By ANGELA GREGORY
Days before he slaughtered three people, including his two children, an agitated Brian Aporo was spotted stumbling out of the Rawene pub.
From the Rawene Baptist Church across the road, Pastor Jack Algie watched the short, stocky 31-year-old approach.
"He was raving. I didn't know if he was drunk or mad," Mr Algie told the Herald in December 1999.
The recollection came just hours after Aporo slit his two children's throats with a butcher's knife, attacked their mother and stabbed in the heart a neighbour who tried to stop him.
Aporo was yesterday found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity.
Mr Algie, with other church members and almost everyone in Rawene in contact with Aporo, knew his problems ran far deeper than any battle with the bottle.
In the weeks leading up to the killings, Aporo had told people he was suicidal, the son of Satan, was cursed, about to be killed, and at times talked in tongues.
He had even asked church members if he should seek medical help, but was advised not to. Instead, he relied on Bible readings, religious counselling and amateur exorcisms.
Those closest to him knew he had a history of mental illness.
They included his de facto wife, Te Huia Hape, his father figure, Murray Platt, and a mental health consumer advocate for Hokianga Health patients, Toby Adams - all three heavily involved in the Rawene Baptist Church.
At Aporo's trial yesterday, the High Court at Whangarei heard how some church members had been trying to counsel him. They advised him that he did not need psychiatric help, and one even attempted a sort of exorcism at his home.
When the Herald asked Mr Algie last year what church members had known or done about Aporo's problems, he said they were not aware how sick he was. Aporo was not that involved in the church - "He hadn't really come to us for help."
But in 1999, Mr Adams told the Herald that Aporo had shown symptoms of mental problems, with slight delusional behaviour, and the church had been "awesome" in helping. "The church was an anchor."
Aporo belonged to a small support group run by Mr Adams, who said his main aim was to "bring them to the Lord."
A police statement by Te Huia Hape indicated that Mr Algie and Mr Platt had known of Aporo's suicidal thoughts and his fears that he was possessed.
In the week leading up to the killings, Aporo's behaviour was so erratic that he had even wanted to commit himself, she said.
However, Mr Platt had advised against that, saying he would only be pumped full of drugs, whichwould not solve the problem.
In another police statement, Mr Algie's wife said Aporo had confided to her husband that he feared he would harm his family.
A church member told police how he had once joined in talking in tongues with Aporo, and marched around his home demanding that Satan leave.
But blind faith or divine intervention were never going to save Aporo.
Only timely intervention stood a chance, and the church and many others in the tight-knit community either ignored or missed their cues.
In response to Herald inquiries last year, Mr Algie denied that the church saw itself as a cure-all for people with serious mental illnesses.
Though the church believed in the power of prayer, Mr Algie said he would recommend medical help for clearly unwell members.
When he saw Aporo lurch out of the Masonic Hotel in December 1999, he had noticed he was saying things which were "a bit bizarre."
"He was a bit unbalanced, but I didn't know how urgent it was."
He said Aporo had been "mucking around" with a tohunga (Maori priest), and had contacted a counsellor because of suicidal thoughts days before his rampage.
One close friend said Aporo had confided he was hearing voices in his head and talked of "cutting the jugular."
He had also been struggling with an alcohol problem and guilt over his infidelities.
Another church member told the Herald that the week before the killings Aporo had borrowed a religious video from him. "He kept replaying the scene where David chopped Goliath's head off with a sword."
But despite his deteriorating condition, the mounting concern and the presence of a hospital just up the road, Aporo escaped the attention of doctors and nurses.
Mr Adams felt guilty for failing to alert Hokianga Health, although he said he was about to have a quiet word with the mental health nurse.
The former sufferer from bipolar disorder admitted: "If anyone should have hit the panic button, it should have been me."
Mr Platt knew Aporo had received some psychiatric treatment before, "but we thought he was doing all right. There were no clues he might turn violent," he said on the day of the murders.
Outside the High Court yesterday, Mr Platt seemed less sure what he had known then about Aporo's psychiatric history.
He said he was appalled that Aporo had not got the help he needed, but no one had pieced together the full extent of the problem.
"At the time no one knew the whole story ... He was scared to tell the truth."
A director of the Northland rural consortium of general practitioners, Dr Graeme Fenton, said rural people could be very tolerant of bizarre behaviour. The mentally ill could present themselves as quite benign, or just eccentric.
GPs were losing contact with mental health issues in the community as the work was increasingly taken over by mental health units, he said. There needed to be consideration of the role of GPs in caring for the mentally ill as they risked losing competence in dealing with such cases.
A clinical manager with the former Health Funding Authority, Gwen Tepania-Palmer, said the Rawene tragedy highlighted problems facing isolated rural and predominantly Maori communities.
The Hokianga people wanted to care for their own, but needed resources and information on how to identify mental health problems.
She called for trained whanau support networks equipped with skills, knowledge and leadership.
It was unfortunate that there were only three Maori psychiatrists in the country.
One health worker, who did not want to be identified, said at a hui that one cause of the tragedy was people not knowing their limits. "Mental illness cannot be fixed with a prayer."
Forensic psychiatrist Dr Rees Tapsell said that although prayer could be an important part of healing, severe mental illness required a range of treatments, including drugs.
There was a risk that religious teachings could become incorporated and expressed in the illness, "and religious sects tend to be attractive to those people who are vulnerable."
When perplexed about the world, the mentally ill tended to latch on to any kind of external means of defining that.
"They can see themselves as a central part of some sort of fight over what is good or evil."
People with very strong religious and spiritual beliefs would frame whatever happened to them in those terms.
"They may be surrounded by religious zealots who reinforce bizarre explanations in their head - that the devil is there, that there is a fight between God and the devil, and the devil is going to take over their families."
Most, if not just about all insanity acquittals had a very strong religious flavour, said Dr Tapsell.
To succeed with an insanity defence to murder, you had to have either a disease of the mind such that you did not understand the nature of what you were doing, or did not understand that what you were doing was morally wrong.
In such a scenario, someone might kill a child believing the child had been taken over by the devil, or that the child was the devil.
"They think the only way to get the child back is to kill the devil. At no point do they think it is morally wrong."
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