Terror in the dark
A8-10 A8- 10 The full story of the Riverhead quarry attack
A jury yesterday found Colin Jack Mitchell guilty of kidnapping a 23-yearold woman, driving her to a deserted quarry and assaulting her. Anna Leask recounts the fateful night a young woman crossed paths with her attacker, and how she got away.
T he quarry sits at the end of Sawmill Rd in Riverhead and is about 25km from Great North Rd — a 23-minute drive at normal speed with average traffic.
At 2.01am the same silver car belts out of the quarry, visibly much faster than when it went in.
Just metres away, out in the dark silence of the same quarry, covered in her own blood, scrambling over loose gravel to get away from the man she feared would end her life, the 23-year-old called 111.
When the victim woke for the first time, her attacker had been standing over her with a weapon, a mask covering his face.
The jury heard her harrowing story — the first time the full details of her ordeal had been made public.
“I woke up in a gravel area and I can remember feeling this side of my head was just covered in blood.
“I think I had my undies on but I’m not sure, I definitely didn’t have my dress on.
“And there was a man with a mask and some kind of softball or baseball bat and I was crunched up on the ground.
“I don’t really remember what he was wearing.
“He kept asking me to turn around, he was standing about a metre away from me . . . I just knew this wasn’t going to happen to me, so I just refused everything.
“He sounded very strange and he wanted me to turn around and I refused and I just kept begging.
“I just said ‘no, I’m not, I’m not, this isn’t going to happen to me’.
“I think I was saying to him ‘you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to be this person’.
“I don’t know if he said ‘you are going to get yourself killed’ or ‘I’m going to kill you’ but he was threatening me with the bat.
“I just kept begging and begging . . . and I remember him hitting me across the face.
“I starting panicking, thinking ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to have a plan.”
She feared she would be raped and then killed.
The attacker kept demanding the victim turn around and she refused.
“So he hit me again and I must have passed out or got knocked out,” she said. “And then I don’t remember anything.”
The next time she woke up she was on the move.
Remember, she had been drinking — too much, conceded the Crown — but she’d also been struck at least twice across the head with a substantial weapon.
It’s no surprise she had no memory of the sequence of events.
When she came to the second time she was frantically scrambling across loose gravel, terrified she was being followed or that she would hurtle down into the quarry holes below.
Before she even realised she was conscious, she was on the phone to a friend, begging for help, saying she’d had to play dead to get away. She then called 111. “I had no idea where I was,” she said. “I was scared.”
It would take an hour for police to find the distraught woman.
She had no idea where she was, there were no signs or landmarks, and she had no data on her phone so couldn’t help police pinpoint her coordinates. Eventually she came to a building at the quarry — she was finally able to give police enough information to find her.
She cowered, petrified her attacker was lurking nearby.
She wet her pants and threw up, the fear taking over her whole body.
The woman stayed on the phone with the police operator until she saw blue and red flashing lights.
Help had come, but her ordeal was far from over.
“I just remember running out and I just wanted a hug but . . . they didn’t want to touch me for DNA.”
With only fragments of memory and an attacker who had disguised himself, the victim was unable to give police a solid description of her attacker. In the early days, they had no idea who he was and why he had targeted the 23-year-old.
But in the 12 days that followed the victim being found at the quarry, a picture began to emerge of the man responsible. Colin Jack Mitchell.
The CCTV footage. The car. Police were confident Mitchell was their man.
When they got DNA results back that confidence grew to 100 per cent certainty.
The DNA came from a glove found near the scene of the attack at the quarry. It was close to the pool of the victim’s blood that poured from her head wound as she lay injured at the mercy of her attacker.
It was close to drag and claw marks, the result of the victim being dragged through dirt and gravel from her attacker’s car and trying to get away from him.
It was close to her cellphone, found lying in the dirt where it fell as she fled.
The glove was tested by forensic experts and the DNA found on and inside it matched a sample taken from Mitchell’s house when police searched it.
But Mitchell had a different tale to tell. He was not, he claimed, the Riverhead quarry attacker. Police had the wrong man. From the get-go, Mitchell denied the offending.
It wasn’t him, it wasn’t his car — he simply was not on Great North Rd that morning and he certainly wasn’t at Riverhead.
A year to the day of the attack, he spoke for the first time.
After 10 days sitting in the dock in Courtroom 6 at the High Court at Auckland, listening to witness after witness give evidence in the Crown case, it was Mitchell’s turn.
His appearance has changed since his first appearance in court last year — he’s lost weight and his already white hair and beard seem a much
paler shade.
When it was his turn, he explained his movements the night of the attack.
His account would later be branded “a pack of lies” by the Crown — a sentiment arguably believed by the jury who found him guilty.
“Where would you have gone from Avondale?” defence lawyer Mark Ryan quizzed his client.
“I would have come back to my address,” Mitchell responded.
“What time did you get home?” Ryan pressed. Mitchell said he didn’t remember. “Possibly after midnight,” he said. Ryan asked: “Did you travel to the Riverhead area that night?”
“No, I’ve never been up there in my own car,” Mitchell asserted.
He responded similarly, with a firm “no” when Ryan asked if he had travelled near Great North Rd the night of the attack — and to the most important question.
“Did you uplift a young lady?” said Ryan. “No I did not,” Mitchell stated. The truck driver went on to explain how his DNA got on the gloves found at the scene of the brutal attack.
Mitchell needed a pair of gloves so went to The Warehouse to see if he could find some.
He found a three-pack of gloves, all connected together by packaging ties, and tried one pair on.
Ryan asked if Mitchell purchased the gloves after trying them on.
“No, I didn’t . . . I think these ones were too expensive,” he claimed.
He later said the gloves were “not satisfactory to what I wanted to have” so he “hung them back up and kept going”.
Ryan claimed that the “real” attacker must have purchased the exact same pair and left them at the quarry after the incident.
Mitchell was also adamant that the car in the CCTV footage in the city and at Riverhead was not his.
But, after more than two weeks of evidence including police first to the scene, those who undertook the scene examination, cellphone, car, DNA experts and that crucial CCTV footage, the jury simply did not believe him.
Despite his lawyer pulling the Crown case apart, strand by strand — rejecting the “unreliable” cellphone evidence, denying his client’s car was the offending vehicle and doing his best to convince the jury that the glove DNA was coincidental — the jury believed it.
Mitchell was the offender, it was his car, he was guilty.
In the trial of she said, he said — she was the one they believed.