A life less ordinary and much less pleasant

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

OPINION: When Rufus Marsh died in jail last weekend I doubt that anyone shed tears, but I won't forget him.

I first saw him charged with murder in 1974, covering his pre-trial depositions in a small Wellington courtroom. Marsh was 18, and his friend Dennis Luke 16 when they kicked an elderly man to death in Wellington's Hopper St, allegedly over a racist taunt, and then went out nightclubbing.

So careless and callous - and probably stoned - were they that they left an obvious trail of their victim's blood back to where they were staying. And so equally callous were their mates that they detoured to gawk at the dead body on their way down town.

The image has stayed with me of Marsh and Luke play-fighting with a piece of string in the courtroom like naughty schoolboys, their friends grinning behind them, while the injuries their victim suffered were described in chilling detail.

Convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter this time, both would kill again, and be convicted of murder. Luke was among Black Power members who gunned down a New Plymouth man at his front door in 1996 to prevent his giving evidence in an upcoming trial. He'll be eligible for release in October.

Marsh's second killing happened on a lazy summer day not far from where I lived at the time; I watched from my front door while police hastily taped off the street.

Diane Miller, a 32-year-old Justice Department clerk, had been battered to death minutes before, and her body just discovered, buried under her bedding. The police photographs, which I wouldn't want to share with anybody, are seared on my memory.

I wrote about the case, and was at his trial when Marsh gave evidence - inarticulate, threatening and desperate. There was a point where it seemed he would hurl himself at the judge, and as Marsh was led away after the verdict, he tried to throw himself at a young woman who'd been a key witness against him, and had to be restrained.

Marsh was a big, burly fellow in 1986, with a babyish face, his IQ well below normal. Freed after his first killing, he'd since been in jail again for attempted rape, been convicted of aggravated robberies, and had assault charges outstanding when he killed Ms Miller, who was unlucky enough to be at home sick.

A flatmate had left the back door of the house unlocked when he came home for lunch that day, and Marsh had spent the day prowling for a victim all over Mt Victoria.

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I was the only journalist to interview Marsh. His lawyer took me to see him in jail after the trial. I wanted him to tell me about himself, and soon realised that I would not be doing him justice if I turned what he told me into normal reported speech.

He expressed himself in language that barely hung together, yet there was urgency in his story of hardship and deprivation, and in its starkness, ugly truth.

We know more about people like him now; about homes where children are abandoned, neglected and beaten; how schools and welfare systems fail to help them; how they take to life on the streets; and how some of them - Marsh was one - prefer life in jail, and will commit crimes to get back there, and feel safe.

We delude ourselves if we think we can ever get into the minds of killers; they are not like us; but Marsh taught me something about the nature of evil that I did not expect, that it can be blank, a dark hole, a spiritual emptiness; just a terrifyingly casual state of being.

"I'd rather spend time being locked up than being out, than mix with people and that. I got used to it, so I liked it," he told me then. Now, 22 years later, he has died there.

Marsh was 53, and had spent just 18 months out of jail since he was 14. I feel sure he would have killed again, if he'd been freed, if he felt like it. Yet rereading my long-ago interview with him I felt the same confused compassion as I did then, for somebody who never had the chance to be fully human, and never found out what that meant. That was his hell, and he was never out of it.

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