Malcolm Rewa appeared at the High Court in Auckland in 2019 for sentencing for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett in 1992. Photo / Michael Craig
Warning: This story contains distressing content and deals with sexual assault
A teenager who was raped by serial sexual predator Malcolm Rewa was suffocated with a rope before being tied up and gagged with her tights during a horrific attack in which she thought she would die.
But 37 years later, her attacker would be identified after a DNA breakthrough when a swab taken from her body that night was matched with the convicted murderer.
Rewa, who is already serving an indefinite prison term for the rapes of more than 20 women, as well as for one of the nation’s highest-profile murder cases, pleaded guilty this month to another historical rape.
The court heard the long-time inmate, now 72, sexually violated a girl in Auckland in June 1988.
The High Court has today released the police summary of facts, which sets out the chilling events of that night.
It says the victim, who was 16 at the time, was attending a birthday party on Mt Smart Rd, Onehunga.
She had drunk alcohol and left the party to get some fresh air.
She walked a short distance up the road, then sat down on the pavement outside a house on Arapuni Ave.
Rewa approached her from behind and tapped her on the shoulder.
She remembered saying, “I’m not feeling good.” As she said this, Rewa wrapped a rope around her neck.
“The complainant was trying to clutch at the rope and pull it away from her neck. However, she was unsuccessful. The defendant held the rope tightly around her neck, causing her to lose consciousness due to lack of oxygen.”
Rewa dragged the victim to the rear of a property. As she regained consciousness, she was pushed face-first on to the wet grass.
“She began to panic, she started yelling and swearing. The defendant pushed her down further until she was flat on her stomach.
“As the complainant struggled against the defendant, he grabbed her arms and pulled them behind her back.”
He removed the teenager’s leather jacket and, using the same rope, tied her hands together.
“This caused the complainant to believe she was going to die, and she could no longer physically fight back.”
Rewa then rolled the teenager on to her back.
“Every time the complainant would scream, the defendant would say to her ‘shut up’ or ‘shut up bitch’, and would cover her mouth with his hand.”
Rewa pulled off the teenager’s boots and forcibly removed her tights, which he used to gag her by wrapping and tying them around her head.
“The gag was so tight that the complainant felt like she couldn’t breathe, and her front tooth ripped out.
“The defendant pulled the complainant’s top up over her head, so her face was covered.”
He then lifted the teenager’s bra and began licking her breasts.
“When the complainant would try making a noise, the defendant would pull down on the pantyhose in an effort to muffle the sound.
“The complainant heard the defendant undoing his zip and pause for a moment. The complainant, petrified, froze.”
Rewa then raped the woman for about 10-15 minutes as she lay on the ground, her top covering her face, hands bound, and her body exposed.
When he had finished, Rewa told the teenager to stay where she was, or he would come back.
“As the complainant lay there in fear, she could hear the defendant’s footsteps walking away from her on the wet lawn.
“When the complainant could no longer hear the defendant’s footsteps, she got up. Unable to see, she stumbled until she found a tree and rubbed against it to remove the clothing covering her face.”
She ran back to the party and told the first person she saw that she had been raped. Her hands were still tied, and her top was still pulled up.
She was untied, taken inside and given a blanket to cover herself. Police were called.
The victim underwent a forensic medical examination later that evening.
As a result of the attack, she lost her front tooth and suffered cuts, scrapes and burns around her neck and different parts of her body.
DNA was found inside her body, “which has only recently been identified as that of Malcolm Rewa”.
“At the time of the incident, the complainant did not know who had attacked her. There was no DNA databank available to compare the samples taken from the complainant with. The DNA databank became available in 1996.”
In 2025, the victim called the Police 105 line and asked if her medical swabs still existed, and whether they had ever been compared against the DNA databank.
She told police the nature of the attack made her think the rapist had likely offended against other women.
“Inquiries revealed that the swabs did still exist. They were run against the DNA databank. The DNA from the semen matched Malcom Rewa.”
Rewa declined to comment when spoken to by police.
The murderer and serial rapist appeared this month in the High Court at Auckland before Justice Matthew Downs, where he entered a guilty plea.
The judge set a sentencing date of April 17. Name suppression, which had been in place earlier, also lapsed.
Rewa faces up to 20 years in prison.
Rewa sat through three high-profile trials for the 1992 rape and murder of Susan Burdett in her South Auckland home. The first jury, in 1996, was unable to reach a consensus on both the rape and murder charges, but they found him guilty of most of the 43 charges of sexual offending against 25 other complainants.
The jury had been shown DNA evidence linking Rewa to Burdett’s body, but by that point another high-profile defendant, Teina Pora, was already serving a prison sentence after confessing to the murder. Decades later, it would be accepted that Pora’s confession was false.
The Crown tried again with a trial in 1998. Jurors that time found Rewa guilty of Burdett’s rape, but again could not agree on the murder charge.
The third and final murder trial took place in 2019, four years after the Privy Council quashed Pora’s murder conviction. That time, Rewa was found guilty of murder.
Rewa was handed a life sentence for the killing, to be served concurrently with his existing 22-year preventive detention sentence for the prior rape convictions.
He appealed against the murder conviction, trying to take the case to the Supreme Court when the Court of Appeal failed to find a miscarriage of justice. The Supreme Court declined to hear the matter in 2024.
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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