The murder scene police discovered at 65 Every Street, Dunedin on June 20, 1994, was a house of horrors in more ways than one.

Weatherboards were rotten, windows had jammed, daylight could be seen through some of the walls and maggots crawled in the bathroom. The Bain family were hoarders and collectors, so the grounds resembled a salvage yard and rooms were piled up with household goods and bric-a-brac. The Bains had collected many interesting souvenirs and artefacts from their time in Papua New Guinea and these were dotted around the house. Only the front room, just inside the front door, was kept reasonably tidy. It was used for family meetings and to receive visitors. By the time the family was killed, housework had slipped even more than usual and the house had a bad smell.

Visitors approached the Bain house along a path to the front door.

Built around 1850, the once handsome but gloomy villa was already way past its best when the Bains bought it in 1974. By the time they returned to New Zealand in 1988 the house was almost beyond repair. The first police on the scene still remember the uncertainty of that morning as they approached the house. Geoff Wyllie had been a police officer for three-and-a-half years when he and his partner Kim Stephenson, who had been a cop for five years, got the call to go to the Bain house on June 20, 1994. The constables, whose patch was South Dunedin, were on the 7am shift. "I was making the coffee and Kim wasn't feeling very well and thinking about going home again and then the call came over the phone," Wyllie says.

Geoff Wyllie gives evidence at David Bain's second trial in 2009.

"We had very little information - just to go to 65 Every St and the whole family is dead. We couldn't get any more information immediately. "So many times you get called to these things and it sounds horrendous and there's nothing. But we didn't take it lightly either." When they arrived at Every St, an ambulance was waiting outside number 65. Stephenson says he thought the call might be about a gas leak but the sight of people taking cover behind the ambulance suggested otherwise. As the officers went up the path in the dark they saw a head and shoulders in one of the windows by the front door of the house. This would turn out to be David Bain. Both constables were worried the figure might start shooting so they turned off their torches. "We hopped into the flax and watched for 20 seconds. Afterwards I said to Kim we were lucky it was David Bain not David Gray,” Wyllie says.

The west side of the Bain house shows the door to the kitchen.