Scott Watson’s conviction<\/a>\u00a0for the murders of Smart, 21, and Hope, 17.<\/p>\nCunninghame has prohibited the publication of a police jobsheet from the day Wallace’s body was discovered, detailing the scene examination at the road worker’s house and his reference to Watson’s case, which is still active.<\/p>\n
Watson, who has been in prison for almost 25 years, maintains his innocence, claiming he never met Smart or Hope that fateful New Year’s Eve in 1997 at Furneaux Lodge in the Marlborough Sounds and was not the mystery man on the water taxi who invited the friends to sleep aboard his boat.<\/p>\n
The pair were never seen again and their bodies have never been found.<\/p>\n
Watson’s lawyers will contest Wallace’s controversial identification as Watson as the mystery man and forensic evidence that placed two of Hope’s long blonde hairs on Watson’s yacht, Blade, at a Court of Appeal hearing in May.<\/p>\n
Wallace’s credibility as the police’s key witness was tested over the years after his story changed.<\/p>\n
At Watson’s 1999 trial, Wallace, who had picked Watson out of a second montage of photos supplied by police in which Watson was blinking, told the jury he recognised Watson’s eyes and his “mistrusting look”.<\/p>\n
But later he would say police pressured him and for two decades he vowed Watson was not the mystery man.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WARNING: This story deals with suicide and may be upsetting. The death of Guy Wallace, the water taxi driver who was one of the last people to see Ben Smart and Olivia Hope alive and a key witness in the murder trial of Scott Watson, was self-inflicted, says a coroner. Wallace was 55, living alone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3437,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3435\/revisions\/3437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}