Murder in Paradise: Coups, Colonial Legacy and Homophobia | Award-Winning Documentary

[Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is a story of two brothers two fourth generation white fiji islanders [Music] for much of their lives they lived away from fiji yet one brother always had a longing to return it was like a call but fiji had changed and that longing was to lead to tragedy [Music] we leave tonight with a horrific double homicide in one of sylva's most prominent suburbs it's believed one of those dead is the director for the fiji red cross john scott along with an unidentified european male the house belonged to john scott the director of the fiji red cross some police officials described the scene as a site of horrific violence police swooped on a neighborhood not far from the house where the bodies of the two men were found hacked with a cane knife the person is now in our custody is a super resident and was also an associate of the two person two deceased persons [Music] wrong the murders of my brother john and his partner greg caused me to leave london where i'd been living and move back to the pacific i needed to make sense of the murders and i needed to make sense of my family's long history in fiji in fact i needed a better understanding of fiji itself both as it was and how it is now [Music] a good starting point was a visit to the graves of my great-grandfather and father buried in a remote spot in the bush near the village of daku i had to seek permission for the visit in the traditional manner [Music] foreign you'll have to excuse me i'm i'm a kaiviti in my heart but i'll have to speak like a kaivalangi i wish i could speak fijian like my brother and my father did i remember coming here as a child with my father a lot and my father he always instilled in my brother and me my family's links with the fijian people and taught me to respect you very much [Music] well the last time i was here i was standing on either side of um my father's grave was john so that was 1977. [Music] my great-grandfather the reverend william weir lindsay arrived in fiji in 1871 and he's buried on the site of the missionary training institute he once headed eventually he became the chairman of all the methodist missions in fiji in those early colonial days this was a good christian man in the midst of buccaneers and pioneers and they would have known that uh river the nachello river that we came up very well because that's how they used to get back into suva in punts road by oarsmen [Music] that's one thing to be buried here but my father decided to be buried here as well so just to be difficult [Music] the house that john and i grew up in was built by my father in the 1950s with a large open veranda looking out over the whole of super harbor my earliest memories are of parties by the pool dogs parrots and large tropical gardens and the fijian staff whom i was very close to [Music] i remember my father always saying to us this was the best view in the world [Music] so owen did you always feel the scots belonged in fiji well very much so john and i were brought up to feel very responsible about our connection with fiji the fact that we were born here and our father maurice put us under quite a lot of pressure to continue the so-called scot legacy as far as a young fellow like myself was concerned he had a kind of heroic image uh he had gone away to the second world war and joined the raf and had got a dfc so we held him on a little bit of a pedestal but we also knew that he was a real playboy [Music] he loved the girls and had a lot of time with the girls and we heard of a few illegitimate children that he had [Music] he wasn't disparaged for that he was held as one of the lads and held in high esteem for his ability to do that and get away with it [Music] john and i were the children of the two marriages that my father had with my mother so my parents married divorced married again and divorced once more so john was a child of the first marriage and i was a child of the second marriage was he a bully maurice oh yes were you frightened of maurice well i was we led a very public life socially locally at home it would be very difficult um when fenner came on the scene it was a bit difficult if we went out to party or anything it would be morris scott and his two wives i knew i'd have to get away somehow yeah that was when i started trying to get away yes my parents divorced for the second time in the 1960s my mother finally got away from my father and john and i ended up moving with her to new zealand it was a change in circumstance as well as country life was quite tough by comparison to what we'd been used to but each summer there'd be a taste of the old life again when john and i would return to fiji for the christmas holidays my father was now married to the woman who had been his mistress fenergati the other wife as my mother used to call her she was glamorous and wealthy and we used to spend several weeks each year on her private island katafara sun sea sand and fishing all the things that boys love those were pretty special times in spite of what we had to deal with in terms of our father's behavior [Music] my father was very hard on my brother he taunted him quite a lot and this was usually fueled by alcohol so there would often be circumstances where we were out in the car and my father would be telling my brother to go faster faster you know um don't be a queen this was the type of behavior that my father indulged in john left here in the 60s we were still british we were still colonial suva was a european town it was a white place [Music] not only was it run by europeans there were whole suburbs of europeans running the government even bank tellers were europeans fijians were not allowed to come in freely until about 1966. so you know it was a white place well of course the european families during the colonial days led a very privileged life they enjoyed privileges that the indigenous people and indians did not have uh they formed of course uh part of the commercial life of fiji particularly in suva and also the professional life and the lawyers such as the scots [Music] my grandfather and my grandmother lived in a rather beautiful house in suva called hokum they used to entertain lavishly there parties and lunch parties on sundays my grandmother was famous for her entertaining on a sunday [Music] we were at the top of the pile the fijian people were considered lazy buggers they really didn't have any prospects at all and the indians were considered mere laborers after fiji became a british colony in 1874 sugarcane was planted as a cash crop a workforce was needed so the colonial administration brought in indentured labor from one of britain's other colonies india the indian population rapidly grew and sowed to its voice before long indians began to question colonial rule indigenous fijians for the most part did not work on the plantations instead they continue to live a traditional community-based way of life centered on the village [Music] well i think in the colonial times the europeans certainly aligned themselves with the fijians and that was partly because indians were agitating for democracy for equality and that was seen as a threat and seen as unacceptable to the european elite but they could deal with the fijian majority [Music] indigenous fijians generally were comfortable with colonial rule an unspoken alliance developed between fijian chiefs and the european elite there was a shared fear of what was perceived as the growing political and economic power of the indian community my father became involved in the fijian nationalist movements of the 1950s and 60s very much on the fijian side of things then in 1970 fiji became independent although most indigenous fijians wanted the country to remain a colony the fijian and indian populations were by now roughly equal in number well i think there's always been an implicit belief or understanding on the part of fijians that while indians can live and work in fiji and prosper that fijian political control should always remain in their hands there was a great feeling euphoria at the time and for the early years we progressed very very well and i think fiji was one of the few countries in the world that had gained their independence without any uh any war or any any revolution it was done in a very amateur way during this period of change in fiji john and i were still living in new zealand i was studying law and john was in business our father had died in cg seven years after independence and john and i probably saw ourselves as being settled in new zealand john had married and he had had a son pierce but then when peers were still quite young the marriage ended there was some surprise when john met greg but their friendship soon developed into a long-standing relationship in fiji tensions between fijians and indians began once more to escalate and in 1987 lieutenant colonel city veni rambucha staged fiji's first coup 87 was a turning point because an indian-backed party won government rambucca believing that there was a risk that fiji would be taken over by the indian community because they had dominance in economic in the economic sector and now they had dominance in government and so rambucca was able to foment that belief into the coup john and greg were actually in fiji when the 1987 coup occurred renovating the house that john and i had inherited from our father it was empty and had fallen into disrepair and john feared that it might be taken over by the military so john and greg decided to sell up in new zealand and begin a new life in fiji this is where there are a lot of parties in my father's day [Music] a lot of drinks parties lots of fun very colonial white mischief days [Music] just out of the blue john and greg turned up and i must admit when i saw greg it was like oh okay all right so john's now like that that's fine i knew greg oh god who didn't it was gorgeous it was gorgeous i remember when he first arrived in fiji the women were like oh my god have you seen so and so i was like forget it [Laughter] my husband and i both realized at the time that they came because they needed to speak to somebody that they could trust about them coming back home again because they were they were in a relationship they were going to live openly in fiji uh and it was very new and it was something that really wasn't uh done at the time greg had a lot of bravado about it oh it doesn't matter but you wouldn't have known no but john was very concerned because he's i mean the scott family were an old family so we just said to them look it is new but you're obviously not going to go out there and be all you know in people's face about it just get on with your life like everybody else john saw himself as an insider i always got the feeling that he believed he'd come home but a lot had changed it was a completely different country all of the people who lived here had no memory of the scots and so all the average person on the street saw were two white men [Music] 1987 coup poverty had worsened in fiji my brother had always had a humanitarian streak so when the opportunity to work in an aid organization arose he was happy to leave the corporate world behind i was president of the red cross and we were faced with finding a new director general so we went on a hunt and advertised for the position and one of those who applied was john scott there were some on the board of red cross at the time who didn't believe john would be the appropriate person because he was known to be gay at the time so we had a a little bit of a tussle within the board over that issue but eventually our view prevailed and john was julie appointed the director general and he came in and he grasped the nettle and really did a fantastic job he was good at fundraising and he introduced a number of very effective fundraising events such as the ball the fashion parade and really built up the image of red cross to a point had never been that been before [Music] they were really like role models to most sort of gay gay men i remember once there was a gay men sort of meeting at the back of our traps and a lot of people turned up because they wanted to meet john and greg because there were these sort of rich white people who had this big house on on the hill they went to all the fancy parties we'd see them shaking hands with sort of dig dignitaries in the newspaper so yeah they were huge they were real role models in the community and it's important for young people who saw them like i did to sort of kind of get to know them because that that's so true yet that there were other times maybe it was just their personal choice i don't know but there were times when they attended functions um together john and greg but both of them took a female partner things were categorized for john and greg they had this category of friends here compartmentalised there was the family ones the ones with kids and that were husbands and wives and in heterosexual relationships then there were these other compartments that we knew were there but i didn't want to know about it and i certainly didn't want them to share any of that with me but they never ever brought that life into our life [Music] then in may 2000 there was another coup once again in the name of fijian nationalism and once again arising out of the perceived threat of indian political and economic power [Music] foreign [Music] this coup was much more violent than the one in 1987 the one that had indirectly brought john and greg to fiji in the first place suva a city in crisis the country's prime minister is being held hostage by armed rebels desperate kidnappers in fiji threatened to kill the elected prime minister we have executed a civil coup on behalf of the indigenous peoples of fiji the coup occurred because these this group of men were able to convince suspicious indigenous fijians who feel disenfranchised economically politically etc and in essence marginalized economically were able to manipulate them to stir up unrest for their political and economic gains moments earlier two gunshots were heard from the parliamentary complex the police are not able to tell us anything they are not able to go into the parliamentary complex themselves it seems reminisce of the 1987 cruz it's like nothing has changed since then i was in england when i first heard about the coup the 2000 coup and at first it was very difficult because we didn't um we didn't have any contact with john and then i discovered that on the first day i think it was he had walked up alone to the gates of the parliamentary complex and i must confess that i arrived at the gates here in nervous state to say the least the guards were standing there with their machine guns i approached them and explained that i was from the fiji red cross society and that i needed to have access to the hostages no please don't test the situation the indian prime minister mahendra choudhary was taken hostage along with members of his government they're not legitimizing anything okay that's fine to walk into a military slash civilian coup with military personnel some of them holding guns and civilians who had never had any training with guns in a mob mentality environment to be able to have the guts to walk in you'll be crazy you had a large group of people who had come down from the hills who were persistently drunk either on alcohol or carver or their own adrenaline who were running around with sub machine guns and pistols and goodness knows what anyone who went into that parliament was at risk and and john was certainly at risk look i could easily have shot all these people okay don't forget the cause for which we acted and plus i'm talking fijian to fijian and i don't expect the europeans amongst this international press corps to understand that i made an endeavor to to go to the hospital to pick up medicines that were required because you have to remember that suva had been looted and burned that day driving around the streets was a nightmare to put it mildly streets were full of drunken young people with supermarket trolleys full of liquor these people were irrational lying on the road trying to get in the way trying to get rides from vehicles such as mine so it was very awkward [Music] because of him they got hope i mean i can't imagine what they must have been thinking they'd be killed and so on and so forth i remember that scene where you know george spade took chaudhary out into parliament grounds he held a gun to his head and threatened to shoot him i can't imagine that what that must have done to the members of parliament who are watching that and what john must have been thinking watching that thinking where is this going to go the length that we have between the hostages and the families has become obviously increasingly important so we will maintain that and we will endeavor to to keep their suffering to a minimum it was in this period that we went through the uncomfortable situation of receiving three death threats the words we used were tell him that if he puts his white face anywhere near this complex we will shoot and we will shoot to kill i remember having a phone conversation with him in london in which he said i can't do this anymore and i could hear his voice cracking up and it was very strange to be in london to say to him yes you can yes you can you can carry on john to be able to go through and be the link between the hostages and their families and to just come out and help to be able to do that only someone that was sent by god can do that jon scott was uh the angel that brought the light every day to us i'm embarrassed because there are people up there who keep lifting up my t-shirt looking for the stubs of the wings [Music] [Applause] without the backing of the army the coup failed and the hostages were released in a surreal scene george spate shook hands and posed with the very people he had locked up and intimidated for 56 days reality was quite different the end game in the conflict was yet to be played out [Music] in the process of looking again at my family's past i decided to visit the grand pacific hotel partly because it was one of my father's watering holes but when we went to film there to our surprise we found the gph had been taken over by the military the tensions behind the crisis in 2000 had never been resolved and they erupted again in 2006 resulting in another coup [Music] this hotel once the epitome of colonial elegance was now a military camp in the early 20th century up to the mid 20th century it was a very chic hotel and i mean you had royalty that came here the queen stayed here in 1954 i think it was on her royal tour of the coronation tour and some of the rich people in fiji too that used to the planters they would always when they came into town stay here it was it was very chic and then when they used to have banquets there'd be these long refractory tables it was it was very grand i want to have a look in one of the rooms look at that here's a state room and there's a pup tent in there i mean it's just sort of bizarre the queen wouldn't have stayed in the parking lot it's it's just ah incredible [Music] soldiers remained on the streets long after the 2006 coup had taken place unlike the crisis in 2000 which was more renegade this coup was planned and executed by the army headed by its commander commodore frank by nimrama the military has taken over the government has executive authority and the running of this country fiji's changed hugely since my father's day but it's not politics or nostalgia that's brought me back in trying to understand my brother's death i felt i needed to meet the family of a petty caissoe the man who had committed the murders i wanted to hear what the family had to say i'm not entirely comfortable with it i have to say but i feel obliged to be there to meet them and hear what they have to say i mean for the purposes of this film i understand um that's okay [Music] yes [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh oh [Music] i'd only met the kaiser family once before just briefly at the time of the trial i really i want to be seen with him last time we met was how many years ago oh it's 2003. that's right it's a difficult time for you yes yes that's right it's good we meet again it is [Music] for me as a mom my training that i gave to peter was for him to be a independent and confident young man he achieved that in his early teens and he was a great rugby player right from primary school our true forte is the families of deep religious convictions that was tested during that time and uh you know we came through so if you can imagine now um influential the churches in our lives i can remember when i was a child that that's the the thing that we do every day even if it means missing the school bus we made to sit down and do our prayers before we go to school yeah and you know bringing up so very important that was a driving force and i'm just telling the congregation that you're here to film a documentary and i was telling them that this is the church that betty was probably brought up in is to attend sunday school here and this is a church that uh he attended every sunday and what made him did what he did because he believed there's a god that's going to help him it's a god it's close to his heart and they said he believes that god started what he did and he's going to end it for him so thank you for coming thank you for having a good heart to film our documentary on patty's family the scots family and the people that made an impact on petty's life [Music] i don't really know how apeti first came to meet john and greg his cousin zachariah lived at tamil war village near to the house and villagers would often work at the house just as they had in my father's day maybe a petty helped out in the garden and over time some sort of relationship developed a petticoat was a very strong part of their household uh greg and john's there was a lot of interruption and everything and weekends away and all sorts of things but he moved freely in and out of their houses in on the properties the boat everywhere he had full access to everything there is a fijian proverb which means you're trying to to get to the moon you're trying to get things that in reality you're not able to and i believe petty was and he expected a lot in life but to get to that expectation it was not there the white man and the local the younger local present a dilemma for the the average person here because they immediately perceive that it's the power of the money and the material comforts that attracts the the local person to do something that they would not otherwise do a large number of fijian men think nothing of having sex with other men but they don't regard themselves as gay i mean you know that right i mean that's true a lot of places and they don't regard themselves as poofters as they would say right or gauri they don't regard themselves as gory the one receiving is the gori not not them they're macho in this country there's a lot of promiscuity so long as it's hidden so long as those in charge or those outside your circle don't know it's okay but you don't wear it on your sleeve and that was what john and greg were doing [Music] you've got to put this in the context there has been a definitive move to right wing christian fundamentalism from the 87 coup rambucha ground his constituency was the methodist church the methodist church has slowly and surely moved towards fundamentalist christianity so even if there was a degree of tolerance at what's at one stage or more like turning a blind eye than tolerance per se not like social tolerance in the wider sense of the word they'd become less and less tolerant because of christianity oh we we cause hurricanes and poverty yes my favorite quote the methodist two different presidents of the methodist church said that once we caused poverty god would look down upon fiji and see this deviant behavior going on and would cause the country to become impoverished and the other one said that we would then bring like bad weather yeah and if they thought about it we probably caused us to lose the seventh title as well there was a perception that john and greg were not of here and in addition to the homophobia there's a kind of xenophobia and justified by a protective kind of impulse you know we must protect ourselves from these corrupt and corrupting outsiders i understand there came a point when john and greg tried to put a bit of distance between themselves and the petticai sound and it was around this time that apeti went to new zealand to try and become a professional rugby player when he went that was part of our 21st birthday gift to him he turned 21 yeah and then we said okay why not let's uh give him a a trip to go to new zealand he started from number seven then drifted to center full backhand wing then they found out that he was lethal in the full back and he could run the whole field pick up the bull underneath the goldball's hand on the other side of the trailer very quiet but extremely polite loved the kids he looked after the kids like his own sisters helped out the in the garden loved working around outside uh yes he was a really nice young man but very quiet they called him the white angel during the coup everything changed john scott you were sitting down here and he saw that then his face changed fate during fiji's last note i'm embarrassed because there are people up there who keep lifting up my t-shirt looking for the stubs of the wings everything changed it was sort of like saturday oh i don't want to go rugby now i'll just stay home i said hang on these people they're expecting you to be there you know i don't care so that's it you just go back the offices and close the door and that was him there was a lot of times he was spending downstairs in his room um whereas before he used to come up and be part of the family and sit and watch tv or talk but then he started just to be in his room i know i'm reading that's all right you know he'd have food and disappear again it was a totally different appetite from being in a loving person to sort of angry to himself we did find a piece of paper in a book which said an eye for an eye a tooth for tooth and it was printed out on a piece of paper he did suggest about hating gays they don't like gays these people should be dissolved on earth that's what is not like gays they shouldn't be alive [Music] so [Music] i last saw john in 2001 january 2001 i'd gone down to fiji for christmas there was piers john's son and my mother and uh we went and crossed and stayed with john and greg we got on well and we used to go out in john's boat and of course piers would be there and we were all quite a happy family [Music] john was he was more relaxed by that stage earlier and i saw him about four months after the coup and he was still shell-shocked he was traumatized really i think some would say that he um had post-traumatic stress disorder really but that last holiday was it was a good one at least we have good memories of how close we were that last time we were together [Music] in 2001 apeti suddenly left new zealand and returned home to fiji without warning one sunday evening we came back home and then he was sitting on the veranda uh he didn't say what i said a lot to him he was just sitting there and then hey betty hello no like a mother greeting the son after two three years away he was just sitting there low well i was really confused whether it was bethel or his ghost whatever and i went back inside and i was threatened that was not the son that i knew he usually likes to walk i usually walk night at night at two three o'clock in the morning he likes to walk by himself i heard a call from him they said her pet is here and i i told him i'm working tell him to wait tomorrow morning and it's about nine ten o'clock that night it came down to me i'm a christian i'm a committed christian we were conversing and it's a bit of an argument and i was telling him in about the new testament the new testament involves jesus christ and who's died on the cross and the old testament involves sacrifices of of flame of beast for the cleansing of our of our sin he he asked me a few questions about john and when i was sharing bible verses to him he told me that same versus bible verses you should go and share it to john scott and greg well why is that because if you didn't do anything i will do i will do something that's what he said that night exactly what he said that night he already put the weapon there at our house there somewhere he hid the weapon somewhere that night then he went down take that shortcut into john's house [Music] my brother was having a cup of tea here at about 6 30 on july the 1st 2001. and he saw the killer coming up the stairs there with a with a cane knife and he was chased back into the house he tried to lock the doors tried to get on the telephone but he wasn't quick enough [Music] and then after that there was a struggle which was violent and not only were john grey killed but they were effectively beheaded as well [Music] well in that moment your life changes forever it's it's like you've been branded it's like you have a mark on your skin in a secret place that very few people will ever see and then it was just an extraordinary time i just knew it was going to be very difficult and a long time to get to fiji it was going to take us three three days to get there it's good having a doctor my immediate response was the fact that i was really torn in terms of responsibility because i had an elderly mother in new zealand and i needed to make sure that somebody was looking after her i was able to help him a little way in blocking the curious and encouraging our local newspaper not to spread it over the local press and to allow you a little privacy and also allow you support [Music] we received the news with absolute shock shock that somebody so close to us could be so brutally murdered shocked that it was right next door to us more or less it just floored me really flawed me i remember my mother breaking down and crying as well because she was very close to greg um but for myself the first thing i thought of was ah this has got to do with his role in the red cross and and and something to do with the cool to be quite honest i thought it was a robbery gone wrong and uh because there were there were struggles with a lot of families after the coup of 2000. the most likely thing was that extreme disapproval by some bizarre person of their lifestyle i thought that it was a buddy gone wrong well i suppose i made an assumption it was something to do with his sexuality that it led to this i mean we had heard rumors of all sorts of parties and functions up there that [Music] were risky um and we i suppose we weren't all that surprised that something like this had eventually occurred but not in it not to the extreme brutality of it as we subsequently found out fijians don't don't normally take a cane knife and just chop somebody up you know at least at this time okay cannibalism was there before christianity came but that's gone but this is a new thing a new and terrible horror it's horrible in a repressive space that's the most extreme form of punishment for being gay here and so that i that stayed with me for a long time in the possibility that you could be killed oh yes definitely you were losing sleep weren't you yeah it was scary for all of us um friends of mine were being called john on the street why john scott they'd call us so it was almost like a warning that's well that's how we were feeling at the time was like well keep on behaving like that this is what happens to people like you that's the feeling that we're getting from from the community it was a premeditated murder that's what we're being told they went in busted the door down um killed the two and then ran back out throwing the knife in a nearby bush and i think a piece of cloth with some blood on it he told me there's a break news breaking news at 12 o'clock that jon scott and greg scrivener murdered what he touched me and he told me i did that he said i didn't believe him so that's a sunday and uh whole of that time he was asking me asking me uh my cousin win in fiji and we used to call his starter tavale and he called me tavale do you believe me and i said tavala i didn't believe it right on the screen i was going man this could be him it was funny that when i get to think of it now why out of everything else that it dawned to me that it was better now when i when i talk about it and i said you know i believe it was god telling me that it was him and it never was wrong and a couple of days later the police came home when i saw the police truck i just wept and i said this is it i was not wrong when i when it it struck me when i was watching the news yeah so when i came in there she asked me mom haven't you heard i said i heard what haven't you heard that they are looking for pete and then [Music] you know i wasn't ready for that and then she had to tell me what happened that the police were looking for him because he's a suspect a person is now in our custody is a super resident and was also an associate of the two person two deceased persons we took him out to the crime scene and what he told us and as he took us through step by step was very much consistent with what happened on the sunday morning [Music] he was there with the group of police officers and then you know just out of the blue side they started crying heavily when i saw him then he said mom don't cry mom don't cry he told me don't cry twice i just stopped you know why he was telling me not to cry and i was really boring myself out and i just looked at him and that was it those were the tears that i shared after i met him when he was taken in as the suspect i had time to speak to him i think he was bold he was very bold to come up uh come out of it and he said uh you know what i did i did it for the good of the nation i did it for the young generation because whatever they were doing was wrong somewhere wrong i don't think he has any regrets foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] he basically was the spin doctor that got the newspapers to behave in the way that they did because he said oh well apparently the killings took place certainly at a certain time and then he was quiet for a while and he said well there was a lot of illegal activities happening at the house and then the question started flying what legal activities and then he started with all the videotapes believed to be homemade pornography the white powder believed to be cocaine photos as well as more of an unidentified white powder in a search of the men's suva home today people were focusing on the good side of mr scott and his partner greg but then people tend to forget that he's a practicing homosexual i don't profess to understand everything about homosexuality he's just that they tend to be more vicious than the normal uh heterosexual relationship i yes scary i mean in his allegations what do you think his message was what do you think he was saying they deserved it they deserved it that was all they behaved resounding message they deserved what happened to them yeah my god this guy's justifying the death he's justifying the killing in a very subtle and not so subtle way sometimes i mean someone might as well have been a pastor you know with a white collar his throat investigating in the end um the white powder was baking soda that was used to clean silver and also the police said that they'd found pornography at the house which included some incredibly boring holiday videos of mine and they a months later they publicly stated that they had not found any pornography at the house the opportunity to paint john and his partner as sexual predators was one that the media lapped up so you know sexual predators preying on on um vulnerable youth in the tamivu area that sort of thing they would lap it up and it deflected attention away from as a crime being committed collect the evidence prosecute the offender get a conviction once again it comes back to the acceptance of homosexuality if there is an acceptance of homosexuality in the country the the the police would have presented a more understanding picture to the media and the media will then be the most peace to the general public there are some who could not accept the way that john lived but his long relationship with greg was about the universal things in life that we all crave trust intimacy companionship and above all love too often people concentrate on differences when they should be looking instead at similarities may john's memory be a unifying one for all people in fiji particularly at this time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] after john's funeral i returned to england and from there tried to keep in touch with various officials in fiji who were supposedly handling the case but i couldn't get any information and it was incredibly frustrating then finally i managed to make contact with the new prosecutor on the case and from then on he kept me up to date with what was turning out to be a very complicated and difficult trial the prosecution strategy at the outset was quite straightforward here we have a a very horrible crime but we have a confession so really quite a simple compact albeit traumatic trial to prosecute he gave himself up on saturday and sunday sunday afternoon i received a phone call from all the way from new zealand and someone whom i don't know happens to be a queen's council he said you know just agree that i'll come and find a better case i became involved because a friend of mine was very friendly with a pity and so that's how the connection began a pediatric worked at the local store in fact i mean he'd supplied uh you know my people from the farm here in fact he he knew them all well i mean a very nice guy everyone liked him there was a person who was always going out of his way to you know feed stray animals was very very compassionate good sense of humor comes as a really shock at the end of the day when when there's an allegation like that for someone who would appear to place it wouldn't hurt to fly when i first heard that that this murder had happened at tamar my first thought was oh god don't let the cops it up um the possibility of the investigation being botched was very real and as it turned out it was almost realized for example the commissioner of police the then commissioner of police who had no police training he was ex-military he leapt on television and i used the word let deliberately he couldn't wait to get on television to announce that we will have a suspect arrested within an hour and then he was required to come back an hour later and say well we'll have somebody by tonight and i know for a fact at that stage the investigation had nothing to go on it was it was a um embryonic investigation so it was an outlandish thing to have suggested in the meantime he had gone to the scene himself um and when his own officers his scenes of crime officers went in to take fingerprints at the scene the only prince that they could find that were not those of um john scott and scrivener were the commissioner of police's own fingerprints so the commissioner had gone in and completely violated all the rules of crime scene integrity and put his own great thumb prints all over the thing some of the police officers who had been assigned as a scene guards at the scott house ended up stealing from the house they ended up being prosecuted by my office if you can't maintain integrity of your scene what kind of forensic case can you actually mount i think it was bumbling but i think it was bumbling because of certain beliefs i think it was a combination of of lack of training maybe not that keen on on on you know seeing someone like like a pity you know face these charges um some of the police officers and clearly knew the family they were very well known i mean there was there was there'd probably be a certain um you're not being very popular being part of an investigative team trying to actually you know convict someone of a serious allegation like that they knowing what the background was and there's no two ways about it the senior police officers weren't enthusiastic the police had identified a suspect prior to arresting a pity kaiser and nandi they secured a confession from this second suspect a confession that was corroborated by the scene effectively the prosecution's task doubled and that i not only had to prove a petty's case beyond reasonable doubt i had to disprove this other case this other confession beyond reasonable doubt we had to consider whether we had enough evidence to even continue a clever defense council can effectively say that there's so much confusion around the case and point out incompetence that it was possible that a petty kaiser could have walked from the trial so the strategy um post-depositions really was a second wave of retreat to wonder whether we can go forward with this prosecution at all in a in a realistic way um but our our tortuous cogitating overall that was sort of swept away when when insanity came on the horizon as an option for some time prior to to the event he was known to have been absorbed and almost obsessed with with his religious convictions his bible had been read and re-read and material passages had been marked extracts from you know about sodom and gomorrow and the immorality of homosexuality and it was a huge focus apparently there was even one bible he underlined a passage thou shalt not worship false idols and that was the association with john becoming famous during the coup the annotations that had been hand written in that that bible were i thought disturbed ramblings of a disturbed mind it was then that i i put aside finally any reservations i had about kaiser's state of mind [Music] [Music] a very common theme in cases like this is preoccupation with religious imagery and religious message in a note that he penned i can only assume shortly after the murders he talks of doing god's work he he says i hope i have done right unto you or words to that effect father he said it was the voice of god but there are voices talking to us every day peter was not able to discern which voice and then he took the theological aspect of from the old testament that if somebody was behaving this way he need to be done away with but that's not what christ came to to do it wasn't like a one-night thing they picked this guy up and then he turned on them no they had a relationship some as some form of a relationship well i don't know whether it was a recognized threesome but it was um he was definitely a big part of their lives for a little while we believe we had an intense hatred for the way they exploited not only him but other youths of fiji to fulfill their desires maybe he did have some gay tendencies or felt that he could be gay and needed to experiment and didn't like the answers he got relationships with different power different economic status different even race in fiji knowing how all of those mixed and meld together and how that has translated before there are always issues around risk and ethics it's hard to put ethics and just because it was just such a way of life and it still is such a way of life for not the whole gay community but certainly a a portion of it and that behavior still happens yes there's still ethics involved in it but i certainly can't say whether it was right or wrong there's also a tradition of same-sex experimentation for younger men here it's similar to what happens in samoa but not as institutionalized not everybody does it and if you're willing to do it uh i think that there's more than just the the material part of it there must be some other desire or motivate motivating factor in it [Music] of insanity i thought the outcome of the trial was overwhelmingly satisfactory we got the right man the right man ostensibly um wasn't sentenced as a convict but sent to a psychiatric institution where he could receive appropriate care and treatment the insanity plea is sometimes you know not an easy one for the victim's family to deal with you know because it doesn't seem to really lead to justice in the end [Music] i thought that he had the rational capacity to make the decision i think that that was wrong i thought he should have been found guilty convicted found guilty and convicted for murder [Music] uh [Music] hollywood if you are mentally ill um and you mix it with a bit of christianity or fundamental any kind of fundamentalism um and if you've been involved in in licentiousness particularly homosexual licentiousness that's a volatile cocktail you know your guilt can drive you into becoming the avenging angel for yourself and society and you it's i can see how easy it is to place yourself as a victim and then take power and protect everybody else by ending the source of your your shame or your guilt i don't think justice was served in the end it's created this lasting feeling that what he did was justifiable in a kind of bizarre way you know that people have the right to take into their own hands the moral judgment of the society and decide for themselves without a court of law that so and so is wrong and so and says right yeah it's the same thing that the commander's doing he's decided that he knows what's best for us same thing what kaiser did and society condones it and accepts it because the victims were gay gay men living together openly so it's that kind of mentality that is appalling and that's the legacy this case has left us with i don't feel great anger or animosity towards a petty kaiser in comprehension and sadness perhaps i've always thought that he was mentally unwell i don't think he could have done what he did if he hadn't been unwell [Music] four generations of my family now lie buried in fiji in some way they've all left their mark i can't help but be struck by something very circular in the story there in the beginning was the reverend william weir lindsay encouraging fijians to be good christians and live according to the bible then just over a century later his great-grandson is murdered by a man quoting the same bible to justify what he'd done believing he was following god's command fiji is very much in my blood and like john i'll always be drawn back but it has to be to a place of the present and not the past [Music] hey [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] me you

Channel: Java Discover | Free Global Documentaries & Clips

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Keywords: java films, javafilms, javafilmstv, documentary, murder, crime, film, red cross, gay, gay rights, lgbt, lgbt murder, crime documentary, true crime documentary, political assassination, history of fiji, gay murder, homophobia, evangelical christianity, real crime, true crime, an island calling documentary, travel, island, documentaries, documentary movies - topic, full documentary, adventure, bbc documentary, lifestyle, independent, videos, vice guide, vice presents, vice news, vice.com, vice

Id: pCCbV36l0hc

Length: 75min 13sec (4513 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022