10 reasons police may have got the wrong man for a 1992 murder
Despite mounting evidence that police got the wrong man, Teina Pora remains behind bars for the 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett. Phil Taylor outlines why several experts believe the conviction is fundamentally flawed
“Had the police known the semen in Susan Burdett’s body belonged to an infamous solo stalker rapist when
Teina Pora began to tell his stilted, vague, contradictory stories about a gang home invasion, he would likely have been charged with wasting police time rather than rape and murder.”
Had the police known the semen in Susan Burdett’s body belonged to an infamous solo stalker rapist when Teina Pora began to tell his stilted, vague, contradictory stories about a gang home invasion, he would likely have been charged with wasting police time rather than rape and murder.
There is no doubt Pora was a fool who played a dangerous game by implying he knew who was responsible for one of the most shocking murders of its time. Susan Burdett was a 39- year- old accounts clerk and an avid ten pin bowler who lived alone. She returned late from club night at the Manukau Superstrike on Monday, March 23, 1992, and after showering, was raped and battered to death. Her killer posed her body, crossing her legs, which were positioned off the bed. Lying on the bed beside her was the softball bat she kept for protection.
Pora was convicted of her rape and murder in 1994 and was again found guilty at a retrial in 2000, ordered after the semen in Burdett’s body was found to belong to Malcolm Rewa, the country’s second- most prolific rapist and someone who otherwise always attacked alone. Rewa was eventually convicted of Burdett’s rape, but two juries couldn’t decide about murder.
Many people have had trouble with the case, including chief justice Dame Sian Elias, who sent the case back to court commenting that the Crown had been ‘‘ selective’’ in saying Pora told a pack of lies about almost everything except his involvement.
Pora’s motives for lying lay in the situation he found himself in, says Tim McKinnel, the former policeman who, as a private investigator, has taken up Pora’s cause.
Pora was a prolific car thief and had been arrested on a bench warrant for failing to attend court. Though relatively minor, jail was possible because of his long rap sheet for such crimes. He was a kid without a mother, father or job and, already a parent himself; his habit was to try to ingratiate himself to police when in trouble.
Since being charged with the rape and murder of Burdett, Pora has maintained he had no part in it, even though that stance has made it difficult for him to be granted parole. Senior detectives who worked on the case are among those who share that view, and new evidence collected during the past year supports it. The central plank of the case against Pora was his own varying admissions, which the world’s leading authority on false confessions has recently described as ‘‘ fundamentally flawed and unsafe’’.
In a second piece of new evidence collected by McKinnel and barrister Jonathan Krebs, who are working to have the case reviewed, a British criminal profiling expert has concluded Rewa was ‘‘ highly unlikely’’ to have worked with any cooffenders, let alone Pora, a juvenile associate of an enemy gang.
It began for Pora on March 18, 1993 when he was arrested on the court warrants. He was 17, the son of a teenage mother who died when he was 4 and a father who was never around; he had a baby daughter to look after, was in a bitter dispute with senior Mongrel Mob members, having pinched back a car they had taken from him. Mobsters had turned up looking for him with a gun. He knew the gang was after him and he was in trouble with the police too.
It has never been explained how Pora went from being processed on the warrants at the Gordon Rd police station to be being quizzed about the Burdett rape and murder. He had provided his DNA and been excluded as a suspect the year before. In the normal course of events he would have been escorted to court on the warrant matters that day. Instead, Pora was held in custody for four days, during which he was questioned about the Burdett case for 14 hours, without a lawyer.
What is known about that morning is that Pora was brought in at 7.45am. According to a police job sheet, the head of the Burdett homicide inquiry, Detective Inspector Steve Rutherford, received an anonymous phone call 40 minutes later from a female who named a prominent Mongrel Mobster as responsible for the killing. The woman cautioned that her information was hearsay, refused to give her name or number and hung up.
Serendipitous? Sitting in an interview room having been dealt with on the warrants was Pora, a young Mongrel Mob associate.
Whether or not at the instigation of the anonymous call, within 30 minutes Detective Sergeant Mark Williams went to speak to Pora and the Burdett case was raised. Williams recorded in a job sheet that Pora asked whether police had anyone for it yet.
‘‘ No, but if you know something about it, tell me.’’ ‘‘ I know who did it.’’ ‘‘ Tell me about it.’’ ‘‘ They’ll get me.’’ ‘‘ Who?’’ ‘‘ Mobsters.’’ ‘‘ Did you do it?’’ ‘‘ Nah, nah but I know who did. I’m just shit- scared of them. They’ll get
The longer he lied, the harder it became to own up to having no useful knowledge about the crime whatsoever and to having completely wasted the time of the officers who had been kind to him.
Professor Gisli Gudjonsson
my missus and my baby.’’ ‘‘ Did you know there’s a reward?’’ Pora was told the reward was $ 20,000 and there was an indemnity against prosecution for non- principal offenders. Williams fetched the indemnity form and when Pora told him he couldn’t read, explained it and read Pora his rights.
Over the next four days, Pora’s story evolved from claiming he’d driven two Mongrel Mobsters to Burdett’s house, to having kept lookout, to having witnessed the attack, to having helped hold her down on her bed with one mobster while another raped her. Pora didn’t volunteer names but when police put names to him — including the one nominated by the anonymous caller — Pora went along with it.
IT WAS a significant development for a police inquiry that was going nowhere. A year had passed and despite an enormous effort, they were struggling. Several hundred people had volunteered DNA and been eliminated as having deposited the semen found in Burdett’s body, including Pora. The homicide inquiry team had been halved.
On the fourth day, exactly a year after her death, Pora was charged with the sexual violation and murder of Susan Burdett and burglary of her house. ‘‘ Will my baby get the [ reward] money?’’ were the first words a weeping Pora said to a lawyer after he was charged.
The charges were laid despite Pora’s story being shot through with holes. He couldn’t find the street Burdett lived in, couldn’t point out her house when police stood him in front of it, described her as fair and fat when she was dark and slim, didn’t know the bed he claimed three assailants and the victim were on was a waterbed. He couldn’t describe the house layout, claimed to have taken a ten pin bowling trophy when none was missing, didn’t know the position her body was left in, said she screamed and yelled when her closest neighbour heard only a series of dull thuds. And those he claimed had raped her were all cleared by DNA.
There was no physical evidence to show Pora was ever there. Critics say police sought to build a case on his words rather than test whether he knew anything about the crime at all. Otherwise, says McKinnel, a neighbouring house could have been pointed out and Pora asked whether that was the one. The scene of a brutal murder is not easily forgotten. Had police done that, says the investigator, it would have been obvious Pora didn’t know what he was talking about.
Instead Rutherford, a celebrated detective whose successes include solving a cold case botched by the original murder inquiry team, stood Pora in front of Burdett’s house and asked, ‘‘ would it help if I showed you the house?’’ In explanation for not recognising it, Pora said that the hedge had grown. In fact it had been trimmed to about half the 3.5m it was at the time of the murder.
McKINNEL WAS a junior detective working in Manukau at the time of Pora’s retrial. He recalls being an observer during many ‘‘ vigorous debates’’ in the police bar about whether Pora was innocent. ‘‘ If you wanted to start a verbal altercation, that was the case to mention.’’ After Pora was again convicted, a cop expressed his disbelief to McKinnel, calling it an outrage. ‘‘ I was a young cop and I thought that was an absurd thing to say. It stuck with me over the years.’’
McKinnel completed a degree in criminology, travelled overseas and