Frankie Edwards pleaded guilty to five attacks on women across Auckland in 2006. Now he's been proven innocent of kidnapping one woman from outside the Auckland Badminton Club in Epsom. Photo / NZME composite image
The kidnapper ambushed his victim in broad daylight. He watched the car parked outside the badminton club in Epsom, and waited until the owner unlocked the door.
As soon as the woman got behind the wheel, he jumped in the front seat beside her and pulled out a knife.
He threatened to “kill her whole family” unless she did as she was told.
Scared for her life, the 42-year-old drove along Gillies Ave but managed to run away at a nearby set of traffic lights.
The kidnapper drove off in the car, which was later abandoned in Avondale.
It was the 10th of April 2006 and the brazen attack in the middle of the day came less than 24 hours after a similar episode in Henderson.
A woman was sitting in her parked car when a man smashed the driver’s window with a spanner, grabbed her by the throat to silence her screams, then ran off with her handbag.
Those attacks escalated into even more sinister crimes across Auckland: three kidnappings where young women were abducted in their cars, robbed and then raped.
Frankie Te Uira Edwards, 30, had a long criminal history and became the prime suspect for the string of assaults, which police believed to be committed by the same offender.
He was arrested in June 2006 and soon pleaded guilty to 34 charges related to the five attacks.
It was only afterwards that Edwards claimed that he had nothing to do with the Epsom carjacking.
His denial fell on deaf ears.
Edwards was sentenced to 16 years in prison, which was replaced by preventive detention (essentially an indefinite term of imprisonment) when the Solicitor-General appealed for a harsher penalty the following year.
Ever since then, Edwards has remained behind bars but maintained his innocence over the Epsom kidnapping.
In September 2022, he wrote to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the authority established to review potential wrongful convictions, which agreed to open an investigation.
Court documents released to the Herald reveal the CCRC’s six-month inquiry uncovered five problems in the original police investigation.
The most glaring was the “clear discrepancies” between the victim’s description of her attacker and Edwards’ physical appearance.
The kidnapper was Caucasian with dark skin and “dense” hair on his arms. Edwards is Maori and has no body hair.
The victim also said her attacker had no distinguishing marks on his arms, where Edwards has obvious tattoos on his hands.
Most obviously, the kidnapper also had a large tattoo written across his stomach, about 12cm high, in black and green lettering.
Edwards did not have a large tattoo on his stomach, or any sign of laser removal.
“There does not appear to have been any attempt by police to establish whether Mr Edwards had any of the identifying marks described by the victim,” according to the report of Colin Carruthers, KC, the former chairman of the CCRC.
“In particular, had police undertaken this relatively simple inquiry, they would have found that Mr Edwards does not have a horizontal tattoo across his stomach.”
Despite interviewing Edwards about the other four attacks, in which he admitted his involvement, the police also failed to ask Edwards any questions about the Epsom incident.
The CCRC also said that the police failed to follow several “obvious” lines of inquiry in relation to an injury suffered by Edwards when he smashed the car window in Henderson, the day before the Epsom kidnapping.
He badly cut a finger which later required surgery, but the Epsom victim did not describe any injuries to the hands of her kidnapper.
The only information on the police file that could have connected Edwards to the offending was that the Epsom victim’s car was found near his sister’s home.
However, the CCRC investigation discovered the address belonged to a woman with the same name, not the sister that Edwards was living with at the time.
The CCRC concluded that Edwards did not commit the Epsom kidnapping and that a miscarriage of justice had taken place, so referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.
In a judgment released this month, the Court of Appeal said Edwards pleaded guilty “for reasons which will never be fully understood”, although it was clear that neither he nor his original defence lawyer appreciated the lack of evidence for the Epsom attack.
The Crown also conceded that the police, after conducting an internal investigation following the CCRC inquiry, could offer no evidence to link him to the crimes.
Given those circumstances, the Court of Appeal said it was in the “interests of justice” to quash his convictions for kidnapping, threatening to kill and conversion of a motor vehicle.
The question of whether Edwards’ sentence of preventive detention imposed largely on the basis of the multiple rapes he committed will be argued at another court hearing in February.
Marie Dyhrberg, KC, Edwards’ new lawyer, declined to comment as the matter was still before the court.
A spokesperson for the Parole Board confirmed that Edwards was declined parole last year but will again seek to be released at a hearing in December.
The decision to overturn Edwards’ convictions means that the Epsom kidnapping is officially unsolved.
The Herald asked police if the victim had been informed and, given the passage of time, whether the cold case would be investigated again.
A spokesperson said the police were unable to comment at this stage because relevant staff were unavailable.
Jared Savage covers crime and justice issues, with a particular interest in organised crime. He joined the Herald in 2006 and has won a dozen journalism awards in that time, including twice being named Reporter of the Year. He is also the author of Gangland, Gangster’s Paradise and Underworld.