‘I wasn’t there’: Mikaere Oketopa the victim of a miscarriage of justice, investigating body finds

Friday, 15 December 2023

Mikaere Oketopa, previously known as Michael October, was convicted of murdering Anne-Maree Ellens in 1994 but has always insisted he is innocent.

Mikaere Oketopa’s convictions for rape and murder remain one of New Zealand’s most contentious and troubling cases. Today, it was sent back to the Court of Appeal in a landmark decision by a new investigative body, which found it “improbable” Oketopa was involved. Mike White reports on a 30-year battle, and speaks with a “humbled and grateful” Oketopa.

In October 1997, several inmates at Christchurch’s Paparua Prison launched one of the most brazen uprisings in New Zealand’s jailhouse history, by taking six prison guards hostage.

Their leader was Rex Haig, who’d been controversially convicted of killing Mark Roderique on board his fishing boat at Jackson Bay in 1994.

Alongside him during the siege was Mikaere Oketopa, known then as Michael October, who’d been found guilty of raping and murdering 22-year-old Anne-Maree Ellens in Christchurch the same year.

This was despite there being no forensics linking him to the crime, and the two other men convicted of the crimes insisting Oketopa wasn’t there.

With a hoax stick of gelignite, the prisoners kidnapped the guards, and barricaded themselves in the prison’s east wing for 26 hours, demanding the cases of Oketopa and Haig be independently reviewed.

In a media interview, Haig stressed they had both been wrongfully convicted, and nobody believed them.

“All we want is maybe a Criminal Cases Review Commission set up, like in England.

“We believe the justice system is that rotten at the moment, that nobody’s getting any fair justice.”

A monument near the English Criminal Cases Review Commission in Birmingham, to those who died in terrorist bombings. Six men were wrongly imprisoned for the bombings, and their cases led to the creation of the CCRC.

England’s Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) had been established earlier that year, to look at potential miscarriages of justice, following the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, falsely accused of terrorist bombings, that shocked the country.

After a tense day-long standoff at Paparua, the authorities relented, promising to appoint a senior lawyer and private investigator to reconsider the hostage-takers’ cases.

Haig’s conviction was eventually quashed in 2006.

However, the review of Oketopa’s case went nowhere, and he remained in prison until 2005.

And it took until 2020 for New Zealand to establish a CCRC.

But when it did, Mikaere Oketopa was among those lining up to have his case reinvestigated.

From left: Dean Parata, Mikaere Oketopa, Rex Haig, and Richard Genge, who were involved in taking hostages at Christchurch Prison to get the cases of Haig and Oketopa reconsidered.

This morning, in its first major decision, New Zealand’s CCRC sent Oketopa’s case back to the Court of Appeal to be reconsidered, citing strong concerns with the police investigation, and his convictions.

Twenty-six years after desperation drove Oketopa to take hostages in order to get a second chance at justice, he’d finally got his wish.

Mikaere Oketopa admits he was totally pissed when Anne-Maree Ellens was raped by at least two men, and had her head smashed on a concrete step at a Christchurch school, early on the morning of September 17, 1994.

He’d started drinking before lunchtime the day before, at Wunderbar in Lyttelton, with two friends, Alan Taylor and Michael Green.

By the time they’d driven into central Christchurch in Green’s Ford Falcon, Oketopa had passed out in the passenger’s seat.

Taylor and Green couldn’t raise him, so they went into Warner’s Hotel in Cathedral Square by themselves, soon after 1am.

Some time after 2.30am, they returned to the car, with three women, and drove to a party.

Anne-Maree Ellens had gone out on the town that evening with two friends, and headed to the Palladium nightclub in Gloucester St shortly after midnight.

By 1.30am she became separated from her friends, and started walking home.

Warner’s Hotel in Cathedral Square, Christchurch.

At the corner of Colombo and St Asaph St, she met Richard Genge and Samuel Kirner who’d just bought a bottle of whisky, and the trio staggered off towards Cathedral Square.

Around 2.30am, a woman walking home down Barbadoes St passed what she said was three men and a woman.

Another witness, Murray Muir, said he was driving home on Barbadoes St after closing up at the cinema he worked at, about the same time, and when he stopped at the Gloucester St lights, he saw a woman sprawled on the footpath 7m away from him. However, Muir said there were only two men with her.

And this is the heart of Oketopa’s case.

In Oketopa’s version, which is backed up by other witnesses, he remained comatose in Green’s car, outside Warner’s Hotel, and didn’t wake up until much later, when they’d all gone to another party.

But the witness who claimed she saw three men with a woman in Barbadoes St at 2.30am, picked out Mikaere Oketopa from a photo montage, and was certain he was one of the men she’d seen, even though her description of the man appeared more like Genge.

Mikaere Oketopa will be 55 in February and says his murder and rape convictions have affected him for more than half his life.

It seems likely the woman and Murray Muir both saw Anne-Maree Ellens on Barbadoes St.

Her bashed and brutalised body was found later that morning in the grounds of Christchurch East School, just around the corner on Gloucester St.

But whether Mikaere Oketopa was with her, hung on the single identification of him, by the passerby.

Until, that is, he confessed.

When police caught up with Oketopa in Motueka, the events of that night were somewhere between a blur and a blank.

After being shown photos of Ellens’ body, and told by detectives he’d been identified as one of the men with Ellens, Oketopa began to wonder if he might have been involved, given his drunken state, even though he had no memory of it.

The grave of Anne-Maree Ellens in Christchurch.

Police told him he’d been seen with two other men - and Oketopa remembered he’d been with Taylor and Green, and wondered if something had happened with them.

And then the memories started creeping back. Yeah, he did remember Ellens. Yeah, he had sex with her, but it was consensual. And afterwards he’d heard her screaming.

“I’ve blocked it out,” he told police. “It’s so bad. Why didn’t I stop them?”

Taken to the school grounds, Oketopa identified the place where he’d supposedly had sex with Ellens. But there were no forensics to support that.

In fact, Oketopa’s DNA and fingerprints were nowhere to be found in the area or on the victim.

But Oketopa’s confession, and the eyewitness identification, were all police needed to charge him with Ellens’ rape and murder.

It wasn’t until Oketopa met Green in prison, that Green told him he’d been asleep in his car outside Warner’s all the time - and not a kilometre away raping Ellens with two strangers.

At this point, Oketopa realised he must have imagined the events that led to his confession - and retracted them.

Nigel Hampton, KC, who was one of Oketopa’s first lawyers, and always believed the case against him was implausible. Hampton is a CCRC commissioner, but recused himself from consideration of Oketopa’s case.

And when Genge and Kirner were arrested, and their DNA was matched to the scene and victim, but they said they didn’t know Oketopa and insisted he wasn’t present, it seemed Oketopa had been thrown a lifeline.

The police scenario at Oketopa’s trial was this: That some time before 2am, Oketopa woke up in the car, stumbled out, encountered strangers Genge, Kirner and Ellens, went with them to Christchurch East School 1km away around 2.30am, raped Ellens without leaving any forensic trace, then walked 1km back to the car in Cathedral Square, and was asleep again when his friends returned.

It seemed totally implausible.

But his early confession, combined with the contested eyewitness evidence, stuck, no matter what other evidence was put forward in Oketopa’s defence.

In October 1995 a jury of 12 white men convicted Genge, Kirner and Oketopa, who are all Māori, for rape and murder.

They were sentenced to life in prison.

To be clear and fair, considering whether Oketopa might be guilty was made easier if you knew his past.

The day before Ellens was murdered, Oketopa had robbed a dairy.

When he left the party, about 5am on September 17 he robbed a taxi driver, then kidnapped a woman, forced her to withdraw cash from a money machine, and stole her car.

His rap sheet of serious convictions was extensive.

And even after he was paroled in 2005, Oketopa didn’t go straight.

Documentary maker Bryan Bruce, who investigated Oketopa’s case and believed he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

In 2010 he was recalled to prison after strangling his girlfriend and threatening to kill her.

He was recalled again, briefly, in 2018 for breaching his parole conditions by smoking cannabis.

Oketopa accepts all that.

But he insists he didn’t rape and kill Anne-Maree Ellens.

His confession was the result of confabulation - striving to fill in blanks in his memory, and then believing what his imagination was telling him.

Over the years, many have looked at Oketopa’s case, and agreed that the scenario painted by police is illogical, the evidence against him, scant at best.

Documentary maker Bryan Bruce, who in 2010 made a TV programme about the case, concluded Oketopa’s conviction was a grave miscarriage of justice.

“I do think that Michael October confessed to a crime that he did not commit.

“If there was ever a case that cried out for the appointment of a Criminal Cases Review Commission, as is now available in Britain, then in my opinion, it’s the case of Michael October.”

Oketopa looks back to that 1997 prison siege where he joined calls for a CCRC, and notes the irony that it’s that newly-established body that’s led to his case returning to the Court of Appeal.

Kerry Cook, who is Mikaere Oketopa’s lawyer.

“It’s like a prophecy, for me, isn’t it.”

He’s not angry it’s taken so long for his wish to come true, just frustrated.

“I’m 55 next year - it’s over half my life.”

Oketopa says he’s humbled and grateful for the opportunity to prove his innocence, and is quick to pay tribute to all those who’ve helped him in his fight.

Dean Parata who stood by him in prison and ever since; lawyers Kerry Cook and Nigel Hampton, KC, among others; journalists Chris Cooke and Bryan Bruce; university sociologist Jarrod Gilbert; the Salisbury Street Foundation that helps prisoners reintegrate into society, and gave him a job when he was paroled; his partner; his family.

“So many people to thank.

“You can’t stand in front of a rock with a pickaxe by yourself and think you can conquer that, without the support of other people.

“There were staunch people behind me that believed in my innocence and never gave up.”

Colin Carruthers KC, the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has referred Oketopa’s convictions back to the Court of Appeal.

In its decision, the CCRC cited expert opinion that Oketopa’s admissions had “all the hallmarks of internalised false confessions”, and police adopted a “guilt-presumptive mindset”.

It also highlighted the unreliability of a key eyewitness’s evidence; strong evidence other witnesses saw Oketopa asleep in the car at Warner’s multiple times; police’s interviewing of Oketopa without a lawyer; the “integrity of the police investigation”; and “the absence of crucial documents which were either not created as they should have been, or removed from the police file.”

“Having reviewed all of the information and evidence relating to timings, including reinterviewing witnesses, the Commission considers it improbable that Mr Oketopa was at the crime scene or involved in the victim’s rape and murder.

“The Commission has concerns that police conducted their investigation with tunnel vision, focused on Mr Oketopa as a suspect. This meant any alternative explanations were discounted.

“The Commission considers the cumulative effect of these issues is that a miscarriage of justice in Mr Oketopa’s case has occurred.”

Oketopa’s lawyer, Kerry Cook, says he is looking forward to arguing Oketopa’s case before the Court of Appeal, hopefully next year.

Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, left, and Morgan Freeman as “Red” in The Shawshank Redemption, which is set in a prison.

“I’m really pleased to live in a country where a Criminal Cases Review Commission exists, because no justice system is perfect, and we need safety valves.”

On Friday, police acknowledged the CCRC’s decision to refer Oketopa’s case back to the Court of Appeal, and said they were referring the matter to the Independent Police Conduct Authority for assessment.

The CCRC hadn’t contacted the Ellens family, however police had, and were providing support to them.

Oketopa didn’t always imagine he’d get his case back to court, despite the efforts of those who supported him.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m human. There’d be times where my mind was going, ‘Time out, what’s going on here, where am I going - my appeals knocked back, still in prison.’”

But Oketopa cites the movie The Shawshank Redemption: “Andy Dufresne never gave up, did he.”

And Oketopa won’t give up till he’s cleared his name.

Even now, with a stable life, and good job as a metalworker, paying taxes, and having paid his dues for the crimes he did commit, Oketopa is still a murderer in the eyes of the state, having to report to his probation officer fortnightly.

“It’s the invisible anklet I wear every day.

“But I can look at my partner, and I can look at my stepdaughter, and I know I’m grateful to be alive today.”

Oketopa (Tainui, Te Arawa) changed his name by deed poll from Michael October when he got out of prison, wanting to mark a new chapter in his life.

But he knows that some, maybe many, will always believe he’s guilty.

And the Ellens family, including Anne-Maree’s father, Mervyn, may be among them. (Anne-Maree’s mother, Beverley, died three years before her daughter.)

“I’m truly sorry for the loss of your daughter, Mervyn - sister, niece, aunty,” says Oketopa.

“But I didn’t take her life, I did not participate in anything - I was not there.”

And he understands how people might feel, and that his appeal will open painful scars for the family.

“If it was my sister, and someone was now standing up pleading their innocence, yeah, it would be really hard. I’d still be holding those feelings of, ‘How dare you.’

“Everyone has a right to an opinion, and I’m not here to judge anyone.

“I’m just here to clear my name, and tell them that I didn’t do it.”