Stanley Graham

A 1981 British-New Zealand film, Bad Blood, was made about Stanley Graham and his chain of killings, as well as the dimensions of historical context and social injustice involved. Australian actor Jack Thompson played Graham.

In 1974 Nightwood Films produced a 26-minute documentary concerning the manhunt. This film is the only audio-visual record of many of the participants' recollections. It was also the first time the large cache of photographs taken during the manhunt by Home Guardsman Dave Stevenson were made public.

In 1968 the Australian drama series Homicide based episode 180, "Dead or Alive", on the case, with the Graham character being played by Brian Wenzel. Unlike real life, the Graham character is captured alive, with the detectives wondering at the end of the episode whether he would be found insane or sentenced to death.

In early 1941, Graham was in a dispute with the police, who wanted his .303 rifle for war use. This was finally handed over on 15 July, but Graham and his wife still held a shotgun and two Winchester rifles, a .22 and a .405.

On 4 October 1941, a neighbour of Graham's, Anker Madsen, complained to Constable Edward Best, stationed in nearby Kaniere, that Graham was accusing him of poisoning his cattle. Best decided not to respond in order to give Graham time to calm down.

They married in Christchurch on 22 December 1930, living there for six months before moving to run a small dairy farm at Kowhitirangi on the West Coast. They were to have a son and a daughter.

Through the late 1930s, Graham maintained reasonably good relations with his neighbours, although he and his wife took little part in social life. By 1940, though, the Graham family was under severe financial pressure, having had cream condemned by the Westland Co-operative Dairy Company and incurred debt from a venture into cattle breeding. As income from his farm dropped, he fell into debt totalling more than £550 (approximately NZ$49,263 in 2015). His behaviour took a turn for the worse, and he began threatening and abusing passing neighbours. Graham and his wife practised target shooting from the back of their home in the middle of the night. Graham was an expert marksman and had an assortment of firearms.

Graham was born and raised in Kokatahi, New Zealand and, as a child, worked at the Longford Hotel, built in 1902, ten miles from Hokitika, whose proprietor was his father, John Graham. Graham met his wife, Dorothy McCoy, when she moved from Rakaia in the late 1920s to work at the hotel.

Eric Stanley George Graham (12 November 1900 – 21 October 1941) was a New Zealander who killed seven people.