Five years after the murder of baby Kahui twins no one has so much as had a smack on the hand let alone been sent to jail. The father, Chris Kahui, had been arrested, tried, and released without charge. So, it wasn't him, right?
As the general public, not privy to details of the case or the methods of interrogation the Police may or may not have used, we're left with the process of elimination to justify our disgust at this crime and all fingers are now pointing at the mother - she must have done it and now, after all that's been said and done, here she is writing about it, profiteering from her own babies' death.
Well that was the 1+1=5 conclusion I came up with when the news of this book hit the headlines and groups started appearing all over Facebook requesting/demanding shops refuse to stock it - groups such as Re-open-the-Kahui-Case and Boycott-the-Macsyna-King-Book .
The latter has over 47,000 members so it was real easy for me to jump on the bandwagon and jump I did. From what little I learned from the Media at the time (and in there, lies the problem), I saw a mother who'd spent the last 12 months figuring out what lies to record on paper to help influence the general public during her current inquest trial. I must say, the timing was impeccable.
But something just didn't sit right.
I couldn't figure out what I was pissed off about the most - whether it was the loathsome marketing of this book (cashing in on the current inquest in order to boost sales) or the fact that Ian Wishart, a highly respected investigative journalist, was involved, or.. god forbid, she was as innocent as the book claims and I'd have to return to that void of never knowing what on earth happened to those two little boys.
Like anyone, I imagine, we all want answers. Someone killed those babies and someone knows who. The temptation to line up the entire whanau (family) in some sick torture chamber till someone confesses is as strong now as it was five years ago but I do think, in my haste for answers (any answers) I was as guilty as the 47,000 others who concluded Ms King killed her babies, and I did that without even looking inside the book to hear what she had to say.
Now that in itself, is ironic to me because my frustration in this case comes from the silence the family have kept for five years and yet, here we are, presented with streams of information, an insight to one person's perspective of events, and we're calling for a book ban, a gag order?
Don't get me wrong, I was livid to learn, after all these years of silence, that Ms King was practically given a microphone to the world, and my knee jerk reaction was to agree with the book banning. That was until I learned that it was not actually Ms King who wrote the book and that, aside from three slices of pizza during an interview with Ian Wishart, she'd not received any endorcements or payments for her story - unlike Chris Kahui, who sold his snippet to a magazine for $10,000.
So if it's not profiteering that she's getting out of this and I'm still left with a feeling of disgust, then what is it about this woman that I find so... unforgiving?
Maybe it's because she's a mother, just like me, and I have serious doubts about any mother who would know her baby boys had historical fractured rips or bruises all over their small bodies? I mean, didn't she notice anything? What about when she had to bath them, what then? Nothing? Ian Wishart answers this with a transcript played on RadioLive - both babies were taken to hospital and had regular check ups with the Plunket Association and even those professionals didn't pick up on any "historical injuries".
My first question is this... why are we so focused on a mother's ability to see her child's injuries? Women don't have innate powers of observation. What about the father, isn't he just as questionable?
I won't be buying the book because the only reason I would, would be to find out who did it, and if the answers were really that simple as reading a 'novel' then I'd like to think the Police would have been tipped off on that by now. Do I want to read the book just to get an insight into domestic violence and how easy it can be for a family to fall into the abyss of murder? No, not really. I have my own memories of that and for those that don't, just watch 'Once Were Warriors.' I do believe this book would be interesting, however, if you were a Government Policy Maker cause maybe they could look at the trends within Society that make for events like this to happen - gee, and do something about it. Now there's a 'novel' idea.
For now, I believe the more you delve into this story to find answers, the more questions arise.
