Will to Kill: The Barlow trial and other notable New Zealand murders

On a fine summer evening in 1994, businessmen Eugene Thomas and Gene Thomas were gunned down in their Wellington offices in a mysterious 'gangland' style slaying. The police's principal suspect, John Robert Barlow, was to undergo three controversial trials for their murder before being finally convicted the following year.

Fred McLean here examines the facts and myths of this and 15 other solved and unsolved New Zealand murders, including:

* The Ormondville massacre
* The Mangeweka massacre
* The case of Dennis Gunn, the first person to be convicted solely on fingerprint evidence
* The saga of Westland mass-murderer Stan Graham
* The unsolved case of the murder of homosexual Miles Herbert Radcliffe * The enigma of Marie Emily West
* The infamous case of teenage school friends Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker who bashed Pauline's mother to death with a rock in a stocking in a Christchurch park (subject of the film Heavenly Creatures)
* The trial of "teenage dominatrix" Renee Chignell and her boyfriend for the murder of connoisseur sado-masochist Peter Plumley Walker
* The Aramoana massacre of 1990 in which 13 people were shot dead through the actions of a "survivalist" gunman.