David Herkt's Summer Story Season continues: Brandon Cassell imagines several mainstream NZ media reports of laisons between men gone violently wrong. Patrick Kitson Clark, a 37 year old video-store manager of Papatoetoe was found beaten to death in the carpark behind his store. His injuries were caused by a length of timber found at the scene. The only explanation offered by his killer, Solomona Taulima Nua, a 24 year old unemployed man from Otahuhu, was that he 'walked funny'. 'You are a conflicted man,' said Judge Frank Siedler of the Christchurch High Court, when he sentenced Hamish Duncan McLeod, a married 42 year old horse trainer of Riccarton to 15 years of imprisonment for the rape and murder of Bevan John Cuthbert, a 20 year old Kaiapoi jockey. McLeod had drugged Cuthbert with a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills, kept him stupefied for a period of three days, during which the Cuthbert was sodomised repeatedly, before he was suffocated and his body dumped in the Waimakariri River. Troy Oliver Perrin, 29, of Taupo was sentenced to 6 months imprisonment, with leave to apply for home-dentention, for the accidental shooting of Darron Andrej Kupinski, 32, also of Taupo, during a weeklong hunting expedition in the Kaimanawa Ranges. The court was told that the two men went hunting together several times a year and that Perrin, who was regarded as a careful and well-prepared man, had accidentally shot Kupinski, who had apparently strayed into the hunting territory the pair had allocated to Perrin. Newspaper reports described Jason Oliver Malpresence, 56 years old, of the Auckland suburb of Glendowie, as a well-known bird-watcher, who had established the popular annual New Zealand Ornithological Society Bird Camp events for young people. He was repeatedly stabbed in the neck by Delaney Elton Spence, a 19 year old food franchise employee, who claimed that the older man had lured him to his home and made an unwanted homosexual advance. A struggle had resulted during which Spence had accidentally killed the older man. The prosecution, however, was able to prove that Spence had visited Malpresence regularly in the lead-up to the crime and had accepted payment for sexual encounters. Spence had also told friends that he planned to kill the older man in order to take his ATM and credit cards. Taking into account his youth and previously unblemished record, Spence was sentenced to 6 years in prison. In the course of a domestic argument in their shared home, Carlos Antonio Guiseppe, a 34 year old chef in a Mission Bay Italian restaurant, hit Samuel Francis Wakeman, a 32 year old coffee salesman. Wakeman fell onto a slate-tiled floor and suffered a severe brain hemorrhage which left him in a coma that resulted in his death three weeks later. The argument was apparently caused by Wakeman's failure to return home after a night out. Guiseppe pleaded not guilty to a charge of involuntary manslaughter and received a prison term of six years. Extradited from Anchorage, Alaska, former schoolteacher Rewa Te Rua Henare, 45, faced a charge of murdering his wife, Louise Rachel Henare, a 39 year old child-care worker, four years previously. Louise Henare‘s body was discovered approximately two weeks after her death during which time her husband had left the country to join a man he'd met in an Internet chatroom and with whom he lived under a false name until standard checks after a traffic offence in Fairbanks, Alaska revealed his true identity. Malcolm Tane Buck, a 29 year old Greymouth timber mill worker, pleaded guilty to the murder of a hitchhiker, Russ Lambert Fountain, a 22 year old Nelson sickness beneficiary, whose body was found in dense roadside scrub in the Buller Gorge. During a night of drinking in a Whakatane home, Leo Arthur Bensman, a 26 year old shoe-store manager, was strangled by Michael Robert Luskinson, a 23 year old factory-hand, in front of Luskinson's girlfriend, a 20 year old waitress Isolde Gwynth Tizane, after Bensman had said that Luskinson was ‘really gay' and the relationship with Tizane 'would never work.' While the Defense claimed that Chou Wang, 31, had died from self-inflicted injuries, the Crown asserted that the various mutilations to Wang's body, including to his genitals, had been caused by Steven Wayne Yip, 42, an immigration consultant and pastor in the New Life Christian Church, during the course of a 3-day exorcism ceremony. It was alleged that Jason Phillip Eisen, a 34 year old Porirua computer consultant, was beaten to death with a crow-bars by Adam Shayne Jenkin, a 36 year old factory worker, and Will Tama Toki, a 38 year old building contractor, following suggestions that Eisen had been involved in a series of sexual relationships with teenage males, all of whom, however, were over the age of consent. In her summing-up, Judge Marie Swanson stated that the victim may have been a man of 'unsavoury habits' of which the Jury might disapprove, but their task was not to judge his life. Instead she directed them to assess impartially the evidence of the crime of murder that had been placed before them. Daniel Bartholomew Esperance, 27, a Napier bartender, stated to police that he was so drunk he could not remember attacking and killing Richard Lloyd Jones, 35, a mortgage broker, of Auckland, nor could he suggest any reason why he should have done so. The incident happened in Jones' motel room after the pair had met at the Marine Parade bar where Esperance worked. A Dunedin general practitioner is facing disciplinary proceedings after a middle-aged transsexual died of toxic shock following a hospital visit. Dr Shyam Sunder Chadhar, 41, had been called to the home of Sondra Dionne Stockley, 56, after the latter had been discharged from Dunedin Hospital following a minor throat operation. Two days later Stockley had begun vomiting, had difficulty walking and was running a high temperature. It was alleged that Chadhar had failed to examine Stockley, had neglected basic follow-up procedures, and had not sent his patient to hospital quickly enough. The deaths of Steven Fitzpatrick O'Hara, a 61 year old caregiver of Whangarei, and Stanley Marshall Fisher, a 70 year old retired man, also of Whangarei, was judged to be a murder-suicide by the Whangarei Coroner, Garth Callen, yesterday. The Coroner heard that Fisher had suffered from Alzheimer's Disease and that two letters found at the men's shared home in the Whangarei suburb of Kensington revealed details of the long-planned incident. Leonardo Beau De Thierry, 21, was convicted of manslaughter after an attack on his step-father, Robert Allan Franklin, 48. Judge Saunders of the Wellington High Court took the allegations of sexual abuse made by De Thierry against Franklin into account when he sentenced De Thierry to six years imprisonment. In the Hamilton High Court trial of two men accused of manslaughter, it was claimed the incident occurred during in a consensual bondage and discipline session held in a Hillcrest home when a ball-gag worked loose and choked the victim. The Court heard how Steven Ian Sims, 39, and Liam Gore Albers, 46, had invited Matthew John Roberts, 33, to their home on January 29, and the incident had occurred when Roberts was naked except for a gag and a black leather hood in a garage decorated to resemble a prison cell. Auckland Police are appealing to any witnesses of an accident on Dominion Road, Mt Roskill to contact them. It appears a man driving a white BMW veered suddenly onto the footpath to deliberately knock down and kill a second man. ‘The incident occurred at approximately 3.30pm on Tuesday afternoon,' said Detective Inspector Garrick Malloy, 'and we are asking anyone who may have seen it to come forward.' Police are investigating all aspects of the incident including any previous connection that may have existed between the two men involved. A man killed another man yesterday. BRANDON CASSELL is a 24 year old journalist who lives in Auckland. He believes that the duty of a writer is to ‘synthesize experience' and present it in a way ‘that enables the reader to really see the world in which we live.' Copyright ©David Herkt. All Rights Reserved. Brandon Cassell - 19th January 2008