forgery, and false pretences being the chief of them. But for the Dunedin community of 1909 the reason for her notoriety was undoubtedly her “marriage” to the daughter of her host and hostess in a boardinghouse at the little South Otago seaside resort, The Nuggets. She was then 45 years of age and the “bride” was 32. Amy Bock had arrived in New Zealand 25 years before from Victoria, and at the time of her adventure at The Nuggets she had already served prison terms at Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Timaru, the sentences ranging up to three years, and the crimes including false pretences, forgery, and larceny. Her final and most heartless escapade – the “marriage” – was probably a practical demonstration of what she meant when she told the police, after her last conviction, that she was “tired of defrauding men; they are too soft and easy to work on”. It would be idle to deny that she had the experience on which to base such a conclusion.

Amy Bock used a number of aliases – Shannon, Channel, Vallane, and Skevington being among her most popular choices – but it was as “Percy Carol Redwood” that she “married” Miss Ottaway, of The Nuggets, in the grand manner, with the Anglican vicar officiating, and the local Presbyterian minister assisting. Her gifts to the “bride” included £100 worth of jewellery obtained by a false pretence in Dunedin, and for which she had given the name of her “father-in-law” as a guarantor. The honeymoon was to have been in Melbourne, and even in this she was able to persuade someone else to purchase the steamer tickets. The gay and debonair manner of “Percy Redwood” captured the fancy of The Nuggets, particularly as there seemed to be no lack of money to be thrown about, and it is perhaps not surprising that the masquerader won the heart of Miss Ottaway. In the meantime, however, the police were searching high and low for their old friend Amy Bock in connection with the small matter of a fraudulent bill of sale which she had given over the furniture and household effects of the family by whom she had been employed as a domestic. Her ready money also included a substantial sum which she persuaded a well-known young Dunedin woman to part with, and before leaving Dunedin she had had a field day among all the tradespeople she could coax to give her credit. Hence her immaculate masculine wardrobe.

The end came when inquiries followed a Dunedin man's suspicion about her sex. She was arrested on the eve of her honeymoon (on which, she confessed, she had no intention of taking her “bride”) and was taken to Dunedin. A contemporary eyewitness of her arrival in Dunedin under escort said she looked every inch a male, “walking with hands thrust deep into the pockets of a stylish grey overcoat in the way of a man when the wind is raw and his underclothes are thin”. Her appearances in Court drew large crowds of excited people, and there was no secret about the public disappointment over the failure of a sensational trial to eventuate. Amy Bock admitted the worst the police could charge against her, and after she had appeared in the Supreme Court for sentence on charges of masquerading as a man, forgery, false pretences, and theft, she was returned for a few more years to the prison cell where she had already spent not much less than half the quarter century of her sojourn in New Zealand. That she achieved fame of a sort was shown by the absurd prices paid at auction for her personal effects which were sold for the purposes of restitution. A few weeks after her final appearance in Court, divorce proceedings were brought by her “wife”. Although legal opinion agreed that such a “marriage” required no official annulment, the relevant formalities of dissolution were carried through for the sake of the records.

Keen public interest and a good deal of morbid sympathy were aroused by the appearance in the dock in 1905 of Edward Lionel Terry on a charge of murdering an aged and inoffensive Chinese in Haining Street, Wellington. The prisoner used the occasion for a violent attack on British policy towards unnaturalised aliens, and described his crime as “a merciful delivery on a world-weary man, and a service to the community”. There was never any doubt of Terry's guilt. He shot his victim down in the street and then went to the police station and described his crime, produced a revolver as evidence, and handed a copy of his pamphlet The Shadow, a harangue on aliens, to the watchhouse-keeper, with the bland remark, “If you read that you'll understand the position”. At his trial he conducted his own defence, and reached remarkable heights of histrionics and rhetoric in his speech from the dock, which was mostly an appeal for the elimination of alien influences in the Empire. The Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout, told the jury that the material question was the mental state of the prisoner, a suggestion to which Terry reacted violently with an assertion that he was perfectly aware of the quality and nature of his act. The inevitable verdict of guilty was accompanied by a strong recommendation to mercy, and the Chief Justice sent him to prison for life. Terry spent the rest of his days either in gaol or in the Sunnyside and Seacliff Mental Hospitals, but he was a perennial source of embarrassment to the authorities by reason of his escapes and attempted escapes and the violence of his conduct. Though sentenced in 1905, he was still news in 1908, especially when he celebrated one anniversary of his trial by setting fire to his quarters in the Lyttelton Gaol, one wing of which had been specially gazetted as a lunatic asylum for his benefit. He died under restraint at Seacliff Hospital on 20 August 1952.

A case described by that doyen of New Zealand jurists, Sir Joshua Williams, as “almost, if not altogether, unprecedented”, was that of Alexander Thompson, a seaman of the s.s. Otarama at Port Chalmers in 1901, who was twice charged and discharged on an indictment for the murder of a greaser on the same ship, one George Gibbs, who was stabbed to death during a general mêle in the forecastle of the vessel. Thompson was committed for trial by a Magistrate, but when he appeared in the Supreme Court the grand jury ignored the bill, and he was discharged. As he left the courtroom the Crown Prosecutor issued the order to the Police: “Arrest that man again immediately”. Thompson appeared once again in the lower Court, charged on precisely the same evidence, and a Magistrate and two Justices of the Peace committed him for trial for the second time. A somewhat diffident grand jury accepted the bill on Thompson's second appearance, but they had the benefit of a carefully reasoned and thoughtful direction by the trial Judge (again Sir Joshua Williams) on the peculiar situation that had arisen. On this occasion the grand jurors, like their predecessors, debated the matter for several hours and eventually sought a direction from the Judge on the point whether a majority decision of the jury would be acceptable and binding.

Within a few minutes of being advised that no fewer than 12 of the grand jurors must be agreed upon the confirmation of the bill, the grand jury returned with the second “no bill” in the case. Thompson was discharged again and no further attempt was made to place him upon his trial.

When the Ariadne, a schooner-rigged luxury yacht, reputed to have cost £30,000, foundered at the mouth of the Waitaki River, north of Oamaru, in 1901, Lloyds' surveyor in New Zealand (Captain Willis, of Lyttelton), after attending the nautical inquiry at which the master, Captain George Mumford, lost his certificate for three months, considered that some further investigation on his part might be profitable to his principals. Lloyds' interest in the craft stemmed from the fact that the Ariadne, bought for £2,000 in 1898, had been insured with them for £10,000. The Ariadne's owner, Thomas Caradoc Kerry, a globe trotter of means temporarily in Sydney, had sent the vessel to Port Chalmers for refitting and provisioning. Captain Willis was intrigued by the fact that a craft of that type should have been dispatched right across the Tasman from a free port like Sydney for such a purpose. He sought out Captain Mumford and finally extracted from him the startling information that Kerry had promised Mumford £400 if he would cast the Ariadne away on the voyage to Port Chalmers. The idea, according to Mumford, was to wreck the yacht, buy another, and then wreck that in the Straits of Magellan.

Captain Willis paid Mumford the £400 in consideration of a full confession, with documents, if any. These Mumford obligingly supplied, and in due course he appeared with the owner, Kerry, and a crew member, E. J. H. Freke, in the Supreme Court in Christchurch to answer charges of conspiracy to cast away the Ariadne. The trial was notable for the legal representation engaged. Mr Justice Denniston was on the Bench. T. W. Stringer (later Mr Justice Stringer) prosecuted with the assistance of Michael Myers (later Sir Michael Myers, C.J., (q.v.)), and Kerry was defended by C. P. Skerrett (later Sir Charles Skerrett, C.J., (q.v.)) and A. C. Hanlon of Dunedin. Mumford was represented by George Harper (later Sir George Harper).

The case looked to be a strong one for the Crown and Lloyds, but as the evidence snowballed it disclosed an unmitigated fraud on the part of Mumford, and branded him as a liar, a perjurer, and a forger. His documents were proved to be as false as his confession. In the end it took the jury only two hours to acquit Kerry (Freke had earlier been discharged from the case) and to find Mumford guilty. He was sentenced to four years' gaol. The case deserves a place among notable trials by reason of the exemplary but characteristic impartiality and fairmindedness of the Crown Prosecutor, attributes which, perhaps as much as any other, distinguished the career of Sir Walter Stringer both at Bench and at Bar. The sequel to it all took place some months later in London when Kerry recovered his insurance on the Ariadne.

In the official, and probably subterranean, archives of the General Assembly Library in Wellington lies the 380-page report of the Marine Commission of 1899 which tells the story of the “Marine Scandal”. The tribunal differed from many of its kind by reason of the fact that the Premier of the colony, Seddon, spent several hours in the witness box refuting serious charges preferred against him and one of his principal Ministers, the Minister of Marine, W. Hall-Jones. It was not a trial in the ordinary sense of the term, but since it involved the impeachment of the Premier and his Government, it had no less a judicial character than one of Her Majesty's highest Courts. The proceedings lasted a full 15 days and at the end of the hearing District Judge Ward and Dr Joseph Giles found that the charges of wrongful use of ministerial powers by Seddon and Hall-Jones in the matter of the issue of master mariners' certificates were entirely unfounded. The case arose out of an attack from the floor of the House of Representatives by John Hutcheson, a ship rigger, who was also a member of Parliament for the city of Wellington. Far more than the personal integrity of the individuals concerned hung on the outcome of the investigation, and on that account alone it takes its place among the more significant judicial hearings in New Zealand's legal history.

It is probable that the special Parliamentary Committee on Banking in 1896 would have had no more interest for posterity than most of its kind had it not been for the connection of the then Colonial Treasurer in the Seddon Government, J. G. Ward, later Sir Joseph Ward, with the sale of the Colonial Bank to the Bank of New Zealand and the subsequent liquidation of a number of its accounts. What, in the first view of the matter, was a routine official commission, developed into an inquiry that was publicly commented on in the strongest terms all over the colony. The Bank of New Zealand, shortly after its purchase of the Colonial Bank (with Government approval), found itself in need of State aid, and a Committee was set up by the Premier to find out why, and also to investigate the sale of the Colonial Bank. The hearing took three months, and the evidence, together with the charges and inferences sought to be drawn from it, fanned political and religious differences to an intensity that survived for many years.

The Colonial Bank, itself a child of discord, came into existence in 1874 because Dunedin and the South Island generally resented Auckland and London domination over the only genuinely colonial banking institution in the country – the Bank of New Zealand. By 1894 it was in deep water. Its reserves were small and its advances included some very large troublesome accounts. Unfortunately, among the more difficult accounts were those of the Ward Farmers' Association (of which the Colonial Treasurer was managing director and chief shareholder) and Ward himself, both being heavily indebted to the bank. Personal animus and opposition to Ward's financial policies were brought to a head by the explosive political atmosphere of the day, and when the Bank of New Zealand bought out the Colonial Bank, in 1895, Ward's enemies said that he had persuaded the Government to approve the deal to avoid the embarrassment to his company and himself if, as seemed most likely, the Colonial Bank were to go into liquidation. Here was the source of most of the acrimony and bad feeling. The Bank of New Zealand rejected certain categories of accounts in the Colonial Bank and these were handed to liquidators to wind up. The Ward accounts were included, and when shareholders found that all they could expect from the final wind up was 11s. 1 ¾d. in the pound, they began to demand the investigation of the Ward accounts and also those of the directors. The story of the liquidation is shrouded in a good deal of mystery, but it was 10 years (1905) before the Official Assignee at Dunedin achieved the final dissolution. In the meantime the Ward Farmers' Association had been forced into liquidation and the Colonial Treasurer adjudged bankrupt.

The Committee of Inquiry sat long and earnestly, and the general view was that it was designed mainly to exonerate the Colonial Treasurer from the charges of his political enemies. It could all have been a great deal worse, but for the firm stand taken from the outset by William Watson, then president of the Bank of New Zealand, and former chief inspector of the Colonial Bank. He pleaded the deeds of secrecy associated with his appointments and point-blank refused to discuss individual accounts. He was hailed before the Speaker of the House, told that his attitude was “indefensible”, and fined £500. The Bank of New Zealand paid the fine and Watson stood his ground. He was examined day after day from 15 August to 9 September, but he successfully short-circuited the efforts of certain members of the Committee and the Opposition to have the accounts of Ward and his company and those of certain directors of the two banks investigated. Other bank directors and executives were questioned interminably from July to September, when the Committee returned to the House with recommendations that brought about the reconstitution of the Bank of New Zealand under the Bank of New Zealand and Banking Act Amendment Act of 1898.