By JAMES GARDINER
It is less than a 10-minute drive from the leafy streets of Epsom, with its immaculate well-tended gardens and heavily secured villas, to the almost treeless, fenceless suburbia of Mangere, but the contrast could not be sharper.
In the High Court at Auckland this week there was contrast, too. The young Maori defendant, led from a Mt Eden jail cell into the dock for sentencing. Behind him, most of the public gallery packed with white, middle-class faces, here to witness the fate of the man who shattered the lives of people they love. The one person not present from this group is the victim himself, but the reason for that is soon heard.
Arriving late, and seating herself on the other side of the public gallery as close as possible to the dock, is the defendant's mother. She calls to her son, oblivious to Auckland Crown Solicitor Simon Moore, who is talking about blood splatters that forensic scientists say indicate an already bleeding man being kicked repeatedly in the head.
Dressed in a trendy mustard shirt, dark blue jeans, new trainers, and with a short stylish haircut, the defendant faces the judge. His eyes alternate from rolling skywards to staring straight ahead at Justice Peter Salmon, his mouth downturned, impassive.
The defendant, for the family and friends of John Timmins, is the beast. The vicious animal who, with no apparent motive, beat and kicked Timmins nearly to death, then drove away in his car, leaving him brain-damaged and physically and psychologically scarred for life, possibly unable to work again.
His name is Joshua Wiremu McIsaac. He is 28 and he is almost certainly going to spend at least five years in jail.
He is no stranger to prisons, nor to violence. The court hears how in 1992, then aged 18 and going under the name of Joshua McClutchie, he hit a 2-year-old he was supposed to be minding with a hairbrush because the boy would not stop crying. Then he threw the toddler on the floor and punched him in the head.
The crying continued so he picked up the boy and threw him down again, fracturing his skull. Realising the injuries were serious, he fled the house.
Even at that age, McIsaac was known to the authorities. Court records show he has 30 convictions, the earliest in 1988, 10 of them for violence. His current girlfriend says he was in trouble from the age of 9 but juvenile court proceedings are not matters of public record.
Jump forward to October last year. McIsaac has continued to run foul of the law, spending more time behind bars. The 16 months he received for wounding the baby with intent to cause grievous bodily harm was followed by a four-year term for beating his girlfriend in 1997. He punched her repeatedly, then kicked her in the stomach. He is still on parole for that one.
McIsaac is good at kicking. When questioned about the Timmins bashing more than a month after the event, he bragged about his expertise as a kickboxer. Given the opportunity, he could take on the New Zealand champion.
Court records show that in the preceding month - the days after the Timmins attack - he assaulted two women, both of whom knew him, on separate occasions, and both said he kicked them in the head. One was knocked unconscious.
His criminal history is dotted with episodes that follow benefit day binges. And the day he attacked Timmins was benefit day for McIsaac.
That day, October 4, the successful barrister, highly regarded by others in the profession, drove his black BMW 325i into the high-rise central Auckland office in what was known as the Fay, Richwhite tower, a symbol of corporate affluence.
This was the eve of a holiday to France for 49-year-old Timmins and his wife Julie.
A former senior partner in law firm Chapman Tripp Sheffield Young, and a father of four ranging in age from 25 to 11, Timmins had built a formidable reputation as a meticulous courtroom lawyer, specialising in commercial litigation and employment law. Air New Zealand numbers among his corporate clients.
He has political and business links at the highest levels.
While Timmins was spending the afternoon tidying up his affairs at the office, McIsaac was in Onehunga getting, in his words, "wasted". So wasted, he tells police, that he remembers nothing from that afternoon until waking up in the shed outside his de facto wife's flat in Tarata Cres, Mangere, the next day. His de facto wife, Gale Watkins, later tells police she did not want to let him in the door because he appeared extremely drunk and she knew that was when he became violent and unpredictable. The other thing she noticed was that he was wearing boots.
All Timmins remembers was driving to his Epsom home for dinner and returning to the city to work late into the night. Next day he was found 10km away, barely alive, bashed beyond recognition in a bloody heap outside a factory smoko room in the industrial part of Onehunga. The staff who found him initially thought they had stumbled on a tramp until they noticed an expensive-looking gold watch.
How he got there, no one - apparently - knows. His car had been found in the early hours of the morning smashed on the other side of the Manukau Harbour's Mangere Inlet at Wallace Rd, Mangere Bridge.
Driving the BMW at the time of the crash was McIsaac, then a 27-year-old father of three, but he fled the scene. It was possible, he admitted to police, that he had attacked the car's owner and stolen the vehicle. He simply did not remember.
For Timmins, the blackout lasted much longer. In an interview with the Weekend Herald, he said he could not remember from the time he was at work until he woke up from his coma in hospital eight days later.
By then the case had hit the headlines but not because the police wanted it that way.
The Herald revealed the attack on October 10 after a tip-off. Police were fully engaged in their inquiry by then, codenamed Operation Brief (the term for lawyer), but admitted they hushed up the investigation for "security reasons".
What those security reasons were was never explained. At the time the police said they did not know whether they were dealing with an accident or an abduction.
The idea that Timmins could have crashed his car on Wallace Rd then, with such severe injuries, dragged himself back across the motorway over Mangere Bridge to Hill St, Onehunga, seemed absurd, but police had to investigate all possibilities.
As to abduction, video footage from cameras in the carpark of the tower in Queen St, where Timmins worked, showed the car being driven out about 11 pm but no one else could be seen in the vehicle.
The only evidence before the court that might provide a clue about why the attack occurred in the back streets of Onehunga in the dead of night is suppressed at the request of the Crown.
In the end it was, as defence counsel Mark Edgar said, "a random hit on the DNA database" that saw police finger McIsaac as the culprit.
Police remain reluctant to talk about the case.
Staff at Shieling Laboratories in Hill St, Onehunga, where Timmins was found, were interviewed by police about what they saw that morning and the night before.
One of the company owners, Graham Taylor, remains puzzled that two of the three people the police chose to call evidence from "saw nothing", whereas he and another man who saw an orange car in the area were questioned but not required to assist further.
Taylor said he left work about 12.30 am after the nightshift finished. He saw two cars outside, which was unusual because the staff had all left and the factory is at the end of a no-exit street where no other businesses operate night shifts. He told police he saw a man go from the driver's side of an orange car to a dark-coloured vehicle, which he now assumes to be Timmins' BMW. Whether the man got in or not, he was unsure.
Other staff who left work earlier reported seeing an orange car being driven slowly around the streets and stopping in the middle of intersections as the driver appeared to be looking for something. "They thought the driver looked Asian; I thought the guy I saw looked Polynesian," said Taylor.
As he pulled out of the factory carpark the dark car did a u-turn then stopped when it saw his headlights and waited as Taylor turned right and drove up the street.
As he drove up Hill St, Taylor changed his mind. "I thought, 'this is funny, what are these people doing where there isn't a single house', so I did a u-turn and drove back to the stop sign nearest to our factory. I shone my lights down the street and there were no vehicles. I was suspicious but I thought 'oh well, they've gone, don't worry about it'.
"Maybe what I saw had nothing to do with it but I don't think so. There are too many elements there that ring in with what happened."
The witnesses whose depositions were taken and handed up to the court in written statements in June this year included James Macavoy, who left work at 12.03 am and said he saw the dark-coloured car outside but no other vehicle. The other two Shieling employees whose evidence was required were Molia Sio and Oliver Hofmann, who said they went into the courtyard outside the smoko room just before 10 am and found Timmins lying on his side with his head covered in dried blood, propped up on one hand.
Another witness was a Hill St resident, Daniel McRae, who said he heard a male voice outside just before 1 am, then three or four minutes later heard a car alarm go off, followed by a "beep beep" as it was deactivated. He went outside to check his own car and found nothing untoward.
That evidence suggests the attack occurred between 12.30 am and 1 am, and that either Timmins drove his own vehicle from the city to Hill St or McIsaac was not the only other person involved.
The police officer in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Kevin Hooper, refused to discuss it after sentencing this week. He said he was "off duty" when approached, then agreed to a telephone interview later, but it was the police "media liaison" Noreen Hegarty who returned the Weekend Herald's call.
She refused to say why Hooper was not speaking and said police were "happy to have got a successful prosecution". Asked whether all the witnesses the police had been intending to call if the matter had gone to trial had given statements at depositions, Hegarty said "why wouldn't they be?" then rang back later to say "The defence has had full disclosure."
She denied "absolutely" that police had anything to hide. "There is no case any more; there's been a conviction, there's been a sentencing. We don't discuss some of the things that have gone on."
Disclosure was an issue throughout for the defence. At sentencing defence lawyer Edgar countered the Crown's argument that his client should not get full credit for his guilty plea by pointing out that the plea, entered on October 31, followed almost immediately after the Crown's case was fully revealed. Justice Salmon agreed and gave McIsaac what he called a "generous" two-year discount and settled on a jail term of seven years. The charge McIsaac eventually pleaded guilty to - injuring with intent to cause grievous bodily harm - had a 10-year maximum sentence. The original charge he faced - causing grievous bodily harm with intent - carries a 14-year maximum.
McIsaac's girlfriend, a 25-year-old with a 6-year-old daughter and son, 2, plans to marry him. They met two years ago but had been "going out" for just two weeks, she said. She was the only one visiting him in jail. "He told his mother not to."
She asked not to be named because she feared for her own safety from those who might want to harm him.
"Josh," she said, "doesn't want any more stories appearing about his past and that baby thing. He's not happy with what's been written."
In the time she has known McIsaac, she has never seen his violent side and trusts that if he does the anger management and alcohol and drug abuse courses in prison, she never will.
For all the contrasts between McIsaac and his victim, there is a similarity. Timmins has been appalled by the publicity. When McIsaac pleaded guilty, he and his family were spared the anguish of a trial, where defence lawyers would be free to suggest to jurors possible alternatives to the prosecution argument about what happened, making much of the huge gaps in both victim's and accused's memory of events and the lack of motive.
Timmins said his career may be over. He has not been able to work for over a year and lacks physical strength and the ability to concentrate because of brain damage caused by blows to his head.
He went into shock every time an article about the attack appeared. There was nothing unusual, he said, about the family retaining Queen's Counsel John Haigh to represent its interests in court. "I am the victim here."
Out of work, he was dependent on ACC and a pension scheme. The court was told the family home, a large villa on a big, elevated section, may have to be sold, because of the financial losses Timmins suffered.
After McIsaac was led away to serve his sentence his mother left the court room alone.
She had apologised to the Timmins family and was thanked by Julie Timmins. She shook her head, saying she did not know why her son had turned out the way he did. He was one of five children.
"I tried to bring him up right, maybe I didn't. He tried to make a go of it and get work but he couldn't. I've got another one like him."
Lost hours hide clues to lawyer's beating
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