For more than 20 years, David Hawken tried to put his dark past behind him. Once a feared hoodlum in Christchurch’s rampant gang underbelly, he had moved to the wilds of Central Otago to live a quiet life. But his new world came crashing down three years ago when he was arrested for the 1995 murder of young Christchurch mum Angela Blackmoore. Today, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He will serve at least 10 years before he can be considered for release. While awaiting trial for murder, he spoke to Herald senior journalist Kurt Bayer in a series of interviews, claiming his innocence and talking candidly about the dark and violent world he came from. This piece was first published last year.
He was the man with a plan, a deal, an angle. Million-dollar dreams in five-dollar strip joints. Snappy suits in a shady world of leather vests and grubby denim. Brick phone at the ear, scheming, hustling, always armed with hope, aiming high, with scant regard for those he trampled, or stomped on, along the way.
Christchurch in the 1990s: Beyond its meandering river and Edwardian homes festered a seedy and violent underbelly. Dave Hawken was running at its dark heart.
Gangs were rife. The Highway 61s, white-laced skinheads, romper-stompers, Road Knights, Epitaph Riders, Devil’s Henchmen, Mongrel Mob, Black Power and the wild Harris gang. But it was the Templars MC gang that Hawken was aligned with. He was never a patched member – the associate stood out in his two-piece suit - but he was undeniably one of them, strolling inside the Templars’ fortified clubhouse on Rotherham St unimpeded and unquestioned.
A self-confessed “two-bit hood”, he was tight with the bikie gang’s president, the peg-legged Robert “Red” Williams and his feared enforcer, sergeant-at-arms Ross “Oscar” Hesselwood. They flatted together at 445 Cashel St, where Hawken ran his debt collection business. Nobody wanted those guys knocking at their door.
Hawken was also hired muscle at a strip club. At that time, the Garden City had a burgeoning red-light district, well beyond its Manchester St prostitutes. Massage parlours and strip clubs, with brash neon lighting up the city: Atami Bath House, Route 66, Felicity’s on Hereford St, Regal Lounge, Jojo’s, Firecats, Charlie’s, Femme Fatale, Wicked Willies.
It was in that world that Hawken would first meet a young dancer called Angela. A former glue sniffer, she was dabbling as a stripper at Wicked Willies, owned by notorious Christchurch sex industry kingpin Terry Brown.
She’d fallen in love with the quick-tempered Willie Blackmoore who was working as a bouncer at another of Brown’s strip clubs, Crazy Horse. They were tight circles and Hawken also knew Blackmoore, through an old schoolmate, and he soon discovered Blackmoore owned properties, had some money. He sensed an angle, and he edged in, all banter and elbows.
Another young strip club doorman was around at the time: Jeremy Powell, cosy with a dancer who went by the name “Biscuit”, aka Rebecca Wright. Biscuit would also have an on-and-off sexual relationship with Angela.
It was a whirlwind of clubs, pubs, booze, sex and drugs, dodging the law and the tax man.
But on the night of August 17, 1995, things took a sinister, unimaginable twist, that would put that murky underworld into a tailspin.
Powell was allegedly offered $10,000 to kill Angela Blackmore. After “chickening out” a few days before, Powell plucked up the courage and went to Blackmoore’s house in the suburb of Wainoni. With the help of her friend and confidant Biscuit, Powell got inside the house. He pounced, bludgeoning and stabbing the young pregnant mum to death while her 2-year-old son slept soundly in the next room.
Nearly three decades later, Powell would cough up to cops and finger Hawken as the figure behind the $10k hit job.
Hawken was arrested and charged with being a party to Blackmoore’s grisly killing.
Today, after a four-week trial at the High Court in Christchurch, a jury found they agreed with Powell’s account and found Hawken guilty of ordering the murder of Blackmoore.
‘I’m good to my word’
On the slopes of a dusty hill above a glittering Lake Wanaka, the local wood merchant Davie, as some locals know Hawken, switches off the chainsaw. The sudden silence slices through a sweltering late autumn day. He wipes sweat from his brow, leaving behind a dark smear.
“I’m very honest about who I’ve been and the person who I was in the underworld,” he tells the Herald, who he has been speaking to over the past few weeks while on electronically monitored bail awaiting his high-profile murder trial.
It’s the first time the conversation has been face-to-face though, and although Hawken is speaking candidly, often jokingly, there’s something menacing being up that hill, alone with a suspected killer with a ticking hot chainsaw at his feet. There’s also something about Hawken’s manner, perhaps in his intent gaze, that suggests you wouldn’t want to piss him off. The New Zealand Herald car is parked nearby, unlocked, pointing back down the hill.
“But one thing I’ve never done,” he says, narrowing his glare, “is hurt women and children. And if you know me, you know I’m good to my word.”
Through his business, Debt Collectors International, which he operated out of Willie Blackmoore’s front room at Cashel St – a place that would feature prominently in the murder trial – he said he often stuck up for women.
He tells a story of getting sacked from one large city appliance store for refusing to repossess a washing machine from a mum with two kids.
“I’m still the same today and help a lot of people out,” says Hawken, who for the past few years has worked with underprivileged kids in the Central Otago region. Nobody knew his past.
“But in the criminal world?” he continues while a young worker, a kid under his wing, keeps sawing logs. “Yes, I did beat up a lot of people and I was an enforcer. I used to do a lot of repossessions on gang members. It was the world I came from.”
Born into hell
Born in Christchurch, Hawken was raised in Raglan, where his family goes back generations.
He cites a tough and painful upbringing, claiming he was “born into hell and raised by the devil”.
Following Hawken male tradition, he attended Auckland Grammar but was kicked out for stealing on a dare. He was a handy rugby player, he reckons, with natural speed. But even that wasn’t enough to save him from expulsion.
From there, he was sent to Hamilton Boys’ High School where he lasted until fifth form. Just before he turned 15, his mum packed his suitcases. He recalls his father shaking his hand and saying, “Good luck, you little prick”.
“I’ve had to fend for myself for a long time,” Hawken says.
As a young man, he moved south to Christchurch, picking up whatever work came his way, including stints as a male stripper, minder, doorman, debt collector and stand-over merchant.
Many of the city’s gangs were behind the sex industry at the time, including the massage parlours and streetwalkers.
“Christchurch was the most violent city in New Zealand – and it probably still is,” Hawken says.
After he met Willie Blackmoore, who married Angela in 1993, Hawken moved into their home at Cashel St.
Angela soon fell pregnant but it wasn’t a happy marriage. Her mother Pauline Keen wasn’t a fan of Willie from the start when she brought him home and allegedly verbally abused them both for smoking.
Keen would later tell police about an argument in 1994 – again sparked by Angela’s cigarettes – where Willie allegedly grabbed her daughter by the throat or collar and shoved her hard against a wall.
The protective mother stepped in, she would say, and told Willie if he was going to punch anyone, it would be her. When he allegedly took a swing, she was ready, and smacked him in the face.
One day as Angela changed for the shower, Keen said she saw her daughter’s body covered in bruises. She would claim she had fallen over – but later allegedly admitted that Willie hit her but it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t mean to.
Angela allegedly told her Willie used to get very drunk and hit her, the court heard.
Although the marriage was short-lived - they separated after about 16 months – they now owned two properties together: an empty section on Ferry Rd and the Cashel St house.
They had mortgages of just over $65,000 and after the split began arguing over child custody and the properties and called in lawyers.
The mortgage was not being paid and fell into arrears.
Willie was not a money-minded man, Hawken says, and he claims he stepped in to help negotiate a deal that would buy out Angela’s share.
But during the trial, the Crown alleged that from “early on” Hawken had an eye on the financial benefit of the two properties, wanting to use them and his own assets to secure loans for future business ventures.
They claimed that Hawken had been in talks with a property developer to buy land at Moncks Spur, Redcliffs, for a multimillion-dollar development, while also looking to set up a telecommunications business.
In the meantime, Angela had started seeing a local taxi driver Laurie Anderson – someone not in the underworld - and had moved into his Vancouver Cres house.
He was a welcome change, offering her stability and a way out of a troubled lifestyle.
By now, Hawken had started helping with the matrimonial property problems, talking directly with the bank over mortgage arrears and even allegedly making a proposal to sell Ferry Rd to sort out the issues.
Hawken allegedly also told the bank that he was expecting a large ACC payout for a back injury – he was walking around with a stick, although some witnesses claimed it was all for show - and that he intended to take over the mortgage from Angela and become co-mortgagor with Willie.
He also visited Angela at Vancouver Crescent to get her to sign documents. It’s not known if she ever did.
But by then, Hawken was in debt, being pursued for bankruptcy, and his ACC claim was declined.
So he “hatched a plan” and organised to have Angela Blackmoore killed.
Underworld ‘ripped to bits’
After Blackmoore’s horrific, cold-blooded murder, fingers were immediately pointed towards Hawken - and his Templars gang associates, Red Williams and Oscar Hesselwood.
Police raided 445 Cashel St but also pounced on the Templars’ gang pad.
“[Police] absolutely ripped the underworld to bits, just because of my connection to Willie,” Hawken told the Herald on the phone last year, suspicious that his calls were still being bugged by cops.
He was certain that it was Willie who was steering detectives towards him and the gang. They raided the clubhouse and took senior members in for questioning.
Hawken believes police used the allegations as a “can opener” to tear into the Templars, which would later become a chapter of the Devil’s Henchmen.
In his very first police interview, which Hawken claimed was not recorded, he alleged that Operation Vancouver officers told him that Williams and Hesselwood were “singing like canaries”.
“I didn’t have a clue what the f*** was going on,” says Hawken, who was, he says, home with his missus on the night of the murder, giving him a solid alibi.
“[The Templars] didn’t f****** know [Angela Blackmoore]. Nobody knew her in that underworld.
“If they had concentrated on solving the case and getting to know how Angela operated, they should’ve caught Powell back then.”
After police probes, Hawken says that Williams – who died in 2013 - put him “on notice” to find who had killed Angela and that “they were going to do to them, what they had done to Angela”.
Hawken – and Rebecca “Biscuit” Wright - denied any involvement. The underworld shut down and the case went unsolved for more than two decades before Powell was arrested in 2019 after police offered a then $100,000 reward.
In his police statement, obtained by the Herald, Powell said he met Hawken through his then-girlfriend Wright, claiming he had done two or three debt collections for Hawken, including some drug debts. He called Hawken a “scary bugger” who was tied up with a gang and who had told him that there had been six unsolved murders “up north” that he was responsible for.
Hawken offered Wright and Powell $10,000 to kill Blackmoore, he said, and that he and Wright had three or four meetings with him to plan the murder.
But when Powell first went to the house to carry out the hit, he “chickened out”.
About a week later, a menacing Hawken said it had to be done and threatened to kill them and their families.
The trial heard how Wright – who was close with Angela – acted as the lure to get her to open the door that night, allowing Powell entry with a knife and baseball bat hidden under his trenchcoat.
The theories
High-profile murder trials are often supreme drama. And Hawken came dressed for the part: a Chinese collar shirt under a tweed sports coat, nodding an acknowledgement to me on press row.
In his Herald interviews, he rubbished the police claims, and during the trial would laugh ruefully at the prosecutor’s comments.
He also shook his head through the evidence of an old debt collector associate, Jarrod Constantine, who then went by the name Destry. He had answered a classified advert to help at Hawken’s Debt Collectors International firm.
Destry was a chatty guy and in the days after the slaying, which was headline news, recalled driving around in Hawken’s Mark III Ford Cortina calling in debts and throwing out “theories” on the case.
“I came up with a theory on her murder originally ... someone hired someone, they’d get paid off,” he told the jury in the first trial this year before it was suddenly aborted when new evidence came to light.
He said Hawken’s hypothesis was similar, except that he reckoned Willie Blackmoore had contracted a killer for $10,000, the court heard, and that they would be paid through the sale of a house or insurance.
“I pretty much laughed,” Destry told the court. “I said, ‘$10,000, f*** off, you can’t do anything for that price and [Hawken] goes, ‘You’d be surprised’.”
Days later, Hawken took him to the Templars’ headquarters, warning him: “Watch what you’re asking [about the Blackmoore murder case] because these guys will probably kill you.”
Going straight
After the murder, Hawken’s money woes continued.
The hustle was on and he went into the pub game, running Mak Heeths bar on Manchester St.
“It was a ratbag’s joint,” Hawken tells the Herald. “It was carnage in that place.”
But he says the establishment provided a safe haven for the street workers, bringing with it heat from the pimps, pushers, and players.
“We put the Mongrel Mob in their place, the Road Knights, Highway 61s ... I battled it out with all of them and we got peace. For about six months, no girls got stabbed, hurt, or injured. It was really nice.”
It all went south eventually though and Hawken lost the pub in 1997, with creditors booting him out.
The next day, he was arrested for a $100,000 tax evasion scam and he ended up doing a long prison stretch. It was inside that he finally decided to go straight.
The decision didn’t go down well with some of the underworld’s heavy hitters though.
“They were tugging on me coat tails ... which means they were trying to kill me,” he says, claiming he survived several attempts on his life.
“A bit worse for wear, but I survived.”
One hit came while behind bars. He says he was lucky that he knew Artie Beasley, then national president of Black Power.
After a savage beating where he suffered a smashed face and busted arm, Beasley “put the word out for the rest of my lag that no-one was to touch me”.
Once out of jail, Hawken went to a family farm in Mid Canterbury, worked on the land, gave up drinking, and “really tried to sort myself out”.
“What does a broken-down crim do with himself?”
His “hardman tactics” helped some at-risk kids in Ashburton.
“I realised, hang on, instead of working in organised crime with my violence, why don’t I just start f****** sorting out these f***ers who are picking on kids. So I did, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
He later moved further south to Wanaka, still helping kids, with many ending up working for him at his firewood business.
The local woodman enjoyed the quiet life. The anonymity of Central Otago and its spectacular wildness and scenery.
That new world came crashing around his ears in 2020, however, when he was arrested for Blackmoore’s murder and he spent more time in jail.
Adamant he had nothing to do with Angela’s death, he said prison was tough.
“Being in jail this time round though, when you’re an innocent man, it’s a lot different,” Hawken told the Herald.
“Every time I got thrown in the clink in the old days, I was guilty, and you suck it up, it’s just the way it is. But not this time round. It did, it really affected the brain.
“I don’t like saying this, and don’t take it the wrong way, but sometimes I wish I was guilty, it would be like, yep let’s go, finish this off. But, yeah... nah.”
Hawken is back in custody again, this time awaiting sentence for murder, which in New Zealand, carries a life sentence. The minimum period for parole will start at 10 years. At 50 years of age, he will come out an old man.
Kurt Bayer is NZME South Island Head of News based in Christchurch. He is a senior journalist who joined the Herald in 2011.