In 2011 Nortessa Montgomerie was bashed unconscious and dragged across a rainy and cold Great Barrier Island by her ex-boyfriend Nathan Boulter.
She had left him after repeated violent assaults – but he could not accept the end of the relationship and stalked her from Southland to her father’s island home.
Over 38 hours, Boulter subjected Montgomerie to prolonged physical attacks and terrifying threats before she led him to believe she wanted to leave the island with him.
In doing that, she saved her own life.
This week Montgomerie saw Boulter for the first time since he was jailed for her ordeal, this time as he was sentenced for the murder of Christchurch mum-of-two Chantal McDonald.
She spoke to senior crime and justice journalist Anna Leask – who was also at both court hearings.
“It’s like watching a horrific car crash happen that you knew was gonna happen – and you’ve tried to get a stop sign there for years and years and years and nobody listened,” Montgomerie said.
“And then someone died and it feels so defeating … you can’t help but just feel like, how can no one see what we so clearly saw?
“I mean, you’ve been writing about this guy over the years like it’s a journal entry … so, I was shocked and absolutely gutted yes, but surprised? Absolutely not – not for a second.”
Boulter was jailed for more than eight years for his attack on Montgomerie, described by the sentencing judge as horrific, brutal and callous.
She was just 21 at the time and her 7-year-old brother was in the house when Boulter – who had snuck in and hid under Montgomerie’s bed to wait for her – struck.
His imprisonment was far from the end of the nightmare for Montgomerie. She endured parole hearings and then, when he was released, lived on edge, always looking over her shoulder, fearing he would show up.
She was further traumatised every time she read news reports about his offending against other women.
In 2025 her world was shaken yet again when she saw him in a Christchurch street.
Unbeknown to her, he had relocated there after meeting McDonald.
“I hadn’t seen Nathan since I put him away, however there were two occasions I was certain that I’d seen him out on the streets,” she told the Herald.
“I kind of gaslit myself into thinking that it was someone else but now that everything’s come out in the wash I’m pretty sure that it would have been him – and my reaction was so visceral that it couldn’t have been anyone else.”
Boulter murdered McDonald on July 23 last year.
The pair had a brief relationship, but McDonald dumped him when he was recalled to prison. She told Boulter she did not want any further contact with him.
When he was released, he immediately began a “significant electronic harassment”, including making almost 600 calls to her in a 13-day period and sending a raft of threatening messages.
He told her: “Ima chop u down to nothing hoe” and “one two guess who’s coming for you! Your lack of human compassion and empathy will be the death of you one day soon, my Lil hoe! Xxx”.
McDonald was terrified and began locking her front gate with a padlock to keep herself safe. She did not respond to a single message from her tormentor.
On July 22, Boulter went to a hunting store in Christchurch and purchased a 19cm pig-sticker knife.
The next night, he went to the street where McDonald lived. He hid behind a tree across the road from her house and “lay in wait”.
McDonald arrived home with her children at 7.15pm.
Boulter “crept” across the road, and as McDonald walked back to close the gates behind her, he leapt out and attacked her with the knife.
Her terrified children ran inside the house to safety as Boulter carried out a “frenzied” attack, stabbing McDonald 55 times.
She died soon afterwards.
When Boulter was first charged with murder, he was granted name suppression, so Montgomerie had no idea he was connected to the grisly crime.
Soon afterwards, police began doing “wellness checks”, and a reporter left a note at her home asking to speak to her.
“That really sounded alarm bells,” she said.
“Police obviously couldn’t go into detail around what they were calling about. There was a lot of checking up on me and when I asked questions they said they coudn’t go into it.”
Montgomerie looked online and saw a news story about Boulter being arrested in July in Riverton for making unwanted comments to a young woman and then challenging her father to a fight.
“I assumed that the police were calling about that ≠ that he’d done a runner or something like that,” she said.
“But through the grapevine and my own curiosity, I kind of started putting two and two together … obviously that was really shocking.”
Montgomerie made a “very last-minute decision” to attend Boulter’s sentencing.
“I had gone to work like any normal day, and about 20 minutes before I knew that he was going to appear, I thought to myself, I don’t know if I have a right to be there, but I felt really called just to show my face in support of Chantal’s family,” she said.
“Because I personally know how distressing these encounters can be, and I didn’t want them for a second feeling like they were dealing with it on their own.
“Obviously, I have all my own personal feelings to go through – but I have a bit more space and perspective – so I just wanted to be there and support them.”
Montgomerie said she did not introduce herself to the family; she just sat quietly in the courtroom.
“I didn’t, under any circumstances, want to take the focus off the reason that we were there, and so I hid in the background, but some of the family started to recognise me and come over and say hi,” she said.
“I didn’t realise how grief-stricken I would feel over a woman that I’d never met, and that was huge. I could feel their loss with them.
“But I was so impressed by their solidarity and their grace and just the way that they showed up together.
“I was really proud to be there beside them. I was so sorry for the circumstances, but I could tell just by meeting them how loved Chantal was and what a deep hole this horrific and very avoidable thing that has happened has left in their family.”
Montgomerie described how she felt when she saw Boulter for the first time in more than a decade.
“It was a lot seeing him … but I really am not scared of him anymore because I’ve done so much therapy around what happened to me,” she said.
“I look at him, and there are a lot of feelings, but fear really isn’t there.
“I was angry … but I don’t think anger is serving. We’re all feeling the loss of what’s happened, and anger’s not helping.
“I’m disgusted, though – I’m disgusted with the way that this has been handled. I’m disgusted with the lack of accountability from him and from different sectors. I’m disgusted that we treat our legislation around protecting women like it’s a joke and it’s negotiable.”
Immediately after McDonald’s murder, Corrections commissioned a review into Boulter’s management to “identify any areas where we could strengthen our practices”.
The recidivist offender had been on release conditions – in place to keep the community safe from him.
Corrections confirmed it had “communicated and worked with” police and others in a “multi-agency group” to monitor his “risk and his compliance with his conditions”.
The review is complete but will not be released to the public at this stage. A coronial inquest into McDonald’s death is expected, and Boulter’s management will be a key focus of that process.
Montgomerie said McDonald’s death showed clearly that when it came to domestic violence in New Zealand, the “system is so broken”.
“[Agencies] are just gathering at the accident at the bottom of the hill,” she said.
“It’s, it’s all aftercare, and we really need to look at this and make systematic change.”
Montgomerie said she is still trying to recover and heal from what Boulter put her through.
“I think I lost my whole twenties to just trying to stay alive,” she said
“The effects of that trauma … both the physical trauma, and the emotional fear permeated my life in a way that I can’t explain to someone who wouldn’t know.
“Things as simple as going to the supermarket to shop became an issue – and I think I just spent 10 years just trying to get to the point where I wasn’t scared that I was going to die.”
When Boulter was released from prison in 2020, a new kind of terror enveloped her.
As his sentence for the offending against her finished, she was no longer a registered victim of his crimes. Authorities no longer had to keep her updated about his whereabouts and activity.
“Since then, my whole sense of safety, my baseline has been pretty shattered because I didn’t know what level of risk I was at,” she explained.
“Every time he came up in the news for doing something or hurting someone, I was directly affected because my story was brought up in unison – we were tied together by this, this terrible thing.
“So the sense of whiplash and limbo I felt over the last five years has been constant … It was very hard for me to know how much danger I’ve been in, and now I have an answer – I was in a lot of danger.
“We [women] were all in a lot of danger, and now it is finally over.”
Seeing Boulter jailed for life had helped Montgomerie. She was still reeling from the experience but felt a sense of freedom.
“I feel like after the sentencing, there’s a part of me that feels like I’m stepping out of a fog that I didn’t even know I’ve been in for the last 15 years,” she said.
“There’s a sense of finality … I’m still processing it, but I feel like I know that somewhere in the future, I’m gonna be able to look at my life and plan ahead.
“Until now, I’ve been so busy trying to stay alive that future planning hasn’t been a privilege I’ve been allowed.”
Montgomerie said the feelings of unease she had since 2011 had been replaced by hope.
“I feel really hopeful,” she said.
“I think that I’ve been preparing for this for a very long time … I’m definitely in this stage of grief; grieving for all of the years that I’ve lost just from living in fear of him, and also trying to protect myself and others from him.
“But I feel like I’m at a point now where I’m excited to see what life looks like when I’m not.”
Montgomerie also had a feeling that “the work has only just begun”.
“You cannot witness what we have just witnessed [in court] and not feel called to make sure that the people who also have Chantal’s blood on their hands are made accountable for their negligence,” she said.
“So I feel this deep responsibility to her and to her family to not just forget that we experienced something absolutely heinous – but that Nathan wasn’t the only person responsible for this happening.
“He might have been the person wielding the weapon, but we know that it goes deeper and higher than just one bad man – so much higher.
“It’s driving me to make sure that I can do everything I can within my own power to like help other people see that this is like, it’s actually shameful. Like, how dare we as a country sit there and pretend that we are loving and caring and clean and green – and we can’t even keep our women alive. It’s embarrassing … it’s disgusting and it is our biggest shame.”
Montgomerie hoped that authorities would make meaningful change in the aftermath of McDonald’s death.
“I believe that we are so used to focusing and catering on the fallout at the bottom of the hill,” she said.
“We really need to turn to focus on these at-risk offenders, these perpetrators, the people who are showing signs of risk, and allowing ourselves the tools and resources to help them emotionally regulate around this rejection that they cannot handle.
“But, it just feels like I’m yelling into a funnel sometimes.”
Montgomerie’s last words were directed to Boulter – the man who almost destroyed her life.
“I hope you don’t ever think for a second that you have any power over me, and I want you to know that I don’t think about you with anything but annoyance and frustration,” she said.
“And I hope that you continue to have the life that you deserve, that you have created with your own two hands. You have made your bed, and you can lie in it, and exactly like I said in 2012 – if you do this to another woman, you can rot in there. And that is exactly what you can do.
“And how embarrassing for you that the only way you can get someone to show you love is by forcing their hand and taking their life and taking their agency.”
Anna Leask is a senior journalist who covers national crime and justice. She joined the Herald in 2008 and has worked as a journalist for 20 years with a particular focus on family and gender-based violence, child abuse, sexual violence, homicides, mental health and youth crime. She writes, hosts and produces the award-winning podcast A Moment In Crime, released monthly on nzherald.co.nz