Ok, so I'm pre-empting the official story, but it seems certain to me that the double-murder in South Auckland was clearly committed by the past boyfriend of the dead woman.
What is it that causes some men to be so possessive that they cannot live while their former girlfriend/wife/partner takes up with another man?
Some names of similar cases to throw into the mix that may ring a bell:
The Lawson Quins - famed as NZ's multiple-birth family. After separation, their father killed their mother and then himself.
Greg Meads, prominent horse-breeder and local personality around Matamata found out his wife was taking up with another man and about to leave her husband, so he got out his shotgun and shot her in the face at point-blank range.
Certainly, you could point to evolutionary origins where animals will fight to the death for a female, but we've been down from the trees for some time now. However, the inclusion of rape of a spouse as crime has only recently been enacted, while so-called crime passionel laws are only recently removed from our statutes.
In South Africa, the crime passionel defence was available right up to the 1960s, while it took France until the '70s to divest the horrible piece of legislation that put ownership of women in the hands of their husbands.
Humans like to consider themselves as superior to our mammalian cousins, but the continuing killings by driven-mad with jealousy by some men shows that we aren't all that far from the trees in the end.
Copyright © Alan Charman