Prison for 'stupidity' in handless body case

Wellington butcher Peter George Leach arrived home one Saturday evening in July to find the floor, furniture and walls of his flat stained with blood.

The next day, after showing up for work at his Wellington butchery pale and worried, Leach and his flatmate went shopping for items to cover up the bloody patches that included floor mats, rugs and wall ornaments.

On the Tuesday, the flatmate met Leach at the butchery and gave him a yellow rubbish bag.

Inside, Leach was told, were the severed hands of murdered Wellington man Tony Stanlake, 62, or "The Boss", as Leach knew him as.

In the High Court at Wellington yesterday, Leach, 22, was sentenced to 15 months' jail for his role in covering up Mr Stanlake's murder. He was granted leave to apply for home detention.

Mr Stanlake's body was found at Owhiro Bay on Wellington's south coast on July 9, the morning after Leach returned home to find blood on the walls.

Leach had previously pleaded guilty to a charge of being an accessory after the fact to murder, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years' jail. One of his flatmates, Daniel Moore, is charged with murdering Mr Stanlake and is facing a pre-trial hearing early next year.

Defence lawyer Keith Jefferies said Leach had known his flatmate since intermediate school and felt a deep sense of loyalty towards him.

"There was no monetary profit whatsoever involved, no premeditation and a certain amount of fear and coercion from the alleged principal offender.

"[Leach] is a young man who was very popular and was presented with a horrific situation that was not of his own making."

In sentencing, Justice Warwick Gendall described Leach as a "good person who allowed [him]self to become involved in dreadful events".

Leach was intelligent and posed no risk to public safety, but he had acted stupidly and out of misguided loyalty.

Despite Leach's remorse and guilty plea, he had co-operated with police only once he knew "the game was up".

"[And] you did more than pervert the course of justice. You assisted in the additional indignity to the deceased's body and the feelings of his loved ones."

Police accepted that Leach had nothing to do with the murder or the disposal of the body, Crown prosecutor Grant Burston told the court.

But his role had "serious criminal overtones" in a gruesome crime.

Mr Stanlake had a skull fracture, stab wounds to his back and an attempt had been made to sever his head.

Police used a piece of skin from his right palm, still attached to his arm-stump, to identify him.

According to the police summary of facts, security footage showed Leach wrapping the bag containing the severed hands inside three rubbish bags before placing it in a skip. He then told a colleague that the bag's smell made him want to "puke".

He spent the evening helping to dismantle two cannabis-growing operations in the flat - one upstairs and one in the garage - to cover any tracks that could lead to Mr Stanlake, who had previous cannabis convictions.

Numerous items were removed from the garage, including carpet, wooden planks, boxes and plates, many of which were stained with the victim's blood.

Leach and his flatmate stripped the blood-stained wall-linings and carpet and moved bloodied furniture into a car, which they drove to Johnsonville.

The next day, they dumped a trailer-load at the Happy Valley Landfill. The same day, the butchery rubbish was dumped at the same site. A subsequent police search failed to recover the hands.

Leach's flatmate's car, which was used to dispose of the body, was driven to and left in a garage at a Wainuiomata address. Leach spent that afternoon scrubbing the garage floor and spray-painting over bloody marks.

He later left the house and returned to find a police car outside. He "freaked out" and drove to Lower Hutt, where a family member advised him to go to Wainuiomata and rub his fingerprints from what he thought the murder weapons were - an axe and a mallet.

At the same time, police were already at the Wainuiomata house with a search warrant. They recovered the axe and mallet - both with the victim's blood on them - from the flatmate's car and found more blood inside the car.

Leach turned himself in on July 20.