This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we take a look at four compelling true crime cases.
Could DNA tool finally nab Mellory Manning’s killer?
It was supposed to be just one more night working in Christchurch’s red-light district to raise some money to buy Christmas presents for her family.
Ngati “Mellory” Lynette Manning, then 27, was turning her life around following her sister’s suicide which had helped convince her to stop taking drugs. She’d also spent several months out of prostitution.
About 9.30pm on December 18, 2008, she was dropped off at her corner of Manchester and Peterborough streets wearing a distinctive pink skirt and a blue and white polka dot bikini top.
The following morning about 6.40am her body was found floating in the Avon River near Dallington Terrace.
Nearly 15 years after Manning’s battered body was found mystery surrounds the identity of those responsible.
Could a controversial DNA tool that helped the FBI catch a serial killer and rapist in the United States help identify the elusive Male B?
Herald senior crime journalist Sam Sherwood reports.
He was jailed 20 years ago for murdering his wife. Now he wants to clear his name
Kevin Harmer and his wife, Jill Thomas, appeared from the outside to be a loving, respected couple who worked hard on their farm near Dunsandel.
Harmer, 45, was well-known in the community and worked full-time for the Selwyn District Council in Leeston as regulatory manager. Thomas, who had been diagnosed as being in the early stages of multiple sclerosis, was a former schoolteacher who looked after the farm alongside Harmer. The couple were also finalising a book on Perendale sheep.
On October 4, 1999, Thomas died after a fiery car explosion at their property. Initially, police believed her death was the result of an accident caused by the ignition of flames after petrol had leaked from a container which had been standing in the well of the passenger’s seat.
However, just over one year later, after obtaining evidence from an internationally renowned expert in fire investigations, police charged Harmer with murder.
Twenty years after he was jailed for murder, Harmer maintains what happened that day was nothing more than an accident and hopes the Criminal Case Review Commission will clear his name. Sam Sherwood reports.
Life and death in the Auckland shadows
There was no one at home when I visited a big rotting weatherboard pile in Castor Bay where a Chinese man lived until he drove to a cul de sac in nearby Albany just after midnight on January 12, 2022 and stabbed another Chinese man to death.
Police had visited, too, and took photographs of his Seaview Rd address. They were very bleak photographs. His little rented room was divided by a curtain; someone slept on the other side.
Detectives were looking to see whether he took his knife from the kitchen before he drove out that night. That would have suggested intent, premeditation. But there was no evidence, no drama. It was such a flat and resolutely meaningless death, really over nothing, a crazy misunderstanding - it was a very Auckland death, hard workers sending their money back to China, going about their lives in shadows and corners, chasing the New Zealand dream.
Steve Braunias investigates a tragic killing in Albany.
The man who died at his parole hearing
After a life spent locked up, Wuti Wellington Waa died just before his chance to make a bid for freedom.
The 58-year-old was serving a life sentence after a conviction for the 1988 killing of Northcote Motel proprietor Rex Bell during an armed robbery gone wrong. The conviction came after a trial featuring evidence from a controversial jailhouse snitch, a frequent flier in the witness box at the time, who also testified at the trial of David Tamihere.
The Herald on Sunday reviewed court files dating back to the 1980s and spoken to Waa’s family and friends to piece together the story of his life spent largely confined to institutions.
Those institutions spanned the boys’ homes and borstals he first entered as a ward of the state aged 9, to the Auckland South Corrections Facility at Wiri where he died.
Waa died while appearing before the Parole Board in Auckland. So who was he, why did he spend more than 30 years in prison and was he guilty of murder?
George Block investigates.