The woman who led a vulnerable misfit to his death can now be named. Steve Braunias reports.
The woman found guilty and sentenced to eight years’ jail in September for leading an intellectually impaired man to his death – she told him to burn down a house in Mt Roskill, but he set himself on fire and died in agony, screaming – has finally been named. Isabella Niki-Harper Ahlawat, 32, made very determined attempts to maintain permanent name suppression, but the Supreme Court rejected it on Wednesday. There was no surprise about that. Her crime was too extreme. The judges said, “This was very serious offending, involving the manipulation of a vulnerable individual with impaired intellectual capacity who died as a consequence of the applicant’s actions.” Her appeal had previously been dismissed by her trial judge, Justice Geoffrey Venning. At sentencing, he wondered about what sort of person she was, and came to a flat and devastating conclusion. “You are not,” he said, “of good character.”
Stephen Ewart was killed in the fire at Mt Roskill. He burned to death on a summer morning in 2016. Police found his naked body, his clothes burned off, his knees pulled up, outside a flat right across from Keith Hay Park. He had lived at the address for five years previously, and police were initially baffled why he tried to burn it down. There were 16 plastic milk bottles filled with petrol beneath the house. Police doubted he had the nous to come up with the idea. Suspicion soon fell on his former neighbour, Niki (as she’s known) Ahlawat. The court heard that Ewart had the mental age of a 12-year-old, and the Crown case was that Ahlawat used Ewart to burn down the house as an act of revenge against the landlord.
It took six years of patient and meticulous detective work to bring her to trial. A jury found her guilty of arson and manslaughter. She maintains her innocence and has suggested that it was all Ewart’s work, all his idea; she had nothing to do with it. Her case is strong. Her lawyers Sam Wimsett and Tiffany Cooper have filed an appeal. Again, no surprise: even the two detectives who busted her, and remain convinced of her guilt, were surprised when the jury returned its verdict of guilty. It was a difficult case to prove. Ahlawat was nowhere near the scene of the crime, there was no forensic evidence, and the prosecution relied heavily on circumstantial evidence – a great quantity of circumstantial evidence, though, and much of it was very good-quality.
The name suppression order was in place during her trial in September because she was set to appear in another trial next year, concerning another case and another man, who at least survived his ordeal with Ahlawat, but is dealing with a life in tatters. She was charged with perverting the course of justice. Police allege she made a false complaint against an Indian taxi driver. He was thrown in jail for six months on remand and essentially had his life destroyed. The charges have been dropped; she was already going to jail for Ewart’s manslaughter, and police and the Crown decided another trial wasn’t in the public interest. But the man who she accused would like an apology from police for believing her story in the first place. He blames them for helping to create a monster. As for the woman, he can’t even bear to think of her.
Little was heard about Ahlawat at her trial other than accusations of her criminal behaviour. The prosecution devoted much of its case to presenting a sad portrait of Stephen Ewart. He was revealed as a loner and a hoarder, vulnerable and gullible, so desperate for Ahlawat’s friendship that he did anything she told him to. They had been neighbours in Mt Roskill. Her mum fed his cats when he went to hospital. She sometimes called him “uncle”, a common Indian term of respect for someone older, but he sometimes called her “daughter”. In court, a rare and ancient doctrine of criminal law was summoned to describe Ewart as an Innocent Agent, someone so childlike and malleable that they cannot be held responsible for their actions.
“You used him as an Innocent Agent,” Justice Geoffrey Venning told Ahlawat at sentencing, “as your instrument.” The fact that Ewart actually lit the fire was deemed irrelevant. Ahlawat was seen as the arsonist, her hands guiding Ewart’s hands – he was her puppet, her trained robot. It absolved Ewart of all guilt. It was a rare principle of criminal law, but the jury accepted it, and so, too, did Venning. “The jury rightly found you guilty,” he said to her.
She ruthlessly manipulated Ewart, said the Crown. She acted in stealth to cover her tracks, said the Crown. She had zero concern for Ewart’s safety, said the Crown. It was a portrait of evil, and the cops who busted her viewed her as evil, but was she actually evil? Who was she, really? Justice Venning filled in some of the blanks of an Auckland life at sentencing. She was born in India as the only child of Nandira and Manjul Ahlawat. They emigrated to Canada, and later to New Zealand.
Justice Venning said: “The cultural report confirms disharmony in your background and family. You came to New Zealand with your parents when you were 11 years old and witnessed domestic violence between your parents. On your self-reporting, you also suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of your father … The psychologist considers you are likely suffering from PTSD.”
This was pretty much the extent of Venning’s sympathy. He told her, “Ms Ahlawat, you may have some form of PTSD, but your actions did not prevent you from pursuing the deliberate and complicated course of action you pursued in this case.” And: “You are clearly not remorseful at all.” Also: “This is not a case where it can be said you are otherwise of good character or have made any positive contribution to society.”
A court hearing was held in October to determine her bid for continued name suppression. It was staged as a telephone conference and it wasn’t a very long call. My ears burned, briefly, at the mention of my feature story published after sentencing. Justice Venning: “A lengthy article was published in the New Zealand Herald which included comments by the police that Ms Ahlawat was ‘evil’ and a ‘wolf in lamb’s clothing’. He [Sam Wimsett, Ahlawat’s lawyer] submits that publication of Ms Ahlawat’s name in connection with the offending would cause her significant emotional distress … He argued publication could also affect her rehabilitation.
“While the comments in the newspaper reports attributed to the police go further than would usually be regarded as appropriate, publication of her name in connection with this offending falls well short of the standard required to suggest that publication would be likely to cause her extreme hardship. The comments were made in the context of an in-depth article which discussed the case from a number of perspectives, including a detailed legal analysis. Overall, the balance of the article was fair.
“There will be ample time for Ms Ahlawat to rehabilitate herself and cope with the consequences of her past actions before her release into the community. Indeed, continued suppression with the possibility of the suppression being lifted in the future may simply prolong any existing state of anxiety.”
There was no getting away from the nexus of the entire case: the Crown case that she led a vulnerable misfit to his death. In the judge’s words, “It is the nature of the offending itself which is remarkable.” Again, it was the quality of evil.
The two detectives who built the case against her, Detective Inspector Glenn Baldwin and Detective Libby Willis, only ever talked of Ahlawat as someone of bad character. Baldwin said, “She has a black belt in manipulation.” Willis said, “We had a listening device in her house for a couple of weeks, and that’s when we really started to understand the level of her manipulation over people. We got a glimpse at how good she is at turning people.”
Many cops form a kind of contempt for the villains they arrest and are unequivocal about their guilt. There are probably old retired officers who still think Arthur Allan Thomas killed the Crewes, and only a year ago, I spoke with a senior officer who scorned Tim McKinnell’s private detective work that secured Teina Pora’s release. Once cops see what they think of as a person’s true colours – usually black, and only black - that’s all they see.
On the night Stephen Ewart walked to the apartment in Mt Roskill to burn it down, Niki Ahlawat was at Waitākere Hospital. She was pregnant. She felt weak, and worried, and asked for an injection of iron. Here is Baldwin’s interpretation of her, as viewed on the hospital’s CCTV: “As she comes up the ramp, she’s holding the rail for support, and she sort of limps in there and is put into a wheelchair. She’s fine when she walks out. And has a good long look at the camera when she leaves, and has certainly recovered her strength by then.” Baldwin had a flair for narrative and the essential ingredient to give a story shape: a sense of humour. His story continues, “She stops at the bakery for a pie on the way home because she wants a pie. But the pies aren’t ready. Not a perfect world.”
His version of Ahlawat at the hospital is that she was putting on an act, and chose to go there to establish an alibi – it makes for good comedy, too, to picture her glaring at the CCTV cameras. But maybe she was unwell. Maybe she really needed that iron supplement, urgently. Except that wasn’t all she was doing that night at the hospital. Police found evidence to suggest she had bought two burner phones, one for her and one for Ewart, to plot the arson without the calls being traced to their cellphones; data investigation indicated they were calling each other constantly on the night she was at the hospital, and Ewart was on his way to the scene of the crime.
Detective Willis told another story about her, and the moral of it was that it revealed Ahlawat’s arrogance. She said, “There’s just like little things that she [Ahlawat] did [where] I was like, ‘Wow’. For example, when we returned her laptop, she laid a complaint that we had broken it. Some of the keys weren’t working. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh’, and I looked into it. I don’t know what made me do it, but I ran a word search for ‘laptop’ on her texts. And I found conservations saying the ‘q’ and the ‘t’ keys didn’t work. I was like, ‘Is that arrogance?’ Even to try to con the police wasn’t out of her scope. She was like, ‘I’m going to get them to buy me a new laptop.’ If I hadn’t found those messages, we would have replaced it.”
Most of us make a binary distinction between people in our lives – good or evil, innocent or guilty, straight-up or a total liar. Ahlawat’s conviction and Justice Venning’s damning judgment (“cynical … manipulative … you lied to police”) give us further permission to think of her as monstrous. But was Stephen Ewart really led by the nose, and so absolutely blameless? What about Ahlawat’s argument, that he brought it all on himself? The principle of the Innocent Agent is close to fantastical. It demands total obedience to the tenet of faith that Ewart was some kind of mindless robot. But he went about his own life the best he could; he looked after himself, to a point; he loved gossip, company, a beer. He also loved the junk that he hoarded and was furious if anyone touched or removed it. Justice Venning told Ahlawat, “You engaged in a series of text messages with a former neighbour … in an attempt to establish some sort of a defence and to place the blame on Mr Ewart, based on the suggestion Mr Ewart had been upset about his belongings being removed from the flat, so as to paint a picture he was solely responsible.”
According to her version, then, Ewart had motive. As well, witnesses at her trial testified he had a short temper, refused to back down from an argument and formed ridiculous ideas. There’s something in all this. But it begins to fall down when you tie the Ewart death to the other charge of perverting the course of justice. Ahlawat’s father left her mother in 2016 – and according to the man she falsely accused that year of sexual assault, it led her to exact revenge, not on her father, but two of his friends who had provided him with the name of a divorce lawyer. One of the men, she told police, came to her house and threatened to kill her. Her story was backed up by Stephen Ewart. When detectives investigated his death, they took a great deal of interest in Ewart’s version of events and deduced that Ahlawat had coached him to lie on her behalf. It suggested propensity, which is to say police viewed that she had form in getting Ewart – faithful and obedient, her willing dupe – to do as she instructed. Once again, the Innocent Agent. By the time the police saw what was going on, it was all a bit too late and too useless for Riwander Singh.
Riwander Singh, 58, was a Reliable Cabs taxi driver in 2016. So his was friend, Nirander Ahlawat, Niki’s father. When Ahlawat asked him for help with a divorce lawyer, Singh gave him a name. “That,” said Singh, “was when it all went wrong.”
Our interview was conducted in a unit in a scruffy part of Hillcrest on the North Shore. A rather sick-looking creek flowed past in a littered culvert. The walls were bare. The kitchen was bare. There were a few Hindu figurines from a $2 shop on a ledge. Singh moved into this depressing little space in April; he takes meds for high blood pressure and eczema, and Escitalopram for depression. He had none of these conditions before his false arrest.
Niki Ahlawat told police that he had visited her at her Mt Roskill flat, sexually assaulted her, threatened her mother – and assaulted Stephen Ewart. What was Ewart doing there? “He came to pick up his mail,” Ahlawat told police. Really? He’d moved out five years previously, and yet the cops believed it; they believed everything about her account, which supposedly happened on April 13, 2016, and brought 15 charges against Riwander Singh. They included threatening to kill, intent to rape and possession of an offensive weapon.
It was all nonsense. Singh said he could provide GPS data from his Reliable cab showing his exact whereabouts that day. The complaint was made four months after the alleged assault; Detective Anthony Darvill, who arrested Singh, told him that that data would have been deleted in that time. Singh’s family and friends hired a private detective, who quite easily located the GPS data and proved that he was in fact taking a friend to Internal Affairs on Albert Street at the exact time Ahlawat said he touched her and yelled, “I’m from the Taliban”. He’s not even Muslim.
Stephen Ewart came to the police station and made a statement. Again, it was taken at face value. But detectives working on the case of Ewart’s death found a recording on Ahlawat’s phone which showed that she was coaching him to make the statement – delivered word-for-word to police. This was presented by the Crown as crucial evidence at her trial last month. It established a clear pattern of manipulation, of using Ewart as her proxy, her faithful pet, her Innocent Agent.
Riwander Singh already knew Ewart’s version was a total lie on account of the fact he was 100 per cent innocent of Ahlawat’s accusations. He also had evidence. He hired linguist Dr Bronwen Innes to compare the two police statements given by Ahlawat and Ewart. It struck Innes that Ewart sometimes spoke in forms of Indian English as opposed to New Zealand English. She wrote, “This seems odd … Both statements comment on the alternate use of Hindi and English during the incident … Mr Ewart at times uses features unusual for a speaker of New Zealand English … There are clear and frequent similarities between the two statements … There is a remarkable similarity in which the events are told. There is remarkable similarity in vocabulary ... It is possible that corroboration was involved”.
Private detective Michael Rhodes was also hired to compare the statements given by Ahlawat and Ewart. He could tell straight away they had colluded. I interviewed him at Circus Circus café in Mt Eden, and he said: “It was obvious it was a set-up. He had to have been coached. If he wasn’t, I’ll eat my hat.”
The linguistic report cost Singh $5000. The legal bill was $40,000. Among his file of papers is a District Court document dated July 4, 2017. It’s a ruling by Judge RJ Collins. It reads, in its entirety, “Mr Singh, on all the charges you face, the Crown have offered no evidence, therefore all these charges are dismissed. You are free to go.” The paper was folded in half, and then in half again. Singh looked at it and said, “Six months [in jail] and $40,000 just for those two lines.”
It wasn’t that he was bitter. He was too depressed for bitterness. The six months in jail destroyed him. “I’m scared of people,” he said. “I’m afraid of the world.” When he sees a police car, he sometimes has a panic attack. At first, he was angry that police wanted to drop the false complaint charges against Ahlawat. A trial was set for February next year. “I had hoped for an opportunity to bring this case back and to clear my name,” he said. “But it’s done. I’ve suffered enough. She’s already gone [to jail]. So let’s move on.”
He wouldn’t say Niki Ahlawat’s name. “I don’t even want to think of her. Nothing.” But he can’t get over the wrongness of his imprisonment, and the failure of police to acknowledge they had made a terrible mistake. He lodged a complaint with the Independent Police Authority. It got precisely nowhere. They sent him a letter which said precisely nothing. “I understand that the content of this letter will come as a disappointment to you and I wish to assure you that we have carefully considered the issues that you have raised in determining to take no action on your complaint,” replied case resolution manager Kerry Wright.
Detective Inspector Glenn Baldwin led the Ewart case. Asked about the Singh case, he said, “The police have been misled. We get sick when that happens. You physically get sick. That poor man [Singh] had six months in remand as a consequence of what she had manipulated Stephen to say, and was Stephen’s evidence critical in those charges [against Singh]? Absolutely it was. Here was independent corroboration to her complaint. We were misled and manipulated. That man was incarcerated … The New Zealand Police came down on him [like] thunder.”
Detective Libby Willis found the recording of Niki Ahlawat coaching Ewart to give his statement. She said, “Stephen said that he [Singh] indecently assaulted Niki and put a knife to her throat and punched Stephen when he tried to get him to stop. It’s quite a hard-out story when you read it.”
Baldwin: “Yeah. It sounds like a really violent attacker with a sexual element in it.”
Yeah. “Hard-out”, “sounds like” – it was all malicious and fabricated. Baldwin said, “We found out the defendant [Singh] was not at her house as when she alleged.” He meant the GPS data proving Singh was in Albert Street. Baldwin and Willis are to thank for chasing Niki Ahlawat for six years. They had nothing to do with the Singh case. They are not to blame for Singh’s incarceration and loss of equilibrium, his dismal mental state in an empty flat next to an ugly culvert. When it was mentioned to them that a private investigator had done a much better job at finding the GPS data than the New Zealand police, the two detectives looked at each other, looked away, and changed the subject.
Riwander Singh feels that the police’s failure in his case helped set Niki Ahlawat up to later send Ewart on his doomed journey to burn down the flat in Mt Roskill. When the charges against Singh were dropped, she walked away in the same manner: without a strain on her character. The arson and death happened five months later. “All of that could have been prevented,” said Singh. “She gained a lot of confidence when she made her complaint against me. She thought, ‘I can lie, I can fabricate evidence, and the police won’t do anything’. So why not continue on her path to criminality?”
No, he said, he didn’t know Stephen Ewart. The innocent man had never set eyes on the Innocent Agent. All they had in common was Isabella Niki-Harpur Ahlawat, 26 years old at the time Stephen Ewart burned to death and Riwander Singh began to plummet into a depression he has yet to escape.