For nearly four decades, police have quietly maintained that Edgar Kidman was responsible for Wellington’s Trades Hall bombing, which killed caretaker Ernie Abbott in 1984. He was never charged. No court ever tested the evidence against him. Yet suspicion followed him for the rest of his life.

Was Kidman a terrorist who evaded justice — or an eccentric engineer whose life was irreparably damaged by assumption and circumstantial evidence? Newly examined documents and testimony raise serious questions about whether police focused on the right suspect at all.

A very public arrest

When police arrived at Edgar Kidman’s Breaker Bay home in August 1984, they made sure the neighbourhood noticed.

Squad cars approached from both directions, sirens cutting through the quiet seaside suburb. Kidman, then 49, was taken into custody and questioned at length at Wellington Central Police Station.

Detectives wanted to know whether this marine engineer — a lifelong Wellingtonian — was the man who had planted a bomb inside the Trades Hall five months earlier.

On the evening of March 27, caretaker Ernie Abbott was tidying the foyer after 5pm when he noticed a small suitcase left near the entrance. When he lifted it, a mercury switch triggered the device. The blast shattered windows across the street and killed Abbott instantly. He was 64.

The investigation that followed was one of the largest in New Zealand policing history. Hundreds of officers were involved. More than 500 people were considered potential suspects.

For months, Kidman was not among them.

Evidence that seemed overwhelming

Police interest in Kidman intensified after a search of his Breaker Bay home uncovered items strikingly similar to components recovered from the bomb.

Investigators had reconstructed much of the device from fragments: a mercury switch, an old stove timer, electrical wiring, a square six-volt battery commonly used in torches, and a Teal soft drink bottle containing accelerant. Pages from a June 18, 1977 edition of The Evening Post were also found among the debris.

At Kidman’s house, police located Teal bottles, electrical wire, detonators, tape, and a torch missing its battery. Most compellingly, they found a copy of the same 1977 Evening Post — with the very pages recovered from the bomb missing.

To many observers, the coincidence seemed impossible to ignore.

Yet Kidman was never charged. He was not formally interviewed again. Despite that, police suspicion never fully lifted. Over time, he became the unofficial answer to a crime that had never been solved.

A life that didn’t fit the narrative

What complicated the case was that Kidman did not resemble the portrait police later suggested.

He had trained as an aircraft engineer, worked as a boilermaker, served in the Army, and spent years at sea as a marine engineer. He played a key role in the salvage operation following the Wahine disaster in 1968–69, just offshore from his home.

By the early 1970s, Kidman had turned his attention to mineral exploration. He spent years prospecting in Golden Bay and held multiple mining licences. Documents show that in the days leading up to the Trades Hall bombing, he was finalising plans for a substantial gold-mining venture.

A week before the explosion, merchant bankers proposed forming Pioneer Mining Ltd, using Kidman’s licences and water rights. The projections were ambitious: millions of dollars in recoverable gold, investor returns as high as 225%, and Kidman retaining half ownership.

Correspondence shows the project continuing to progress even after police raided his home.

The question becomes unavoidable: why would a man on the brink of financial success carry out a bombing designed to kill union officials — and do so at a time when his own future appeared increasingly secure?

Motive without motive

Police profiling described the bomber as a disgruntled loner: a hoarder, a drinker, anti-union, skilled with explosives.

Kidman did hoard newspapers and bottles. He lived quietly and had few close relationships. His professional background meant he understood machinery and explosives.

But other elements didn’t align. He was not a heavy drinker. He had been a union member himself. He expressed no hostility toward organised labour. Police have never produced evidence demonstrating anti-union views or a history of violence.

Even those who believed Kidman capable of constructing the bomb struggled to explain why he would do so.

The DNA that changed nothing

In 2018, the case was reopened. Detectives sought DNA samples from surviving suspects, including Kidman, then in his 80s and living in a care facility after suffering a stroke.

Police told his family that DNA testing could “rule him out”.

The results did exactly that.

In June 2019, police confirmed privately that Kidman’s DNA did not match material recovered from bomb evidence. Yet this was never disclosed publicly. Around the same time, a television cold-case programme aired strongly implying Kidman was responsible.

Even after the negative DNA result, detectives continued to suggest they were “close” to solving the case.

Why police allowed public suspicion to persist — while knowing forensic evidence did not support it — remains unexplained.

An unresolved injustice

More than 2,500 people attended Ernie Abbott’s funeral. His death remains one of the most shocking acts of violence in modern New Zealand history.

No one has been held accountable.

Edgar Kidman died in 2021, still under a cloud of suspicion, still officially uncharged, still publicly associated with a crime the evidence never conclusively tied him to.

Whether he was guilty or not may never be known.

But in the absence of proof, the continued portrayal of Kidman as the likely bomber raises a troubling possibility — that in trying to give the public an answer, police may have settled on the wrong one.

And in doing so, compounded one injustice with another.