Neighbours feared sex offender so much they moved away
STEWART Murray Wilson was jailed for 21 years in 1996 for crimes that shocked the nation.
Among 22 charges covering rape, stupefying, bestiality, ill treatment of children and indecent assault were revelations he made his daughter eat whitebait and Weet-Bix from a bowl with the cats and drugged his de facto partner, forcing her to have sex with other women and the family dog.
The eldest son of an alcoholic couple long since divorced, Wilson was born in Temuka, near Timaru, in 1946.
He had two brothers – one who died in a car crash – and a sister.
He attended Marchwiel School and Timaru Technical College before leaving at age 15. ‘‘I had a good upbringing, I was good at school, I was always going fishing . . . and bringing home a feed of fish because dad was injured during the war,’’ he said this week.
He got on well with his parents – ‘‘That’s why they never deserted me.’’
He still speaks to his mother every week. ‘‘They are very genuine and very honest and they brought me up to believe that you love the person, not what they’ve done, regardless, and that’s the way I believe things should be. Everybody makes mistakes. I’ve made a lot of mistakes.’’
He refuses to talk about his later teenage years other than to say he was caught stealing from a property and removed from the care of his parents. ‘‘All sorts of real hell took place.’’
His crimes between 1971 and 1994 involved 16 women and girls whom he took into his home on the pretext of friendship and subjected to cruel and degrading treatment. The offences involved luring vulnerable women into his life, then drugging, beating, degrading them and raping them.
One victim was a 13-year-old raped in front of her mother, whom Wilson had earlier drugged. He repeatedly raped the girl in 1984 and 1985 and beat her and her pregnant mother, causing her to miscarry.
A mother of three told the court in 1996 that Wilson kept her a virtual prisoner for two years and forced her to have sex with him on a table in front of her three children while they ate dinner.
The court was told that Wilson, who allegedly stupefied and as- saulted the complainant between 1980 and 1982, beat the woman and her children, drugged her with prescription drugs, locked her children in a shed for hours, wanted her to have sex with a dog and asked her to choose one of the girls for a ‘‘special purpose’’.
Wilson instilled so much fear in people that neighbours sold their houses to get away from him.
Even social workers feared him. One reported being so scared of him that she tried to get a climbing rope as an escape measure if he ever trapped her in her office.
After Wilson’s convictions, So- cial Welfare came under fire for failing to protect Wilson’s daughter over a four-to-five-year period.
His intimidation was so great that it prolonged the suffering of Wilson’s daughter at his hands. In the end, Child, Youth and Family workers and most people who had contact with Wilson began to accept behaviour from him that would not be tolerated in others, the service’s chief social worker, Mike Doolan, said at the time. The Beast’s 16-year prison ‘‘hell’’: in the