Justice a hair's breadth away

DNA evidence has brought a Waikato woman justice 10 years after she was raped by a stranger in her own home.

Her attacker is a serving inmate who gave a DNA sample to the national database after being sentenced to 11 years in prison for raping another woman in 2002.

Pubic hairs taken from the sheets of the woman raped on August 12, 1994, have, a decade later, matched the DNA sample of William Wii Katipa, 38.

"I have waited a long time for justice," says the woman who was a 19-year-old mother of two when she was attacked.

At 29, now a mother of four, she has put the attack behind her, Katipa's guilty pleas to rape and burglary in the High Court at Hamilton this week helped.

He will be sentenced on October 12, "then it will be over", she says.

Katipa was just over a year into his sentence for raping a woman on February 12, 2002, when a check of her case through the national DNA database returned a hit just over a month ago.

The news they had found her attacker was a shock.

"It was so long ago, I didn't want to remember," when Detective Grant Dean, who had held her file, called saying he wanted to talk to her in person at the Pukekohe police station.

"I just assumed they're going to close my case, it's over with, then he dropped the bombshell. 'Sorry I came to tell you we've found him, he's in prison'."

Katipa has been in and out of prison most of his life.

In 1991 he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for the aggravated robbery of three women in a Pokeno shop.

He was described as a person fated to be a criminal from an early age, the son of drug addicts who himself seemed constantly stoned.

Before the 2002 rape, which saw him give the fated DNA sample, Katipa had just been released from a one-year sentence for being an accessory after the fact to manslaughter.

"I feel bad that it [rape] had to happen to someone else for him to be found."

She remembers the morning Katipa hid and waited outside her home as her husband left for work.

The sun slowly coming up, Katipa opened the unlocked door to the woman's home, sneaked down the hallway and into her room while her children slept in their bedroom.

Her 2-year-old daughter walked into the room and watched as her mother was raped, Katipa told the woman he would kill her children if she struggled.

When he left he told her to lock her door next time.

"The first four years were hell, I wouldn't sleep very much."

She moved her bed to face the doorway, got up every morning her husband left for work, relocked the house, turned on all the lights and would sit waiting for the sun to come up.

She has since divorced from her husband but they are still close. He went to court with her this week.

"There was all this banging coming from the cells, it was Katipa, he was upset I was there," she says with satisfaction.

"I was glad, I had put the shits up him, he did it to me 10 years ago."

She walked out from behind the courtroom door - where she had shielded herself as Katipa came in - and took a seat in the back of the court room with her ex-husband.

"I didn't remember him. It was like being outside, I remembered his hair."

And it was his hair which solved her case.

Pubic hair stored away until one day it matched an offender's DNA in the national database.

Sitting on a chair hugging her knees to her chest, she says Katipa did not remember her either.

"When he was escorted in he mouthed to his lawyer 'is that her?'," she says, shaking her head.

"His lawyer wouldn't answer."