Mistakes aren’t good enough

David Bain’s two trials for killing his family are a well-known story, but his groomsman, who has since raped and killed for a second time, adds a new and disturbing element to his wedding photographs, some of which have appeared in media lately.

A second jury found Bain not guilty, but he served 14 years in jail before his retrial and release. Two-time rapist and murderer Paul Russell Wilson was reportedly his closest and oldest friend there, and must have seemed an obvious choice as groomsman after the years they spent in jail together serving long sentences. Since Bain and his wife now live in Australia, that relationship will have lost its intensity, and after all, nobody could have predicted Wilson would kill again.

Only they did, and they told the Parole Board so. The father of Wilson’s first victim killed himself in apparent despair when he heard Wilson had murdered another young woman. He and his wife had made repeated submissions to the board, predicting he would reoffend, and the people who knew Wilson in the real world were better predictors of his behaviour, as it turned out, than qualified experts who dealt with him hundreds of times in jail.

‘‘He may have ticked all the boxes in the right psychiatric report, but that is the way to convince people he has changed,’’ they wrote. Their insight into his manipulativeness, and their observation that he was a psychopath, should have been worth something. Somehow it never is.

It’s some consolation that Wilson is unlikely to get out of jail again, but he should never have had the opportunity to take another life. Three psychologists said he was at low risk of reoffending, and it’s a statistical truism that murderers seldom reoffend. But some do, and the upshot was that they failed his second victim, as did the police.

Nobody means to make mistakes, but they did. They pulled him over in his car the night of the second murder, after a minor traffic accident, and tested him for drinkdriving. Wilson was three times over the limit. Rather than take him into custody overnight, as in hindsight they might have done, they took his car keys and the knives he had in the car, then sent him on his way.

Wilson told them he needed the knives for his job, though he was working as a labourer for a scrap metal firm at the time. They can’t have checked where he worked, either. That could have alerted them.

It seems Wilson’s details didn’t come up on the police computer, if it was accessed as it should have been. He’d changed his name to Paul Pounamu Tainui, but that should have been on the file. He went on to catch a taxi to his victim’s house, tie up and gag her male flatmate, lie in wait, then rape and kill her when she got home, because he could act normal, as dangerous people can.

There are a few ‘‘shoulds’’ about that night. Sorry will always come too late, even if statistics are your fallback position, and none of this was good enough.

Island Bay School, meanwhile, may have been lucky that a known paedophile didn’t offend against any of its pupils. It admits it didn’t have appropriate checks and balances in place, and Stephen Shone may have been able to teach music there on Saturday mornings. He was paroled in 2016 after serving all but two weeks of a 71⁄2-year jail sentence for sexually abusing five girls, during which he was – incredibly – able to blog and blame his victims.

Hopefully this is a case of mistaken identity, but with young lives at stake, is hope anything like good enough?