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In Dark Places: The Confessions of Teina Pora and an Ex-Cop's Fight for Justicee
In Dark Places: The Confessions of Teina Pora and an Ex-Cop's Fight for Justicee
In Dark Places: The Confessions of Teina Pora and an Ex-Cop's Fight for Justicee
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In Dark Places: The Confessions of Teina Pora and an Ex-Cop's Fight for Justicee

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Teina Pora, a 17-year-old car thief, was wrongly convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Susan Burdett, who had been beaten to death with the softball bat she kept next to her bed for her own protection
Tim McKinnel, en ex-cop turned private investigator, discovered the long forgotten case 18 years later, saw an injustice had been done and set out to win Teina’s freedom.
Reaching from the mean streets of South Auckland to the highest court in the Commonwealth, this is the story not just of Tim’s quest, but also of how an innocent man who was left rotting in a prison cell for two decades found the inner strength to rise above the dark places to which he had been condemned.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherBookBaby
Release dateMar 18, 2016
ISBN9780473326852
In Dark Places: The Confessions of Teina Pora and an Ex-Cop's Fight for Justicee

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    In Dark Places - Bennett Michael

    FRANKLIN

    PREFACE

    THE BRUTAL, THE VIOLENT, THE UNEXPECTED

    IN FEBRUARY 2011, AN EMAIL from a stranger arrived in my inbox. An investigator based in Hawkes Bay was working on a criminal case. He wanted to discuss the investigation with me. He was curious to find out if I could see a story in the case.

    We organised a meeting, but before we could get together, the Christchurch earthquake hit. A city fell. The country mourned 185 people dead.

    I met Tim McKinnel at my office soon after. Early 2011 was a time of profound reflection for every Kiwi. Even if you didn’t know someone directly affected by the quakes, what happened was a reminder of just how quickly everything — everything — can change. How an ordinary day can become extraordinary. How lives can be shattered by the arrival in one unannounced moment of the brutal, the violent, the unexpected.

    Tim brought his laptop to our meeting, and sitting in my office he showed me excerpts from police evidence videotapes from nearly two decades before. An horrific crime scene from a 1992 murder in the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe. And the 1993 police video recordings of a young car thief being interviewed in connection with the murder.

    Watching the material, I was shaky. The grainy poorly-filmed video footage was a document of two lives destroyed by the one act of violence. The life of the victim, Susan Burdett, ended in a pool of blood, her head broken by the softball bat she kept by her bed for her own protection. And the life of the young man who went to the police a year later and told them a strange and convoluted and nonsensical story about his involvement in the murder.

    I was left desperately sad from the things I saw on the crappy, degraded VHS footage. Sad, and angry. Something terribly wrong had happened, that much was clear even from that first viewing. There was something deeply amiss with the interrogations, and with the convictions that resulted from them.

    The answer to Tim’s question, could I see a story here? Yes.

    I knew this would be one of the most important stories I would ever tell.

    A few weeks later I met Teina Pora for the first time.

    Saturday is visiting day at Paremoremo prison. When prisoners come to meet their visitors, they wear prison-issue overalls — bright orange. The kid I’d seen on the 1993 police tapes was slightly built. Long curly black hair that he was obviously proud of. As the 17-year-old Teina was questioned he had an openness, a politeness, an enthusiasm to please his questioners that reminded me in many ways of my own son, who happened to be about the same age when I first watched the police tapes.

    The Teina Pora I met in the unit 6 visiting room was very different from the guy on those tapes. The long curly mullet was long gone, his head now shaved. He was stockier. It was the start of the league season and Teina was working out like crazy, closing in on his ideal weight, 87kg, almost all of it hard fast-twitch muscle.

    On the police videotapes, you notice Teina’s smile. His cheeky grin comes out now and then — when one of the detectives teases about his smelly basketball boots, say, or when he’s offered a ciggie, or when there’s the promise of a Chinese meal. But towards the end of the nine hours of questioning, Teina isn’t smiling so much any more. He’s starting to realise something is going very wrong in the police interview room. Something he can’t understand. Something completely out of his control.

    Teina’s smile disappears then.

    In real life, when I met him two decades later, Teina smiled often. Teina was mid-thirties, but he still had the same shy boyish face from the videos. Dark brown eyes, so dark they’re nearly black. But a liveliness in the eyes, a brightness, a warmth. Still the same politeness as on the videos, the openness. The sense of wanting to please.

    Teina is a guy you feel comfortable with fast.

    From someone who had never set foot inside a prison and who didn’t feel at all comfortable with the idea, I ended up happily taking my family on visits, or to watch Teina’s league team playing on the Paremoremo playing fields. You make a shift as you get familiar with the place, as you get familiar with the people who live there. When Teina’s daughter Channelle was unable to visit him on the last Christmas he was inside, my two young daughters made cards and insisted we all go for a Boxing Day visit.

    One particular visit was towards the end of league season. Teina’s team, the Pare Raiders, was on course to top their division. In the coming weeks they would play the final at Mt Smart stadium. Teina was voted the team’s MVP that year, known for putting huge hits on guys twice his size. He’d score at least once every game, usually more.

    As we sat at a table in the visiting room, chatting about league and the All Blacks and our families and who knows what, a ladybird landed between us. One of the little blue-black shiny things with wings. Maybe it’s not even called a ladybird. A bug.

    As we talked, the ladybird crawled across the table. I vaguely thought about squashing the thing, and when I saw Teina’s hand move towards it, I assumed he had the same thought. Bugs probably don’t have a long life span. Seemed this one’s life expectancy had suddenly gotten a whole lot shorter.

    But instead, Teina placed his hand in front of the ladybird, slowly, carefully. The bug climbed up on his finger. Teina raised his finger, looked at the ladybird a moment. Then he blew gently.

    The bug spread its blue-black shiny wings, flapped, and flew away.

    In the following months and years, over the course of making a documentary on the case and writing this book, for me the same questions remain as when I first watched the videotapes of the police interviews.

    Why did Teina Pora walk into the interview room and start that conversation with the cops? Why did he steadily dig himself deeper and deeper into a hole there was no climbing out of? Why were the befuddled, contradictory, often laughable accounts Teina gave of Susan Burdett’s rape and murder seen as adding up to a coherent viable confession? Why did two separate juries, in 1994 and in 2000, decide that the confused kid on these tapes was guilty? Why did this case lie unaddressed for so many years, despite widely acknowledged problems and questions? Why did it take over 20 years for the New Zealand justice system to give a shit?

    The following chapters are an attempt to answer some of these questions.

    This is a narrative that spans 23 years. The big story is the intersection of many smaller stories and many many players — investigators and mobsters, cops and lawyers, serial rapists and neuropsychologists, South Auckland car thieves and British law lords, prison guards and inmates, mothers and aunties, daughters and grandsons.

    To give shape to what could be a convoluted and unmanageable narrative, I have chosen to relate events in a broadly chronological order. The book begins on the night of March 23 1992, the night Susan Burdett died. The book ends on March 3 2015, the night the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council handed down its decision.

    To bring the reader into the heart of the things that happened, I use the conventions of the non-fiction novel. This is a story about real events, real people. In the book I frame the factual events and actions in the present tense, as if I was there, observing as they happened. Sometimes I was. But obviously, most often, I was not there.

    I wasn’t in Manukau Superstrike as Susan Burdett had her last gin with her teammates on that March night in 1992. I wasn’t in her car as she drove home from the bowling alley. I didn’t see her glance into the rear-view mirror as her little Starlet drove under a streetlight on Pah Road.

    But, I know Susan drove home that night. I’ve seen photos of her car, I’ve studied the accounts of the people who bowled with her that night. I know she had arranged to phone her son Dallas, and was heading home to do this. I’ve driven down Pah Road at the same time of the night as she did, the same time of the year. I’ve passed under those same streetlights she drove beneath. I know she used her remote control to open the garage door, drove her car in and closed the door behind her. I know that a few minutes later, Susan was dead.

    My goal is to bring together these known circumstances, the established events, and in the storytelling, to walk a step or two behind the characters as the events unfold. To transform the cold facts of what actually happened into lived experiences, moments that are real and present and human for the reader.

    At a certain point in the last section of the book, I become a part of the story. For the sake of consistency, where it is unavoidable but to include my involvement in those events at which I was actually present, I refer to myself in the third person.

    This is a story with heroes. It’s a story with villains. It is the story of a vicious crime. It is the story of a quest for justice. It is the story of a descent into the pit. It is the story of a steep mountain scaled. It is a story which had in 2015, at last, some kind of resolution.

    But it is a story that remains far from finished. When the last page is read, the reader may feel there are many questions yet to be answered. I would agree. These are the questions I believe need to be addressed most urgently.

    What will be done to make right what happened to Teina Pora?

    What will be done to ensure this never happens again to another New Zealander?

    And —

    What will be done to bring Susan Burdett’s killer to justice?

    A government-commissioned 2005 report by High Court judge Justice Sir Thomas Thorpe estimated that at least 20 wrongly convicted men and women are serving lengthy jail sentences in New Zealand prisons. Thorpe concluded that Māori and Pacific Islanders are far more likely to be affected. In the ten years since the report was released, none of Thorpe’s many recommendations have been implemented.

    Following the Privy Council decision in March 2015, the minister of justice Amy Adams and the prime minister hurried to reassure the electorate that, as the appeal system ultimately brought judicial closure for this case, this proves that the New Zealand justice system is working.

    This is bullshit of the highest order and must be treated as such by the clear-minded and the honourable.

    Teina Pora was imprisoned for more than 21 years for a crime he had nothing to do with. His case only ever became of public and political interest because unpaid private individuals committed themselves to putting right what our justice system had got so terribly wrong.

    And the person who took Susan Burdett’s softball bat, who lifted that bat high and brought it down hard, the person who beat Susan repeatedly with purpose and with determination until she lay dead — that person remains unconvicted for her murder.

    The end of this book is not, and cannot be allowed to be, the end of this story.

    Michael Bennett

    October 2015

    PART ONE

    1992 - 1996

    CHAPTER ONE

    UNDER A MILLION STARS

    MARCH 1992. SOUTH AUCKLAND. IT’S a Monday night. Monday night is league night. She’s been playing in the ten-pin bowling social league at Manukau Superstrike for several years now. Mondays are a chance to catch up, bowl a few games, have a laugh. Then a drink or two. The people she bowls with are more than teammates. They’ve become good friends. Monday night is her favourite night of the week.

    As she pulls on her team uniform, she thinks about ringing Dallas. She only recently connected with the son she gave up for adoption years before, when she was little more than a child herself. She still can’t get her head around it. So strange to see the baby she only knew a day or two, now a grown man.

    She opens her bedroom window to let in some fresh air. Her small two-bedroom unit gets airless on warm March nights like tonight. It would be nice to give Dallas a call, say hi, check everything is okay.

    She looks at the clock on the wall. There’s only twenty minutes till she has to be at Superstrike for her first game. No time to make the call.

    As she heads out the door Susan Burdett decides to definitely phone Dallas when she gets back from bowling tonight.

    Another part of South Auckland. The same muggy early autumn of 1992. Walking alone past locked and security-grilled shopfronts, Teina Pora laughs, remembering something.

    Hangi Pants. Lobelia, the little bitch, calling him Hangi Pants! When it’s Teina running around the bars of South Auckland every other night looking for his 13-year-old sister. It’s him dragging Lobelia’s skinny brown arse home before whichever uncle and auntie she’s staying with works out what she’s up to — which is getting pissed with guys ten years older than her. And she’s calling Teina the Hangi Pants. What?!

    Teina catches a glimpse of himself in a shop window as he passes. The long curly black hair. The big smile. The baby face, younger than his 16 years. The clothes that he always keeps clean and tidy. Maybe Lobelia’s right. The girls are interested, for sure. Teina’s never had a problem in that department. So what? There’s only one girl who matters to him now.

    Channelle. Just turned one year old. Cute as anything. His baby girl.

    Teina turns to walk down a side street. This one’s not so busy. Darker, a few street lights out. Way better.

    As he checks out the cars, Teina thinks about the tricycle he’s had his eye on. Big wheels, easy for Channelle to balance on. Red. Her favourite colour. He can just imagine bringing the trike home for Channelle. Teina thinks he might pocket a bit more of the money he makes tonight, keep back a wee bit of extra tax from what he’s gonna hand over to the mobsters. He’ll use it to buy her a jacket, the same colour. For when she’s riding her new trike.

    Teina slips the fork out of his pocket. The two outer prongs are already bent back, ready to go. He eases the fork in the door-lock of the Subaru. A couple of well-practiced twists, click.

    Teina slips into the driver’s seat, he reaches under the dashboard for the wiring. As the engine sparks to life, Teina grins to himself. He can’t wait to see the look on her face when Channelle sees her new trike.

    He can’t wait.

    Susan buys her round, and she takes the drinks to the table where her team are celebrating. Half past ten on a Monday night, Superstrike is still rowdy as hell. The rumble of bowling balls, the bleeping of Space Invaders machines, the cheering of bowlers. The smash of pins being knocked over. Susan likes this place. It’s noisy but it’s a comfortable kind of noisy.

    The team played well, they won easily. At the table the conversation follows the usual well-travelled paths. How’s work? Who are we playing next week? Seeing anyone new? Familiar. Easy.

    A teammate goes for another round of drinks, but Susan takes a last sip of her gin and says goodnight. It’s a work night, she has to be back in at the accounts department first thing. Susan smiles to her friends. See you next Monday.

    In the carpark Susan gets into her charcoal Toyota Starlet. She keeps the little car clean and tidy. The same way she keeps her little house. That’s one advantage of living alone, you can have things just how you like them.

    As she drives away from Superstrike, a million stars shine beautiful and silent in the skies above South Auckland.

    In early autumn 1992, Riversdale beach in the Wairarapa isn’t clammy like South Auckland. The sea breeze cools everything down. Not that Tim McKinnel is noticing the breeze. Or anything, really. He’s having trouble just seeing straight.

    Tim is just beginning his sixth form year, a basketball star in his small Catholic co-ed school. He recently broke up with the principal’s daughter. Sarah is beautiful. Very beautiful. In the end Tim felt she was too beautiful, too mature. Out of his league.

    So now Tim is down the beach with a group of his mates. All good Catholic boys from good Pākehā families. All drunk and determined to get a lot drunker, as fast as possible. Tim was a slow starter with alcohol. He’s making up for lost time. He has finished one and a half bottles of Marque Vue in a matter of minutes. Marque Spew they call it. With good reason.

    Sinead O’Connor is playing on a shitty little battery-powered cassette player. Nothing Compares 2 U. The lyrics remind Tim of the principal’s daughter. Everything reminds Tim of the principal’s daughter. Tim concentrates hard on sculling the second bottle before Sinead finishes.

    Tim is 17 years old. Almost exactly the same age as Teina Pora. Not that Tim knows anything about Teina. Or Susan Burdett. For now, Tim has no idea that the worlds of these three complete strangers will become entwined and entangled over the following two decades. For now, Tim knows nothing of the events about to unfold in a small unremarkable two-bedroomed unit in South Auckland that will change all three lives, forever.

    For now the biggest thing on Tim’s mind is getting drunk. And forgetting the principal’s pretty daughter.

    It’s an eight-minute drive from Superstrike back to her house. As it turns into Pah Road the Toyota Starlet passes under a streetlight, brighter than the others. Susan catches a glimpse of herself in her rear-view mirror. She unconsciously touches her curls. Still her natural colour at 39 years old, not like some of the office ladies who are younger even than her. Susan’s quietly pleased. She doesn’t have to dye yet.

    She turns right into Olive Crescent, pushing the remote switch. The little Toyota Starlet idles a moment in the driveway as her garage door labours upwards. Then she drives into

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