Tipene Funerals former undertaker Fiona Bakulich during sentencing at the Auckland District Court.
Disgraced former funeral director and reality TV star Fiona Tania Bakulich, who has been in prison since April for defrauding mourning families, has had her sentence reduced to home detention on appeal.
High Court at Auckland Justice David Johnstone issued his written decision to the parties on Tuesday, referring to the earlier two-year, three-month sentence that was doled out in Auckland District Court as “manifestly excessive”.
His decision was released publicly this morning.
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 accused 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.”
However, 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 amounts over $1000.
At last week’s High Court appeal hearing before Justice Johnstone, defence lawyer Susan Gray argued that her client should have received more generous reductions for her remorse and personal circumstances during the district court hearing.
Gray suggested Bakulich should have received a 15% discount for “the compounding effect of widespread publicity relating to her prosecution”, which, she argued, made the sentence disproportionately severe.
She also argued for an additional 15% reduction for Bakulich’s traumatic childhood and 5% for her genuine remorse.
In the six months since her sentencing, Bakulich has twice requested voluntary segregation from other prisoners due to her notoriety, her lawyer noted.
“Ms Bakulich’s health did not feature, to any significant extent, in the District Court sentencing,” Justice Johnstone noted in his decision.
“It is unsurprising, given the modest supporting material and the written submissions of Ms Bakulich’s former counsel, that the sentencing Judge made no reference to Ms Bakulich’s mental health.”
The judge said he accepted that her experience in prison has impacted more severely upon her than others. He also noted that, to an extent, she should have expected as much when she voluntarily participated in a reality TV show.
“However, some of the media and social media coverage that was generated was attached to submissions,” he continued.
“There has been inaccurate reporting. And the non-traditional media publicity has been vitriolic.
“While some of that too might have been expected, the additional factor in this case is Ms Bakulich’s pre-existing susceptibility to stress and vulnerability.
“Overall, I am satisfied Ms Bakulich was entitled to a meaningful reduction from the adjusted starting point, calibrated to account for the disproportionately severe impact upon her of a sentence of imprisonment, arising because of her poor pre-sentencing mental health and the compounding effect of vitriolic publicity of her offending and personal deficiencies.”
Justice Johnstone declined to order an additional reduction for Bakulich’s background but said the discount offered by the district court judge for remorse was inadequate.
He allowed overall additional discounts of 15%, which would have brought her sentence down to one year and nine months’ imprisonment. For any sentence of less than two years, a judge can then consider non-custodial alternatives.
Normally, Justice Johnstone said, he would have imposed an alternative sentence of 10 months’ home detention. But because Bakulich has already served months in prison, he instead ordered her to serve four months of home detention.
The home detention sentence started Wednesday.
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.
Sign up to The Daily H, a free newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.