Torture trial: Pair guilty of murder in horror house
Graphic content warning Mother of teen victim sits through grisly evidence
Aman and woman have been found guilty of torturing and murdering a teenage girl at an Auckland “house of horrors”. Ashley Winter, 29, and Kerry Te Amo, 25, have been on trial for the past 21⁄2 weeks in the High Court at Auckland.
They were accused of killing Dimetrius Pairama, whose body was found on July 8 last year by police searching an abandoned state house on Buckland Rd in Ma¯ngere.
The 17-year-old had been dumped in a rusty steel drum, among some weeds.
The jury took much of yesterday afternoon to find both the accused guilty after retiring to deliberate yesterday morning. There was little to no emotion shown by anyone in the courtroom, including Winter and Te Amo in the dock, when the verdicts were delivered.
During the trial, the jurors had heard some truly horrific evidence, leading Justice Timothy Brewer to invite them to take up the court’s 24-hour counselling services.
It was the first time Pairama’s mum had heard the raw details about what happened to her daughter.
On day one of the trial this month, Lena Hetaraka-Pairama was shocked and distraught by the graphic nature of the evidence.
“I didn’t realise it was going to be the first thing talked about and it hit hard,” she told the Herald yesterday.
“We got briefed a little about it . . . I tried to sit through the whole thing.”
The guilty verdicts, she said, made her feel more at ease but empty.
“I was more hurt because of what she had to go through, that some people had laid their hands on her like that.
“I feel sorry for my baby because she’s not going to know her sister,” Hetaraka-Pairama said of her now 2-year-old daughter.
Pairama was described by those who knew her as a “bubbly, pretty and very friendly” girl with a distinctive laugh.
She was a student at Northland College in Kaikohe who loved kapa haka, singing and arts and crafts.
At the start of the trial, Winter pleaded guilty to kidnapping Pairama but denied murdering her.
Te Amo had initially denied both charges but at the end of the trial’s evidence also pleaded guilty to kidnapping Pairama.
Throughout the trial, however, they blamed each other for Pairama’s death.
Pairama’s short life ended at what Te Amo’s lawyer, Shane Tait, described as a horror house.
“The house of horrors on Buckland Rd . . . We’ll never know exactly what happened,” he said.
The court, however, heard from another teenager who was at the house.
She was the Crown’s key witness and was given immunity from prosecution by the Deputy SolicitorGeneral.
“They told her to take her clothes off and shaved her hair, burned her body parts and then had a little meeting,” the teen witness said.
Pairama, the teen said, was “crying . . . she doesn’t know how to fight . . . she just went with it”.
Tied to a chair with rope and gagged, Pairama was then given a chilling choice: At three o’clock to be stabbed if she didn’t choose death by hanging.
The witness told Detective Constable Frageo (Damon) Petersen in a filmed interview that she was told to keep lookout and heard stomping and banging.
“One of them came outside and I opened the door and I saw her hanging,” the 15-year-old witness said.
A noose had been fashioned out of bedsheets.
Pairama’s body was then cut down and wrapped in the sheets and plastic.
The group, which included a fourth person, left about 1am, having dumped Pairama’s body in a rusty, steel drum among some weeds.
Winter was the one in charge, the witness said. “Everyone listens to Ashley.”
Walker said what happened at the house was “barbaric”.
Winter and Te Amo are now due to be sentenced in November.