Howse guilty of murdering stepdaughters

Bruce Thomas Howse last night joined the ranks of convicted murderers alongside his older brother Peter - one of New Zealand's most notorious criminals.

Peter Robert Howse, 14 years older than Bruce, is serving a sentence of preventive detention in Auckland's maximum security prison at Paremoremo for a series of sex attacks, and was convicted in 1982 of murdering his de facto partner.

Late last night, Bruce became the second convicted murderer in the family. A jury in the High Court at Wellington found him guilty of murdering his stepdaughters Saliel Aplin, 12, and Olympia Jetson, 11.

The verdict came exactly a year after the sisters were stabbed to death in their beds, in the sleepout of their Masterton home.

In her summing up to the jury, Justice Lowell Goddard said they had to decide which of the two parents killed the girls.

She said the incident arose out of the family dynamics of the household.

The Crown maintained that Howse killed the girls and the defence said it was their mother, Charlene Aplin.

Justice Goddard said if there was a reasonable possibility that Ms Aplin had done it, the jury had to acquit.

Because the jury could not get into the minds of Ms Aplin or Howse to see their intentions, they had to look at the surrounding evidence, she said.

Crown prosecutor Grant Burston said Howse was trying to avoid moral responsibility for the girls' deaths.

He said that during the confession Howse had made to police he described exact detail that no one else but the girls' killer could have known.

Mr Burston warned jury members that they were not setting out to prove that Howse sexually abused the girls, but it was something to consider as part of the background leading up to the killings - that Howse had known about allegations made by Olympia.

A note by Olympia said it all: "My dad is going to kill me."

The allegation that Ms Aplin had murdered the girls was "a pack of lies constructed to avoid the moral responsibility of these killings".

Mr Burston said Howse had made up stories - wild goose chases for police; voices in his head for the doctor - and when they did not work he came up with shifting the blame to Ms Aplin.

Defence lawyer Val Nisbet said police had picked out Howse as the prime suspect too early and gathered evidence that led to him without considering the overall picture.

He said it was possible that Ms Aplin had killed the girls.

Mr Nisbet said it did not make sense to say that killing the girls solved Howse's problems.

"Howse was not an angel and nor is Charlene."

- NZPA