Until 9 October 1967, New Zealand pubs were required to close at six in the evening. The policy created the infamous "six o'clock swill," a frantic rush of drinking as closing time approached, and it created something else: a parallel economy of unlicensed drinking houses where alcohol flowed long after the legal taps shut off. These beerhouses occupied a grey zone in New Zealand society. Technically criminal, they were widely tolerated as a form of petty vice. But their clientele was anything but petty. Beatnik poets and modernist musicians rubbed shoulders with boxers and rugby league players. Wealthy Aucklanders came to "slum" with the underworld. Drug addicts, alcoholics, and professional gamblers mixed with people who simply wanted a drink after six. The beerhouses also served as distribution points for cannabis and other drugs during the 1940s and 1950s. The Bassett Road house, in respectable Remuera, was one of these establishments.

John Gillies and Ronald Jorgensen, the men arrested for the murders on 31 December 1963, had first met in a borstal in 1951. Both came from the South Island. Jorgensen was born in Kaikoura to an authoritarian Danish father, and he accumulated a record of assault and theft in Christchurch before moving to a life at sea. Gillies had fled New Zealand in 1956 to avoid trial on multiple criminal charges, making his way to Australia, where he eventually landed in Melbourne's Pentridge Prison. Deported back to New Zealand in October 1963, he was on home soil barely two months before the Bassett Road killings. Gillies admitted to acquiring the machine gun but claimed it was for personal protection. Both men denied the murders. Both were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jorgensen's story did not end with his conviction. After serving part of his sentence, he vanished. Police initially suspected he had faked his death, and he was eventually declared legally dead. But in 2010, a TVNZ documentary called The Missing, directed by Tom Reilly, traced Jorgensen's life and uncovered several eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him in Perth, Australia during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The show's makers concluded that strong evidence pointed to Jorgensen having faked his own death and fled New Zealand in 1984. In a final, almost novelistic detail, an oil painting attributed to Jorgensen surfaced in June 2019 after falling from the ceiling space of a garage during the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, shaken loose from the same South Island town where he had been born.

The Bassett Road case touched figures who would later occupy the highest levels of New Zealand politics. Robert Muldoon, who went on to become Prime Minister, and John Banks, a future Member of Parliament and Auckland mayor, were both connected to the periphery of the beerhouse world. Banks's father Archibald was involved in the sly grog milieu and sent his then-teenage son to provide cleaning services for his clients. The case became a lens through which New Zealand examined the unintended consequences of its own morality legislation, the way that forcing drinking underground created spaces where violence could flourish. Referendums eventually made it possible for pubs to stay open past six o'clock, and by 1968 the beerhouses were obsolete. The murders at Bassett Road had not caused the change, but they had made the cost of the old system impossible to ignore.

Gillies was paroled in the late 1960s. Despite learning technical drawing in prison, he returned to crime, served further sentences, and was not finally released until 1987. He lived the rest of his life under a new identity in Wellington, dying in 2019. The police officers who worked the case rose through the hierarchy in the decades that followed. Scott Bainbridge published a full account of the murders in 2013 through Allen and Unwin. The house at 115 Bassett Road still stands in Remuera, a quiet residential street where the most dramatic crime in New Zealand's mid-century history played out behind drawn curtains. The six o'clock closing law is long gone, but the story it produced endures.