The mentally ill man who reported seeing visions of the devil before he fatally stabbed entomologist Stephen Thorpe outside Auckland’s Blockhouse Bay Tennis Club will be held indefinitely at a lockdown psychiatric facility.
The 27-year-old returned to the High Court at Auckland today as Justice Graham Lang ordered him deemed a special patient.
A long-term stay at Auckland’s Mason Clinic is really “the only choice” given the risk he continues to present to the community, the judge said during the brief hearing.
“He will need many years of treatment and close supervision before the risk will abate,” he said.
Interim name suppression was set to lapse, but remains in place after a last-minute bid by the defendant’s family to keep his name secret permanently. That issue will be decided at a later hearing.
The defendant was arrested in August, days after the daylight attack in the tennis club car park as Saturday revellers enjoyed the facilities and the nearby reserve.
The attack, on August 24, 2024, was unprovoked and appeared to be random.
Although it was a weekend, Thorpe, 54, had been at work that day inside the Whau River Catchment Trust office, underneath the tennis club. He worked seven days a week, and always took a breather around 11.30am to go for a walk while scouring the area for bugs, an officemate previously told the Herald.
But seconds after Thorpe went outside that day, he called out for help. He died at the scene, having suffered a single stab wound to the neck.
Longtime friends of the defendant told authorities his personality started to change around 2013, when he started regularly using drugs, including LSD and cannabis. By 2019, the regular drug use “was having a marked effect on him”, Justice Lang said at a hearing last month.
“[His] friends noticed that, by 2020, he had started to talk about ‘seeing things’, including the devil,” he added. “He also displayed bouts of anger they had never seen before.”
By 2022, the defendant became the subject of a compulsory treatment order due to his mental illness. The following year, he was described by those around him as acting erratically and seeming to experience hallucinations.
One friend who is now a police officer said the defendant had been known in the past to carry knives.
He recalled a text the defendant had sent him one day in 2023 announcing, “Voliyah is my real name which I go by now”. His legal name, the defendant had added, “never really existed”.
Police found the word “Voliyah” etched on to a knife left at the crime scene.
Police also found a vape at the scene, similar to ones found at the defendant’s nearby home and with what appeared to be matching DNA.
Today’s hearing marked the culmination of a months-long three-step process to dispose of the criminal case in favour of a mental health approach.
In May, Justice Lang found the man unfit to stand trial. Another short hearing followed in June in which the judge determined that “on the balance of probabilities” the defendant had committed homicide even if he couldn’t be found guilty of murder due to his mental state.
Today’s final step was to determine whether the defendant should be deemed a special patient at the Mason Clinic, in which case he would be held indefinitely, or whether a less restrictive option was available.
There was no dispute between prosecutor Kristy Li and standby defence lawyer Sam Wimsett that an indefinite, long-term stay was the most realistic option.
Psychological reports that had been suppressed until today note that, despite months of treatment since the man’s arrest, he continues to have “an abnormal state of mind currently characterised by continuous delusions of a grandiose and spiritual nature”.
“He holds underlying delusional beliefs in relation to his family relationships to Freemasons, and the special interest of the Government in this case,” Justice Lang noted.
“Staff at the Mason Clinic continue to observe him talking to himself as if responding to non-apparent stimuli such as hallucinations.”
A second psychiatrist noted the defendant “appears to be preoccupied by a bizarre delusional system that he only rarely expresses openly”.
The judge described the defendant as having a rudimentary understanding of the legal system and understanding that a murder charge had been filed against him. But he refused to interact with his assigned lawyer.
“[He] appears to be of the firm belief that he will inevitably be acquitted before the end of the year on the basis that the Government has a special interest in the case,” Justice Lang said in May, concluding that the defendant was unfit to enter a plea, instruct counsel or meaningfully engage in the trial process.
Referring again to psychological reports today, the judge noted that “response to treatment so far has been minimal”. Without extended, compulsory care, his risk of similar offending would remain “chronically elevated”, one of the two specialists determined.
Friends and colleagues of Thorpe described him in the days following his death as a gentle, eccentric scientist who lived and breathed his passion for entomology. The English-born scientist had no family in New Zealand but formed bonds through his research.
The former University of Auckland employee, who had degrees in chemistry and philosophy, spent about a decade working in the School of Biological Sciences laboratory. Although he had most recently worked out of the Whau River Catchment Trust office, he did not work for the agency, instead doing contract work for Landcare Research and other organisations.
He had contributed an estimated 12,000 insect specimens to Auckland Museum, where he volunteered in the 2000s, and nine new species had been named after him.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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