Christoper John Lewis (pictured) tried to kill the Queen with a .22 rifle in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1981
New Zealand police will re-examine a teenager’s plot to kill the Queen during her 1981 visit after secret documents confirmed how close she had come to being assassinated.
A senior officer will lead the examination of case files into Christopher John Lewis who shot at the monarch with a .22 rifle as she drove through the city of Dunedin in a limousine in October 1981.
At the time the incident was played down by police who told members of the public that a crack they heard was a council sign falling over.
Lewis, who was 17 when the shooting took place, was never charged with treason or attempted treason, but was convicted of a much lesser offence.
He killed himself in his cell at Mt Eden prisons in Auckland in 1997.
That has led to allegations of a cover-up by New Zealand police after declassified papers were obtained obtained by the New Zealand news website Stuff.
The papers confirm that police officers and members of the public heard ‘what they took to be a shot’.
An SIS document said the possibility of a firearm being discharged in the vicinity of the Queen was highly likely.
A .22 rifle, with a discharged cartridge in the breech, was subsequently recovered by police from the fifth floor of the building Lewis had chosen.
The incident was swept under the carpet by New Zealand police who did not charge the teen with treason because the case was ‘politically too hot to handle’
The angle of fire would have made it difficult to hit the Queen as buildings screened her from view, although she was visible briefly on four occasions, the papers stated.
After a former Dunedin detective went public about the assassination attempt in 1997, an SIS memo from the same year stated Lewis had intended to assassinate the Queen but did not have the equipment or vantage point to carry out the attack.
According to a former Dunedin police officer, Tom Lewis, who worked on the 1981 case, police tried to play down the the attack.
According to a former Dunedin police officer, then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon feared the Royals would not return to New Zealand if word got out
‘You will never get a true file on that. It was reactivated, regurgitated, bits pulled off it, other false bits put on,’ he said.
Tom Lewis said then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon feared the Royals would not return to New Zealand if word got out about just how close the rogue teenager had come to killing the Queen, reports Hamish McNeilly for the website The Stuff.
He revealed the teenager’s original statement was later destroyed in an official cover-up.
Murray Hanan, the would-be killer’s former lawyer, said police decided not to charge the young man with treason – which in 1981 carried the death penalty – because they had received an order from ‘up top’.
They believed it would draw undue attention to the event and cause deep embarrassment.
He said: ‘The fact an attempted assassination of the Queen had taken place in New Zealand… it was too politically hot to handle. I think the government took the view that he is a bit nutty and has had a hard upbringing, so it won’t be too harsh.’
Lewis later claimed in a draft autobiography (entitled ‘Last Words’) that he had been visited by top brass from Wellington during the interrogation process who told him never to speak about the event.
In the manuscript he sent to US publishers Howling At The Moon Productions he described how police threatened him.
‘If I was ever to mention the events surrounding my interviews of the organisation … they would make sure ‘I suffered a fate worse than death”, he wrote.
Lewis’s charge was later downgraded to possession of a firearm in a public place and discharging it.
Lewis (pictured) fired on the Queen from half a kilometre away, missing by just metres
Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, visit Auckland in New Zealand in 1983
However, questions were asked of police at the time. In the hours after the shooting officers were questioned over what had occurred.
They told press the distinctive noise was just a council sign falling over.
Later, under questioning, another narrative emerged. They said someone had let off a fire cracker nearby.
Christopher Lewis was interviewed eight times by police after the incident.
The young man said he had been ordered to kill the Queen by an Englishman known as ‘the Snowman’ – of who he was immensely scared.
‘The Snowman’ had told Lewis about far right groups in Britain like the National Front and said he could take refuge in similar groups in new Zealand.
Two years later the same teenager attempted to overpower a guard and escape from a psychiatric ward where he was being held in order to murder Prince Charles, who was visiting the country in April with the Princess Diana and their young son, William.
His school career was marred with a number of expulsions: tipping over desks, playing with matches and showing porn to his classmates.
He left school for good at just 15.
By the tender age of 17 Lewis had a history of armed robbery, arson and animal cruelty.
His idols included Australian bandit Ned Kelly as well as cult leader Charles Manson – who ordered the murder of American actress and model Sharon Tate.
When the Queen (pictured during her trip to new Zealand in 1995) returned the government sent Lewis on a beach holiday to ensure he would not launch another attempt
In 1995 when the Queen (pictured this year) returned, the New Zealand government sent Lewis, now 33, on a tax-payer funded holiday to the Great Barrier Reef
After the incident Lewis was sectioned and police found clippings of the Royal family in his grimy flat, as well as a detailed map of the Queen’s route that day.
Written on the map were the words ‘Operation = Ass QUEB’ – assumed to to be the name he had given his ‘mission’.
And in 1995 when the Queen returned, the New Zealand government sent the man on a tax-payer funded holiday to the Great Barrier Reef.
‘I started to feel like royalty,’ he wrote in his memoir.
At 33, Lewis (pictured in 1996) killed himself in his shared cell at Mt Eden prisons in Auckland
They thought it safer to have him idling on a beach far from trouble. He was given free accommodation, spending money and a vehicle.
Lewis, however, was not under surveillance during this period.
He would later go on to kill himself in Mt Eden Prisons in Auckland in 1997 – at the age of just 33 – while awaiting the trial of a woman and the kidnapping of her child.
On the day he was found sat upright, dead in his cell, Lewis had previously been visited by his girlfriend.
She noticed nothing out of the ordinary apart from the fact Lewis turned down an offer to put money into his bank account.
Lewis’s shared cell had an easel and paintbrushes, as well as TV and a typewriter in one corner, where he had begun working on his memoir.
At 3.15pm when a corrections officer opened the door to Lewis’s cell he was found slumped in a metal chair ‘in a lifeless state’, reported the New Zealand Herald.
The guard initially though Lewis was asleep before he noticed the man’s colour.
At 33, Christopher John Lewis, infamous for attempting to assassinate the Queen in Dunedin, was dead.