A shadow in the night
For years, the people of South Auckland were terrorised by a sexual predator. Elizabeth Binning looks back on the story of the hunt for Joseph Thompson.
When police knocked on Joseph Thompson’s door at 7am on a Saturday, the serial rapist knew there was no point trying to run.
He opened the door and told the officers: “I’ve been waiting for you guys. It had to come, I know that.”
It was something of an anti-climax for Detective Sergeant Dave Henwood, one of the lead officers responsible for hunting down the notorious “South Auckland Rapist”, New Zealand’s worst serial sex offender.
“We had planned every possible response from him and of course we got the best possible response we could get from him,” says Henwood as Thompson becomes eligible for parole for the first time.
Thompson was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 25 years in 1995 — the harshest handed down since the death penalty was abolished.
“It is difficult to think of any person who has brought more pain and misery to so many people in recent New Zealand history,” Justice Fisher told him. Thompson pleaded guilty to 129 charges, including rapes and sexual violations against 47 victims, dating back to 1983.
Henwood, who is now retired, says Thompson’s offending was on a scale the likes of which police had never seen before. He believes the number of victims was much closer to 70.
But it wasn’t until 1993 that police first suspected a serial rapist might be at work — and even then they had no idea that he had already been offending for 10 years.
In February that year, a traumatised 12-year-old-girl told detectives she had been dragged from room to room and raped four times by a masked intruder as her mother lay tied to a couch. The man, who had climbed through an open window at 2am, and carried a knife, threatened to kill both of them before fleeing into the night.
He was described as Ma¯ori, about 1.78m tall, of slim to medium build, wearing blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He had a ponytail and was well-spoken.
Police managed to track him to John Walker Drive before losing his trail. It would be another three years until they found him.
By August, police said it was too early to say whether the sexual violation of a 15-year-old girl taken from her Clendon home to Mountford Park was linked to two earlier rapes in the area. But two months later, when an 11-year-old was threatened with a knife and raped in her living room while her brother slept nearby, it was impossible to ignore the similarities.
Three days later a story headlined “Fear has grip on Manurewa” hit the newsstands. There were now possible links to five rapes and four other possible sex-related incidents in the South Auckland suburb.
Residents were scared, fixing extra locks to windows and doors. Children were taken to school rather than being allowed to walk on their own.
One woman was so scared she lied about being attacked in an attempt to increase the police presence in her neighbourhood. Instead, she faced charges for laying a false complaint.
Detectives urged residents not to form vigilante groups, saying they could hamper the 27 officers who were working on Operation Park — named in reference to Mountfort Park, a location near the attacks.
Police were now officially looking for a serial rapist, but Henwood assured the public they were confident of catching the man.
By the end of 1993, police said they were following “promising” leads on a serial sex offender who had struck more than eight times since 1989 in O¯ tara, Manurewa and Wiri.
But, with DNA testing still in its infancy, they were only scratching the surface — Thompson’s list of victims already topped more than 30.
Henwood says the team were under constant pressure and without any real leads or experience in dealing with a serial rapist.
“It was a 24/7 thing. You are under stress because you are trying to investigate the last one and there’s another one coming in and you are trying to prevent the next one . . . it was at a time when serial rapists weren’t something that we all knew about. We had to read up on it.”
Knowing the rapist hadn’t “just fallen out of the sky”, Henwood started going through old files, including unsolved rape complaints.
“I remember sitting at home in bed reading the damn things to get a handle on whether they were all committed by one person, and that’s where the profiling started.”
Political pressure
In early 1994, pressure was mounting. Manukau City mayor Sir Barry Curtis pleaded with the community to help catch the serial rapist.
“As with all of these things, somebody knows what’s going on,” he told the media. “All I can do is appeal to people if they do have any suspicions whatsoever, to report them please.” His call came after a 13-year-old girl was bashed and raped as her younger brother slept nearby. Police believed she was the rapist’s 26th victim and officers visited more than 400 homes in the hope of finding some sort of clue as to who was responsible. Curtis recalls people going as far as putting number 8 wire around their property to prevent the rapist from coming into their homes. “There’s no doubt about it, the community at large were absolutely terrified knowing there was this kind of person on the loose and eluding the police.”
“He was terrorising young mothers, single mothers, families . . .”
By this stage, police were turning to America in the hope that by studying serial rapists they might be able to “enter the mind” of the South Auckland Rapist.
In April 1994, Curtis made another plea for information, this time asking people to get in touch with him directly, saying he would give a personal guarantee of confidentiality. His request generated hundreds of calls — and criticism from police who said he had no legal authority to offer protection to informants. Curtis wasn’t worried, and instead highlighted the lack of progress police were making on the case.
“I certainly wasn’t trying to belittle the police,” he recalls.
“But two years is two years and I got to the stage where I had to try a new way of trying to tempt people to provide any information they had which would assist to apprehend this particular person.”
As tensions grew, a 14-year-old girl lay in Middlemore Hospital, drifting in and out of consciousness because her face was so swollen, and missing a tooth after being repeatedly punched during a rape at her Papatoetoe home.
The suspect list now stood at 600 and police said it was “a long, slow process eliminating a suspect from an inquiry like this”.
Why couldn’t they catch him?
Police knew the rapist tended to choose Ma¯ori victims, many of whom were girls aged between 10 and 16.
He hunted at night, knew the areas he offended in well and did his research in advance. In one incident he knocked on a door and told the girl who answered it that her cousin — whom he named — was waiting outside for her. When she went outside to look, he attacked.
He had also returned to attack at least three young girls for a second time after they failed to tell anyone about their first rapes.
Police knew his weapon of choice was a knife, often taken from within the victim’s home. He sometimes covered his face and was getting increasingly violent.
But, the reality was police weren’t really any closer to catching Thompson. Their only description hadn’t changed much — he was a Ma¯ori or Pacific Islander in his 20s, about 1.73m tall and now had short hair.
The DNA they did have only linked the crimes, it did not identify him. He had no distinctive features, no distinctive voice or accent.
An Operation Park spokeswoman admitted that police hadn’t even been close to catching him; there were no near-misses, no moments where he was within their grasp.
In May 1994, the pressure was continuing to grow. Manurewa MP George Hawkins questioned whether police had been too slow to take the attacks seriously. Police followed up with a $50,000 reward for any information leading to a conviction — the highest ever offered by police.
Manukau police commander Superintendent Brian Hartley hoped the reward would bring the breakthrough police had been looking for. It didn’t.
“It was a massive investigation and there was certainly a lot of pressure on, especially when John [Manning, the lead officer] took us down the profiling road — it was something that had never been done before and there was a fair bit of heat on him,” says Henwood.
“Anybody can sit in the heat for a little while but when it goes on year after year — it was about two-anda-half years, I think, before we put him away — it was a bit stressful.”
Police Minister John Luxton visited the inquiry team and reassured the public that police had the resources they needed, as Hawkins continued to voice his criticisms over the time it was taking to make an arrest.
O¯ tara MP Phillip Field weighed in, asking community and church leaders to lend their support to the hunt, for neighbours to look out for each other and to act if there was any suspicious behaviour in the neighbourhood.
By July, DNA had linked 10 of the attacks. Other evidence matched a further five. Another 22 rapes were suspected to be the work of the same man.
But, Detective Senior Sergeant Stewart Mills told the Listener that police were still looking for “a shadow in the night”.
He blamed the size of the area Thompson was operating in, the fact that he moved between suburbs frequently and the fact that victims were largely too young and traumatised to recall many details.
False leads, blood tests and more pressure
During 1994, there were several leads that went nowhere.
White sneakers left on a lawn, a discarded bloodstained jacket and a distinctive Stanley screwdriver — all were tantalising but futile clues.
In October, police increased the reward to $100,000. Again it failed to generate the break they desperately needed.
In 1995, the number of officers working on Operation Park doubled to 40 as police again admitted: “We don’t have any idea really who the offender is.”
Two FBI investigators were brought over from America to help with the criminal profiling and police asked colleagues in Australia, the United States and Pacific Islands to check whether they had similar cases that might be related.
By May 1995, police were approaching men in the street, asking for blood samples from anyone who matched the generic description. They were forced to defend the approach, saying it was a lawful investigative tool in what had become the hunt for the most wanted criminal in New Zealand.
The Criminal Bar Association slammed the move, saying it was unjustified.
The controversial technique caused even more outrage when All Black winger Eric Rush was pulled aside for questioning while shopping at Manukau mall and asked for a blood test.
“I was in this record store and they came in and said ‘oh excuse me mate, we are investigating and you fit the profile, do you mind giving us a blood test’,” Rush recalls.
“I was a little bit like ‘oh shit’, but then I thought if it was going to catch the guy I have no worries doing it.”
Rush chuckles while remembering the reaction of a male officer who was waiting outside the store as he came out with a female officer.
“When she took me outside to the other guy who was going to do the test he went ‘oh shit’. He goes ‘you don’t know who this is do you?’
“He said ‘look mate, you don’t have to do this’. I said ‘nah, if it helps then I’m doing it’.”
Rush had a young daughter at the time and there had been a rape near his home.
“It was a very scary time for
everyone,” he says.
“People were locking their doors and reacting to every little sound. I kept a baseball bat in the corner.”
By July more than $4.6 million had been spent trying to find the notorious rapist.
And then came the breakthrough.
Gotcha
On July 17 1995, Joseph Thompson appeared in court charged with 24 counts of rape dating from November 1990 to December 1994. The charges related to 15 victims, aged between 10 and 43, who lived in Manurewa, Papatoetoe, Wiri, O¯tara and Mt Albert. More charges were to follow.
Several hundred people gathered outside the court to catch a glimpse of the man who had terrorised women and children for years. “I have been waiting for this for a long time,” said a man whose cousin was raped. “All I want is a look at him.”
Rush describes it as a collective relief. “Everyone in South Auckland was happy,” he says.
“He worked up the road at Bluebird, where some of my mates worked. His parents lived on Cobham Crescent [a few streets from his own home]. It was a bit close to home.”
A size 10 shoeprint left at the scene of a Papatoetoe rape in 1994, blood left behind after a young victim fought back and he cut his hand on her tooth, and a saliva sample were Thompson’s downfall.
Police said a print from a distinctive John Bull branded work boot was a vital clue.
Over eight months they found the same shoe print at the sites of six other attacks and added it to their profile.
That resulted in Thompson joining the pool of suspects in April.
At the same time, police were working their way through 5000 names generated by a computer program to find sex offenders who matched the profile — someone who had committed a burglary as their first offence in their teens, carried out their first rape in their mid-20s and who lived close to where that first rape took place.
Thompson wasn’t on the first list as he was 36 and the profile suggested the rapist would be under 35.
But, the blood sample left behind after his young victim fought back brought police a step closer; it revealed that only 20 per cent of the population had that type of blood.
That eliminated the majority of people on the original list and a new profile was created that generated roughly 80 names, Thompson’s among them.
In May, police went to Thompson’s home. He refused to give a blood sample, citing religious grounds, but did provide an oral swab.
Using his saliva scientists were able to link his DNA to the rapes.
ESR forensic scientist Sue Vintiner, who helped link the first three rapes in 1993, says it was a good feeling being able to provide police with the results of that first saliva test. “I recall the police were very pleased that they may, at long last, have a lead.”
She says the wait for the second test, which was needed for absolute confirmation, felt like a long time. Back then it took several weeks for the test results to come back and they weren’t sure whether there would be enough DNA left in that test. Fortunately, there was and the news they had all been waiting for was confirmed. Soon after, Henwood and a colleague were knocking on Thompson’s door.
After an 18-hour interview, Thompson took detectives on a tour of Auckland, pointing out the houses in which he had attacked — including eight that the police hadn’t even been aware of.
The victims
Thompson may have had close to 70 victims, but the impact of his offending affected many more people. Their friends, their families and the general fear faced by many in the community was immeasurable.
While those in the community felt relief after the arrest, many of his victims were scared and many were left a shadow of their former selves.
One of his victims, a 13-year-old babysitter, told the Herald that on the day of the sentencing that she walked down the streets wondering whether men she passed were the one who raped her at knifepoint.
He was masked at the time of her attack and she had gone to court to see the face behind the mask, but he looked directly at her, which left her traumatised all over again.
She stopped doing things she normally would — like going out with friends — and tried not to reveal her feelings to her family because she knew it upset them. She became moody, dropped out of school and locked herself in her room.
Her mother said it had affected all the family and caused immeasurable amounts of anger and despair.
She also faced her daughter’s rapist in court. “I looked at him and I thought, ‘What an insignificant weed of a man. You have caused untold grief and unnecessary pressure’.”
Crown prosecutor Simon Moore said Thompson had left behind an extraordinary trail of incalculable social and emotional destruction over 11 years.
Some of his victims were suicidal, suffered flashbacks, nightmares or an inability to sleep. There were feelings of self-blame, school dropouts, paranoia, vomiting and weight gain.
One teen was obsessed with cleanliness and would bathe five times a day and wash her clothing and linen 10 times a day.
There were, however, some victims who refused to let him ruin their lives.
“There’s a lot of people who feel grief, who feel shame and who feel dirty . . . but I didn’t feel any of that,” said one woman who was raped twice in 1989.
“In my mind, it was very clear who did what to who.
“He broke into my house while I was minding my business and minding my children. I’m an innocent woman; why should I feel bad about what he did to me?” says the woman, who is now happily married and has several grandchildren. The making of a rapist Born in Whakata¯ne, into a family with 11 siblings, and a father who was later charged with raping his own daughters, Thompson received very little parental supervision.
He was sodomised from the age of 3, alcohol was part of his life from the age of 6 and drugs were common in his teens.
His father admitted he had had a “broken life” which involved violence.
At 9, when Thompson was living with a relative, he was shipped off to one of his parents, who sent him back to his sisters because he wasn’t wanted.
He came to the attention of social workers at 10 and was charged with burglary at 13. By 15 he had joined a gang. He was 25 when he became a rapist.
His first partner, the mother of two of his children, left him, unable to take the abusive and drunken behaviour. A second partner, the mother of his third child, left him for the same reasons in the mid-1980s.
By day Thompson appeared to be a quiet man who kept to himself. Those who knew him used words like “kind”, “helpful”, “mellow” and even “gentle”. Neighbours described a man who helped fix a flat car battery and often popped over with his wife and their dog to say hi.
Colleagues at the Bluebird Factory in Manukau said sometimes he seemed a bit odd but he was generally friendly and unobtrusive.
Thompson’s stepmother said she had suspected her stepson was the South Auckland Rapist but “nobody believed me”. She didn’t go to police as she didn’t have any evidence, just her suspicions.
His half-sister said she also suspected he was responsible because “everywhere he lived there was rape”.
By the time Thompson was arrested he had four children and a new wife who was reportedly “suffering terrible agony” after learning who her husband really was.
Despite his upbringing, police said Thompson never used it as an excuse and took full responsibility for his actions.
It’s something Henwood has reflected on over the years. He now believes Thompson actually lacked any real awareness of the pain he had caused.
“He had no concept of the absolute bloody field of misery he’d left behind.”
“He was just ‘what about me?’. He talked about getting a disease from some of the victims; he hasn’t got any concept that he was passing it on to the next victim . . . he felt he was the victim.”
Henwood, who saw Thompson in jail several years later, says that he was always happy to have a line in the sand where his life was under control, because there was no control in his upbringing.
He believes Thompson was happy in prison, where those boundaries were clear.
“You wonder about the justice of it all; all these people whose lives he’s destroyed and ruined and he’s stuck in a cell where he’s quite comfortable . . . those bars created a comfort zone for him.”
Still a risk
When Thompson pleaded guilty to each of the 129 charges in 1995, his voice was almost a whisper. He stood with his head bowed.
During his first parole hearing last month he was again softly spoken, seated in a chair and flanked by an officer.
Twenty-five years on, his hair has gone and he’s stockier than when he went in.
When asked whether he accepted he was a high risk of re-offending he agreed. It was the same sentiment he gave in court during his sentencing: he believed he would remain a threat to women and girls and would be prepared to kill to achieve his desires.
In a decision released this week, the Parole Board declined Thompson’s parole. It said a psychological report hadn’t been completed due to lockdown so they had decided to call him back for another hearing in February.
“In the meantime, he is an undue risk and cannot be released.”