Mark Franklin

Curious case of the homicide cop

It was a Friday night in central Auckland. Mark Franklin, a social cannabis user, was strolling down an alley, sharing a joint with friends, when they bumped into some police officers.

It was a terribly awkward moment for Franklin. He knew these cops: after all, he was a senior officer himself – a detective senior sergeant in West Auckland.

No-one was arrested, but Franklin talked to his supervisor about it after the weekend, to avoid putting those officers in a tricky situation. He got a warning.

It could have been much worse. It would have been a serious matter if the media had found out that Franklin, the cop leading the hunt for the killers of Deane Fuller-Sandys and Leah Stephens, was a stoner.

That was around 1998. The media didn’t learn about Franklin’s reefer madness till many years later, long after the trials were over and the guilty verdicts recorded.

Recently, though, Franklin found himself on the defensive at the suggestion that his cannabis use had an impact on how he conducted the high-profile investigation.

‘‘Yeah, there could be the allegation that ‘he was smoking weed – he got this wrong’. Well, that doesn’t wash with me,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m very, very focused. I believe I did an extremely good job in the New Zealand Police.’’

The reason Franklin found himself defending his record on a decades-old case is that he agreed to be interviewed for a new podcast by Stuff and RNZ about the FullerSandys and Stephens case.

Two missing persons files from August 1989 – that of Fuller-Sandys, a West Auckland tyrefitter, and Stephens, a Karangahape Rd sex worker– were wrapped together into a single case almost a decade later, in a two-year investigation that finally led to a trial in 1999, a successful appeal, a retrial in 2000, and an unsuccessful appeal after that.

West Auckland mother Gail Maney was jailed for having commissioned gang member Stephen Stone to kill Fuller-Sandys. Stone, too, was found guilty of Fuller-Sandys’ murder, as well as the rape and murder of Leah Stephens, who he’d feared would tell police about the first murder. Two other men were found guilty of helping dispose of Fuller-Sandys’ body.

The podcast, Gone Fishing, investigates the mysteries surrounding the case, and looks especially closely at Maney’s claim that she is innocent – and never even met Fuller-Sandys.

Franklin, who left the police more than a decade ago, was happy to discuss the case.

‘‘This was a case where there’s no forensics; we didn’t have scenes, we didn’t have bodies, and [for] the evidence we relied totally on criminal associates who were involved in the crimes. That was probably one of the most challenging things.’’

Franklin is in his late 50s. He was in the police force for 27 years. As a homicide detective he worked on several highprofile cases, including that of Delcelia Witika, the 2-year-old killed by her mother and stepfather in 1991, and of Marie Jamieson, who was abducted and murdered in 2001.

The stress of the job was huge. Even now, Franklin told us, ‘‘I still have nightmares – not about the gory stuff, just the pressures of working in police. I’d never go back.’’

In 2004, by then a detective inspector, Franklin was seconded to the Cook Islands to review an old homicide. He fell in love with the place. He was in a position to take early retirement on psychological grounds so he made the leap, and set up a new life there.

Franklin’s a musician too – he plays the guitar and has a deep gravelly singing voice. In Rarotonga he gigged at resorts and bars. But he also fell back into mentoring and training local police officers, and investigating fraud and corruption cases. ‘‘I shouldn’t have been doing it over there really.’’

In 2010, Franklin was diagnosed with throat cancer. He received treatment in Auckland before heading back to the islands.

Then in May 2011 police officers with drug dogs raided Franklin’s home, and he was arrested, and later convicted on drug charges.

As Franklin told Stuff reporter Tony Wall in a 2013 interview inside Rarotonga’s Arorangi Prison, his crime had been to sell a few small packages of cannabis to an undercover police officer. The way Franklin told it, the officer hung around Franklin and his band ‘‘pestering’’ him for weed, until one night Franklin ‘‘caved in’’, and bought $50 worth of drugs for the man from his regular supplier, and later another $100-worth.

When the story was reported in New Zealand, there were references to a ‘‘major drug ring’’, but Franklin said the quantity of drugs involved was small, and he didn’t even know most of the other people arrested.

He believed his arrest was connected to his police work. He’d run an investigation that led to charges against MP Norman George, and Franklin thought George may have tipped off police that Franklin was a social cannabis smoker.

Stuff made calls to Franklin in Rarotonga in mid-2017, hoping he could shed light on some troubling aspects of the case against Maney, and discovered he’d recently been deported to New Zealand.

We then visited him at a property north of Auckland, where he was staying with friends. He told us he’d already picked up some local music gigs, and was doing other odd jobs such as labouring and driving a van for a junkpickup service. He hoped to get back to the islands eventually.

He said he’d had to leave Rarotonga for ‘‘immigration reasons’’, but the background to it was ‘‘very political too, to be quite honest’’.

As we started asking him about the nitty gritty of the Maney case, it was obvious that it was still fresh in his mind. He rattled off the dates Fuller-Sandys and Stephens disappeared. He recalled many witnesses’ names.

We challenged a few important discrepancies between his recollections and the official records of police and courts, but, as Franklin said, ‘‘. . . I’m relying on what I think’s correct from my memory’’.

During the trial, Franklin’s investigation was strongly challenged by the defence. He was asked whether he had bullied witnesses, or pressured them to change their stories to match a predetermined police narrative.

Back then, and again in interviews with us, Franklin totally rejected the idea. Bending the rules during witness interviews would have been self-defeating. ‘‘I know that witness is going to be giving evidence under oath under cross-examination and I’d be cutting my own throat if I said or did anything to jeopardise that case.’’

When asked about one particular interview, where a witness suddenly linked the FullerSandys and Stephens murders after consistently denying any connection, Franklin was more explicit: ‘‘If there’s allegations that I pressured him or thumped him, did something that was not correct . . . there’s no point me doing that because if I’d done that it jeopardises one of my key witnesses.’’

Franklin is proud of his work leading a highly complex investigation – one that resulted in guilty verdicts at trial and survived subsequent appeals. But he’s also candid about the difficulties he faced. There was a nearabsence of forensic evidence, so the case was built on witness testimony from people who in many cases were caught lying.

That means he can’t be certain the police got every detail right. Yet all the same, he was ‘‘100 per cent convinced that Deane FullerSandys was killed and that Stephen Stone was the killer, and that Leah Stephens was killed and that Stephen Stone was the killer.’’

Franklin said the case against Maney was also solid, despite the potential flaws in the witness accounts presented to the jury. But if the publicity surrounding Gone Fishing threw up new evidence, he would expect police to welcome that information with ‘‘open arms’’.

‘‘At the end of the day, we’re not out to convict innocent people.’’

‘‘This was a case where there’s no forensics; we didn’t have scenes, we didn’t have bodies, and [for] the evidence we relied totally on criminal associates who were involved in the crimes.’’