Two people in that house could have pulled the trigger. One of them was dead by the time police arrived. The other spent over a decade in prison, was acquitted, and still, thirty years later, New Zealand can't agree on which one of them did it.
A Family, and a Morning Paper Run
On June 20, 1994, Robin and Margaret Bain and three of their four children — Arawa, 19, Laniet, 18, and Stephen, 14 — were shot to death in their home on Every Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. The fourth child, 22-year-old David, said he had been out delivering newspapers on his regular early-morning paper route and returned home to find his family dead.
There were only two people who could plausibly have been responsible: David, the surviving son, or his father, Robin.
A Family Under Strain
The Bains had moved to New Zealand from Papua New Guinea, where Robin and Margaret had worked as missionaries, settling in Dunedin in 1988. By 1994, friends and colleagues described real strain within the family. Robin, a school principal, was reportedly showing visible signs of depression in the months before the killings — colleagues at his school described him as increasingly disorganized and struggling to manage even basic responsibilities. The eldest daughter, Laniet, had been living away from the family home but returned for a family meeting the night before the murders. At David's later retrial, witnesses testified that meeting had been called because Laniet intended to disclose that her father had been sexually abusing her.
Whether that disclosure happened, and what it set in motion, became one of the central, most disturbing threads running through three decades of legal argument over this case.
Arrest and Conviction
Initial police inquiries actually leaned toward a murder-suicide theory, with Robin considered the likely shooter. That changed within days. Police arrested David and charged him with all five murders. The case against him centered on the rifle used in the killings, which belonged to him; his fingerprints on it; blood found on his clothing; injuries on his body; and a chilling typed message found on the family's computer: "Sorry, you are the only one who deserved to stay." Prosecutors argued David had staged the scene to implicate his father.
David's account was consistent from the start: he said he'd found his family already dead upon returning from his paper run, and that his father had killed the others before turning the gun on himself.
David's 1995 trial lasted three weeks, involved more than a hundred witnesses, and ended with a guilty verdict on all five counts after six hours of jury deliberation. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole term of sixteen years.
A Decade of Appeals, and an Unlikely Advocate
David's case might have ended there if not for Joe Karam, a former All Black rugby player who became aware of the case in 1996 through a newspaper article about university students raising money for an appeal. Karam studied the trial evidence, became convinced something was deeply wrong with the conviction, and spent the next several years and, by some estimates, millions of dollars of his own money pursuing it — visiting David in prison more than 200 times and writing four books making the case for his innocence.
Early appeals to New Zealand's Court of Appeal and the Privy Council in London were unsuccessful. The breakthrough came in 2007, when the Privy Council concluded a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred and quashed David's convictions entirely, ordering a retrial. He was released on bail that May, after roughly thirteen years in prison.
Acquittal
David's retrial began in March 2009 in Christchurch and ran for about three months, involving more than 200 witnesses. New evidence presented to the jury included testimony casting doubt on the original blood and fingerprint evidence, expert opinion suggesting the computer message could have been written by Robin rather than David, and psychological evidence regarding the trauma of discovering one's family dead. On June 5, 2009, the jury acquitted David Bain on all five counts.
The case has been described as one of the most widely discussed and divisive in New Zealand's legal history — and the acquittal, rather than settling the public argument, in many ways intensified it.
A Compensation Fight That Never Resolved Cleanly
What followed was a years-long, genuinely complicated battle over compensation that, even now, doesn't have a tidy resolution. In New Zealand, being acquitted at retrial isn't automatically enough to qualify for compensation as a wrongly convicted person — the claimant has to separately establish their innocence on the balance of probabilities, a different and lower threshold than criminal guilt, but a real bar all the same.
The government's first reviewer, retired Canadian Supreme Court judge Ian Binnie, concluded in 2012 that David likely was innocent on the balance of probabilities, citing serious errors in the original police investigation. But a peer review of Binnie's report by a retired New Zealand judge found enough problems with its reasoning that the government considered it unsafe to rely on. A second, independent review was then commissioned from retired Australian judge Ian Callinan, whose report reached the opposite conclusion: that David had not established his innocence on the balance of probabilities.
Based on Callinan's findings, the government did not issue a formal statement of innocence, and no compensation was paid on that basis. David and his legal team rejected Callinan's conclusions and intended to challenge the report in court. Rather than face that litigation, the Crown agreed in 2016 to pay David an ex gratia payment of $925,000 — explicitly described as compensation for the time and expense involved in the years-long compensation process itself, and a way of avoiding further legal proceedings, not as an acknowledgment of his innocence.
It was, in other words, a resolution that satisfied almost no one looking for a clean answer — Bain received a substantial payment without ever receiving the formal exoneration he and his supporters had spent years seeking.
The End of the Case
David lived the remaining years of his life out of the spotlight to a greater degree than the decades before, though the case never fully let go of him. He died of cancer on July 12, 2023, at a hospice in Christchurch, at age 51.
Thirty years after the killings, the Bain family murders remain a case New Zealand continues to revisit — through books, documentaries, podcasts, and newspaper retrospectives marking each major anniversary. Joe Karam's advocacy, the forensic disputes over blood and fingerprint evidence, and the deeply painful question of what happened inside that house on Every Street in the hours before dawn have never fully settled into consensus. Both possible explanations — a son capable of killing his entire family, or a father capable of the same after a devastating disclosure — remain, to different people in New Zealand, the only one that makes sense.
Sources
Bain family murders — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bain_family_murders
Bain family murders: 30 years on, case continues to grip the public — RNZ News https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/519710/bain-family-murders-30-years-on-case-continues-to-grip-the-public
A timeline of David Bain's case — RNZ News https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/309979/a-timeline-of-david-bains-case
Conclusion reached in Bain compensation case — Beehive.govt.nz (New Zealand Government) https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/conclusion-reached-bain-compensation-case
Individual compensation claims — New Zealand Ministry of Justice https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/constitutional-issues-and-human-rights/miscarriages-of-justice/individual-compensation-claims/