Crime, justice ... and journalists
Stories of offenders and their victims – be they articles, books, podcasts, or documentaries – start with reporters, in daily newsrooms, gathering facts.
What happened? Where and when? Who is the victim? And how did the police catch them? These tales can be harrowing, bizarre, or even, in rare circumstances, oddly inspirational. We asked five journalists to take readers behind the headlines of crimes they still think about – even years later.
There it was, abandoned in bushes, a gold Ford Laser with a firearm wedged between the two front seats. The police had spent all week looking for the murder weapon and getaway car used in the horrific home invasion of Beverly Bouma and here we were standing in remote bush south of Rotorua looking at it.
Five days earlier, on November 30,
1998 the gun had been used to shoot the adored Reporoa wife and mother after four men broke into her home. Beverly and her husband, Henk, were tied up at gunpoint and their money cards stolen. While two of the offenders drove Bouma's vehicle to Taupo¯ to empty the accounts, the other two remained guard at the farmhouse, during which time David “Blue” Poumako shot Beverly Bouma dead.
On December 5, photographer Stephen Parker and I had just followed an Armed Offenders Squad convoy to Kaingaroa, where police arrested the suspects. We were heading back to the office when we noticed the Eagle helicopter hovering above part of a forest. We parked up and headed into the bush to investigate and it wasn't long before we came across the Laser hidden in the trees.
Next thing, we found ourselves surrounded by the Rotorua Armed Offenders Squad screaming at us to get away. We did what we were told and carefully retreated. Our shoes – including my Baby Spice-inspired black boots on massive platforms (it was the 1990s after all) – were confiscated to allow forensic examiners to remove our footprints from the scene of the crime. It was months before we got them back.
The chopper was keeping tabs on the car until they arrived. They never imagined we'd get there first.
Beverly Bouma's murder was a crime that angered the nation and was the first time the words “home invasion” were used. Although all four offenders were held to account – with Poumako, Dillon Hitaua and brothers Mark and Luke Reihana all being jailed for murder or manslaughter – the tragedy's twists and turns continued in the years to come.
In 2001, Poumako died in prison from a heart attack and 10 years later Hitaua was stabbed to death by his long-term partner as she fought him off during an argument.
Four years after the violent death of his wife, Henk Bouma died from liver cancer in 2002.
It takes your breath away, coming face to face with a murderer. It was June 1998, and I was walking down a Tauranga driveway when Lester Roberts pulled up. He looked at me. I looked at him. As moments go, it was up there.
Technically, he wasn't a murderer then. It would be another few days before a Rotorua High Court jury would find him guilty of murdering his wife, Rosemary, after he ran her down with his ute near their Bay of Plenty farm in March 1997.
Roberts had been having an affair with his neighbour. He used to leave the marital bed at 5am, supposedly to go milking. Instead, he was going next door.
The Crown said he killed Rosemary so he could continue the relationship without having to pay his wife a $500,000 divorce settlement, her share of their farm, and so he could keep their three children with him.
Rosemary certainly had her suspicions. The night before she died, she rang a friend asking her to go with her to a lawyer the following week. She wanted to know her rights should she and her husband separate.
The day he murdered her, Roberts rang Rosemary on his way home from a job to suggest she walk to meet him. That he and his young son would pick her up and they'd drive home together.
In court, I found myself fixating on that call, wishing it had gone unanswered. If only she'd been in the bathroom, or outside, anywhere but at home doing cross-stitch. Instead, Rosemary was summoned to her death.
The Crown said Roberts coldbloodedly planned his wife's execution with that phone call. He said he hit his wife by accident. That he did not see her until it was too late, that she'd “jumped out” at him. As if. They were the pathetic, awful excuses of a man going straight to jail.
The jury took just four hours to reject his version of events. Justice.
Throughout the trial Roberts denied the lover motive. I was about to ask for her version of events when Roberts turned up in the driveway. The trial had been adjourned for the day and he was on bail, free to visit her. Fears of an aborted trial meant I had no choice but to leave.
So Roberts spent some of his last hours of freedom with his lover. I hope it was cold comfort.
By covering the crime and justice round for more than 20 years I have written hundreds of stories about heinous crimes. One case always stuck vividly in my mind. A 17-year-old girl was asleep in a caravan in Mount Maunganui in 2002 when she was raped. Her attacker was never found.
Ten years later, I happened to be in one of my favourite haunts, the Tauranga District Court, when I noticed Barry Rikihana Farrell's name on the list of accused due to appear in the dock that day.
He ended up pleading guilty to rape but I didn't make the connection to the 2002 cold case until I got my hands on the police summary of facts, and pulled up the original Bay of Plenty Times story from the archives.
Forensic science had indeed caught up with Farrell as predicted by the original officer-in-charge and so had the long arm of the law.
He had been compelled to give a DNA sample to police when he was arrested on a 2012 burglary, which gave the police a forensic hit on the rape 10 years ago.
I tracked down the detective in charge of the original investigation and, to my surprise, also persuaded Farrell's family to speak to me. They were in shock.
His victim talked to me, too. The sexual attack on her as a 17-year-old girl made her hit rock bottom, she had considered taking her own life. Farrell had stolen 10 years of her life but now she had a voice to claim back some of the power taken from her in the dead of night all those years ago.
The killing of George Taiaroa at his stop-go sign was a despicable act of racist violence.
If you could boil down the Crown case, that was the essence of why Quinton Paul Winders pulled the trigger.
And yet the crucial evidence that put the murder weapon in his hands – despite the firearm never being found – was not emotional rhetoric but clinical, forensic science.
The 2013 murder was a puzzle. Taiaroa seemed an unlikely victim – he would be 75 next month if he had lived, so this was no young man managing traffic at the isolated single-lane bridge north of Taupo¯ where he was killed.
There was little about George Taiaroa that answered the question: Why were you killed? Media and public assumption attempted to fill the gaps, and did so focusing on his ethnicity with inaccurate and tired stereotypes – Ma¯ ori equals gangs, equals drugs.
The first time I spoke with his wife, Dr Helen Taiaroa, the pain caused by these mistaken assumptions was so clear. It was there during our next conversation, and almost every time we spoke after that.
As became clear later, the answer to the question lay entirely with the killer.
Winders was a racist, and when his father's impatience at the traffic stop led to a minor accident, that smouldering hate flared.
He blamed George Taiaroa for the accident, then came back to kill him.
The evidence against Winders was shocking. It included testimony from neighbours who had been shot at by Winders in repeated acts of extreme territorial defence of his property in remote Whangamomona.
It is odd the police were not told about Winders' aggressive behaviour although, crucially, the remote region was not beyond the reach of the law when it came to checking firearms licences.
The police officer who inspected Winders' firearms took the extra step, which was not required of him, to write down the serial numbers of the guns.
After the murder, detectives could not find among Winders' weapons any rifle which matched the calibre of bullet removed from Taiaroa's skull.
Without the rifle, there would be no way of forensically matching the bullet with the weapon that fired it. For a prosecution, it was a yawning and uncomfortable gap.
But in an extraordinary breakthrough, the serial number on the rifle – written down in the notebook of the officer who inspected the firearms all those years ago – was tracked back to the Canadian factory in which it was made in the 1970s.
From there, the search was on for sibling weapons that rolled off the same production line as police worked on the theory that a series of rifles made from the same length of barrel would share similar qualities when examined.
It was actually even better than that; New South Wales police scientists showed the missing murder weapon would make the same barrel markings to the fatal bullet as its sibling rifles, tracked down in obscure parts of the world.
In that Rotorua courtroom, police did not have the murder weapon and yet, in a way, they did. Scientific study of the missing rifle's siblings brought it to life – an almost ghostly image that became increasingly real as detective work and science placed it in the hands of the killer. Winders was found guilty of murder.
The murder stays with me. If for any reason, it's because of the space George Taiaroa left behind. He seemed a man who thoroughly filled his life and those of those around him, and the vacuum left was immense.
And there was the stroke of luck and innovative police work that placed the missing murder weapon in Winders' hands. It is hard to explain just how clever that was, and the wonder of it is hard to escape.
Over two decades of police and emergency services reporting across much of the North Island I have, unfortunately, covered hundreds of tragic fatal car crashes.
One remains a mystery and still has me asking: Whatever happened to Bobby Roberts?
Te Paewhenua “Bobby” Roberts, 53, was driving a Fulton Hogan work van that crashed through a stone wall and plunged 250m off the Kaimai Range summit into dense bush around 8.30am on November 30, 2004.
I arrived at the summit, along with the police and fire service, soon after the crash and spoke to witnesses, who described how they had seen the van accelerate at the wall and “fly” off the side of the mountain range. I watched as police launched themselves on abseiling ropes over the top and into the bush to start their search for Bobby. They thought they would find the body under the van or nearby, as the windscreen had exploded and Bobby, who was not wearing a seat belt, was catapulted further into the bush.
But they never did.
I watched the van being winched up through the bush and back into the car park, broken to¯ tara branches and ponga fronds poking out at odd angles, the windscreen shattered, but no Bobby.
The day after wha¯ nau gathered and joined a 55-strong team to help search for him. They stayed at the marae at the base of the Kaimai Range for weeks but had to pull the pin when even cadaver dogs didn't pick up a scent.
For months, the family held out hope he was still alive using his bush and hunting skills to survive in the rugged terrain. And even in 2017 at a coroner's inquest, his son, Lester Roberts, said he believed his father was still alive.
Two other men came forward after the inquest to say they had seen Bobby Roberts.
Police followed up the reported sightings but still, nothing. No remains have been found, either.
Bobby has never accessed his bank accounts or applied for a benefit.
Every time I drive over the Kaimai summit I stop, walk to the stone-walled lookout barrier, look down into the native bush and wonder whatever happened to Bobby Roberts?