Murders of Christine and Amber Lundy

Christine Marie Lundy, 38, and her seven-year-old daughter Amber Grace Lundy were found dead in their Palmerston North home on the morning of 30 August 2000. Police said both were killed with a tomahawk-like implement that was never recovered. Investigators collected 21 hairs from beneath Christine's fingernails, but they were never tested for DNA and were destroyed by police in December 2003 despite requests from Mark Lundy that evidence in the case be preserved.

Mark Lundy, Christine's husband and Amber's father, had travelled to Petone on business the day before the killings, checking into a motel and later spending time with a sex worker that evening. Police initially considered 60 suspects and ruled out 55 before focusing on Mark Lundy. After a six-month investigation, police arrested and charged him in February 2001.

At his first trial in 2002, the prosecution argued Lundy drove from Petone to Palmerston North and back — a 134-kilometre trip each way — within a three-hour window to commit the murders, relying heavily on testimony from a Texas pathologist who identified a mark on Lundy's shirt as Christine's brain tissue, and on a witness who described seeing a person running near the Lundy home. Lundy was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, later increased to 20 years on appeal to the Court of Appeal in 2002.

In 2013, the Privy Council quashed Lundy's convictions after finding that exculpatory evidence about the reliability of the brain-tissue testing had been withheld at the first trial, creating profound divisions among experts that could only be resolved by a new jury. At the 2015 retrial, the Crown presented a different theory — that Lundy drove to Palmerston North and back in the middle of the night after the sex worker left his motel — and introduced new mRNA testing on the shirt stains. Lundy was found guilty again in April 2015. The mRNA evidence was subsequently ruled inadmissible by the Court of Appeal in 2018, but his conviction was upheld on the basis that other evidence still proved guilt. The Supreme Court of New Zealand dismissed a further appeal in December 2019, concluding the evidence established beyond reasonable doubt that Lundy murdered Christine and Amber Lundy.

Later reporting disclosed that the 21 hairs found under Christine's fingernails and fibres found on a window near the presumed point of entry were sent to the Institute of Environmental Science and Research but never tested, and the hairs were destroyed by police. In 2022, the Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to investigate Lundy's case. He was denied parole in 2022 and 2023 over concerns about a lack of a safety plan, and was granted parole in April 2025, being released on 7 May 2025 after 23 years in prison, subject to conditions including a media-interview ban that was lifted in December 2025. In the latest cited reporting, the CCRC had not announced a decision on his application.