Hell with the Beast
Despite living hundreds of kilometres away, the man known as the Beast of Blenheim casts a menacing shadow over his former partner. Harrison Christian reports.
LORRAINE is a small, timid woman, 60 years old but frail beyond her years. She suffers from nightmares triggered by memories of her 14-year relationship with Stewart Murray Wilson, aka ‘‘The beast of Blenheim’’.
‘‘I lash out,’’ she says, rolling up a sleeve to reveal a thin arm covered in bruises. ‘‘That’s the latest one there, from when I up and bashed the wall.’’
Lorraine (not her real name) sits at the dining table with a cup of coffee. ‘‘I’m meant to be taking medication, but after what I went through with him,’’ she says through sharp breaths, ‘‘I won’t even take an aspirin now.’’
‘‘She yells out a bit sometimes at night,’’ confirms Rererangi Eketone. A sexual abuse therapist and counsellor, Eketone acts as Lorraine’s victim advocate. The pair have lived together in her small Hamilton unit for two years.
Eketone is staunch. Tainui. Nononsense. A 64-year-old who’s survived three bouts of cancer. She is dedicated to securing the compensation she believes Lorraine deserves from ACC, which she scathingly refers to as the ‘‘re-traumatisation unit’’.
To Lorraine, Wilson is ‘‘him’’ or ‘‘he;’’ she seldom uses his name. Perhaps it helps diminish the phantom presence he seems to hold, despite the fact he is down country and held
under strict parole conditions. In 1996, Wilson was jailed for crimes against at least 42 women and girls, the charges covering rape, stupefying, bestiality, ill treatment of children and indecent assault.
He currently lives in a cottage on the grounds of Whanganui Prison under an extended supervision order.
Sunday News spoke with Wilson two months ago, as he fished at the Whanganui river mouth during one of his scheduled public outings. Standing on a pier away from the two minders who accompany him whenever he leaves the prison boundary, Wilson revealed he was being investigated once again by police for historic rape allegations. He denied all his offending, and demanded his freedom.
A request that Lorraine’s face not be photographed for this story could be well-justified – she alleges Wilson has twice threatened her life behind bars.
Of all Wilson’s victims – and there were many – Lorraine was perhaps the longest-suffering. During Wilson’s reign over her life she was drugged, beaten and forced to have sex with other women and a dog.
She gave birth to two of Wilson’s children: a daughter with whom she’s no longer in contact, and a boy who died of brain damage in infancy. While pregnant with her son, Wilson beat here so severely she lost consciousness.
Wilson took advantage of Lorraine’s meek and trusting nature from day one. They were mere acquaintances when he spotted her out walking in South Auckland in the 1980s, and decided to rope her into his squalid life.
‘‘He just turned around and said ‘right, you’re coming with me’, and that’s when he started pumping the drugs into me, and not letting me go.‘‘And if I didn’t take them, he’d up and bash me. My whole face, my whole bottom jaw was smashed.’’
Eketone continues: ‘‘Lorraine couldn’t talk much about this at first. It took a while.’’
A diagnosed psychopath, Wilson, now 70, has always used manipulation and intimidation to get his way. When he was finally locked up, Lorraine was freed from the drug-addled captivity he’d inflicted on her.
But in subsequent years she somehow fell through the cracks of social services. For decades she lived a transient life, even spending time on the streets, with no government support.
During the late 1990s in Auckland, a woman she met at a bingo night agreed to take her in and ended up as her caregiver.
She assisted the woman, who has since died, for about 19 years, until meeting Eketone two years ago.
At that point, she weighed just 33 kilograms. Aged in her late 50s, she looked more like an 80-yearold.
‘‘In all my life, in all my years I’ve worked in sexual abuse, this is the most horrific case ever,’’ says Eketone.
Lorraine has a strong advocate in Eketone, who gives no quarter.
In 2015, after two months lobbying ACC on Lorraine’s behalf, Eketone secured her $20,500: a special claim for post traumatic stress disorder. It was the first form of compensation Lorraine had ever received for her abuse, almost 20 years after the fact.
But Eketone hasn’t stopped there – due to her ailing health, she says she can’t look after Lorraine for much longer and argues ACC should pay for Lorraine to live in a rest home.
She says Lorraine would not be safe living independently or in a boarding house, because she gets ‘‘taken over’’ by opportunists.
Lorraine’s eyes fill with tears. Like Wilson, she is a prisoner in her own right; the trauma he inflicted on her is a life sentence.
‘‘You take the amount of drugs that I was on, and get forced into having sex with another woman. Or dog,’’ she says.
‘‘How would you feel? If you didn’t do it, you got a hiding, you got put into a cold bath. Right? This is what I had to put up with.’’
‘‘But I’m happy,’’ Lorraine continues, ‘‘And I’m grateful for the support that I’m getting from my advocate. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know where I’d be today. And that’s all I can say is that my advocate has helped me right from the outset, and I appreciate it.’’
‘ In all my years I’ve worked in sexual abuse, this is the most horrific case ever.’ RERERANGI EKETONE
HARRISON CHRISTIAN, DAVID UNWIN / STUFF