Why it took so long
The six-year-old’s killer had an alibi for the timeframe police were considering.
After Jules Mikus was convicted, in October 2002, of Teresa Cormack’s murder, inquiry head Brian Schaab conceded that the initial police concentration on a narrow timeframe for the 1987 abduction may have been a mistake.
The focus from 8.45am-9.15am – after the little girl had apparently decided to return home after reaching Richmond School – meant that anyone who could produce an alibi for around that time was downgraded on the suspect list.
“We weren’t considering the wider picture perhaps as much as we should have been,” Schaab told the Listener’s Denis Welch after the verdict.
Mikus had been able to place himself on the other side of town between 9.30am and 10.00am. Even the fact that he had repainted his Vauxhall Viva car was not seen as unduly sinister.
Schaab told Welch there was never enough hard evidence at the time to pin the crime on Mikus. “Unless this guy had coughed or … someone had been able to tell us something about him, we still wouldn’t have been able to do something until last year anyway.”
The evidence that finally sealed Mikus’ fate would have to wait 14 years in a plastic bag in a coldstore. It included two pubic hairs found by a forensic scientist examining Teresa’s panties and smears of semen taken from her body.
A month after the murder, police were no closer to finding Teresa’s killer but were getting blood and hair samples from anyone remotely considered a suspect – just in case, one day, a way might be found of linking the killer to evidence left on the body. Mikus gave a blood sample to a doctor at the Tamatea Medical Centre in Napier on July 20, 1987.
But DNA testing had been invented only in 1985 and none of the conventional methods used in 1987 were capable of establishing a link. The country’s first DNA testing lab would not open until 1989.
Police and scientists could only sit back and wait as DNA testing techniques evolved. In February 2002, at the ESR institute in Auckland, forensic scientist Susan Petricevic was working her way through blood samples given by 845 “key suspects” in the Teresa Cormack case, looking for a match to a DNA sample obtained 11 months before from semen found on Teresa’s body. She tested more than 750 samples before finding a match. The DNA profile she held in one hand, extracted from Mikus’ blood sample, matched exactly the DNA profile in her other, extracted from traces of semen stored for years in a Wellington lab.
To make sure that the case against Mikus was watertight, Schaab took the pubic hairs to the US for further analysis, where it was found the pubic-hair DNA matched Mikus’ blood sample DNA.
DNA testing had only just been invented and there wasn’t enough conventional evidence to identify the killer.
the convictions. Following his release, he returned to Napier where, he says, the harassment continued, and he and his family became pariahs in the district, turned away from jobs and talked about in the street.
In 2000, Montaperto says he was jailed for 18 months on dangerous driving and other charges after running a couple of police cars off the road in Huntly. “I’d said to the cops, next time you haul me up, I’m going to run you off the road. They didn’t listen to me, they were harassing me, so I did … I’d done something worth going to jail for.”
In 2001, he complained to police about his treatment during the Flaxmere and Cormack inquiries. The then Police Conduct Authority, although upholding some aspects of the complaints, found overall they did not constitute misconduct or neglect of duty. It said the police were entitled to treat Montaperto as a suspect and there was no evidence to support the serious allegations that he had been “fitted up” for the Flaxmere offences or unfairly targeted in the Cormack case.
The authority said it was inevitable that provincial reporters, through their contacts in the community and the police, would discover the focus of police inquiries and it wasn’t possible to tell what officers had actually told reporters. “The investigator was unable to establish that the police had engineered what had occurred.” The authority said the media coverage “bordered on what was unacceptable” but declined to take contempt proceedings.
The Ministry of Justice report prepared for Andrew Little places little weight on the other grounds for Montaperto’s appeal, including the importance of alibi evidence not introduced at trial, among which was that of his cousin, who said Montaperto was with him during the period in which the Flaxmere children were abducted. That day was Montaperto’s birthday, and he and family members said he had been at a garage sale for much of the day before getting pizzas with his cousin. The ministry’s report said it had serious doubts about the credibility of the cousin’s affidavit, which raised more doubts than it resolved.
But Mansfield says the evidence against his client was “never that strong in my view” and his alibi appeared credible. “I do believe the damage was done when the jury was told that information [about Cormack].” He said the alibi evidence was not fully investigated or called at the trial. The ministry’s report said Fairbrother decided not to call the witnesses because he thought he had raised sufficient doubt about the reliability of the prosecution evidence through cross-examination, and a misstep with a defence witness could have undermined that. He thought the witnesses were “unsophisticated and vulnerable to spirited cross-examination”.
INCONVENIENT ALIBI
Fairbrother told the Listener he was “100% sure” Montaperto was innocent of the Flaxmere charges. “He is one of the few people that I really believe that about who has been convicted – probably the only person.”
He told the ministry investigators that Montaperto had agreed with the tactical decision not to call the alibi evidence, a view Montaperto disputes. Fairbrother said the alibi was an “amalgam” of evidence, with not one witness able to account for the whole timespan.
The ministry’s report said: “One feature of the potential testimony was that it had the unintended effect of Mr Montaperto being away from his Napier home and in his car at around the relevant period of the alleged offending.”
Mansfield says he’s never met anyone who’s completed a sentence who’s been so determined to clear his name. He believes Montaperto. “He could just complete the sentence and get on with life … he doesn’t need to be as consumed with it as he is.”
Mansfield doesn’t know when the Court of Appeal will consider the case, but says Montaperto’s experience proves once again the need for an independent Criminal Cases Review Commission. Little introduced a bill to Parliament last month to establish the commission. “We’re such a small country and I think we get too insular. If you’re part of the system, you’re also part of protecting the system because you want to believe that it’s working; you don’t like to think it’s not.”
Montaperto has long believed he was framed for the Flaxmere charges – allegations the police have vehemently denied. After publicity about Montaperto’s planned appeal in 2008, Schaab told the media that there was no benefit for police in framing Montaperto for a crime he didn’t commit. “It doesn’t make sense. We wouldn’t have achieved anything in doing that,” he said. But Montaperto says the police actions “need to be looked at”.
“You have good police and bad police. I’m not saying all the police are bad. They had a job to do but they had no right to do what they did to me back in the day. They are answerable for the wrong they’ve done, apart from the good work they do … I’m not out to hang them, or execute them publicly for what they’ve done. I didn’t warrant what they did to me. I was their scapegoat.”
The long fight to clear his name has left him feeling abandoned, with no one listening to him, he says. “If someone is injured, you can hear them if they’re 30m away or 300 yards away, but we’re talking about 30 years here.”
Success at the Court of Appeal would change his life, Montaperto says. “You don’t have to look behind you, do you? You have to live a life of Rambo when you have something like that on you; you have to be on the lookout. You can’t drop your guard. It’s quite a load having something like that on your shoulders. It’s haunted me.”
Ask what a win would mean for him, and he replies with just one word: “Peace.”
“I’d said to the cops, ‘Next time you haul me up, I’m going to run you off the road.’ They were harrassing me, so I did.”