Twenty-year wait for justice over

A police bungle in a child-abuse investigation meant two sisters had to wait 20 years for justice.

The girls were aged just 8 when their grandmother’s partner abused them in 1980 and 1981.

The girls went to police and gave statements some time in 1996 or 1997.

Police made initial inquiries, but the investigation went no further. Then an error in the police’s administration system resulted in the file being closed.

The file was only reopened following an audit in 2010. The girl’s abuser, John William Ross, was spoken to and charged two years later.

In September, 2016, Ross was found guilty of seven charges of historic sexual offending following a jury trial in the High Court at Napier. He was jailed for four years and six months.

Ross, now 67, was most recently living in Hastings.

He offended against the girls who stayed with him and his partner, in 1980. Ross and his partner lived in a state forest settlement in Northland at the time. Ross also offended against one of the girls at her parents’ home in South Auckland in 1980 or 1981.

The 2016 trial was a retrial. It followed a 2013 trial in which he was found guilty of the rape of one the girls and six charges of indecency against both girls. The Appeal Court quashed the convictions in 2015 and ordered a retrial.

The retrial, before Judge Geoff Rea in the Napier District Court, was held in September 2016 and ended with guilty verdicts for the indecency charges, and the amended charge of attempted rape.

Ross denied all the offending, saying the girls’s recollections were unreliable. He denied that the girls had ever lived with him, and denied that they had been

"A range of improvements have been made to police systems nationally."

Detective inspector Shane Cotter

enrolled at a local school, despite evidence from the school showing he had been the one who enrolled them.

He also said there were witnesses who could have confirmed his version of events, but they had died in the nearly 40 years since the offending occurred. He blamed police for failing to investigate the allegations earlier.

Ross also alleged there had been errors made by his lawyer Russell Fairbrother, QC, and Judge Rea. He appealed the convictions. In a recently released decision the Appeal Court dismissed Ross’s appeal, saying the victims’ accounts of Ross’s offending were ‘‘unshaken under crossexamination’’ and the Crown’s case had been strong ‘‘notwithstanding the passage of time’’.

On Friday, Wellington district manager investigations, detective inspector Shane Cotter, said police apologised to the complainants for the unacceptable delay at the time the case was re-opened.

The girls’ case was among those discovered as part of Operation Scope, a national audit of child abuse files undertaken after police became aware of a backlog of child abuse files in Wairarapa.

Operation Scope examined 2752 current and completed files. Of those 186 were tasked for further examination.

‘‘As a result of the audit and subsequent review a range of improvements have been made to police systems nationally ...’’ Cotter said.

Neither of the victims wished to comment.