‘Paranoia’ in challenge to mum’s estate

An Auckland engineer who killed his father and then sued his brother for a greater share of their late mother’s $700,000 estate has lost his court battle.

Paul Holden Ellis, 46, unsuccessfully sued through Australian courts over a $65,000 payment his brother Clive received.

Ellis was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder of his father Tony after beating him to death with a baseball bat at their home north of Auckland in 2001.

A Ministry of Health inquiry into the failings of the South Auckland mental health unit treating Paul Ellis found ‘‘a combination of errors, omissions, timing and circumstances’’ led to ‘‘overall inadequacy’’.

Ellis and his two brothers, Clive and Spencer, were left around $220,000 each after their mother Victoria died in 2010.

Clive had been close to Paul, returning from Australia after their father’s death to do much of the investigation work into the Health Ministry inquiry.

But Why on Earth he would ever take me to court. . . It’s unbelievable. their dispute arose over $65,000 Clive was paid for renovations, property tax and a deposit he paid on their mother’s Perth home.

The Supreme Court of Western Australia has accepted that this money had been a loan to be repaid when their mother passed away.

‘‘Why on Earth he would ever take me to court I don’t know. It’s unbelievable,’’ said Clive from Western Australia. ‘‘In his own paranoid way he thought I had committed some sort of fraud.’’

Clive Ellis, who represented himself, stresses he’s not bitter and twisted about the ordeal, but has come to the conclusion that his brother is ‘‘evil’’.

‘‘He’s evil for trying to control the family. What he did to mum, to the extent to which he’s tried to blame others.

‘‘When the family tragedy happened, I did everything for him. I gave him every opportunity to rehabilitate himself and give himself another go.’’

Clive says he came face to face with Paul for the first time in years in a Western Australian courtroom.

‘‘It was fine,’’ he says. ‘‘We both came from the same chicken. I’m hardly going to be scared. I would like nothing more to sit down and have a beer with him. But he owes me an apology.’’ Paul Ellis declined to comment. He was released in 2008 after spending several years in a secure unit at the Mason Clinic in Auckland. He was recalled to the clinic after he stopped his medication, and during the court battle in Australia, blamed medication on the killing of his father.

Since his release, he has built up a successful engineering firm.

In an interview with Metro magazine in 2009, Paul Ellis told how he was ‘‘chillingly calm’’ as he drove to his father’s home after being released from a Counties Manukau DHB mental illness unit.

‘‘I got the strange idea in my head that my father had killed his father and I had to kill him as well. Because he didn’t ever talk about his father or his family. That’s madness for you.’’

Subsequently, Clive Ellis helped his mother move to Perth, where he helped her buy the house. After her death the property sold for $1.3m.

Clive says his brother had wasted more than $30,000 in legal fees pursuing the case.