Devil The day the came to Te Teko
The family of Tehiritanga Hill knew something was wrong with him, but they struggled to get him the help he needed for the demons in his head. For his father’s partner, Pania Melrose, it was too late. Tony Wall reports.
Pania Melrose was becoming increasingly worried about her partner’s son, Tehiritanga Hill. He lived with his dad, Bob Hill, at a rural property near Te Teko in Bay of Plenty, an impoverished community which the locals call ‘‘Texas’’.
Melrose, 57, would drive over from her place in Rotorua and spend weekends with them.
The trio also spent the Covid-19 lockdown together. Tehiritanga, 24, – known as Hiri – had a sleepout at the back of the property.
He had a history of strange behaviour, usually when he’d been drinking, but had never been diagnosed or received treatment.
‘‘Mum told me once she woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing in the bedroom door, staring at her,’’ says her only child, Amiria Karekare, 39, who lives in nearby Kawerau.
‘‘Or she’d walk past him and he’d start screaming ‘what did you say?’ and she’d said nothing.’’
Karekare says on the occasions she met Hill, including once when he helped her move her mother’s furniture into house at Te Teko, he seemed socially awkward, shy and withdrawn.
It wasn’t until after her mother died, when reading a psychiatric report, that she and the wider wha¯nau learned what was going on inside his head.
Hill, a kiwifruit worker, told the doctor that he believed he was being controlled by the Devil, that animals were staring at him and Satan was going to take him to hell.
He believed Melrose – a grandmother of three described by her daughter as ‘‘a lovely, lovely person, a very sweet, popular lady’’ – was a witch, could read his thoughts and was taking over control of his body.
Hill’s sister, Jaimee Lagan, says his first psychotic episode happened about five years ago when he was living with her in Perth, Australia.
He’d passed an online course to get his White Card safety certificate so he could work in the construction industry, but had to answer some questions by phone.
‘‘He panicked and freaked out about the phone call, saying ‘I can’t do it’. I thought something must be wrong so I took him to the doctor’s.
‘‘They said ‘something’s definitely wrong, but because it’s his first time, maybe just get a journal for him and let him write down his thoughts’. Every day he’d write in his journal... but that’s as far as it went.’’
According to Karekare, Hill threatened her mother with a knife one Sunday in early June.
‘‘He held it up to her throat and said ‘I’m gonna f...... kill you’,’’ she says.
She was furious with her mother for not calling police, apparently because she didn’t want Hill to be arrested and his father to have to go and pick him up from the cells.
‘‘She said to me, and I know she believed it, ‘he would never hurt me’.’’
Karekare, a second-year psychology student, had a long talk to Melrose about Hill and what to do about his behaviour.
‘‘I said to her, ‘if he’s hearing voices it’s beyond anxiety or depression – you’re looking at bipolar or schizophrenia’.’’
She advised her to stay away from Te Teko. On the Monday, Melrose and Bob Hill took Hill to see a GP in Edgecumbe, and it’s thought a regional mental health crisis team was alerted.
‘‘There was supposed to be a call back, but noone did,’’ Lagan says.
‘‘I want to know what the crisis team did – they’re called that for a reason,’’ adds Karekare.
Dr Fiona Miller, mental health clinical director for the Bay of Plenty District Health Board, says an investigation is under way into the care provided to Hill.
As the matter is subject to ‘‘ongoing legal processes’’, it’s inappropriate to comment further, she says. ‘‘This is a tragic situation and our thoughts go out to the affected families.’’
Bob Hill took his son back to the GP on the Wednesday, Lagan says, and he was given risperidone, an anti-psychotic. He’d never taken such medication before, she says, and it made him worse.
Hill later told doctors that after he started taking the medication the voices in his head became worse and he saw demonic images when looking at faces. He began to see symbols and numbers such as 666, believing they were signs from the Devil. Melrose returned to Rotorua – where she worked as an administrator at a child care centre – but came back to Te Teko on the Thursday evening.
According to a written judgment by Justice Timothy Brewer, on the Friday morning of June 12, Hill rose at about 8am. His father left at about 9am to play golf, leaving his son with Melrose.
Hill later told doctors he thought Melrose was controlling his thoughts and making him do things; that she was part of a ‘‘Devil cult’’ and had made a pact with the Devil to hurt him.
At about 10.30am Melrose phoned her partner saying Hill was becoming aggressive. A short time later, she phoned again, this time crying about Hill’s behaviour.
Hill took the phone and told his father: ‘‘She’s the one to blame, it’s all her fault, it’s getting ugly.’’
There was a physical confrontation on the front lawn – Hill took a hammer and struck Melrose eight or nine times about the head and face, fatally wounding her. She died shortly afterwards.
When Bob Hill arrived home, he found her lying on the lawn with the bloodied hammer nearby; Hill was inside having a shower. His father restrained him until police arrived.
In Kawerau, Karekare had also taken a call from her mother that morning. ‘‘She wasn’t herself, I didn’t recognise her voice, something was wrong. I put it down to lack of sleep – she said ‘we’ve been up all night, we’ve had a bad night with Hiri’.’’
Karekare told her mother she’d make a call to see what was happening about Hill’s referral to mental health services.
Later that morning she was at a petrol station when she saw three police cars speeding out of town.
‘‘Just after lunch a police officer walked into my work and asked for me. He said ‘there’s been an incident in Te Teko and your mother’s passed away’. I asked him immediately, ‘did he kill her?’.’’
She drove to Te Teko and got as far as the police
‘‘I get that they can’t put him in jail with everybody else and leave him there. But what I can’t understand is that it makes him not guilty.’’ Amiria Karekare on Tehiritanga Hill, above.
tape. She could see her mother’s body, but wasn’t allowed any closer. ‘‘That’s the last time I saw my mum – on the ground under a blanket on the front lawn of that house.’’
She wasn’t able to view the body at the funeral home. Hill’s attack had left her unrecognisable.
The first psychiatrist who examined Hill after the killing deemed him fit to stand trial because of the treatment he’d since received, but also believed ‘‘there are ample grounds to consider a defence of insanity’’.
Two different psychiatrists for the Crown and defence diagnosed him with schizophrenia and said he was insane at the time of the homicide.
Justice Brewer wrote that he was satisfied Hill was ‘‘labouring under a disease of the mind to such an extent as to render him incapable of knowing that striking Ms Melrose with the hammer was morally wrong’’. He found him not guilty of murder on account of his insanity.
The words ‘‘not guilty’’ strike at Karekare’s heart. After the final court hearing last month, it felt like her mother’s killing had been brushed under the carpet, she says.
‘‘We left that courtroom feeling like it was similar to appearing for a traffic offence.
‘‘I get that they can’t put him in jail with everybody else and leave him there. But what I can’t understand is that it makes him not guilty.
‘‘It probably seems like such a trivial thing, but he took my mum’s life and is ‘not guilty’, just like someone who didn’t do it. There’s no record, no criminal conviction. It’s not fair for my mum – she gets nothing.
‘‘We feel very strongly there was no justice served for my mother with that result.’’
Since 2004, 34 people have been found not guilty of murder or manslaughter by reason of insanity, according to data compiled by by The Homicide Report, a Stuff investigation into why New Zealanders kill.
Karekare supports a private members’ bill by National MP Louise Upston, which unanimously passed its first reading earlier this year. The bill would change the wording of verdicts in such cases to ‘‘proven, but not criminally responsible on account of insanity’’.
It would also give victims’ families a voice before decisions are made on releasing an offender back into the community, and notify them when that happens.
Karekare also wants changes to the system for victim impact statements, as she feels they are being watered down.
‘‘I had to take out ‘murder’, ‘murderer’, ‘murdered’, ‘killed’. I still got to address the fact that he killed her, without saying it.
‘‘You had to be strategic and use things like ‘by your hands’. The judge said you can’t address or direct anything ... at the defendant.’’
Some members of her family are angry at Bob Hill for leaving Melrose with his son that day and not returning more quickly when she rang him. They wouldn’t let him attend the funeral. Karekare feels no animosity.
‘‘I feel sorry for him, because I imagine he finds it very hard to live with that. I have a lot of [guilty feelings]. I don’t know what I could have done, exactly. I feel like [I] probably could have made a few more calls, really pushed it.’’
Bob Hill was unavailable for comment as his father had just died.
Lagan says she understands the frustration felt by Melrose’s family.
‘‘Dad feels bad, he’s still kicking himself. He never would have left Pania alone if he thought something like that could possibly happen. He tries to keep busy as much as he can to keep his mind off things.’’
She says her father told Melrose over the phone to leave the property if she felt scared.
‘‘She goes, ‘I can’t leave him like this’. She thought she could help him. It’s just a real sad situation.’’
Hill is getting the help he needs in a secure facility, she says.
‘‘He has no comprehension of what he’s done, he’s still not right. My brother went to visit and said he’s lost, zoning out, in another world.’’