Malcolm Rewa appeared in the Auckland High Court for sentencing for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett in 1992. Photo / Michael Craig
Malcolm Rewa appeared in the Auckland High Court for sentencing for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett in 1992. Photo / Michael Craig
Malcolm Rewa – who is already serving an indefinite prison term for the rape of over 20 women, as well as for one of the nation’s highest-profile murder cases – has today pleaded guilty to another historical rape.
The serial sexual predator returned to the High Court at Auckland viaaudio-video feed this morning, where he admitted his offending on the new charge.
The court heard the long-time inmate, now 72, sexually violated a woman in Auckland in June 1988.
He had earlier pleaded not guilty to the sexual violation charge, which carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years’ imprisonment.
But when the charge was put to him today, the greying inmate replied: “Guilty.”
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 regarding Burdett, but they did find 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 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 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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