Death on a dark corner
When a schoolboy was left for dead in central Wellington, his attackers bragged of beating a ‘faggot’. Talia Shadwell revisits the killing of Jeff Whittington.
Early in the morning of May 8, 1999, a central Wellington CCTV camera captured a glimpse of the tall, rakish figure illuminated occasionally in pools of street light as he trailed off into the gloom.
Jeff Whittington was drunk and high on datura as he made his way down Vivian St after a night out.
Earlier in the evening he’d had a few mugs of the hallucinogenic tea, boiled up at a friend’s flat, and spent his night out dancing and drinking with girls in town.
About 4.20am a policeman found him sprawled on Vivian St, but Jeff told him he was all right.
The officer helped him on to the footpath and continued on his way. Jeff struck on in the direction of the Aro Valley home, above a dairy, that he shared with his father.
People who saw him that morning would later say he looked a lot older than 14.
He had purple hair and wore green nail polish.
Then-Wellington High School principal Prue Kelly recalls the fourth-former as ‘‘the boy in the sewing class’’.
‘‘He dressed with flamboyance … he coloured his hair and his nails. But around High, he wasn’t the only one of the boys to do these things.’’
On that morning in 1999, Jeff probably did not look out of place on the bohemian corner of Cuba and Vivian – home to cafes, art shops, neon-lit bars and flesh clubs.
Tassled and bedazzled Cuba carnival-goers would have partied down the intersection in the months before Jeff would cut across it on his lonely walk home.
Yet the boy with the purple hair would only make it about halfway up the street before a pair of strangers driving by clocked him.
Detectives didn’t know who the boy on life support in Wellington Hospital was, or how he came to be kicked senseless in Inverlochy Place, a nook near Aro Valley.
Seeing the way he was dressed, they skipped the mainstream news organs of the day and instead had his description broadcast on an alternative radio station in hopes of getting the gravely injured teen identified in time to get his family to his side.
Sure enough, then-Detective Inspector Brett Kane recalls, the station’s listeners had the boy identified within hours as Jeff Whittington, 14, of Aro Valley.
He died the next day, with his family around him.
Stephen James Smith, 27, and Jason Morris Meads, 25, had come home later on the morning of May 8 with a couple of prostitutes, boasting they had beaten a ‘‘faggot’’ who had been wearing makeup.
‘‘They said he told them to f... off, so they kicked the s... out of him and left him for dead,’’ a friend of the pair said.
‘‘They said they had never seen anyone bleed from the places he bled from. They were laughing about it.’’
The men admitted in court they had been drinking that night and in the early hours of the following morning, drove by and picked up Whittington.
They said the saw the teen – a stranger to them – sitting on the kerb and said they feared he might be beaten up.
They told the jury at their December 1999 trial that all three wound up on Inverlochy Place, a short drive away, to smoke a joint.
They claimed they bashed him because he argued with Smith after spilling beer in the back of Meads’ car.
Yes, they told the court, they punched and kicked him – but denied stomping on his head, saying they never meant to kill him.
At 4.40am a woman found him lying in a puddle with injuries that told a brutal tale.
An autopsy found he had a ruptured bowel and blows had caused his brain to swell, fatally. He had boot marks on his skin.
Smith and Meads were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Whittington’s death unnerved Wellingtonians, Kane, now a police inspector recalls.
‘‘I remember it was the circumstance – a 14-year-old boy, a schoolboy just brutally murdered by people that he didn’t even know, no previous interaction, no dispute, no knowledge of them. Just random – wrong place, wrong time.’’
Jeff was going by the nickname ‘‘Zathan’’ at the time he died. A friend left a note in his memory not long after his death: ‘‘I miss you Jeff. Your smile made me smile. You were so happy in life I hope you are the same in death.’’ His family stayed out of the media glare. Efforts to trace them all these years later have been unsuccessful. Reports of the funeral recounted cannabis leaves painted on his coffin and young mourners who spoke of how he liked writing stories, foxes, candles, and magic, and that he identified with goth culture. Whittington had been into wearing earrings and a stud pierced through his lower lip. His personal diary detailed homosexual encounters, referred to fleetingly during evidence at trial, but it was never clear whether he identified as gay. Brendan Goudswaard was in art class at school with Jeff. He is regretful he doesn’t recall much about him – ‘‘I can count on one hand the number of conversations we had’’ – but remembers with clarity the day in Shakespeare rehearsals when he heard of his classmate’s death. ‘‘One of the girls who was in the same show as me came in and told us. She was uncontrollably blubbering, she was really close to Jeff. I just remember it being really shocking.’’ Goudswaard thinks he himself was probably coming out to his closest confidantes around the time Jeff was killed.
He saw the comments reported in the news – that his classmate was beaten to death for being a ‘‘faggot’’.
But Goudswaard, at 14, didn’t interpret the events as a case of a boy, who might have been going through a similar self-discovery to him, being murdered because of it.
‘‘It was hard to sort of relate – and at that age – what that meant. I had started figuring out who I was at that stage, but I don’t ever remember really connecting the two.’’
Prue Kelly, now retired saw the murder as a hate crime. She’s previously described receiving the news as her worst experience at the school – but her former student’s sexual orientation was not an issue.
‘‘Was he gay? I don’t know. I never think about pupils in terms of gender or ethnicity.’’
She pauses over the phone, then echoes the detective’s comments. ‘‘He was just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time.’’
Ronald Trifero Nelson got to know Jeff, in a way – BATS Theatre in Wellington had insisted he get the family’s blessing for the play he was writing about the murder.
Corner 4am and Cuba was a sellout show – but there was nothing ‘‘joyous’’ about the 2007 production, Nelson recalls.
In its creation he spoke to Jeff’s sister for hours, interviewed his friends and read the eulogies.
Nelson chose not to cast a ‘‘Jeff’’ in his play – instead telling his story through the eyes of bit players in the tragedy. The performance proved harrowing for Whittington’s sister.
‘‘The show was really rough for her. We portrayed the murder three times, three different ways, and by the time the last time came around she screamed out ‘no, no, not again’. It was horrific.’’
Nelson had taken an interest in the story because back in his home country, the United States, he had followed the widespread rage at the ‘‘gay panic’’ provocation defence claimed in 1998 by the killers of freshman Matthew Shepard, who beat and tortured him to death.
‘‘It changed the way Americans saw gay people in our country.’’
When he learned of Jeff’s death, he was surprised the crime had not achieved sustained infamy in New Zealand.
‘‘Why weren’t people talking about it?’’
Newspaper archives show the suggestion of a gay hate crime – the ‘‘faggot’’ quote – did not emerge until trial.
Most of the column inches in the intervening months had been devoted to questions of youth drinking, parental supervision of teens and street violence.
Jeff’s death was framed against a backdrop of intense debate about teen drinking – only three months after he died, Parliament would vote to lower the drinking age from 20 to 18.
Wellington City Council funded street lighting, transport home for late-night revellers, and a youth ‘‘hang-out’’ in the city that became Zeal, which still runs today.
One of Whittington’s killers is now out – Meads, who in 2007 admitted defrauding Inland Revenue of about $17,000 from behind bars, was released in 2013.
Smith has since been in and out of lock-up. Drink-driving and alcohol abuse have punctuated his short bursts of freedom since 2014, and he’s currently back inside – not eligible for parole again until 2017.
Since Jeff’s death, same-sex partners have won the right to marry, the nation has marked 30 years since homosexual law reform stopped prosecutions for sex between men, and his former high school now has gender-neutral bathrooms.
The murder was way before Inside Out ambassador Connor McLeod’s time but he’s heard of it. ‘‘The fear he must have felt and how terrified he must have been.’’
Over tea on Cuba St, not far from where Whittington took his last walk 17 years ago, McLeod shakes his head and laughs wryly when asked if he would hold his boyfriend’s hand out in the street at night: ‘‘Don’t even consider it.’’
He has worked with young people like Jeff for five years and seen some LGBTQI (lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer-intersex) youth despair.
‘‘It was only a few weeks ago that a young person in my community took their own life. It’s a crisis that has been going on for so long.’’
But others have flourished, like McLeod, who passionately advocates for rainbow youth. He thinks he has grown up in a more accepting world than Whittington did.
‘‘I’m absolutely confident that things are going to keep moving forward.’’
One night in 2011, Goudswaard finished his last drink at S&M’s gay bar on Cuba St and overtook a group of men as he walked Vivian St towards Aro Valley, unwittingly retracing Whittington’s final steps.
‘‘One of them started a conversation, it was like, ‘hey, how’s your night going?’ I don’t even know how far I got when one of them just grabbed me and and shoved me [face-first] hard against the wall.’’
Goudswaard’s attacker vanished fast and he asked the other two to call an ambulance, but they looked ‘‘a bit dumbfounded’’.
He wound up in hospital with cuts to his head, blackened eyes, a swollen face and a near-broken nose.
Growing up in Wellington, Goudswaard was a youth worker and, as ‘‘Ellie Kat,’’ a regular on the drag circuit.
He says he found the capital a welcoming place to flourish on the gay scene.
But strangers still tossed insults – it’s where he acquired the sixth sense that tells him when to cross the road and walk away, fast. He felt sure his attack was motivated by homophobia.
‘‘There’s just this look of disgust, and the narrowing of the eyes, this disapproval, and yeah, I’ve seen that look often enough to know.’’
Only a few weeks ago a stranger spat on him in the street in Germany: ‘‘It was surreal.’’
Goudswaard recounts all this on a Sunday afternoon from his new home in summer-time Berlin. He is the same age Whittington would be now.
He still bears a little scar from his own attack, but it’s already concealed under a skull-cap he wears in preparation for a wig and makeup that will transform him into Ellie Kat for an audition later that afternoon.
As he signs off to resume his metamorphosis, he adds a final thought about being a boy who likes to go out at night wearing funny hair.
‘‘It would certainly be easier to blend in more. But I don’t think I’d be happy.’’