Former court reporter turned author Steve Braunias has made a career out of seeing the worst the world has to offer.
He's written articles about some of the nation's most infamous murder cases - and he's turned some of his findings into a book, The Survivors: True stories of death and desperation.
He says he'd never felt the trauma of examining the world of true crime, until too many recent incidents last year.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Now.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Steve Braunius has created a career out of people's worst nightmarees.
A court reporter for twenty years, an award winning true
crime author, he surrounded himsel himself in stories of death,
the worst of which humanity has to offer. And now
he's done. He's hanging up his pencil on his notepad
and he's leaving the world of true crime. But before
(00:35):
he goes, he's given us one last parting work, the
third and final book in his trilogy, The Survivors True
Stories of Just Stories of Death and Desperation. Steve Braunius
is in the studio with me now, I'm delighted to
see you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Good morning, Good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
This is the third book in the true crime series.
How is this different to the previous two?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Ah?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, the first two were written with a great sense
of adventure and optimism and hope, and this one was
written more so in despair. And I had a kind
of a crisis last year, I guess when I was
attending too many murder trials at the High Court of Auckland,
(01:23):
and I'd always been impatient with people who would say
to me, Oh, how do you cope with this? And
I will say, I cope very well, thank you. I
feel totally at ease and calm in a court room
because it's not my problem. The problem in the traumba
(01:44):
the people being accused in the family of the victims,
and they take it home with them and they live it,
and I never did until last year and I kind
of switched. I guess I had a kind of a crisis,
and I started to realize that I started hating certain
(02:05):
people who were accused and plainly guilty of really heinous crimes.
And you don't really want to go to work to
hate people, do you.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
No, it's this thing, really don't Was it a particular case.
Was there a moment when this kind of crisis began?
Can you pinpoint that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It was more accumulative. I attended three trials in a row,
which is unusual for me. I sort of dive in
and then I maybe don't come back for weeks and
I'll do something else. And then at the end of
that process, you think very seriously about how to create
(02:46):
all this writing that you've done into a book, and
you think more you think more deeply are suppose about
crimes and the patterns and the themes and what you
can say about them. So that's and it was during
that that I thought, I can't take the company of
these people anymore in a book. I will continue to
(03:08):
occasionally dip into the High Court and write about trials
for the Herald. And that's been great since I finished
writing that book, that's been great because it's with the
knowledge that it doesn't have another life of thinking hard
about serious crimes and the impact that they have on people,
because you know, going to court and interviewing people afterwards
(03:34):
it's a hell of a thing. You know, this is
people's worst experiences, patiently detailed, day after day in the
worst room in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
I was going to ask you what it is like
sitting in a courtroom, watching observing a trial play out
from beginning to end. I think most of us have
a view on what it would be like, which is
gleaned from ten seconds off the news or a photo
in the newspaper. But to sit there from the beginning
to the end.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yes, it's I mean, it's awful.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
If I ever did something real wrong and I had
the choice of pleading guilty or pleading not guilty. I
think my instinct would be to go guilty.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Get me out of here, give me the sentence. Now,
let's get this done.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
And save everyone else the pain. You see families go
through this, of the victim and of the accused. It's
really really awful for them, you know. But Yeah, So
this book deals in a number of those trials. There's two.
There's two particular trials which have one thing in common.
(04:45):
And I deliberately avoided this thing and my writings as
a court reporter, and that is the murder of babies
or small children. And I deliberately gone nowhere near, and
then suddenly I was doing I was reporting and attending
(05:06):
two of those trials within about six weeks. Yeah, And
I've tried to write about that in a way which
takes people to the courtroom to the extent that they
feel and participate in the tragedies which are being explained
(05:28):
to you and defended too.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I think that's something you've always given us. You challenge
us to think differently, maybe more broadly, and with a
wider perspective of the stories that we're hearing. Because it
is very easy to quickly react, to have emotional reaction
to what you might be hearing somebody did.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm lucky. Really are the court
reporters who do go and do terrific work for the
radio stations of the papers. They have to do it
real fast, they have to do it that day. I'm
not too far behind, but I do have a lot
more time to write about the detail and write about
(06:09):
the people and that court, just to sort of bring
it alive really and to make it, to make it
more kind of realistic in a way. Because you are
dealing with people all day long in a court room,
you know you've got the I mean, judges are such
a mysterious breed, aren't they. They wafted in through these
side doors all of a sudden, wearing bizarre clothes. They
(06:31):
are untouchable. You cannot challenge them. And they're such strange people.
And I have seen the same judge, and I write
about him in this book, be so severe that he
stunned the court room into silence. And in another case,
(06:56):
and this was even more rare, he displayed an act
of mercy so stunning that it silenced the courtroom. So
the power that they have and the test of character
that it has is quite extraordinary. And look, I have
(07:17):
to say, I don't know if this will disappoint some people,
but I've become quite a fan of the judiciary and
the police and first responders. You know, you see the
Saint John's people and they come in and they talk
about in detail repulsive things that they have attended to
(07:39):
and active with great courage and efficiency. Then you have
the police. I write about one person on there, detective
called Detective Libby Willis. She worked on a case almost
impossible to solve, and she was given the time and
(08:00):
she had her own ingenuity, and it's truly impressive. It's
world class stuff. And you've got where the real action
often takes place in murder trials in the lab. The
lab did it, didn't it? The scientists are you know.
You look at the experiment conducted by a man in
(08:24):
Texas who was an advocate of the death penalty, and
he conducted an experiment which claimed to show that the
stain on Mark Lundy's shirt was tissue human tissue, and
that allowed the prosecutor in that case, a man from Hamilton,
(08:46):
to famously say to the jury, a man should not
have his wife's brain. A man should not have his
wife's brain on his shoe. So that case, which I
think is still controversial, and we have not heard the
last of that case, belongs in the lab. There's a
case coming up quite so much I'm not really ought
(09:09):
not to talk about too much or at all, but
a lot of that is going to be extremely forensic.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
So it sounds like, even though you're not going to
write about cases anymore, it does sound like you will
probably still take an interest.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
I'll sneak into the odd one.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Sneak intoge What have you learned from human nature after
sitting in courtrooms and observing so many different trials.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
That's a great question. It honestly is I've just learned.
I suppose one thing I've learned is how decent a
lot of people are. You kind of learned that. You
kind of learned that anyway as a journalist, because the
definition of a journalist is someone who goes up to
(09:54):
complete strangers and ask them personal questions and you find
or I have found that so many people are just
so damn nice, they're so damn decent, and they're willing
to talk to you and willing to share and to
listen to you and you know, and to respond, and
that's a real decency. And yes, you definitely see that
(10:17):
in court the lawyers, you know, the prosecutors. The prosecutors
are easy to like because they seem to be imposing,
you know, authority on chaos essentially, and defense lawyers were
not supposed to like because they're defending the indefensible. But
(10:40):
in fact, a lot of people, as we know, being
accused of these things may well be innocent or the
evidence against them is insufficient, and you have to come
up to that high standard. So yeah, human nature. I've
learnt a lot about decency fortitude. There's one extraordinary trial
(11:02):
that I write about in that book where often the
court is each courtroom is divided into two and it's
essentially so that on one side you can have the
family of the victim on the other side of the
family of the accused. Very often they hate each other,
(11:24):
and that's understandable and stable. And that gets you down
to seeing that even though it's understandable, it's so it's
so bitter that it's awful. But there's one case in there,
at the whole end of the trial, when it even
went to sentencing, the two families. I walked outside the
(11:46):
courtroom and the two families were in the big sort
of waiting room outside, and they were standing in a circle,
and they were holding hands, and they were kind of
did a prayer and asked and gave forgiveness of each other.
(12:08):
Never seen anything like it, never seen anything like it. Beautiful.
So you learn a lot about human nature there, to
the ability to forgive, the ability to be to do
decent and beautiful things.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
The book isn't just about trials, though. You also profile
as opposed in a way, or bring some dignity to
some ghosts, to some other very interesting people living on
sort of the outer edges of society as well. Is
it How important is it to tell their stories as well?
How important is it to tell their stories?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Oh, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. Frankly,
I'm just personally, I'm fascinated by them. I'm fascinated by them.
And yeah, these are people who you could say live
on the fringes of society and they sort of form
(13:08):
in many ways. The theme of the book, and the
theme of the book is how to survive your own life,
where you not only make decisions which make life difficult
for yourself. You have a whole concept of life which
makes it difficult for yourself and sometimes for others. And
(13:28):
some people choose that they choose this difficulty, they choose
the hard road, they choose a complicated lifestyle, and sometimes
it's awe inspiring to see. And yeah, I do write
about people like that. In particular, I guess is two
chapters on one guy, a very strange Man German, a
(13:54):
German intellectual, a German intellectual author who had been quite
a superstar back in Germany in the sixties and seventies,
and then started fom ideas which were not so archotic
that he was being haunted by vampires in his sleep.
(14:14):
Vampires were kind of a metaphor. They were for people
who were draining his energy. And he changed his name
and he came to New Zealand, and he lived as
a pauper, very very poor person, and he he lived
in one sort of boarding house or youth hostel or
(14:36):
backpacker hostel after another whose oars on the move. And
that was to avoid his energy being drained by the
dark forces, which sounds mad and is mad. And yet
he had a whole theorem about this as indeed, he
had whole theorems about all sorts of other subjects, and
he wrote about them incessantly, perched on the top of
(15:00):
a little step ladder, which led into a lock up.
He had series of lockups. He would sit on a
step ladder, unlockers his little door there, and inside these
lockups were papers, his personal papers, and they were like
(15:20):
his library. And he'd sit there for hours on end
with his pencil stubs, making notes and very very happy.
And you know, what a fascinating life, what a strange
thing to do, and yet he's spread a lot of
joy around people. So it's a funny thing. Even though
this book is about I think the subtitles stories of.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Death, stories of death, and desperation.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I think it's a really hopeful book and it's just
about survivors who do survive.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yes, absolutely, Steve brne Is, thank you so much for
coming in. There's a collection of amazing stories in the book.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Now.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Steve Braunius has created a career out of people's worst nightmarees.
A court reporter for twenty years, an award winning true
crime author, he surrounded himsel himself in stories of death,
the worst of which humanity has to offer. And now
he's done. He's hanging up his pencil on his notepad
and he's leaving the world of true crime. But before
(00:35):
he goes, he's given us one last parting work, the
third and final book in his trilogy, The Survivors True
Stories of Just Stories of Death and Desperation. Steve Braunius
is in the studio with me now, I'm delighted to
see you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Good morning, Good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
This is the third book in the true crime series.
How is this different to the previous two?
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Ah?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Well, the first two were written with a great sense
of adventure and optimism and hope, and this one was
written more so in despair. And I had a kind
of a crisis last year, I guess when I was
attending too many murder trials at the High Court of Auckland,
(01:23):
and I'd always been impatient with people who would say
to me, Oh, how do you cope with this? And
I will say, I cope very well, thank you. I
feel totally at ease and calm in a court room
because it's not my problem. The problem in the traumba
(01:44):
the people being accused in the family of the victims,
and they take it home with them and they live it,
and I never did until last year and I kind
of switched. I guess I had a kind of a crisis,
and I started to realize that I started hating certain
(02:05):
people who were accused and plainly guilty of really heinous crimes.
And you don't really want to go to work to
hate people, do you.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
No, it's this thing, really don't Was it a particular case.
Was there a moment when this kind of crisis began?
Can you pinpoint that.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It was more accumulative. I attended three trials in a row,
which is unusual for me. I sort of dive in
and then I maybe don't come back for weeks and
I'll do something else. And then at the end of
that process, you think very seriously about how to create
(02:46):
all this writing that you've done into a book, and
you think more you think more deeply are suppose about
crimes and the patterns and the themes and what you
can say about them. So that's and it was during
that that I thought, I can't take the company of
these people anymore in a book. I will continue to
(03:08):
occasionally dip into the High Court and write about trials
for the Herald. And that's been great since I finished
writing that book, that's been great because it's with the
knowledge that it doesn't have another life of thinking hard
about serious crimes and the impact that they have on people,
because you know, going to court and interviewing people afterwards
(03:34):
it's a hell of a thing. You know, this is
people's worst experiences, patiently detailed, day after day in the
worst room in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
I was going to ask you what it is like
sitting in a courtroom, watching observing a trial play out
from beginning to end. I think most of us have
a view on what it would be like, which is
gleaned from ten seconds off the news or a photo
in the newspaper. But to sit there from the beginning
to the end.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yes, it's I mean, it's awful.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
If I ever did something real wrong and I had
the choice of pleading guilty or pleading not guilty. I
think my instinct would be to go guilty.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Get me out of here, give me the sentence. Now,
let's get this done.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
And save everyone else the pain. You see families go
through this, of the victim and of the accused. It's
really really awful for them, you know. But Yeah, So
this book deals in a number of those trials. There's two.
There's two particular trials which have one thing in common.
(04:45):
And I deliberately avoided this thing and my writings as
a court reporter, and that is the murder of babies
or small children. And I deliberately gone nowhere near, and
then suddenly I was doing I was reporting and attending
(05:06):
two of those trials within about six weeks. Yeah, And
I've tried to write about that in a way which
takes people to the courtroom to the extent that they
feel and participate in the tragedies which are being explained
(05:28):
to you and defended too.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I think that's something you've always given us. You challenge
us to think differently, maybe more broadly, and with a
wider perspective of the stories that we're hearing. Because it
is very easy to quickly react, to have emotional reaction
to what you might be hearing somebody did.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm lucky. Really are the court
reporters who do go and do terrific work for the
radio stations of the papers. They have to do it
real fast, they have to do it that day. I'm
not too far behind, but I do have a lot
more time to write about the detail and write about
(06:09):
the people and that court, just to sort of bring
it alive really and to make it, to make it
more kind of realistic in a way. Because you are
dealing with people all day long in a court room,
you know you've got the I mean, judges are such
a mysterious breed, aren't they. They wafted in through these
side doors all of a sudden, wearing bizarre clothes. They
(06:31):
are untouchable. You cannot challenge them. And they're such strange people.
And I have seen the same judge, and I write
about him in this book, be so severe that he
stunned the court room into silence. And in another case,
(06:56):
and this was even more rare, he displayed an act
of mercy so stunning that it silenced the courtroom. So
the power that they have and the test of character
that it has is quite extraordinary. And look, I have
(07:17):
to say, I don't know if this will disappoint some people,
but I've become quite a fan of the judiciary and
the police and first responders. You know, you see the
Saint John's people and they come in and they talk
about in detail repulsive things that they have attended to
(07:39):
and active with great courage and efficiency. Then you have
the police. I write about one person on there, detective
called Detective Libby Willis. She worked on a case almost
impossible to solve, and she was given the time and
(08:00):
she had her own ingenuity, and it's truly impressive. It's
world class stuff. And you've got where the real action
often takes place in murder trials in the lab. The
lab did it, didn't it? The scientists are you know.
You look at the experiment conducted by a man in
(08:24):
Texas who was an advocate of the death penalty, and
he conducted an experiment which claimed to show that the
stain on Mark Lundy's shirt was tissue human tissue, and
that allowed the prosecutor in that case, a man from Hamilton,
(08:46):
to famously say to the jury, a man should not
have his wife's brain. A man should not have his
wife's brain on his shoe. So that case, which I
think is still controversial, and we have not heard the
last of that case, belongs in the lab. There's a
case coming up quite so much I'm not really ought
(09:09):
not to talk about too much or at all, but
a lot of that is going to be extremely forensic.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
So it sounds like, even though you're not going to
write about cases anymore, it does sound like you will
probably still take an interest.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
I'll sneak into the odd one.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Sneak intoge What have you learned from human nature after
sitting in courtrooms and observing so many different trials.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
That's a great question. It honestly is I've just learned.
I suppose one thing I've learned is how decent a
lot of people are. You kind of learned that. You
kind of learned that anyway as a journalist, because the
definition of a journalist is someone who goes up to
(09:54):
complete strangers and ask them personal questions and you find
or I have found that so many people are just
so damn nice, they're so damn decent, and they're willing
to talk to you and willing to share and to
listen to you and you know, and to respond, and
that's a real decency. And yes, you definitely see that
(10:17):
in court the lawyers, you know, the prosecutors. The prosecutors
are easy to like because they seem to be imposing,
you know, authority on chaos essentially, and defense lawyers were
not supposed to like because they're defending the indefensible. But
(10:40):
in fact, a lot of people, as we know, being
accused of these things may well be innocent or the
evidence against them is insufficient, and you have to come
up to that high standard. So yeah, human nature. I've
learnt a lot about decency fortitude. There's one extraordinary trial
(11:02):
that I write about in that book where often the
court is each courtroom is divided into two and it's
essentially so that on one side you can have the
family of the victim on the other side of the
family of the accused. Very often they hate each other,
(11:24):
and that's understandable and stable. And that gets you down
to seeing that even though it's understandable, it's so it's
so bitter that it's awful. But there's one case in there,
at the whole end of the trial, when it even
went to sentencing, the two families. I walked outside the
(11:46):
courtroom and the two families were in the big sort
of waiting room outside, and they were standing in a circle,
and they were holding hands, and they were kind of
did a prayer and asked and gave forgiveness of each other.
(12:08):
Never seen anything like it, never seen anything like it. Beautiful.
So you learn a lot about human nature there, to
the ability to forgive, the ability to be to do
decent and beautiful things.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
The book isn't just about trials, though. You also profile
as opposed in a way, or bring some dignity to
some ghosts, to some other very interesting people living on
sort of the outer edges of society as well. Is
it How important is it to tell their stories as well?
How important is it to tell their stories?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Oh, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. Frankly,
I'm just personally, I'm fascinated by them. I'm fascinated by them.
And yeah, these are people who you could say live
on the fringes of society and they sort of form
(13:08):
in many ways. The theme of the book, and the
theme of the book is how to survive your own life,
where you not only make decisions which make life difficult
for yourself. You have a whole concept of life which
makes it difficult for yourself and sometimes for others. And
(13:28):
some people choose that they choose this difficulty, they choose
the hard road, they choose a complicated lifestyle, and sometimes
it's awe inspiring to see. And yeah, I do write
about people like that. In particular, I guess is two
chapters on one guy, a very strange Man German, a
(13:54):
German intellectual, a German intellectual author who had been quite
a superstar back in Germany in the sixties and seventies,
and then started fom ideas which were not so archotic
that he was being haunted by vampires in his sleep.
(14:14):
Vampires were kind of a metaphor. They were for people
who were draining his energy. And he changed his name
and he came to New Zealand, and he lived as
a pauper, very very poor person, and he he lived
in one sort of boarding house or youth hostel or
(14:36):
backpacker hostel after another whose oars on the move. And
that was to avoid his energy being drained by the
dark forces, which sounds mad and is mad. And yet
he had a whole theorem about this as indeed, he
had whole theorems about all sorts of other subjects, and
he wrote about them incessantly, perched on the top of
(15:00):
a little step ladder, which led into a lock up.
He had series of lockups. He would sit on a
step ladder, unlockers his little door there, and inside these
lockups were papers, his personal papers, and they were like
(15:20):
his library. And he'd sit there for hours on end
with his pencil stubs, making notes and very very happy.
And you know, what a fascinating life, what a strange
thing to do, and yet he's spread a lot of
joy around people. So it's a funny thing. Even though
this book is about I think the subtitles stories of.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
Death, stories of death, and desperation.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I think it's a really hopeful book and it's just
about survivors who do survive.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Yes, absolutely, Steve brne Is, thank you so much for
coming in. There's a collection of amazing stories in the book.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.