The power of truth
Why Rhonda McHardy fought to tell the story of her rape by Malcolm Rewa – using her real name. Stuff Circuit’s Paula Penfold and Eugene Bingham report.
If there were some sort of heinous leaderboard of New Zealand’s most shameful criminals, Malcolm Rewa would sit among our nation’s worst.
Until his conviction this year for the 1992 murder of Susan Burdett, never before had we had a serial rapist who attacked so many women, and also killed.
The path to that position has been interminably long, the levels of destruction caused to the women whose lives he forced his way into, immeasurable.
But now that this final chapter is over, a murder conviction long sought by so many, one of Rewa’s victims is able to reflect on what it all means.
We first met Rhonda McHardy six years ago.
She was Rewa’s ninth victim. Raped, twice, by him, just two weeks before he attacked Burdett in her Papatoetoe flat. So violent was Rewa’s onslaught against McHardy, they call it a blitz attack. Her instinct was, literally, to play dead.
When we met McHardy, we were actually focused on the case of Teina Pora: he was still in prison, had been there for nearly 20 years, having been convicted as a 17-year-old of the rape and murder of Burdett.
A team led by private investigator Tim McKinnel was trying to prove the police had got the wrong guy. And we began investigating too, to publicly expose what had gone wrong; the flaws in the police case.
Those flaws were many, and fundamental. For one, there was no physical evidence Pora had ever been at the scene of the crime. All the police really had was Pora’s long, ever-changing, palpably untrue story (clearly wrong even to one of the senior police officers observing the interview, who told his superiors that what Pora was saying was inconsistent with what they knew of the case), which unfolded over five days in a police cell, without a lawyer.
When his legal team went all the way to the Privy Council it was with new evidence from a neuropsychologist: that when Pora was interviewed by police, went to trial, and was convicted – twice – he had an as-yet-undiagnosed condition called Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. The justice system was dealing with someone who had the intellectual capacity of a 9-year-old.
The thing is, you can’t properly tell the story of Pora without taking a deviation into the inextricably linked case of Rewa, sentenced in the 1990s to preventive detention for attacks on 25 women (though police think the real number is more likely to be around 50).
The cases were so connected because when DNA from the Burdett crime scene was eventually identified as belonging to Rewa, police changed their position about him always being a lone wolf offender: for the attack on Burdett, they alleged, he must have acted with Pora. It seemed implausible, but it was a story they would stand by for almost 20 years.
McHardy watched our investigations as we set out to try to show the police case was wrong and that Pora was an innocent man. And in 2013, we interviewed her for the first time.
She knew instinctively that Pora did not kill Burdett, and she wanted to say so. She had no doubt – because of the way she was raped – that when Rewa entered Burdett’s bedroom on that night of March 25, 1992, he did so alone.
‘‘I strongly believed [Teina] was innocent. And so initially I wanted to assist in helping to have him released. And I also, of course, at the same time, believed that Rewa was guilty of the murder.’’
And so in a silhouetted, anonymous interview, McHardy described what Rewa had done to her, and concluded: ‘‘There are so many reasons I can see, based on my experience and what I know of both cases, that make it really impossible to believe that Pora was even there.’’ And more.
‘‘Given all the evidence I’ve seen recently about the Pora case and given what I know about Malcolm Rewa, I’d like to see the right person convicted for this crime.’’
Getting name suppression lifted
It was two years later, in March, 2015, that the Privy Council quashed all Pora’s convictions relating to the death of Burdett, and ordered he not be retried.
Pora’s legal team sought compensation from the government for his wrongful conviction and imprisonment. Rodney Hansen, QC, assessed the claim and demolished the Crown case, finding Pora innocent to a higher standard of proof than he needed to.
The facts were bare. McHardy’s instinct was right. Pora wasn’t there when Burdett was raped and murdered.
But what then remained was that nobody was convicted of her murder. Rewa had been tried twice, but two juries hadn’t been able to reach a verdict. And a stay of proceedings had been ordered, meaning Rewa couldn’t face trial on that murder charge a third time.
And the police position? That even though this was now an unsolved crime, they were stymied by that stay of proceedings, but also, the police commissioner said, there was ‘‘no new evidence’’. Nor had they looked for any.
Looking back at that response from the police, McHardy says now, ‘‘I think they reacted like a lot of human beings react when they are exposed for having made a mistake. They want to deny it. They don’t want to admit it, they would like it to go away. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake and they’re wrong.’’
But the fact that it meant a woman’s killer had got away with murder compelled McHardy and another woman, Tracey Kearney – Rewa’s 19th victim – to do something.
They wanted to tell their stories, in full daylight, their faces unobscured, their names available