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Most who have known Stephen Stone have feared him. Naomi Larkin and Tony Wall of the New Zealand Herald background the man convicted in Auckland on Friday of two vicious murders committed 10 years ago
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IN ALL his long hours in court, Stephen Ralph Stone did nothing to dispel the picture of himself as a smirking, remorseless killer.
At 19, he shot a man in the head. Five days later he raped a female friend before slitting her throat.
Witnesses to the 1989 killings of Deane Fuller-Sandys and Leah Stephens said Stone was pretty happy with himself afterwards.
At his depositions hearing in the Waitakere District Court in January last year, he sat with his feet up on the dock while eyeballing, mouthing and gesturing at witnesses and the public.
He was only slightly more reserved at his trial in the High Court at Auckland this month, continuing to cultivate his reputation as staunch -- and feared.
Yet there is nothing obvious in Stone's past that could hand psychologists a textbook answer as to why this man, while still a teenager, was able to calmly commit two murders and hold seven other people to ransom, preventing them from going to police for nearly a decade.
Stone was born in Hastings in 1969. His father Gary's job as a mechanic saw the family -- including his mother, Margaret, and brother, Gary junior -- criss-cross the Tasman till 1980, when they settled in Huntly. They moved to Auckland two years later.
Stone had problems at school. "He has always been a bit of a rebel," his father said.
"It's like any family: you get a couple of good ones and one bad egg. He always liked to get his own way a bit."
When Stone left school before he turned 15, his father gave him a job. But he never considered a career as a mechanic. "He reckoned it was too bloody dirty, this job."
About this time -- 1984 -- Stone received his first conviction for petty crime. He quickly notched up more, including car conversion, burglary, dangerous driving, driving while disqualified, possession of an offensive weapon, escaping from a corrective training institution and possession of cannabis.
Today his record runs over more than...