Fiona Bakulich, a former Tipene Funerals undertaker based in Auckland, appears in the Auckland District Court in October 2024. Photo / Michael Craig
Disgraced former funeral director Fiona Tania Bakulich, who went from featuring in a hit reality TV programme to life behind bars, has cited her celebrity inmate status as one of the reasons she is now seeking a do-over before a new judge.
Bakulich, 49, was sentenced in Auckland District Court in April to two years and three months’ imprisonment after admitting to swindling multiple clients and mishandling human remains.
Today, her lawyer appeared in the High Court at Auckland to argue that the earlier sentence was manifestly excessive.
She is hoping to have her sentence reduced to less than two years, which would allow Justice David Johnstone to substitute a sentence of electronically monitored home detention.
Appellate lawyer Susan Gray said today that her client has been in voluntary segregation in prison for most of the time since her sentencing due to her fear regarding threats from other prisoners who recognised her.
“Her experience in prison is very different from that of other prisoners,” Gray argued, explaining that Bakulich had been subjected to “a campaign of vitriolic hate speech against her”.
“Her experience in prison, in my submission, has been disproportionately severe.”
At the time of the offending, Bakulich worked for Tipene Funerals and was featured in The Casketeers, a reality TV show about the business. Company owners Kaiora and Francis Tipene, who star in the show, have not been accussed of any wrongdoing.
Court documents state Bakulich swindled grieving families out of about $18,000 altogether, starting with a $3000 charge in 2017 to line a loved one’s casket in zinc.
“You gladly pocketed the money. You did not line the casket,” sentencing Judge Evangelos Thomas told Bakulich earlier this year, pointing out that the deceased was instead wrapped in plastic. “The family’s loved one was buried and no one would have ever known.”
But the burial site was disturbed by a flood six years later during Cyclone Gabrielle “and your fraud was distressingly revealed for all to see”, Judge Thomas said.
Another grieving family was targeted in October 2021, when Bakulich “tricked” the victims into paying $7000 extra for what she claimed was a breach of Covid-19 regulations during the funeral.
“That was all a lie,” Judge Thomas said. “You gladly pocketed that money as well.”
In September 2022, another family was charged $1150 after Bakulich falsely claimed the body had to be treated for Covid-19. And from August 2022 to January 2024, she targeted seven more families, claiming payments were necessary because the law required her to inject their deceased loved ones with immunisations.
No such law existed, nor would an immunisation have any effect on a corpse, authorities noted.
She pleaded guilty to two counts of interfering with a grave or human remains, punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, and 12 charges of obtaining by deception. She faced up to seven years’ imprisonment for three of the fraud charges involving anounts over $1000.
Backulich did not attend today’s hearing, which is not unusual when an appelant is incarcerated, but family and supporters filled the courtroom gallery.
Gray said she had no issue with the district court sentencing judge’s assessment that the offending was extremely serious and that the victims were highly vulnerable. But the judge’s 5% reduction for the defendant’s remorse was inadequate, the lawyer argued.
And there should have been reductions for mental illness as well, she said. Gray provided to the court a new psychological report suggesting that Bakulich suffers complex post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from childhood trauma with related signs of depression and anxiety.
Bakulich’s sister provided an affidavit to the court backing up the defendant’s account of growing up in a dysfunctional household marred by domestic violence and a mother who encouraged dishonesty.
She has started to receive therapy to address the trauma, but it stopped abruptly when she went to prison, Gray said. It could continue immediately if she were to instead receive home detention, she suggested.
Gray also provided the court with copies of media coverage and social media comments on the case, which she said exacerbated Bakulich’s difficulties in prison. She noted that the Herald, which broke the story prior to charges being laid, has since issued a correction regarding the wording of some past reporting.
As for Bakulich’s remorse, Gray noted that a pre-sentence report writer had earlier described her as “deeply ashamed and genuinely remorseful”. And in the psychological report filed for the appeal, she was also observed as having deep remorse.
Gray noted that her client could also show remorse through restitution. While Bakulich didn’t have money to pay reparations to the victims at the time of sentencing, she now had $4000 available to pay and could make further payments once released and back on her feet, she explained.
Back in April, however, Judge Thomas had said it wasn’t about the money.
“What they [the victims] wanted was peace and dignity and respect for their loved ones,” he explained.
“Taking their money is not where you caused the harm, and that is what differentiates this case... This offending had deep emotional consequences for people, not financial consequences. They talk about how vulnerable they were.”
There was a distinctive cruelty to “robbing people at their worst time”, the judge said.
“You looked them so softly in the eye and stabbed them so ruthlessly in the back. That is what really got them. That, you cannot fix. That, money does not fix.”
Crown prosecutor Kasey Nihill said today that the sentencing judge’s assessment wasn’t wrong. In a case involving such prolonged offending and such vulnerable victims, a sentence was needed that reflected deterrence and denunciation, she said.
She noted that Judge Thomas has seen a distinction between true remorse for her victims and shame for having let down her supporters. The judge had also pointed to Bakulich having made a “number of excuses” in her pre-sentence interview, the prosecutor pointed out.
Justice Johnstone reserved his decision.
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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