Second chance, second murder
Paul Wilson was given numerous chances by family, friends and the justice system. Two young women paid the price, write Sam Sherwood and Martin Van Beynen.
At important junctures in his life, Paul Wilson convinced people his past was behind him. Friends and relations in Hokitika on the West Coast put their faith in him after he tried to shoot someone who defended his ex-girlfriend Kim Schroder in the local pub.
They thought he would resume a normal life when he got out of jail, and leave the sociable Schroder alone. But he took her life in a heartless murder that would see him locked up for the next 16 years.
Eventually people trusted it was a one-off. Over his prison years, countless hours were invested in psychological counselling and programmes designed to send him out without posing a risk.
Finally expert psychologists and the Parole Board were persuaded he could live the rest of his life without causing further harm. Seven years after release, he killed again, another planned and callous murder – Nicole Tuxford, a young woman who trusted him.
Two lives lost to a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t change.
Wilson stood in the dock in the High Court at Christchurch on Wednesday, dressed in a grey T-shirt, shorts and jandals. He showed no emotion as he pleaded guilty to raping Tuxford. Last year he admitted her murder, but wanted to defend the rape charge.
With suppression orders lifted, the gates were about to open on a man who may never see the outside of a jail again.
FIRST VICTIM
Kim Schroder was a live-wire 21-year-old close to her parents Gary and Nancy, with a wide circle of friends and a good job as office manager for Hokitika firm Evan Jones Construction. She was the only woman on a staff of 40 but more than held her own.
‘‘Kim was well known and well-respected. She was a very warm, open person. She was so bloody happy,’’ says Evan Jones, who employed her straight from school.
The Schroder and Wilson families, both with strong West Coast roots, grew up together.
Wilson’s mother, Diane, is part of the large and respected Tainui family. His father Ernie, who was 19 when Paul was born, left the family when Wilson was still young and now lives in Mosgiel.
Wilson was an average student and eventually started work at the Westland Milk Products factory.
He and Kim started dating in 1989 after they met through one of Hokitika’s then social hubs, the Kiwis Rugby Club, one of three rugby clubs in the town. Wilson, who was 10 years older than Kim, had already fathered a child by another woman.
For a brief period the couple moved in together but the age difference and Wilson’s possessiveness doomed the relationship. By late 1992, it was over as far as Kim was concerned.
Wilson had other ideas.
FRIENDS RALLY
Seeing her at the Westland Hotel in Hokitika, he demanded to know where she was going, but she refused to tell him. Her cousin Bruce Schroder and a few mates took him outside, roughed him up and sent him on his way.
He returned with a loaded shotgun. Bruce put himself between Wilson and Kim, and Wilson pulled the trigger. The gun failed to go off and Bruce and others wrestled the gun from him.
The incident shocked Wilson’s family and friends.
Jenny Keogan, who still lives in Hokitika and manages a tourist shop, counted both Kim and Wilson as good friends.
‘‘Call it naive . . . we just believed at the time that it was so out of character for him to do that, and we just believed that this had to be a one-off. We all thought we knew him so well.
‘‘We all rallied together and we got petitions and stuff, got references about his great character. We rallied together as a community and did what we could to support him.’’
A petition vouching for his good character collected 800 signatures. Gary Schroder’s younger brother Nigel, who went to school with Wilson and played for the same rugby club, didn’t sign.
‘‘I’ve never understood why he wasn’t charged with attempted murder. I didn’t like him at all. I always thought he was a liar and pretty gutless.’’
He remembers Wilson telling everyone he was so devastated at being dumped by Kim he was going to take his own life. Being on the brink of suicide would be a recurring theme in his life.
‘‘He was trying to get people to feel sorry for him and help. But I thought, ‘He won’t kill himself, he hasn’t got the guts.’ He was very clever at manipulating people,’’ Nigel says.
Wilson pleaded guilty to assault and possessing a loaded firearm in a public place, and was jailed for 10 months. He was out in five and would later say the jail experience ‘‘knocked me to pieces’’.
The Schroders kept supporting him. On almost every Saturday of his prison term, Kim and Nancy travelled to Christchurch to visit him. Wilson said Nancy was always there to pick him up when he fell: ‘‘more of a mother to me than my own mother’’.
DEADLY OBSESSION
He spent Christmas of 1993 with the Schroders and thought he could renew his relationship with their only daughter.
But Kim had started another relationship. Wilson found out and began visiting her flat at night, torturing himself by listening to the couple’s lovemaking. Kim began calling him her stalker. One night he knocked on the door and punched her in the face.
On May 17, 1994, he went to her flat about 9pm. Earlier in the day, Nancy Schroder had dropped off a jersey she had knitted for him. Wilson was greeted at the door by Kim’s flatmate pharmacist, Sean Reilly. Making an excuse to come inside, he held a knife to Reilly’s throat and forced him to crawl on all fours to his bedroom, where he taped his wrists and ankles, gagged him and tied him to the bed end.
Wilson threatened to cut Reilly’s throat if he made any noise and waited two hours for Kim to come home. He hid in Reilly’s bedroom and waited while she made a hot drink and watched television.
He confronted her when she went to the bathroom before bed. They struggled, Kim receiving a deep cut to her right hand. Reilly, still tied up, would later say he heard her pleading with
Wilson to take her to hospital. Instead he forced her into her bedroom and Reilly heard Kim crying, saying she had not had sex with anyone since breaking up with Wilson. He called her a ‘‘lying bitch’’ and gagged her with strips of torn towelling.
He then forced her into bed, cut off her jeans and underwear and raped her. Later he claimed the sex was consensual. Kim’s ordeal lasted about two hours and ended with Wilson cutting her throat with the large carving knife his grandfather used to cut up dog rolls.
After wrapping Kim in bedding, he biked to a small hill above the Arahura River that hosts the Arahura Pa and a Ma¯ ori cemetery. Near his grandmother Muriel’s grave, he cut his wrist in a half-hearted attempt to kill himself.
A short while later he turned up at an address where his grandfather Max Tainui was dying and his mother and three aunts were keeping vigil. ‘‘I’ve just killed Kim Schroder,’’ he said, and told them to call the police.
Jenny Keogan says she was ‘‘absolutely gobsmacked’’ when she heard about Kim’s death. ‘‘I honestly just didn’t think he was capable of doing something like that.
‘‘You think you know somebody so well and you want to believe in them because they’re a good friend of yours and then you hear what happened . . . We’ve all really struggled in lots of different ways after Kimmy died. It does affect your trust in people, it affects your relationships. I wanted to be with Gary and Nancy, this was their only daughter.’’
FIRST TRIAL
At his trial in November 1994, Wilson did not deny killing Kim but said he had ‘‘exploded’’ after she taunted him with talk about sex with other boyfriends. He called on the defence of provocation, which no longer exists.
The jury didn’t buy it and took only a few hours to convict him of murder. Justice Neil Williamson jailed him for life with a minimum non-parole period of 15 years. He had looked for regret in Wilson during the trial, the judge said, but found him ‘‘unusually cold with no obvious signs of remorse’’.
Wilson’s counsel, Steve Hembrow, said his client was in an emotionally bizarre state on the night of the murder and had a picture in his head of a fantasy relationship with Kim Schroder.
‘‘She was the one person in the world he would not have wanted to harm.’’
The 15 years non-parole was later reduced to 13 years by the Court of Appeal.
Wilson began his jail sentence while Kim’s family and friends began a sentence of their own.
‘‘It had a massive impact on Gary and Nancy’s lives,’’ says Keogan. ‘‘Nancy became quite reclusive and stuck to a core group of people like us that sort of hung out with them. My grief back then became my fight for Kimmy. I threw myself into what I felt I needed to do then to help be a voice for Kimmy.’’
MODEL PRISONER
Wilson appears to have made the best of his long lag. He gained a qualification as an electrician and attended hundreds of counselling and therapy sessions. He had regular visits from family and was a trouble-free prisoner, apparently determined to make the most of any opportunities to help him resume a normal life.
He was eventually transferred to the hut complex at Paparua Prison (now Christchurch Men’s), where he continued his friendship with David Bain, who was serving a life sentence after a jury at his first trial found him guilty of shooting his family in June 1994.
By 2007, Wilson appeared before the Parole Board for the first time. The board noted he had been an excellent prisoner but turned him down on the grounds his therapy had not focused on the serious sexual aspects of the ‘‘appalling offence’’.
Another application in 2008 resulted in the board ordering he continue treatment for the