Liar, Liar.

If there is one thing I’ve learnt in 30 something years of making my own coherent decisions it’s that lying has a time and a place.

Doing so whilst in Police custody, whilst under the suspicion of murder, is not one of those times. But yet, two wankers subsequently found guilty this past week claimed that they did just that, because they were ‘scared’.

Now I know a thing or two about telling a fib. I’ve done everything from claiming my name was Thad to professing to have invented the question mark and they were just the lame ones. But I’ve never cracked one when accused of something serious that I never actually did, especially when the result of that lie could highly likely lead to stand up sodomy in the communal showers.

I remember one such occasion in my college days. We had this regular reliever who claimed he had been a Special Forces soldier in the UK before coming to NZ to be a relieving teacher. Yeah right. To this day I still can’t picture him as the red beret he claimed to be and of course I challenged him on it regularly because if there was one thing I knew at the age of 14 it was army shit.

Anyhoo, we had him for PE one day. Have I told you about the time I got caught reading a porno mag whilst at PE? That’s another story entirely. As this guy wasn’t a real teacher he had to get changed with us and my mate Tim O’Niell decided that it would be hilarious to hide his keys under a stack of cones in the gym. Tim did tell me he had done it too but as he was a bigger bullshit artist than me I took no notice.

This also happened to be the last period of the day so whilst we were all on our way home our highly trained killer of a substitute was frantically looking for his house and car keys. When he couldn’t find them he went to the assistant principal and of course he only had one suspect didn’t he – the smartarse military historian; me.

The school called home and my father-in-law, he who looked to pin everything on yours truly, gladly marched me and his thickest, blackest black leather belt back down to school. He didn’t need the belt to hold his pants up either. Into the APs office I was shoved and expected by all in attendance to produce said keys, from my anus obviously, because I’d already had the pat down at home.

Needless to say shit got emotional; I was crying, Mr Red Beret was crying and yet I was adamant I hadn’t taken his fucken keys, because I hadn’t. Oh sure, I knew who had but that wasn’t the question was it? I didn’t want to drop Tim in it but after about half an hour of this and coincidentally about the time my step father started taking off his belt, I dobbed him in.

Tim turned up with his Mum and confessed. The keys were returned and the whole sorry saga ended with him getting a kick up the arse all the way to the car by Mrs O’Niell and my step father giving me an encouraging “Okay so you didn’t take them but you fucken knew who did!”

Tim and I laughed it off the next day and he reckoned he was cool with me doing the dirty because I’d held out for as long as I had which made the whole joke funnier. And that probably would have been the end of that but a few years later karma came back to haunt me though when I walked in on him masturbating. He even found that funny.

Notice that never at any stage during that entire incident did I claim to have witnessed who took the keys before being raped by the real culprits and who later returned to my house, put a docking ring on my chopper and threatened to cut it off if I told anyone what I had seen. It’s a good thing I didn’t because that would have forced me to confess to taking the keys.

One legged Dean Mulligan claimed that as his reason for confessing to the murder of Marice McGregor this week. His lawyer admitted that yes, his client was a compulsive liar but this last story of his (there had been four others) was so fantastical, so far out there it could actually be true. The fuck it was.

How this guy got his day in court is beyond me and how his lawyer had the gall to stand there and try and defend him is equally perplexing. It took the jury four hours to find Mulligan guilty and I think it was a miracle it took them that long.

We never did see Mr Commando back at school after the whole keys thing either.