At the dark end of the street
The disappearance and killing of young women has helped cement the seedy status of Auckland’s K Rd. But is its reputation deserved? Tommy Livingston and Kelly Dennett report.
Karangahape Rd was the first street in New Zealand illuminated by modern street lights. Turned on in 1948, they’ve been keeping the darkness at bay day in, and day out. But since those lights have soaked the streets, the road has been defined by what goes on in the shadows.
Its hedonistic heyday was the 1980s, and 90s – when prostitution was illegal – but a series of vanishings and deaths of young women connected to the street cemented its sinister feel.
Now, one of the darkest shadows to ever wander the road could soon see the light of day.
New Zealand’s first serial killer, Hayden Poulter, has been behind bars for more than 20 years, but the Parole Board hinted his prison days are numbered. Poulter raped and bludgeoned his first victim, young sex worker Natacha Hogan, in Pigeon Park, a cemetery at the corner of Karangahape Rd in 1996.
A nun walking her dog found Hogan’s body on a dewy morning, and the street was immediately on guard as police hunted for her killer. The fear reached fever pitch when days later Poulter, a labourer living in Mangere, wrote to media promising he would kill again – and he did. A week after Hogan’s death Poulter walked into a Fort St massage parlour and stabbed the manager, Herbert Norris, and Thai worker Ladda Nimphet.
Another worker was also stabbed, but survived.
Later that day, Poulter turned himself in at the Auckland central police station, leaving a bloodied knife on the front counter. In interviews with assessors presentencing, he said he’d never paid a prostitute but said the recent imprisonment of his girlfriend – a sex worker – had triggered something in him.
An alter ego named ‘Hell’ made him kill, he claimed, but he was deemed by health assessors to be sane and jailed for a minimum of 15 years. Now, reports show Poulter is inching toward freedom, having completed various outings in a bid to ensure he can properly reintegrate into society.
‘‘1996 was quite a f ..... hell of a year for all of us. Terrifying as f...,’’ former sex worker Amanda Wolfe says. Wolfe was friends with Natacha and the pair, of similar age, were part of an unusual trio who stuck together on K Rd but persistently fought with one another.
The third member of that trio was Jane Furlong, who vanished three years before Natacha was killed. Jane’s skeleton was found two decades later at a remote beach, and her murder remains unsolved. A documentary made about Furlong’s disappearance featured Hogan stoically – or naively – saying death was a risk the sex workers were willing to take.
Natacha’s murder was the culmination of years of attacks and murders of sex workers. In 1989 a young Leah Stephens disappeared into the night from the corner of Upper Queen St and K Rd. Her body was later found at Muriwai and her boyfriend was charged with her murder. Then in 1990, Debbie Purdy, another sex worker, was strangled by her husband on K Rd.
By the time of Furlong’s disappearance in 1993, many street workers lived in fear for their lives. ‘‘We were petrified,’’ Wolfe says. ‘‘You could feel the tension. Normally people would say, ‘Hello doll, how you doing?’ You’d share a cigarette, a drink, but when there’s issues, you’d find people were too scared to work so they’d just go around stealing off each other.’’
Hogan was not a particularly well liked figure on K Rd, Wolfe says, because of odd habits she had like spitting, or smoking in people’s cars and accidentally burning their vinyl seats. But she was also generous, and fun and freespirited, and Wolfe recalls Hogan routinely spoiled Amanda’s children with clothes and toys.
She recalled a time when the pair bought nearly $100 worth of McDonald’s and shared it amongst children who were living on the street. ‘‘She was always generous to people.’’
By then the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective had set up a base near K Rd.
Its coordinator, Catherine Healy, spent time there, working with the Department of Health to encourage the sex workers to operate safely, while simultaneously battling the police who routinely raided massage parlours.
The tension resulted in a distrust of the police, and the collective launched its own system of registering dodgy clients. Women reported their experiences to the collective to build what they called an Ugly Mugs profile.
‘‘We used to finish the year around December 24, and the parting shot would be, ‘I hope everyone is going to remain safe’ because I recall the phones going … when some other traumatic situation had occurred. It was a horrific kind of time,’’ Healy says. Still, the workers forged on. ‘‘At that moment in time when people came in they would say things like it was freaky and stuff, but they were continuing to work. So the awareness was there, but the resilience as well.
‘‘It was a potpourri of people, drama, drugs, grog and gangs.’’
Private investigator Ian Varley tilts his head back, trying to remember working the beat along K Rd in the 80s.
A detective at the time, he had a front-row seat during the street’s darkest days.
‘‘Seedy is a reasonable description of it. I don’t think you would have taken your mum up there for a cup of coffee, that is the best way to describe it,’’ he says.
‘‘There were characters up there. Most people wouldn’t have lived a life like that, they certainly wouldn’t have experienced it.’’
Varley remembers Furlong and Hogan, but only just. They were but a couple of many working girls who lingered around street corners.
The K Rd of today is nothing like its younger self, according to Varley. The community of ‘‘characters’’ which used to colour it have all but moved on.
It was the disappearances and deaths which began to spell the end of an era for K Rd.
‘‘An escalation of events in that street caused a death knell to that scene. It is a phase of us growing up as a country.’’
Historian Edward Bennett says K Rd is a mixture of myth and mystery. An almost make-believe place in the New Zealand psyche where bad things happen.
‘‘It is largely an illusion,’’ he says. ‘‘You have a very tiny number of things creating quite a lot of noise. That cast a veil across the entire street.’’
K Rd’s journey down the garden path began in 1962. Auckland’s red light district was previously at the wharf but was eradicated by the Auckland City Council in attempts to clean up the city. The strip clubs and sex workers moved to the lowrent buildings along K Rd.
During the late 80s and 90s it was seedy, Bennett admits, but it was also at times dull and drab with a mixture of clothes shops, Bible bookstores, and the odd strip club.
‘‘You have these two worlds ignoring each other. When one set was open, the other was closed up.’’
By day, K Rd was frequented by women, mostly Polynesians doing their shopping. At night, it became home to the down-and-outers, prostitutes and pimps.
But even then K Rd’s sex scene made up only 3 per cent of the overall business along the street, Bennett says.
The Natacha Hogans and Jane Furlongs of the world made the area seem more sinister than it really was, he reckons.
‘‘When you hear of a prostitute being murdered in the graveyard it heightens things. People think K Road is lined with prostitutes and strip clubs. It isn’t, and never has been.’’
This fiction is what has made it famous. And like Las Vegas, historian Bennett says the narrative around K Rd forms a purpose.
‘‘Everyone needs a place to go to do bad things. In the same sense, everyone needs to know there is a place where the bad things happen, so they can avoid it. That’s K Rd.’’
When convicted double murderer David Tamihere was released in 2010, the Parole Board told him where to live, electronically monitored him, and banned him from visiting the Coromandel – where, a jury found, he murdered Swedish backpackers Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen.
Over time, the restrictions were scaled back, and his electronic monitoring was replaced with a curfew.
Criminologist Dr Jarrod Gilbert says Hayden Poulter will face a similar fate. While releasing New Zealand’s first serial killer may make for good headline fodder, people like Poulter can reintegrate, Gilbert believes.
‘‘The reason I say that is, thankfully, very few people are released from jail to go on and commit murder again.
‘‘There have only been two known cases in New Zealand of people convicted of murder, murdering again once released.’’
Gilbert acknowledges communities generally don’t welcome ex-convicts – in some cases for good reason.
‘‘Remember, we are never going to produce saints here. We are working in a very difficult area. There is always going to be an element of risk.’’
Ultimately though, Poulter, like others, can’t be in prison forever.
‘‘If we are going to keep locking people up, we’ve just got a society of prisoners.’’
In less than a year Poulter may be free to walk down K Rd, and through Pigeon Park once again.
Under the same street lights where Furlong and Hogan once stood, and down a road now busy with cafes and art stores.
In many ways, the road is a shadow of its former self.
Some will undoubtedly wonder whether he is too.