Crooked Cop Culture: How New Zealand Police condoned a culture of wrongful convictions
- Grant McLachlan
- 10 hours ago
- 25 min read
Clockwise from top left (click to drop down list):
Detective Senior Sergeant James Doyle — Ordered the destruction of carpet bearing luminol-illuminated footprints at the Bain family home that matched Robin Bain's feet, not David's, ensuring the defence could never independently examine the most critical piece of physical evidence in the case.
Detective Inspector Mark Franklin — Led the Gone Fishing investigation and was found by the Court of Appeal to have lied in court about witness statements, conducted secret undisclosed meetings with key Crown witnesses, and coerced at least two women into giving false evidence by threatening to take their children from them.
Detective Sergeant Grayson Joines — Led a court-ordered two-month audit of disclosure failures in the David Lyttle wrongful conviction case, then redacted nearly all of the content of the newly released documents before handing them to the defence — defeating the very purpose of the audit the court had ordered.
Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton — Named by a Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1980 as having manufactured a cartridge case using Arthur Allan Thomas's own impounded rifle and planted it at the Crewe murder scene, sending an innocent man to prison for nine years in what the Commission described as "an unspeakable outrage."
Detective Inspector Rob Pope — Led Operation Tam into the Marlborough Sounds murders, declared Scott Watson guilty within days of arriving, suppressed multiple eyewitness accounts of a mystery ketch, and used a deeply flawed photo montage to secure a key identification that the IPCA later found breached so many rules it exposed the investigation's integrity to justified criticism — before being promoted to Deputy Police Commissioner.
Detective Inspector John Hughes — Led both the Arthur Allan Thomas and David Tamihere investigations, gave demonstrably wrong evidence in the Thomas case, and admitted to Sir Bob Jones the night of Tamihere's conviction in 1990 that he had "made up all the evidence" — a statement that took 33 years to surface publicly.
A generation of Supreme Court reversals has exposed a disturbing pattern at the heart of New Zealand policing — evidence fabricated, witnesses coerced, disclosures withheld, and vulnerable suspects railroaded into cells they had no business occupying. From the Crewe murders to a suburban Papakura street to the Coromandel bush, the same playbook has destroyed innocent lives across five decades. This investigation analyses the officers behind the badges, the habits that corrupted the process, and the question New Zealand keeps avoiding: who has been held accountable?
Contents
The architect of two miscarriages: Detective John Hughes
David Tamihere: The jailhouse nark factory
Teina Pora and Mauha Fawcett: The confession merchants
Alan Hall: When the evidence was doctored
Mark Franklin and the Gone Fishing case
David Lyttle: The 'Mr Big' trap
Peter Ellis: The contaminated investigation
David Dougherty: When DNA was not enough
David Bain: Egregious errors in Dunedin
Rex Haig: Immunity for the probable killer
Scott Watson: The case that awaits
Rob Pope: Tunnel vision on a career path
On 31 March 2026, the Supreme Court of New Zealand quashed David Tamihere’s murder convictions for the deaths of Swedish backpackers Sven Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen — 37 years after they disappeared in the Coromandel bush. The five-judge panel found that his 1990 High Court trial had been fundamentally unfair, relying in part on evidence that had been, in the court’s own words, “concocted to secure convictions.”
It was a damning verdict. Not just on the trial that sent Tamihere to prison for twenty years, but on a justice system that had steadfastly refused to examine itself. And for those who have followed New Zealand’s long, painful catalogue of wrongful convictions, it was grimly familiar.
Because David Tamihere is not an isolated case. He is part of a pattern.
In the years since the turn of the millennium, New Zealand courts have overturned the convictions of Peter Ellis, David Dougherty, Teina Pora, Alan Hall, David Lyttle, Mauha Fawcett, Gail Maney, Colin Maney, Mark Henriksen, and now David Tamihere — joining Arthur Allan Thomas, pardoned in 1979, and David Bain, acquitted at retrial in 2009, and Rex Haig, whose conviction was quashed in 2006 after ten years in prison. Collectively these people served well over a century in prison. The Crown has paid out more than $13 million in compensation.
Behind almost every case sits the same cluster of police habits: the use of unreliable informants; the extraction of false confessions from cognitively impaired or psychologically vulnerable suspects; the deliberate alteration or suppression of exculpatory evidence; the coercion of witnesses; and a deep institutional resistance to admitting error.
New Zealand police have not just made mistakes. They have, in case after case, actively suppressed the truth.
The architect of two miscarriages: Detective John Hughes
To understand Tamihere, you must first understand Arthur Allan Thomas — because the man who led both investigations was the same person.
In June 1970, Harvey and Jeannette Crewe were shot dead in their Pukekawa farmhouse. Their baby daughter Rochelle was found alone in her cot five days later. Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton led the inquiry, with Detective Sergeant Lenrick Johnston as his key operative and Detective Sergeant John Hughes as one of the investigating officers. Thomas, a neighbouring farmer who had once admired Jeannette Crewe, was convicted twice — in 1971 and again at retrial in 1973. He spent nine years in prison before being pardoned in December 1979.
A Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1980 delivered one of the most damning verdicts in New Zealand legal history. It found that the cartridge case that had been central to Thomas’s conviction — Exhibit 350, allegedly linking his rifle to the murders — had been manufactured using Thomas’s own impounded firearm and then planted at the Crewe farmhouse. The Commission named Hutton and Johnston directly, describing the fabrication as an “unspeakable outrage.” Thomas received $950,000 in compensation.
Neither Hutton nor Johnston was ever charged with any offence arising from the framing of Arthur Allan Thomas.
The relevance to Tamihere is this: the jury foreman at Thomas’s second 1973 retrial was later found to be a personal friend of Detective John Hughes — a connection the 1980 Royal Commission said was, on its own, sufficient to describe the second trial as a miscarriage of justice. Hughes also gave evidence about Thomas being present at the Crewe property that was demonstrably wrong, and which opened the door to cross-examination that damaged Thomas’s credibility with the jury. Fourteen years later, John Hughes was appointed as the lead detective on Operation Stockholm — the investigation into the disappearance of Sven Urban Höglin and Heidi Paakkonen.
David Tamihere: The jailhouse nark factory
Tamihere was a man of genuine criminal history. He had committed manslaughter in 1972, raped a woman in 1986, and had been living rough in the Coromandel bush when the Swedes disappeared in April 1989. He stole their distinctive white Subaru — something he freely admitted. There was circumstantial evidence placing him near their last known location.
But the Crown case at his 1990 trial relied critically on three prison informants who claimed Tamihere had confessed to the killings while on remand. Chief among them was “Witness C” — Robert Conchie Harris, himself a convicted double murderer. Harris claimed Tamihere had told him he killed and sexually assaulted the Swedes, and that he had given one of his sons the victim’s watch.
The problems were not subtle. In 1995, Harris swore an affidavit retracting his testimony. He later retracted his retraction, claiming he had been threatened. In 2017, after a private prosecution brought by jailhouse lawyer Arthur Taylor, Harris was found guilty of eight charges of perjury at Tamihere’s trial and sentenced to a further eight years and seven months. He died in custody in 2021.
A man went to prison for twenty years based substantially on the word of another prisoner who was later convicted of lying.
The deeper rot runs to Hughes himself. In 2023, journalist Mike White reported in the Sunday Star-Times that Hughes — who died in 2006 — had bragged to property developer Sir Bob Jones, the night after Tamihere’s conviction, that he had “nailed” Tamihere “by making up all the evidence.” Jones, who died in 2025, told White this directly.
Meanwhile, when Höglin’s body was found in 1991 — in a shallow grave near Whangamatā, 70 kilometres from where the Crown had placed the murders — the entire geographic basis of the prosecution theory collapsed. The Court of Appeal failed to act. The Privy Council failed to act. It took until 2026 for New Zealand’s Supreme Court to call the original trial what it was: fundamentally unfair.
Hughes died in 2006 having escaped any consequence for either the Thomas case or Tamihere’s. The system that produced him continues.
Teina Pora and Mauha Fawcett: The confession merchants
The most dangerous weapon in a corrupt detective’s arsenal is a false confession. New Zealand police have proved themselves expert at extracting them from people least equipped to resist.
In March 1992, 39-year-old Susan Burdett was raped and murdered in her Papatoetoe home. In 1993, 17-year-old Teina Pora — a Mongrel Mob prospect who had heard there was a $20,000 reward for information — boasted to police that he had been present at the murder. He was interviewed for fourteen hours without a lawyer. What police did not know, and made no effort to ascertain, was that Pora had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and a functional mental age of nine or ten.
Pora was convicted in 1994. He was convicted again at retrial in 2000, despite DNA evidence that had by then linked serial rapist Malcolm Rewa to the attack. It emerged that some prosecution witnesses in the retrial had been paid. Pora spent 22 years in prison. In 2015, the Privy Council quashed his convictions, finding that his confessions were the unreliable product of a profoundly suggestible mind. Rewa was finally convicted of Burdett’s murder in 2019. Pora received $3.5 million in compensation and a government apology.
Police knew Pora was vulnerable. They questioned him for fourteen hours without legal representation and relied on his incoherent account when the physical evidence pointed elsewhere.
The pattern repeated with devastating precision in Christchurch. Mellory Manning, a sex worker, was abducted, raped, and murdered on 18 December 2008, her body dumped in the Avon River. Four years later, police charged 24-year-old Mauha Fawcett — a Mongrel Mob prospect with undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. They interviewed him eleven times over three years. His stories changed constantly. He was told not to consult a lawyer. In at least one recorded interview, detectives discussed lying to him.
Fawcett was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to a minimum of twenty years. His conviction was quashed in 2017 and the charge ultimately dismissed in 2021, after expert neuropsychological evidence confirmed his FASD meant he was “prone to making up something” when he could not remember. As with Pora, the semen recovered from the victim did not match Fawcett. The real perpetrators remain unidentified.
Wellington lawyer Christopher Stevenson, who represented Fawcett, drew the comparison himself: “David Dougherty, Teina Pora — now add Mauha Fawcett to the list of Māori men who’ve been wrongfully convicted and robbed of years of their life in jail.”
Alan Hall: When the evidence was doctored
If there is a case that makes explicit what others only imply — that New Zealand police have on occasion deliberately falsified evidence — it is the case of Alan Hall.
In October 1985, Arthur Easton was stabbed to death in his Papakura home by a bayonet-wielding intruder. His two teenage sons survived and described their attacker to police as tall, strong, and Māori. A witness named Ronald Turner saw a man fleeing the scene and told police the same thing.
Hall is Pākehā. He is short, slightly built, and asthmatic. He came to police attention because he owned a bayonet and a beanie similar to those left at the scene, and was walking in the area at the time of the attack. Hall, who had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, was subjected to interrogation sessions of eight and fifteen hours without a lawyer. What police did not disclose to the defence was the content of Turner’s statement identifying the suspect as Māori. Instead, Turner’s statement was materially altered: the reference to ethnicity was removed and replaced with a claim that Turner had identified Hall’s blue sweatshirt as matching what the suspect wore. Turner later confirmed he was never shown any clothing. And the sweatshirt had been purchased two months after the murder.
Evidence that exonerated Hall was known to be in Crown files from 1993. His conviction was not overturned until 2022 — 37 years later.
Hall was convicted in 1986, aged 23, and spent 19 years in prison. His mother sold the family home to fund appeals. She died in 2012 without seeing his name cleared. In August 2022, the Supreme Court found a substantial miscarriage of justice and acquitted Hall outright. He received $4.93 million in compensation — the largest wrongful conviction payout in New Zealand history.
What makes the Hall case unique is that it has produced the only criminal charges arising from a New Zealand wrongful conviction. In August 2024, police charged two former police officers and a former Crown prosecutor with wilfully perverting the course of justice. All three pleaded not guilty and received name suppression. One defendant died in 2024. As of early 2026, the trial of the surviving two defendants is before the High Court, delayed by the ill-health of one accused.
Mark Franklin and the 'Gone Fishing' case
In August 1989, Deane Fuller-Sandys went fishing off Auckland’s west coast at Whatipu and did not return. His body was never found. Five days later, a sex worker named Leah Stephens disappeared. Her body was found in Woodhill Forest three years later. It was not until 1997 that detective Mark Franklin began constructing a theory that Fuller-Sandys had been murdered at the direction of a woman named Gail Maney, carried out by a Black Power-affiliated associate named Stephen Stone.
The entire case rested on four immunity witnesses. There was no forensic evidence. Fuller-Sandys’s body was never found. And there were, from the beginning, serious questions about how those witnesses came to give the evidence they gave.
Two of the women witnesses later recanted entirely. One told the court she had given a false statement after police threatened to take away her young child and told her they would make her life a misery. A second woman similarly recanted. A former Henderson police officer, Andrew Thompson, confirmed she had told him the same thing — that nothing she had said to detectives was true — the moment she left her interview.
Franklin’s lawyers described him in Court of Appeal submissions as “the puppet-master” who manipulated witness evidence. Maney’s lawyers said he had “coerced and threatened” all four Crown witnesses.
More concretely: the Court of Appeal found that Franklin had lied in court when he denied that witnesses had been shown each other’s statements. A fax sent in 1998 showed Franklin personally sent one witness’s full statement to the lawyer of another witness; shortly after, that second witness dramatically changed their own account in ways that aligned with the first. An undisclosed job sheet showed Franklin holding unlogged private meetings with a third witness.
Maney and Stone were convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2024, the Court of Appeal quashed all four convictions. Maney, Colin Maney, and Henriksen were acquitted. A retrial was ordered for Stone. In April 2025, the Crown announced it would not proceed with that retrial.
Mark Franklin retired from New Zealand police in 2005 and moved to the Cook Islands. In 2011, he was convicted in Rarotonga of selling cannabis to an undercover police officer and served nine months in prison. He has not been charged with any offence relating to the Gone Fishing investigation.
David Lyttle: The ‘Mr Big’ trap
In May 2011, Brett Hall — a former drug offender living on the remote Whanganui River — disappeared. His best friend David Lyttle, who was building Hall a house, became the prime suspect. Rather than investigate Hall's drug network, police deployed a complex "Mr Big" undercover operation — a technique in which an operative poses as a crime boss and tells the suspect he can make their legal troubles vanish if they confess.
Lyttle was invited on a fishing trip, befriended by an undercover officer, and drawn into a fabricated criminal organisation. He eventually confessed. His account of what he had done with Hall's body was wrong in every particular — police excavated both sites he named and found nothing. The jury convicted him in 2019 and he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of eleven years.
What emerged in the years between arrest and trial was a cascade of deliberate non-disclosure. Police withheld thousands of pages of material from the undercover operation, hundreds of pages from detective notebooks, and — most critically — information received from an informant in March 2014, before the Mr Big operation even began, who told them how Hall had really been killed and that Lyttle had nothing to do with it. Police admitted they ignored this information and never followed it up.
In October 2017, Justice France ordered a court-supervised audit of what had and had not been disclosed. Four officers led by Detective Sergeant Grayson Joines spent two months conducting the audit, which resulted in hundreds more relevant documents being released — including nearly all the notebooks of Detective Senior Sergeant Dave Kirby, one of the investigation's lead officers, which had somehow not been handed over until then. Joines and Kirby then redacted nearly all of the content before delivering them to the defence.
Police buried a statement identifying the real killers, ran an elaborate covert operation at public expense, conducted a court-ordered audit designed to fix the disclosure problem — and then redacted the documents the audit was meant to surface.
In October 2018, at Lyttle's first trial, Detective Senior Sergeant John Gleeson was on the stand when he realised his own notebooks still had not been disclosed. Justice France aborted the trial immediately. The Court of Appeal quashed Lyttle's conviction in 2021, finding the Mr Big operation had placed impermissible psychological pressure on him. The court described the police failures as "egregious and an affront to the administration of justice" and awarded $75,000 costs against the police.
Peter Ellis: The contaminated investigation
The case of Peter Ellis stands somewhat apart from the others in that the primary failure was not fabricated evidence or witness coercion, but the contamination of child testimony by moral panic, flawed interview techniques, and the active role of a Crown expert witness who had no business doing what she did.
Ellis was a childcare worker at the Christchurch Civic Crèche in the early 1990s. Against a backdrop of “satanic panic” cases in the United States and United Kingdom, an allegation was made that he had abused a three-year-old child. Police launched an investigation, and in 1993 he was convicted of 16 charges of sexual offending against seven children and sentenced to ten years.
The evidence was inherently problematic from the outset. The children’s accounts included allegations of Satanic ritual abuse, cages attached to the ceiling, and mass participation by multiple workers — none of which was corroborated by any physical evidence. A parent compiled a list of allegations and distributed it to other parents. Children were interviewed multiple times by police, by therapists, and by parents asking leading questions. A Crown psychiatrist, Dr Karen Zelas, both helped supervise the evidential interviews and then gave expert testimony at trial — a fundamental conflict of interest that the Supreme Court ultimately found had fatally compromised the proceedings.
Ellis spent seven years in prison, maintaining his innocence until his death from cancer in 2019. In October 2022, the Supreme Court unanimously quashed his convictions posthumously — the first time in New Zealand history that a conviction had been overturned for a deceased person. The court relied in part on the emerging tikanga Māori principle that a person’s mana endures beyond death.
Ellis was convicted and died a convicted man because the police investigation created the very evidence on which he was tried.
David Dougherty: When DNA was not enough
David Dougherty’s wrongful conviction for the 1993 kidnapping and rape of an eleven-year-old girl in West Auckland is, in important respects, the simplest case in this catalogue. He provided a DNA sample voluntarily. The sample was inconclusive. A jury convicted him. Five months later, the Institute of Environmental Science and Research found another man’s semen on the victim’s clothing.
The Court of Appeal declined to act. The victim remained certain she had correctly identified Dougherty. Only in 1997, after a sustained campaign by journalist Donna Chisholm and lawyer Murray Gibson, was a retrial ordered at which Dougherty was acquitted. In 2003, Nicholas Reekie was convicted of 30 charges against four women, including the original rape. Dougherty was awarded $868,728 in compensation in 2001. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2017, aged fifty, the compensation long gone.
The specific police failures in the Dougherty case are less dramatic than in Tamihere or Hall, but they share a common thread: eyewitness identification was treated as sovereign. The victim was certain. The DNA was inconvenient. The system backed the certainty over the science.
David Bain: Egregious errors in Dunedin
On 20 June 1994, five members of the Bain family were found shot dead in their Every Street home in Dunedin. The sole survivor, 22-year-old David Bain, was arrested four days later and charged with all five murders. He was convicted in 1995. The case turned on circumstantial evidence — his fingerprints on the rifle, a spectacle lens found in his brother’s room, and bloodstains on his clothing. David maintained his innocence throughout, asserting his father Robin was the killer who then shot himself.
A Canadian former Supreme Court judge, Ian Binnie KC, found in a 2012 report that David Bain was “innocent on the balance of probabilities” and identified “egregious errors” by Dunedin police. These included the failure to preserve firearms residue from Robin Bain’s hands; the deliberate destruction of a section of carpet bearing luminol-illuminated footprints on instructions from Detective Senior Sergeant James Doyle — prints that matched Robin’s feet, not David’s; the failure to follow up on allegations of incest involving Robin and daughter Laniet that provided a potential motive; and the destruction of Laniet’s diaries, which might have contained relevant disclosures.
The Privy Council quashed David Bain’s convictions in 2007, finding a “substantial miscarriage of justice.” He was acquitted at retrial in 2009. His compensation claim was ultimately refused — Binnie’s report was peer-reviewed and disputed by a subsequent reviewer — and the Government made an ex-gratia payment of $925,000, explicitly not characterised as compensation for wrongful conviction. The Bain case remains acutely contested in public perception, but the documented police failures in evidence preservation and the failure to pursue a plausible alternative theory are consistent with patterns seen across the broader catalogue.
Whatever the truth of Events Street, the manner in which Dunedin police handled the evidence ensures that the definitive answer may never be known.
Rex Haig: Immunity for the probable killer
In 1995, Rex Haig was convicted of murdering Mark Roderique, a crewman on his fishing vessel, at Jackson Bay on the South Island’s West Coast in 1994. The prosecution case rested almost entirely on the testimony of Haig’s 18-year-old nephew, David Hogan, and another crew member, Tony Sewell — both of whom were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying against Haig.
A key defence witness, Anton Sherlock, who told police that Hogan had admitted the killing, was murdered before the trial. Haig spent ten years in prison. His 1996 appeal was dismissed. In 1997 he participated in a prison hostage-taking at Paparua — using fake explosives — specifically to force a review of his case. That action led to an independent investigation by private investigator Bryan Rowe, which uncovered fresh evidence pointing strongly to Hogan as the killer. In 2006 the Court of Appeal quashed Haig’s conviction, noting the “evidential basis” to suggest Hogan had murdered Roderique. No retrial was ordered.
Haig sought compensation but was denied it in 2009 after a report by Robert Fisher QC concluded he had probably participated in the murder alongside Hogan — a conclusion Haig disputed vigorously. The case illustrates a specific dimension of police misconduct: the granting of immunity to a likely killer in order to secure a conviction of another man. Hogan was never charged. Rex Haig died in 2016 without receiving either a clear exoneration or compensation.
Police granted immunity to the man who may have committed the murder, secured his testimony against his uncle, and then stood by as an innocent man’s key witness was killed before he could testify.
The common threads
Examined together, these cases reveal not a series of unconnected errors but a coherent institutional pathology with recurring features.
Jailhouse informants. The systematic use of prison narks to manufacture testimony appears in Thomas, Tamihere, and Pora. In all three cases, the informants were ultimately discredited. In no case did the police who cultivated them face consequences.
False confessions from vulnerable suspects. Pora (FASD, seventeen years old, fourteen hours without a lawyer), Fawcett (FASD, eleven interviews, told not to contact a lawyer), Lyttle (Mr Big psychological manipulation), Hall (autism, interrogation sessions of eight and fifteen hours without legal representation) — in each case, police targeted someone cognitively or situationally unable to resist interrogation pressure and then treated their incoherent or contradictory statements as evidence of guilt.
Evidence tampering and non-disclosure. Physical evidence was planted in Thomas. A witness statement was materially altered in Hall. Exculpatory evidence was buried in Lyttle. Witness communications were not disclosed in Stone/Maney. Evidence was destroyed in Bain. The Supreme Court found evidence was concocted in Tamihere.
Witness coercion. In Stone/Maney, witnesses were threatened with the removal of their children if they did not provide evidence police wanted. In Fawcett, police discussed lying to the suspect. In Haig, immunity was granted to the probable perpetrator to secure testimony against another man.
Tunnel vision. In nearly every case, police selected a suspect early and worked backwards, suppressing or ignoring evidence pointing elsewhere. In Lyttle’s case, police literally had an informant pointing to the real killer and chose not to follow it up. In Hall’s case, evidence about a high-probability alternative suspect was actively concealed from the defence.
Targeting the marginalised. There is an inescapable demographic pattern. Māori men are disproportionately represented in this list — Pora, Fawcett, Tamihere. Gang-adjacent individuals, the neurodiverse, those without reliable legal representation, and those with prior criminal histories are consistently over-represented. They are easier to convict than to investigate.
The role of private investigators and journalists. In almost every case, the critical work of uncovering the injustice was done outside the police and the Crown. Private investigator Tim McKinnel overturned the Pora, Hall, Maney, and Stone convictions. Journalist Mike White exposed Hughes’s admission in the Tamihere case. Donna Chisholm exposed the Dougherty case. Joe Karam spent thirteen years working to free David Bain. The pattern is consistent: the system does not fix itself.
Scott Watson: The case that awaits
Conspicuously absent from the list of overturned convictions is Scott Watson, who has been in prison since 1999 for the murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, who vanished from the Marlborough Sounds on New Year’s Eve 1997. Watson has served 27 years maintaining his innocence. The case rested heavily on eyewitness accounts of a mysterious two-masted ketch — which has never been found and does not match Watson’s single-masted sloop.
The parallels with Tamihere are striking: no bodies for an extended period, an opportunistic suspect with prior offending history, identification evidence that raises serious questions, and a justice system that has repeatedly declined to re-examine its own work. Watson’s case is before the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the independent body established in 2020 specifically to review potential miscarriages of justice without ministerial interference. Whether it will prove equal to the task remains to be seen.
Rob Pope: Tunnel vision on a career path
The Scott Watson prosecution has a named architect: Detective Inspector Rob Pope, a Christchurch CIB officer who took charge of Operation Tam — the investigation into the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope — just five days after the two young people were reported missing on 2 January 1998. What happened in the days and weeks that followed is one of the more thoroughly documented examples of investigative tunnel vision in New Zealand policing history.
The central eyewitness, water taxi driver Guy Wallace, had described the mystery man who left with Smart and Hope as unshaven, with wavy medium-length hair, wiry build — and had dropped them at a two-masted wooden ketch. Watson was clean-shaven, had short hair, and owned a single-masted steel sloop. Within days of arriving, Pope declared the two-masted ketch effectively did not exist. Sightings of it — reported by multiple witnesses including a former police officer with forty years’ experience — were not followed up. A former detective who worked on the case, Mike Chappell, later said officers were told not to pursue ketch leads.
By April 1998, four months into the inquiry, Wallace had been shown Watson’s photograph three times and rejected him each time. Police then produced a new montage featuring what became known as the “blink photo” — an image of Watson mid-blink, giving the impression of hooded eyes consistent with the mystery man’s description. Wallace picked Watson from this photograph. He later said he felt tremendous pressure from police and media during the investigation, and signed an affidavit stating he had made a mistake. He maintained Watson was innocent until his death in 2021.
The trial also featured two jailhouse witnesses who claimed Watson had confessed to the murders while on remand. One subsequently recanted. The other was granted the use of a car and a cellphone by police for his testimony — information the jury never heard.
Pope publicly declared his suspect guilty — saying Watson “stood out like dog’s balls” and had “the right sort of agenda and pedigree” — within days of arriving in the Sounds, before hundreds of witnesses had been interviewed.
A formal complaint to the Independent Police Conduct Authority in 2010 resulted in a highly critical report. The IPCA found the photo montages used to identify Watson “breached so many rules” that they “exposed the integrity of the investigation to justifiable criticism and to the drawing of inferences about intention and motivation.” It also found the police failed to adequately pursue sightings of the mystery ketch. On the affidavit allegation — that Pope had sworn a misleading affidavit to obtain interception warrants to bug Watson’s yacht, home and telephones — the IPCA found errors in the document that fell short of the required standard of accuracy, though it stopped short of finding deliberate misleading. A parallel internal police investigation also cleared Pope. Watson’s father Chris said the investigation was handled “in a literal fashion” and was too narrow.
Pope led a second controversial investigation before the Watson case: the 1994 murder of hitchhiker Lisa Blakie, whose body was found under a boulder in the Porter River in Canterbury. Darfield man Timothy Taylor was convicted and remains in prison. Former police analyst Bridget McMenamin, who worked on the case, has said: “I think the people in charge of that case decided that they wanted to get an arrest and Taylor was going to be the easiest person to arrest for the murder.” An unidentified pubic hair found on Blakie’s body has never been matched. A Devil’s Henchmen gang van seen in the area was never searched. A third potential DNA suspect has never been compelled to provide a sample.
Pope led two high-profile murder convictions that attracted serious, sustained doubt. Neither conviction has been overturned. He was never charged with any misconduct.
Instead, Pope was promoted to Deputy Police Commissioner in 2006 — while complaints about his conduct in the Watson case were still before the IPCA. His arresting officer on the Watson case, Tom Fitzgerald, was promoted to NZ police liaison officer in Canberra. Pope retired in 2011 after 35 years of service, the day after an independent police conduct report was highly critical of senior police management culture — a report reviewing changes prompted by a Commission of Inquiry into Police Conduct triggered by rape accusations against officers.
Pope’s trajectory is the clearest illustration in this entire catalogue of the institutional incentive problem at the heart of New Zealand policing. The system does not merely fail to punish officers whose investigations produce unsafe convictions — it promotes them. That signal, repeated across the careers of Hutton, Johnston, Hughes, Franklin, and Pope, is not ambiguous. It tells every detective that tunnel vision, aggressive pursuit of a chosen suspect, and the creative management of identification evidence will be tolerated, rewarded, and ultimately commemorated with a distinguished service record.
Consequences — or the lack of them
The most uncomfortable question raised by this catalogue is not whether injustice occurred. The courts have answered that. The question is: what happened to the people who caused it?
Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton and Detective Sergeant Lenrick Johnston were named by a Royal Commission in 1980 as having planted evidence to convict an innocent man. Neither was ever charged. Detective John Hughes — who is now known to have admitted fabricating evidence in Tamihere, and who gave discredited evidence in Thomas — died in 2006 without facing legal accountability for either investigation.
Detective Mark Franklin — described by appellate lawyers as a “puppet-master” who lied in court and coerced witnesses in the Gone Fishing case — retired to the Cook Islands and was convicted there of selling cannabis in 2011. His policing conduct in New Zealand has never been the subject of a criminal charge. Detective Senior Sergeant John Gleeson — whose repeated failures to disclose evidence in the Lyttle case caused a mistrial — received no known disciplinary action. In the Bain case, Detective Senior Sergeant James Doyle, who ordered the destruction of evidence, has faced no proceedings. Detective Inspector Rob Pope, whose Operation Tam investigation was found by the IPCA to have breached identification best practice to a degree that exposed its integrity to justifiable criticism, was cleared by police investigating themselves and rose to Deputy Police Commissioner before retiring with full honours in 2011.
In only one case has anyone faced criminal charges for their role in a New Zealand wrongful conviction: the Alan Hall case, in which two former police officers and a former Crown prosecutor were charged with perverting the course of justice in 2024.
Criminal defence lawyer Christopher Stevenson has stated publicly that the known wrongful convictions represent only around ten percent of all miscarriages of justice in New Zealand. Private investigator Tim McKinnel — the driving force behind the overturning of convictions in Pora, Hall, Maney, Stone, and other cases — has repeatedly observed that it is journalists, private investigators, and committed defence lawyers, rather than the police or Crown, who have had to fight every inch of the way to expose these failures.
“It says it’s a system that doesn’t like to contemplate that it’s made a mistake,” McKinnel told Newsroom in 2026. “It’s left to other people — not the authorities, not the police, not the Crown — to push for the right questions to be asked.”
What needs to change
The establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2020 was a significant reform, and long overdue. It provides an independent mechanism for reviewing convictions outside the normal appeals process. But a review body is not a deterrent body. It can identify wrongful convictions after the fact. It cannot prevent the practices that created them.
Several structural reforms demand serious consideration. The corroboration rule for confession evidence needs strengthening. Cases like Pora, Fawcett, and Lyttle show that false confessions can still reach juries. Mandatory video recording of all interrogations — not just later phases — and the compulsory presence of legal representation for all suspects facing serious charges are minimum standards.
The use of paid or immunity-granted prosecution witnesses requires urgent legislative attention. In Pora, witnesses were paid. In Stone/Maney, immunity was granted to four people whose accounts later proved to be fabricated. In Haig, immunity was given to the probable killer. Disclosure obligations on police and Crown must be reformulated with explicit criminal sanctions for deliberate breach, not just costs orders that affect institutional budgets rather than individual officers.
Until individual detectives and prosecutors face personal legal consequences for deliberate fabrication and suppression of evidence, the institutional incentives that produced these convictions remain unchanged.
The Hall case has produced criminal charges. That is a start. But the defendants have name suppression. The charges were laid nearly forty years after the offending. That is not accountability. That is accountability’s distant echo.
New Zealand has a deeply embedded culture of deference to authority — what Martyn Bradbury, writing in The Daily Blog, called “Authority Worship.” It is a culture that allowed Thomas’s conviction to stand for nine years after it should have been impossible to maintain; that allowed Pora to be convicted twice despite DNA evidence pointing to another man; that allowed Tamihere to remain a convicted murderer for 37 years after the lead detective bragged about making up the evidence.
The deeper structural problem is that every oversight body mentioned above — the IPCA, the CCRC, the SFO's nascent Anti-Corruption Taskforce — ultimately depends on the same institutions it is meant to hold accountable. Police investigated themselves over Rob Pope. The Crown investigated itself over Alan Hall, four decades after the fact. The IPCA, despite its mandate to oversee police, conducts approximately 85 percent of its investigations using seconded police officers. That is not independence. That is a structural conflict of interest with a letterhead.
An independent commission with coercive investigative powers, operating entirely outside the police and Crown structures, is the missing piece. My proposed Independent Crime and Corruption Commission (ICACC) Bill sets out precisely that architecture — modelled on Australia's state-based ICAC commissions, with investigators holding constable powers so the Commission need not depend on the very police force it may need to investigate. Without something equivalent, New Zealand will continue producing this article's subject matter: a fresh catalogue of wrongful convictions every decade, the same patterns, different names, and the same absence of personal consequences for those responsible.
The question for this country is not whether the justice system gets it wrong. It manifestly does, and has, at a scale that is deeply troubling. The question is whether New Zealand has the institutional courage to ensure that, when it gets it wrong, there are real consequences for those responsible — and that the habits that produced the error are genuinely extinguished, rather than simply waiting for the next vulnerable suspect to stand before the wrong detective.
