‘Tortured soul’
One night in December last year, as a wild storm hit Christchurch, Stuart Black answered a knock at the door of his home.
In front of him stood a sodden, rail-thin woman, with sunken eyes, rotting teeth and unruly grey hair. She’d walked to his property in the pouring rain, pushing a shopping trolley full of the detritus that constituted her belongings. ‘‘I’m dying,’’ the woman said. Black recognised the husky voice of Barbara Campbell, an often cantankerous woman to whom he’d rented a room for a few months in 2018.
She was 45, but looked decades older. Campbell told Black she had terminal bowel cancer, showed him her stoma bag and said she had no pain relief. She weighed less than 50 kilograms.
Estranged from her family, she’d burned bridges with many others who’d tried to help her.
Until August, Campbell had lived in a flat several kilometres away, but was forced out after a year-long tenancy during which she drank heavily, screamed and yelled at neighbours and accused them of crimes such as theft and sexual assault. Since then, she’d largely been homeless.
He took her in. The next day, Campbell barricaded herself inside Black’s house – paranoid someone was trying to steal from her. It took Black half an hour to force his way in.
Two days later, when the worst of the weather had passed, he asked her to leave. She did so willingly.
After Christmas, while on holiday, his phone rang. It was Campbell. She’d found the spare key to his home and was calling people using a work phone he’d left behind. She told him she was trying to stop people breaking into his house.
When Black arrived home, he found Campbell again barricaded inside, burning toilet paper in his toaster on the floor. He knew she was beyond his help and called police.
The attending officers told Black they’d tried unsuccessfully to get Campbell committed to Hillmorton Hospital, a mental health facility, a week earlier, when she was barred from a storage facility. This time, she was only trespassed from Black’s home. She wasn’t charged with any offence.
The next time Black heard Campbell’s name was about a fortnight later. She had allegedly been murdered while living in the doorway of a vacant shop in New Brighton. Black felt shock and guilt, but also a peculiar relief that Campbell’s suffering was over.
Since Campbell’s cancer diagnosis the previous year, her life had spiralled out of control. There were numerous calls to police about her behaviour. She had exposed herself to children and abused people who stared at her. She wasn’t charged with any crime, but it was clear her physical and mental health were deteriorating. Social services tried to help, to no avail. She turned down offers of financial assistance to help with her medical treatment.
She relied on the charity of good samaritans in her final days.
‘‘It’s not good enough,’’ says Black. ‘‘Here’s a woman who’s got cancer, she’s obviously got mental health issues, and yet all the facilities that are supposed to be there to help somebody in that situation, they all failed.’’
The truth was more complicated.
Happy young woman
Pride of place on Lorraine and Brian Campbell’s living room wall, among dozens of family photos, belongs to a portrait of Barbara, their eldest daughter. She’s in her late teens or early 20s. Her blue eyes are fixed on the camera, and she has a wide smile on her face.
It’s hard to rationalise that the seemingly happy young woman in the photo is the same person who sat with blackened toes poking through holes in her socks, surrounded by alcohol boxes, cigarette butts and other rubbish, in a shopfront on the fringe of a supermarket car park.
Those who encountered Barbara during her short, complex life have described her as a ‘‘riddle’’ and a ‘‘mystery within a mystery’’.
She was an alcoholic. She was volatile and abusive. She was paranoid and delusional. But she was also vivacious, creative, hardworking and deeply spiritual.
Lorraine last spoke to Barbara in July 2020, when she and her other daughter, Dianne, went to the Cashel Court Motel in Linwood and handed Barbara a trespass notice. For months, Barbara had been calling and texting family members day and night and abusing them.
Lorraine and Brian installed a call blocker on their landline. When Barbara started ringing Dianne’s work, more drastic action was needed.
Barbara didn’t take kindly to being served with the trespass notice. ‘‘It breaks my heart . . . to think that was the last time I talked to her,’’ Lorraine says. ‘‘We just couldn’t take it any more. It was sapping our life. We’d tried everything to help her.
‘‘We made mistakes,’’ she says, ‘‘But we did the best we knew how. We still love her . . . I just wish I could give her a big hug.’’
‘Delight of our lives’
Barbara Louise Campbell was born in Christchurch on January 8, 1976. She was named after her father’s eldest sister, Barbara, who was born with spina bifida and lived for only 12 days.
Dianne was born two years later. Like many older siblings, Barbara initially didn’t like the limelight being stolen by her new sister, but the pair were soon playing well together.
As the pair grew older, though, it was clear they were very different. Dianne was well behaved. She was quiet, diligent and loved reading. Barbara didn’t like school work. By the time she was a teenager, she had begun to rebel – skipping class and climbing out of her window at night with bottles of her parents’ liquor, and meeting boys.
Aged 13, she got pregnant. Her parents were supportive of her having the baby, but Barbara chose to have an abortion. Lorraine went to the hospital with her.
‘‘She changed,’’ Lorraine says, ‘‘Her innocence had been taken away. Things just seemed to go downhill.’’
In November 1992, two months shy of her 17th birthday, Barbara left school and got a job at KFC. Over the next few years, she drifted in and out of the family home, often staying with friends or boyfriends.
Despite leaving school early, Barbara appeared determined to make something of her life. She completed courses in natural healing, photography and communication skills. She trained to be a flight attendant and did two weeks of work experience with the police. She even completed an anger management course. But her relationship with her family remained strained.
‘‘She could be so nice,’’ Dianne says, ‘‘And then you’d say the wrong thing, and she’d just snap.’’
One day in 1995, Barbara showed up at her parents’ home yelling and screaming. She pulled a knife from the kitchen drawer and glared at them angrily. ‘‘I’m going to kill you,’’ she said.
As Barbara raised the knife in the air, Brian grabbed her arm with both hands. It took all of his strength to subdue her. Lorraine called police. Barbara spent the night in the cells and was released without charge in the morning. Her parents didn’t want to make a formal complaint, resolving to keep supporting their daughter however they could.
In 1997, with her parents’ help, Barbara bought a house bus and embarked on what she called the ‘‘gypsy life’’. For several years, she seemed happy. The bus was her home, but she visited Brian and Lorraine regularly.
Privately, though, she was in turmoil. She was smoking cannabis almost daily and drinking heavily. She wrote in her diary of her struggles with anxiety and depression and how she felt like her family had given up on her. ‘‘When I really need their support, they are never there to guide me or help me along – it’s always more putdowns.’’
Eventually, Barbara sold the bus. She became increasingly secretive about where she was living and what she was doing. Any tenancies she had were brief.
She also became consumed by her paranoia. In 2003, Brian and Lorraine were driving through central Christchurch with Barbara in the back seat. As they approached their destination, Barbara lay down and made them drive round the block several times because she thought someone was following them.
At the time, she was receiving treatment from a community-based mental health centre, and had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and psychosis. She was discharged from the centre’s care after a few months.
The following year, much to Lorraine and Brian’s surprise, Dianne asked Barbara to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. Barbara’s date for the wedding was her boyfriend, Paul Lester, a panel-beater. The couple shared a love of the outdoors and road-tripped around the South Island together, but their relationship was plagued by Barbara’s mental health issues and ultimately failed.
In 2011, about the time Christchurch was hit by a deadly earthquake, Barbara was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She had her left breast removed and several rounds of chemotherapy.
As aftershocks rattled the city, Barbara’s alcohol intake increased and her mental state became even more deranged.
Barbara was twice admitted to Hillmorton Hospital in 2012. Each stay lasted several weeks. Initially, it was thought she was suffering from schizophrenia or substanceinduced psychosis, but when she was discharged for the second time she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a condition that causes extreme mood swings.
Lorraine and Brian only knew of Barbara’s second admission to Hillmorton. They visited her there regularly and attended support meetings. When Barbara was released, they tried to get her to move into a rented home, but she chose to live in her car. Attempts to get her help for her alcoholism were also unsuccessful. Once again, they watched their daughter drift away.
Mother-like figure
In late 2013, Barbara walked through the doors of Treasure Trove, a vintage clothing store in Christchurch, and into the life of the owner, Jenny Bedford.
She noticed a sadness about Barbara and asked Barbara what was wrong.
Barbara began crying. She said her grandmother had recently died, and she was having issues with her family. ‘‘She told me she lived in her car, which broke my heart,’’ Bedford says, ‘‘So from then on I started to support her. I do it because I’m a Christian, and it’s my path in life.’’
For the next year, Bedford was a mother-like figure to Barbara. She acted as a referee on job applications, helped her look for somewhere to live and drove her to places when she didn’t have enough money to pay for petrol.
Sometimes, without warning, Barbara would turn. Once, Bedford did some laundry for her and Barbara noticed one of her bras was missing. She accused Bedford of stealing it and demanded that she buy her a new one. She also sent Bedford abusive messages and called her a bad Christian when she wouldn’t give her money.
In 2015, Bedford passed the mantle of supporting Barbara to her friend Gary Gribben.
Gribben, a retired electrician who attended the same church as Bedford, remembers Barbara as an ‘‘absolutely gorgeous person’’. When she wasn’t drinking.
Gribben tried repeatedly to get Barbara to quit drinking. But each time she got dry, she relapsed.
The last time Gribben really saw Barbara was when he helped her move in August last year.
As they carried her possessions outside, Barbara asked Gribben to watch them. He agreed. Then, Barbara turned on Gribben and accused him of stealing her belongings. ‘‘No, I’d never do something like that,’’ he said.
Gribben saw Barbara only a few times in passing after that.
Security guard
Despite Barbara’s prolonged mental health issues and battles with addiction, she held down a string of jobs, continuing to work until within a year of her death.
‘‘She was a mystery within a mystery,’’ says Max Percy, her supervisor when she worked as a security guard for Armourguard from 2016 to 2018.
Percy knew Barbara was living in a van, but he couldn’t fault her work ethic. She turned up on time and adhered to the company’s strict dress code. She didn’t like working with other staff, and they didn’t like working with her – which is how she ended up on the night shift. ‘‘I had nothing but respect for her,’’ Percy says. ‘‘She was a perfect guard. I wish I’d had more of them.’’
Percy didn’t experience Barbara’s bad temper firsthand until after he’d retired from Armourguard.
She wanted him to be a referee for a driving job, but he knew nothing about her driving ability. He called Barbara and told her he didn’t feel it was appropriate.
‘‘She went off the deep end. I was called all the names under the sun.’’ Percy hung up on her.
Months later, he helped Barbara move some possessions out of a storage container. Afterwards, they had coffee.
‘‘It was like old friends meeting up,’’ Percy says. ‘‘She was just a normal, caring person. And that was the mystery with her, you could never know where she was coming from, but I liked her.’’
Barbara’s last job was at Wigram Lodge, where she patrolled the grounds at night as a security guard. She left in about March last year. Soon afterwards, her life entered its final, tumultuous chapter. For years her fortunes had fluctuated in concert with her mental health and addiction issues and now, wracked by delusions and paranoia and ridden with bowel cancer, she reached her nadir.
Barbara wound up living on the streets of New Brighton.
It was here, in November 2021, while sitting in his car, that Peter Donnelly encountered Barbara. As she approached, Donnelly could tell from her stare that she knew him, but he didn’t recognise her. ‘‘It’s Barbara,’’ she said.
Donnelly had met Barbara through his daughter when she was a teenager. The pair had a shared love of art, socialised in the same circles, and became good friends.
Over the years, Barbara, a keen photographer, had taken photos of Donnelly’s canvases and the sand art he drew on New Brighton Beach.
But now, startled by the emaciated figure before him, Donnelly made his excuses.
‘‘Sorry,’’ he said, ‘‘I’ve got to go.’’ He drove off. Weeks later, Donnelly saw Barbara again, sitting under the eaves of the old Savemart building in New Brighton mall, surrounded by rubbish. Again, he was sitting in his car. Again, he chose not to engage.
On January 8, local hair salon owner Letecia Redcliff approached Barbara, who by then had adopted the name Rose, to see if she needed any help. Barbara told her it was her 46th birthday, and asked her if she could play her favourite song: Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica. The pair listened to the rock ballad together. ‘‘I had tears in my eyes,’’ Redcliff says, ‘‘She touched my heart that day. She sparkled while she spoke.’’
Around this time, Nikki Griffin, who owned the Bin Inn food store in New Brighton mall, says she rang the police several times, concerned for Barbara’s safety. She worried someone would react violently to something Barbara said. ‘‘If you don’t move her,’’ she told the operator, ‘‘she’ll die.’’
Officers twice attended and spoke to Barbara in January but, because her behaviour wasn’t considered criminal, no action was taken.
On January 12, staff from support service Housing First visited. Barbara agreed to meet her Ministry of Social Development case manager, who’d spent months trying to get her into emergency housing, the next day. Hours later, about 10pm, it’s believed Barbara had an argument with a man. She was found lying unconscious on the ground and died on the way to hospital.
A 43-year-old was later charged with her murder. He has name suppression, is in custody and is yet to enter a plea (his next appearance is on July 29).
Identifying Barbara
As their daughter’s life came to a violent end, Barbara’s parents were oblivious. They had no idea she had bowel cancer, or that she was living on the street, just five minutes’ drive from their Avondale home.
Brian will never forget standing in a small, featureless room at Christchurch Hospital. It was cold and quiet. On the other side of a window, within touching distance, was a woman’s body, lying on a gurney. It was covered by a white sheet. Only the face was exposed, badly bruised and swollen.
‘‘Is that Barbara?’’ a police officer asked. Brian wasn’t sure. The face he saw was so badly beaten, he couldn’t tell if it was his daughter.
Brian told him about Barbara’s mastectomy and how, aged about 12, she’d had a mole on her wrist partly removed. The officer and a colleague went into the other room. They were gone a short while, then returned. ‘‘They . . . nodded their heads,’’ Brian says. ‘‘I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.’’