Police report buried for 17 years reveals serial rapist Malcolm Rewa was suspected of dozens more attacks
Friday, 19 May 2023
In 2019, Malcolm Rewa was convicted of the 1992 murder of Susan Burdett.
He was convicted of Burdett’s rape, and attacks of 24 other women, in 1998.
A senior detective wrote a report about the Rewa investigation in 2006 – 17 years later, Stuff can finally reveal what it said.
A never-before-seen police report on investigations into one of New Zealand’s most notorious criminals can finally be revealed by Stuff – 17 years after it was written.
Malcolm Rewa has been convicted of attacking 25 women, including the 1992 murder of Susan Burdett – the crime an innocent Teina Pora wrongly spent over 20 years in jail for.
**READ MORE:
* The painful, drawn-out saga over Susan Burdett's murder is finally over
* Malcolm Rewa murder trial: Guilty verdict a 'really important day' for Teina Pora
* Three of Malcolm Rewa's rape victims tell their story
**
But now, after a nine-year wrestle with police through the Official Information Act, Stuff can reveal police suspected Rewa of a lot more.
A report that police have tried to keep hidden since 2006 reveals a top detective suspected Rewa of up to another 26 attacks.
Rewa’s arrest
It was the night of his arrest in Auckland in May 1996, his blood was dripping on the police station floor from police dog bites, and the man known as a lone wolf attacker was in a reflective mood, seemingly wanting to open up to Detective Inspector Steve Rutherford.
Rewa spoke about his step-parents, his harsh upbringing and his sexual dysfunction, according to details revealed in the report.
But like a book, Rewa said, Rutherford would have to wait until everything was over to read the last chapter.
Instead of telling all, however, Rewa retracted his offer, telling Rutherford he’d rather “break his neck like a twig, if given the chance”.
The final chapter remained unresolved. The full extent of a monstrous and insidious criminal rampage – during which he stood by while an innocent Pora was imprisoned for a rape and murder Rewa had committed – would never be known.
But now, years after Rewa was convicted of attacking 25 women, at least some of the untold story can be revealed.
It’s contained in a report police have managed to withhold since it was written in 2006. Nine years after it was first requested under the Official Information Act, it’s been released to Stuff.
Police initially refused the request in part, because it had “the potential to hinder police ability to collect information of a similar nature in the future”. In 2017, Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier ruled that at the time of the request “there was no good reason… to withhold” and apologised for “unacceptable” delays.
However, by then, the Crown had again decided to charge Rewa with the 1992 murder of Burdett (two previous trials had ended in hung juries), and so the material was considered prejudicial. Rewa was finally found guilty in 2019 and his appeal against that conviction was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in February this year.
Police released the report to Stuff this month, after further delays because of “heavy workloads” and a senior officer being on leave.
In the 2006 report, the now-retired and highly-respected officer, Detective Sergeant Dave “Chook” Henwood, sets out the history of the investigation into Rewa.
Henwood’s report
He also outlines up to 10 more attacks he believes Rewa could have carried out, and said there could be as many as 16 on top of that which police either didn’t know about or haven’t linked him to.
Of the attacks police investigated at the time, Henwood said a 1994 case in Rotorua “easily reached the threshold required” for prosecution. But the survivor of the attack did not want to give evidence.
He believes four more are “probably” Rewa crimes, including attacks across Auckland – in Ponsonby, Māngere, and Papatoetoe – and lists five more where Rewa was a suspect.
“It would be fair to assume that at least another 5-6 offences were never reported to police and at least 5-10 were not identified or located by police due to the geographic extent of his offending,” Henwood said.
“We have no idea [of] the extent of his sexual offending from the early 1980s up until his first identified crime [in the series of attacks] in 1987. If he is true to the national and international average he is unlikely to have stopped after his first rape, aged 22, in 1975.”
Rewa was born in Northland, but brought up in Auckland after the death of his mother. He started carrying out burglaries at a young age, then joined the army.
He was discharged 18 months later, and arrested soon after for rape in 1975 - while his wife was in labour in hospital. He’d broken into a nearby nursing home and attacked a woman there.
Rewa was sentenced to four years in prison and it is not known if he carried out any more attacks until 1987.
“It is unlikely that we will ever know the full extent of Rewa’s sexual crimes … so we will never have that ‘final chapter’ he promised Detective Inspector Rutherford,” Henwood said in the report.
As well as his assessment of how many other attacks he believes Rewa carried out, Henwood’s report also includes:
Him describing an “embarrassing” 1995 police inquiry into an intruder attack in Ponsonby where the survivor identified Rewa, but detectives were fended off after Rewa laid a harassment complaint against them;
That the first victim in 1987 also identified Rewa but the investigation “floundered” and he was not arrested;
Saying the Crown’s attempts to link Rewa with Pora were “at best tenuous” and Henwood believed Pora was never “in any way involved”.
In 1994, Pora was convicted of the rape and murder of Burdett, in her Papatoetoe home. Burdett was beaten to death with a baseball bat she kept under the bed.
Pora had made a false confession that was “frequently contradictory and often implausible”, and he was later diagnosed as having a Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder which left him with a mental age of nine or 10.
Pora spent more than 20 years in prison before eventually having his conviction quashed by the Privy Council in 2015. He was paid just over $2.5 million in compensation.
There was never any physical evidence linking Pora to the crime. The DNA at the crime scene was later identified as Rewa’s.
Henwood’s 2006 report said: “Clearly those involved in Pora’s conviction are satisfied that justice has been done. Many others including myself believe that Pora was never at the Burdett homicide scene nor was he in any way involved.”
Henwood’s assessment – later proved correct – was known by senior officers, but police kept implicating Pora even after he had been declared innocent, maintaining that Pora and Rewa must have acted together.
Although Rewa was convicted of raping Burdett in 1998, it took another 21 years for him to be found guilty of her murder.
A private investigator who worked to prove Pora’s innocence, Tim McKinnel, said the Henwood report “provides further context and background as to what went on”.
For instance, an officer who handled the police file while Pora’s legal team were saying there had been a miscarriage of justice, had previously been involved with the case by looking at Rewa’s complaint over the 1995 investigation.
“The broader issue, in my experience, is when a credible potential miscarriage of justice arises, there is a tendency to bring in police officers who were originally involved in an investigation to manage the file and further investigate,” McKinnel said.
“Most professions and industries wouldn’t tolerate that, but in criminal justice we do, and that needs to change.”
Henwood said the hunt for a serial rapist began in 1995 after DNA testing linked stranger intruder rapes in Rotorua (1988), Ōtāhuhu (1989 and 1990), Hillsborough (1991) and the Burdett murder. Another Ōtāhuhu rape in 1992 was included because of its proximity.
“One of the serious considerations of the team was, ‘What happened to the offender [between] April 1992 and late 1995?’,” Henwood wrote.
By early 1996, police noticed another string of stranger intruder rapes in central Auckland.
Henwood – an expert criminal profiler who was crucial during the investigation which led to the 1995 arrest of Joseph Thompson for 61 sexual violations – was asked to see if there were similarities to the earlier series of attacks.
He linked intruder rapes at Sandringham, One Tree Hill, Remuera, Ponsonby and two in Mt Eden, noting what he called “behavioural similarities”.
Henwood then looked at all stranger intruder rapes in the Auckland area and found more he believed were connected – in Hillsborough, Mt Eden, two in Pt Chevalier, and two in Māngere.
There was a “readily recognisable and distinctive signature” in all the rapes.
In 1996, Rewa’s name came up when an officer was looking at a file left behind by the Thompson inquiry, a 1987 attack in Glen Innes.
Even though the survivor did her own investigations to find out the name of her attacker and passed it on to police, Rewa was let off the hook after giving what turned out to be a false alibi, provided by a fellow member of the Highway 61 gang.
Police hunting the serial rapist became very interested in Rewa – and discovered he had already been questioned over the 1995 attack in Ponsonby. He had laid a complaint of harassment “in an attempt to keep a police investigation at bay”.
While this was going on, no one on the serial rape inquiry had any idea because it had been wrongly coded in the police system as an attempted robbery, Henwood said.
“How the Auckland Central staff had not included it, recognised it, or brought it to the attention [of the officers hunting the serial rapist] proved most embarrassing and definitely hindered the identification of Rewa much earlier than was the case.
“The complainant had positively identified Rewa as her attacker from hundreds of prisoner photographs, her description of him was compelling, and the computer sketch she completed was the only one that was remotely like Rewa.”
Attention focused strongly on Rewa. While police were carrying out DNA tests on family members to see if they could draw a further link, he carried out another violent assault and detectives decided they could no longer wait.
He was arrested the next day with the help of the armed offenders squad and a police dog unit.
Police declined to be interviewed for this story.
A spokesperson said police had previously apologised for “deficiencies in the original investigation involving Mr Pora and have no further comment to make”.
The spokesperson also pointed to a 2014 statement in which a senior officer said “it remains a matter of significant regret that police were unable to catch him earlier and prevent his offending”, and, that while there was no lack of will from detectives “more should have been done in aspects of some of the early investigations”.
An Independent Police Conduct Authority report in 2014 found faults with inquiries but concluded “there is insufficient evidence that any of these impacted on the ability of police to identify Mr Rewa earlier as the serial sex offender”.
Henwood, who retired from the police after a distinguished 37-year career in 2007 (though he later returned to carry out non-sworn work), was unable to be reached for comment.
Sexual violence: where to get help
Rape Crisis 0800 88 33 00, click link for local helplines.
Victim Support 0800 842 846
Safetalk text 4334, phone 0800 044 334 webchat safetotalk.nz or email support@safetotalk.nz
The Harbour Online support and information for people affected by sexual abuse.
Women’s Refuge 0800 733 843.
Male Survivors Aotearoa Helplines across NZ, click to find out more (males only).