TO CATCH A KILLER
New hope in baffling 20-year-old cold case
● Twenty years ago, Claire Hills didn’t make it to work
● The 30-year-old was murdered, burned alive in her own car
● Police have the killer’s DNA but never found him
● Now, they have launched a global search
● Today, a witness speaks for the first time
The car went up in flames, lighting up Mangere Mountain and the surrounding domain as if it were full daylight.
A man in dark clothing sprinted away from the fire as it intensified. His feet found the road leading from the domain.
Then he saw the woman.
She had watched it all unfold in front of her — and now she could see him. He stopped metres from her, stood dead still, looking straight at her.
Then he was off again, scarpering into the early morning, never to be found.
That was 7299 days ago, but the woman remembers as if it were yesterday, rather than a crisp autumn Tuesday morning in 1998.
It was the day she came face to face with the man who murdered Claire Hills.
“I won’t forget it,” said the woman, who is speaking publicly about the incident for the first time.
“I was going up the mountain at about 5.45am and as I got closer, I saw a man moving around a car at the soccer club. The next thing I saw was the thing go up in flames.”
She said that between dawn breaking and the light of the fire, the domain was as light as it would have been at midday.
“I just stood there and watched it … it was like an inferno. I remember thinking as I stood there, if someone was in that car, there’d be no way anyone could get near it to help them. The whole thing was engulfed in flames… like a furnace.
“The person ran away, he didn’t know I was there, he ran straight towards me. Then he realised I was there, he just stopped and we eyeballed each other for a minute — then he turned and ran back the same way he’d come.
“He definitely got a fright to see me.”
The woman ran to a nearby property and asked a man there to call 111. At 3pm, the man called her at work and said there was a body in that car.
“When he told me that, I felt sick,” she said. “It wasn’t nice. I tried to keep the vision of that man in my mind, just in case.”
Three other people reported seeing a man of similar description shortly after Hill’s car went up in flames. A jogger at the domain saw him running away, a taxi driver on the motorway said a man ran out in front of his car and another motorist saw a man walking towards the Mangere Bridge shops.
Their descriptions helped police create a sketch of the killer. But 20 years on, he has never been found.
Claire Elizabeth Hills was born in England and emigrated to Australia with her parents and siblings when she was 2.
The family lived in a hostel for four or five months before buying a house and settling in Wollongong, a coastal city south of Sydney.
Hills, the third of six children, left the family home at 15, taking off with a boyfriend her father did not like. She spent time working on fishing boats in Melbourne, then hightailed it to Auckland on a fake passport under the name of Lisa.
Her sisters, Lynda Hynson and Allyson Harris, told the Herald Hills was estranged from the family, but eventually reconciled with them and was in sporadic contact.
They know little of her life in Auckland — she wasn’t one to share details — other than that she became a Jehovah’s Witness at 21, married a man named Peter Hills and worked in various jobs.
“She seemed to have a happy life in New Zealand, she quite liked it,” Harris said.
“She didn’t think she would ever come back. She had really settled.”
About 18 months before she died, Hills’ marriage collapsed. She moved into a small flat on Sarsfield St in Herne Bay and was working as a manager for McDonald’s — moving to the airport branch a week before she was murdered.
She was the manager on the day shift, which started at 3.30am.
She would usually set her alarm for 2.30am, get up, dress, and drive her black Mazda Familia hatchback 28km to the airport.
The day she was killed she was due back at work after two rostered days off. Flaui Muaulu was duty manager the night before, and called Hills to discuss stock.
He is the last known person to have spoken to her.
“I called her at about 9.45pm, I forgot that she was supposed to be starting work at 3.30am,” he said.
“I needed permission to give this other store our stock. We had a quick conversation and that was it. Everything seemed normal.”
Muaulu was just 18 when Hills died, and had known her only a matter of weeks, but she has had a lasting impact on him over the past 20 years.
“I knew her as Lisa,” he says. “She wasn’t there long before the incident happened. I remember that day very clearly.”
At 3.30am on April 28 1998 Muaulu was woken by a phone call.
“It was the store calling to say Lisa hadn’t shown up. I was getting in trouble because they thought she must have called in sick and I’d forgotten to leave a message,” he said.
“Later that morning the cops arrived at my house. They had found Lisa’s car burned out at Mangere Mountain; they were trying to find out what conversation I’d had with her the night before.” Police updated Muaulu that day, first saying they had found something of interest in the burned-out car. Later, they confirmed the “something” was Hills’ body. “I was really upset, I just couldn’t believe it,” he says.
Firefighters arrived at the Mangere Mountain blaze at 6.31am — delayed by the police officer who took the initial 111 call failing to action it.
Crews attacked the flames with a high pressure hose and managed to extinguish it after about five minutes. Then a senior fire officer approached the charred wreck and saw a badly burned body in the back seat.
Police were called and a homicide investigation was launched. It was later dubbed Operation Hills after the victim was identified through dental records and her McDonald’s staff name tag, which survived the blaze.
A post mortem revealed Hills had been alive when the car was set on fire — but “most probably” unconscious. Her lungs were heat damaged and full of soot and she had a number of fractures to her skull and bones around her throat — but the pathologist was unable to establish whether those injuries were caused by the fire or as a result of an earlier assault.
Hills’ cause of death was listed as carbon monoxide poisoning.
There was also evidence she had been sexually assaulted.
Police appealed for sightings of her car between 3am and 6am and revealed the fuel used to ignite the fire must have been sourced by the killer. There was nothing found in or around the car that could have been used to set the car on fire.
That meant the killer probably went to a service station to buy fuel in a container, or stole it.
A steering wheel lock Hills used regularly to secure her car was also missing and police said whoever had it could lead them to the killer.
To date, the lock has never been found and police have no idea who lit the fire, how or why.
These days the Operation Hills file is run by Detective Superintendent Dave Lynch. He worked on the case back in 1998, and now oversees all major criminal investigations in the Auckland and Northland regions.
He has a strong desire to solve the case. He is a Mangere local and regularly runs through the domain where Hills died. He says it is a “real whodunnit”.
Suspects have been named and investigated over the years — they included Hills’ estranged husband, and the recidivist rapist William Mokaraka, who attacked South
“Why did you do this? Why did my sister suffer such a horrific death?” Allyson Harris
Auckland women in their homes at night while brandishing a knife.
Both men were eliminated as suspects after their DNA failed to match a sample taken from Hills’ body, believed to have come from her killer.
Lynch won’t disclose more about that sample, saying it’s something only police and the offender will know about. He wants to keep that card close to his chest, along with a couple of other aspects of the investigation.
But, everything else the police know about the murder has been shared publicly — numerous times over the years — in a bid to flush out the person responsible.
“From the time Claire got up around 2.30am [to when] her car caught fire up at the mountain, those two to three hours are an unknown for us. A key to advancing the investigation is filling in that window of time,” he says.
“That sighting by the witness is the only solid piece of information we have around who is directly connected with Claire’s murder.
“There’s a range of scenarios, one is that Claire was known to her killer — and the other is that she was the subject of a random attack; and how that attack occurred and where is obviously very much a focus of the investigation.”
Lynch is still committed to finding the killer, despite two decades of dead ends and leads drying up.
“I’m still convinced there’s a person or small group of people out there that know or have some very strong suspicions around what happened,” he says. “I always hold out hope that one day someone will pick up the phone.
“We don’t need much, all we need is names — we do have the DNA profile to work with and we are able to give assurance of confidentiality around any information people are prepared to give us.”
That DNA profile has failed to match anyone in the New Zealand database — made up of people who have given samples after being arrested for criminal offending.
Police have also searched the Australian database and are now investigating what other overseas databases might be available,
“Twenty years is a long time … We’ve got a family living in another country really still looking for answers around what happened to Claire. It’s not too late — give us a call.”
Hills’ family are not holding their breath for that call to come. They have resigned themselves to the fact the case may never be solved.
Even if it is, it will make little difference to them.
“The chances of it ever getting solved are really slim,” Harris says.
“It makes us really upset that someone’s walking around who has gotten away with murder — but if we find out who has done it it’s not going to make us feel better.
“The impact, you can’t even describe — that much violence, and no answers.
“I don’t think you ever accept it. You know it’s happened and you get on with it but it’s always there. Why did you do this? Why did my sister suffer such a horrific death?”
The sisters believe Hills was killed in a random attack. “Claire was in the wrong place at the wrong time — or there would be something to hold on to,” says Hynson. “She was a good human being, she didn’t deserve that. For whatever reason, they decided to murder her, she didn’t deserve to die like that.
“It would have been very scary.” Hills’ mother, Lois Green, doesn’t like to talk about it too much, says Harris.
“She doesn’t like to rehash it. “She thinks that it has happened, nothing is going to change… She has resigned herself to the fact that she is not going to find out what happened to Claire in her lifetime.
“We’ve got no hope at all that it’s going to be solved.”
Harris said her family had moved on, but would never forget Hills.
“It’s not something that you think about all the time,” she said.
“Anniversary, birthdays and
Christmas — I think about her then. The horrific-ness of the crime is always in the back of my mind. “Our family is not complete. There won’t ever be any closure. “She was 30 years old, she didn’t have children, she hadn’t even lived yet.”
The sisters are thankful the police file remained open — and would until there was an arrest or resolution.
“It helps to think they’re still thinking about her, even though there’s no one actively working on the file,” Harris says. “Twenty years is a long time … unless somebody confesses, we will never know.” If you have information for police about Claire Hills or her killer phone 0800 OP HILLS (0800 674 4557).
To pass on information anonymously, contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.