I COULDN’T SAVE MY GIRL
She knew straightaway he’d killed her
Karen Edwards was just closing the door of her historic Northland farmhouse when she heard the phone ring. “I almost didn’t answer it,” she recalls.
It was the morning of July 27, 2012, and the mother-of-three was on her way to a Beef & Lamb seminar in Kaitaia. Thinking better of it, she ducked back inside and grabbed the phone. It was her mum Irene. Breathlessly,
she told Karen she’d just received a strange text: “Sorry to hear about Ashlee drowning.”
“I remember saying, ‘What bullshit!’” says Karen, 46. She hung up and with shaking hands called her daughter’s mobile. “My heart was racing, my stomach was dropping. I remember praying, ‘Pick up the phone, Ash.’ But nothing.”
By then, Karen’s precious only daughter was already lying in the morgue nearly 100km away at Whangarei Hospital – cruelly, the same hospital she’d been born in 21 years earlier.
“Seething ... pacing ... disbelief ... rage,” are the only words Karen can muster to describe how she felt when police confirmed the worst.
“I knew straight away he had done something to her.”
Criminalpast
Ashlee’s life had been brutally ended that morning by her on-off boyfriend of the past three years, Jimmy “Fats” Akuhata, then 29. The couple had two daughters, aged two and four months.
The local police had known Akuhata since he was a teen. Learning difficulties meant he could barely read or write, let alone hold down a job. He had a string of petty crime convictions – but worse, a problem with violence. At the time of Ashlee’s death, he had four convictions for male assaults female – three involving her.
Ashlee had a protection order to defend herself and her daughters, but even the might of the law couldn’t save her.
The night she died, she had accepted Akuhata’s invitation to watch a band at Malbas Bar in Whangarei. The pair argued and left the bar at 1.55am. CCTV footage shows them 15 minutes later at the Lower Tarewa Road Bridge.
Akuhata lifted up Ashlee and threw her over the edge of the railing into the Waiarohia Stream. He then ran down to the river and finished the job, holding the young mum’s head under the water until the bubbles stopped. “When I heard that, I just wanted to up and kill him,” tells Karen.
At home in the rural outpost of Okaihau, just north of Kaikohe, Karen’s memories are immortalised in a stack of red photo albums, all neatly named and dated. “This is what I try to remember, the happy memories,” she says, running a finger across the pages of smiling childhood photos of Ashlee opening Christmas presents, playing at the beach and showing off her pet lambs.
“Do I have regrets? Massive regrets. I was too polite – I should have pushed more. We just didn’t know how to get in and help her out of the nightmare.”
As a single mum, Karen and Ashlee were close.
“I was almost envious of her – Ashlee had this happygo-lucky nature that as I kid, I never had.”