The memory of the last encounter Ann O’Grady had with her living husband was an ordinary one, a moment crisp with everyday familiarity. Being a man of robust health and outdoor pursuits, Kevin O’Grady, 68, was never averse to the rough and tumble of life, spending his leisure time biking and tramping with zest even at his age.
On the fateful afternoon of Waitangi Day of the previous year, the old man was knee-deep in the routine labor of gutter cleaning, standing with a casual sureness atop a ladder — a task from which he would never descend. Ann left him to his afternoon duties. Swift as the passing of an hour, Ann returned, only to encounter a chilling spectacle – Kevin was no more, cold on the ground with a disarray of ladder and a knife gruesomely decorating his chest.
The wife tried to breathe life back into her life partner but in vain. The wheels of justice had an alarming delay set into them, not commencing an investigation into the sudden demise for 10 agonizing days.
The findings of the coroner’s report recently revealed were bitter facts from a harsh reality. The death was due to a fatal combination: an accidental trauma to the head and a stab wound in the chest. Attempts to implicate the involvement of any other individual were fruitlessly ruled out.
The bizarre circumstance of using a knife for gutter clean-up baffled the authorities. In the initial assessment, they brushed off the air of mystery surrounding the death, negligent enough to overlook immediate investigative procedures from the Criminal Investigation Branch (CIB).
Shockingly, it was the pathologist who, after the autopsy, raised consternation to the coroner’s inquest officer. He fired a belated flare of alarm over the unusual circumstances surrounding the case. “Physics and probabilities collapse to allow for a ladder fall accompanied by an accidental stab wound,” he wrote to the CIB. “It is dubious to treat it as an instant conclusion before ruling out all other potential factors.”
The road to justice was further littered with hurdles. Transfer of responsibility from one CIB officer to another, coupled with negligence in follow-up actions marked the investigation proceedings.
CIB was dragged into the investigation months later. They found telltale signs of the fatal incident at O’Grady’s residence, a bucket of knives, and gutter knife-marks. Tracing back innocence and possible debris of the catastrophe, the ladder was found on an unreliable terrain, and O’Grady’s attire of gumboots was assumed to contribute to the unfortunate episode.
The CIB locked down their findings with the convincing opinion that the mishap was free of third-party involvement. Forensic pathologist Dr. Leslie Anderson detailed the peculiar stab wound and spoke about the glaring miss-steps in the initial handling of the incident by the police. This severely restricted the process of crucial information extraction concerning the stab wound context during the autopsy.
In the final summation of the case, Coroner Sue Johnson declared O’Grady’s death an accidental fall. The puzzling circumstances of his demise indeed posed a challenge. Regret was expressed on the inability to provide a detailed outline of the unfortunate occurrence.
Canterbury Rural Area Commander, Inspector Peter Cooper, conceded the detrimental delays in the investigation process afflicting the O’Grady family. Striking an empathetic note, he stated that steps have since been taken to draw essential lessons from this case to avoid similar incidents in the future.
