Howse murder verdict will help community: principal

The principal of the school where Masterton 12-year-old Saliel Aplin went to school says the conviction of her stepfather Bruce Thomas Howse yesterday for murdering her and her 11-year-old sister Olympia Jetson will help the community move on.

"I think there's a certain closure now for the community and certainly the school community and hopefully we can move on from here, Hiona principal Peter Debney said.

"I will be going around classes and just making sure they're all aware that the verdict has been reached and that we actually move on."

Bruce Thomas Howse was last night convicted of the girls' murders aftger a jury in the High Court at Wellington found him guilty after six hours of deliberation.

Mr Debney said the murders of Saliel and Olympia had resulted in initiatives in the Masterton and Wairarapa communities formulated to "rise above the violence, to actually highlight domestic violence and alert the community that this has just got to stop... which is really a positive outcome.

"The tragedy of it is that these sort of events have to occur before those sort of initiatives get formulated," he said.

Mr Debney said the fatal stabbings of the two girls a year ago as they lay in bed, in the sleepout of their Masterton home, happened despite a number of agencies being informed of the girls suffering abuse.

"I know (from) the various schools that the girls attended prior to Saliel coming to Hiona two years ago there had been numerous agencies at various times who were informed, who did take action and there was obviously other instances where agencies were following through."

National MP Katherine Rich said today Child Youth and Family (CYF) had "failed miserably" in protecting the sisters from abuse.

"CYF has been involved with this family for almost a decade. It beggars belief that a serious warning about child abuse was treated so lightly," Ms Rich said in a statement.

Ms Rich said evidence of abuse was downplayed by a CYF social worker dealing with the family.

"We now have every right to expect a full explanation from CYF telling us how they allowed such an obvious family time bomb to explode," Ms Rich said.

Yesterday, after the verdict was delivered, CYF social work and community services general manager Verna Smith said that the department had started a case review in April of "the quality of its social work practice" in dealing with the girls' family.

That review was suspended at the request of the crown solicitor pending court proceedings.

Ms Smith said it had now restarted and was expected to be completed early next year.

The girls' troubled family life was a focus of Howse's murder trial.

In her summing up to the jury, Justice Goddard said the murders arose out of the domestic family dynamics of the household.

Last night's guilty verdict means Howse is the second member of his family to be convicted of murder.

His brother Peter Robert Howse -- 14 years older than Bruce -- is one of New Zealand's most notorious criminals.

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

- NZPA