Father: What I saw in girl's room

A father has told a Wellington District Court jury of seeing a Masterton man, accused of child sex abuse, kneeling in front of his daughter's bed with his hand under the blankets.
The man, who cannot be named to protect the name of the complainant, said he walked in on Ken O'Reilly in the girl's bedroom at his ex-wife's Masterton home in 1985.
He saw O'Reilly "on his knees" in front of the bed, with his hand under the blankets.
His daughter laughed when she saw him and O'Reilly withdrew his hand.
The man told the court that for years he had assumed the accused was just giving his daughter a "horse bite on the knee".
The incident took place on his daughter's 9th birthday in 1985, when he had been having dinner with his new partner at his ex-wife's home.
He said O'Reilly had told the guests he had to give the girl a "special goodnight kiss", but when O'Reilly had been in the girl's bedroom for a few minutes he decided to go and have a look.
O'Reilly, 67, an ex-railway signalman, is on trial for 16 charges of indecent assault or committing an indecent act on two girls aged under 16, with the alleged offences happening between 1982 and 2008.
Those charges range from O'Reilly allegedly rubbing his groin against a girl and forcing her to sit on his lap, to making a girl touch his penis, and touching one of the complainants' genitals.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
O'Reilly's lawyer Mike Antunovic disputed the facts given by the complainant's father, saying the man had been out of his daughter's life for years, living in Wellington from the time the girl was 6 years old.
He questioned whether the man was simply now "remembering" the incident as a belated way of helping the daughter he had spent so little time with.
"Are you sure you're not just trying, in some small part, trying to support your daughter?"
The jury also heard from the complainant's mother, who said the accused "always" visited her daughter in the bedroom when he visited the house.
She said O'Reilly would visit her daughter in the bedroom she shared with a sibling after she had been put to bed, and said on one occasion she remembered being yelled at by one of her children to come and "get Ken out of the room".
She told the court how despite her pleas to her daughter only to wear pyjamas to bed at night her daughter insisted on wearing underpants beneath them.
She said for a period her family used to go to the O'Reillys' house once a week and the O'Reillys in turn came to theirs about once a fortnight, but she denied ever being worried about the accused.
When questioned by defence counsel Jock Blathwayt, she admitted never noting "anything untoward" in the behaviour of O'Reilly.
She said her daughter often went voluntarily into O'Reilly's "studio room", where he kept electronic and audio equipment, despite that being one of the places her daughter told the court on Monday some of the alleged offending happened.
The complainant's mother then broke down in the witness box, describing her daughter's suicide attempt that led to the complainant being hospitalised in 1995.
She said that, when later told by her daughter what O'Reilly had allegedly done, she drove to the house of the accused and confronted him.
But she said when she told him of the allegations: "Ken just sat there on the couch with that stupid smirk on his face."
The complainant's aunt also gave evidence for the Crown, saying she had never liked O'Reilly and had warned her sister to watch him.
Mr Blathwayt suggested she had "formed an adverse view of Ken from a very early stage".
Earlier, Mr Antunovic had questioned the mental wellbeing of the complainant and read from notes made by her before an interview with police in 2005.
In the notes, she said: "The voices drive me nuts. People are saying they are just thoughts ... but I don't think so.
"They sometimes come out of the television, or if I am holding a knife they tell me to cut myself."
Mr Antunovic said there could not possibly have been "hundreds" of incidents of abuse as the complainant claimed because there was little contact between her family and the O'Reillys, and what contact there was had been spasmodic or occasional.
He presented the jury with photographs showing the complainant and O'Reilly in friendly poses, and said the complainant had given conflicting evidence in statements to police in 2005 and to the court this week.
Crown prosecutor Dale La Hood asked the woman - in cross examination - what she meant when she said she had been wrongly diagnosed as a schizophrenic. She said the real diagnosis was post traumatic stress disorder and she had been on the wrong medication for over 10 years. The case continues.
Read earlier story - Alleged sex victim 'voices' queried