Unmasking monsters: How a Kiwi cop caught the most evil amongst us
Sunday, 4 August 2024
Chook Henwood introduced a radical way to catch our worst rapists and murderers. Then he broke ranks to say Teina Pora was innocent. But, as his new book reveals, the legendary detective’s honesty made him unpopular with many. Mike White reports.
Bang, bang, bang.
Dave “Chook” Henwood and another detective stood on the doorstep of a middling Mt Albert house, waiting to meet The Ghost.
For two years they’d been piecing together evidence about a serial rapist who had terrorised Auckland.
He’d carried out more than 40 attacks, over more than a decade, on victims as young as 10.
He’d struck at night, often during storms, when the rain sluiced away his trail.
But not all the clues.
At one house, he’d left a small smear of blood.
Using a nascent investigation technique, criminal profiling, Henwood and his team had drawn up a list of potential suspects, and then visited them, taking blood or saliva to compare with their sample, to eliminate each man - and catch the culprit.
That’s how they came to be standing outside Joseph Thompson’s front door, early on a winter’s morning in 1995, surrounded by lookouts and dog teams and a fleet of backup cars.
The door opened, and Thompson, dubbed The Ghost for his ability to elude police, stood in a white T-shirt.
Henwood’s colleague said who they were.
“Oh yeah,” Thompson replied. “I’ve been waiting for you guys. Come in. I’ll just have a wash. I’ll need a jacket, too.”
Taken aback by Thompson’s unexpected affability, the detectives introduced themselves by name.
“Oh, you’re Dave Henwood,” Thompson said. “I was going to ring you.”
In remarkable fashion, Thompson, one of New Zealand’s worst criminals, then unloaded to the detectives.
On drives around Auckland, and 20 hours of interviews, the 36-year-old father of four, who worked in a potato chip factory, showed them the scenes of his crimes, recounting how he broke in, what he did, and describing the victims.
“I just get this urge, like getting hungry for a feed. I don’t know if it’s sex, or whether it’s to have somebody in my arms, whether it’s love, whether it’s hate.
“I get this compulsion to go out and do these things, and I find when I’m out there, doing it, I can’t stop, and I can’t let anybody stop me doing it.”
It took Henwood and his team to finally stop Thompson.
At the end of New Zealand police’s longest and largest manhunt, the newly-married Thompson pleaded guilty to 129 charges, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
For Henwood, it was the culmination of years of analysis, and vindication of criminal profiling, a technique that used known offender characteristics to predict who might have carried out a crime, and produce a suspect list.
The painstaking work is detailed in Henwood’s book, Unmasking Monsters, which also tells the story of catching another notorious serial rapist, Malcolm Rewa.
The 27-year struggle to convict Rewa for murdering Susan Burdett in 1992 provides a thread to Henwood’s story, and was also the rewarding coda to his career.
So much so, Burdett is one of those Henwood’s book is dedicated to.
“I felt there was a need to say, ‘Look, Susan, we took a bloody long time getting there, but it’s done.’”
When Henwood finally retired from the police after 47 years, he found he had prostate cancer, and was confined to home.
Then COVID came along, and he had even more time on his hands.
That was when he started writing Unmasking Monsters, partly to explain to his children why he’d been away from home so much when they were young.
It’s Henwood’s journey from growing up on a Hauraki Plains dairy farm, the youngest of eight children whose parents hadn’t been to college, to becoming a police cadet at 17, and then a life chasing the worst of criminals.
“It’s just a story about a naive little bloody chicken from the swamp, and going on to lead the National Criminal Profiling Unit,” says Henwood, now 72.
When he hit south Auckland’s streets in 1971 as a 19-year-old constable, Henwood admits he didn’t know what he was doing.
At his first domestic incident, with the family dog latched to his ankle, and a bloodied couple hurling beer bottles at each other, he completely floundered, froze, and had to be rescued by a senior officer who swept in to sort things out.
But he learnt. And got better.
After 10 years, Henwood became a detective, and relished locking up bad bastards.
Henwood makes no bones about it. He’s an old school copper.
And while he accepts change was inevitable, he believes police nowadays have been diverted to become social workers and mental health proxies, rather than focusing on collaring “villains”.
He was never one for police politics, and couldn’t stomach meetings and budgets and projections and paperwork, or the latest ideology that usually turned out to be bullshit.
But he loved trawling files, linking clues, fitting the random jigsaw pieces of unsolved crimes together.
That’s how he came to catch Joseph Thompson. That’s how he tracked down Malcolm Rewa, who’d broken in and raped strangers across Auckland for years.
There were similarities, things that distinguished them, signs of their signature, a piece of their personality left at each scene.
You just had to look, delve deeply, and eventually, you had a shortlist of suspects to follow.
Stopping evil was laborious, meticulous, and exhausting.
While criminal profiling could lead you to a criminal, it also indicated who wasn’t involved.
This became powerfully and painfully obvious during the hunt for Susan Burdett’s killer.
In 1994, teenager Teina Pora was convicted of her rape and murder, having given a shonky confession in an attempt to get a $20,000 reward, despite DNA at the scene not matching him.
The DNA came from Malcolm Rewa, but he was only convicted of Burdett’s rape.
Henwood, however, was certain Rewa, known as the Lone Wolf, would have acted alone.
That’s how he’d carried out all his other crimes.
Why on earth would he bring along a 17-year-old, loose-lipped gang prospect, who could observe his sexual fantasies and inadequacies?
Henwood raised the matter internally for years, insisting the way Rewa operated meant Pora wouldn’t have been present, and had been wrongfully convicted.
“It just made no sense, whatsoever. We all knew Rewa was the offender.”
Despite numerous other senior detectives also expressing concerns, Henwood says police aren’t a democracy, and the hierarchy simply wouldn’t listen.
Eventually, Henwood went public, telling Herald journalist Phil Taylor he didn’t believe Pora was involved in Burdett’s rape or murder.
What followed were wrath and reprimands from police, furious he’d spoken out, as they maintained their bewildering position that Pora was guilty.
“There was a feeling out there, ‘Oh, here’s another one of these bloody people sitting in their cell, saying they’re innocent.’ says Henwood.
“But, unfortunately, on this occasion, he was innocent - and we didn’t do anything about it.”
Pora was eventually exonerated after more than 20 years in prison, and awarded $3.5 million compensation.
Investigator Tim McKinnel, who was instrumental in proving Pora’s innocence, says Henwood’s expertise and evidence helped swing support behind Pora’s case.
“It was incredibly brave, a courageous thing to do.
“And something he didn’t need to do, and most police officers in his position, in my experience, don’t do.”
McKinnel says Henwood had done everything by the book, everything he could to tell police a terrible mistake had been made, and his reward for this honesty was to be punished by police.
“I think what they did to him after he spoke up was a very deliberate strategy.
“Chook was at a stage of his policing career where he could afford to do it. But if you’re not, the message from senior police is very clear: ‘You keep your mouth shut, or we will come after you.’
Speaking up also cost Henwood friends within the police, including the officer who jailed Pora, Inspector Steve Rutherford, who Henwood hasn’t spoken to for over a decade.
“I’d imagine he wouldn’t be happy with me.
“We were pretty close, but now we’re not.”
The way Henwood was “hung out to dry” by police hierarchy over the Pora affair, soured his final years within the force.
As soon as Henwood made his last mortgage payment, he resigned, and in 2017 said goodbye to the only job he’d really known.
Tim McKinnel will be there when Henwood launches Unmasking Monsters.
So will at least four of Malcolm Rewa’s victims.
And hopefully a woman who was raped by Joseph Thompson when she was 13, who recently rang Henwood to thank him for how he looked after her.
The victims were always central to Henwood’s work.
“I had a tenet that I stuck with: Find the truth; look after your victim with compassion; and hunt down the offender with passion.
“We’re the only people they have. The court system is set up for the defendant, and rightly so, so they get a fair trial.
“But who looks after the victim? Nobody.
“That’s why we’ve got to be there for them.”
The greatest gift he could give rape victims by catching their attackers, was freedom, Henwood says.
“You think, how does it help them, 15 years on? Well, it does.
“Every time they walk down the street, and some male looks at them, they think, ‘God, is he the guy that attacked me that night?’”
Whenever Henwood identified a rapist, it meant the victim gained some certainty, a sliver of solace.
The horrors Henwood saw while in the police aren’t something anyone forgets.
You learn to cope with them, and suspend your emotion, Henwood says, or you quit.
“I’d never seen a dead body till I went to Trentham as a cadet, and they took us up to the mortuary and carved up somebody’s brain in front of us.
“I mean, we were completely sheltered in my upbringing. We never even went to funerals, for godsake.
“And you get out on the street, and there’s bloody bodies everywhere.”
Henwood managed to deal with everything about this, except the smells of death, each one different but deep-rooted in his memory. Like the boy they found under a house who’d died sniffing petrol.
“It just clings to you. And the only answer was to dryclean your uniform.”
Despite the things he experienced, and the monsters he confronted, Henwood says life swimming in the “septic tank” of criminality only had limited effect on his personality.
“You become suspicious of people, and your trust in humanity does take a bit of a hit.”
But the flipside of the job was that he also saw the many decent people out there, and the good things they did.
“And you’ve got to believe that, and hold on to that.
“If you just think, ‘Oh, everybody’s a bastard, and everybody’s crooked,’ then you will get buried.”
When he looks back, Henwood can’t imagine being anything else than a police officer.
“I’m not a salesman. I couldn’t work in a factory. I couldn’t be a dairy farmer like my father and my brother.
“I honestly can’t think of any other career I could do.”
Did he make a difference?
“Yeah, I think so. Just to individuals.
“You never win the war in south Auckland, you just win battles.”
He shifted to Cambridge three years ago, to get away from the battleground of his working life.
“In south Auckland, every corner, every street, had a story. Good or bad. Mainly bad.”
Now he’s got a quarter acre, with about 30 rose bushes he and wife Carolyn grow.
It’s a far cry from the 200 he used to have at his previous place, but they give him the same peace and pleasure.
He’s got six children, 15 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
And he’s got band practice twice a week, to fill any remaining spare time.
When he was eight, Henwood joined the brass band in tiny Kerepehi. It was that or boy scouts, and his parents were band supporters.
He put down his tenor horn for 50 years while he was in the police, but rejoined after moving to Cambridge, and now drives 90 minutes each way to the band rooms.
The name “Chook” was given to him as a police cadet, stuck through his career, and now adorns his book.
One name he hates, however, is “cops”.
Copper is okay. But its shortened form rankles.
“It’s one step away from being called a ‘pig’.”
And that’s Henwood, a holder of strong opinions, and someone who tends to favour being direct over being discreet.
“A lot of people think if they’re asked a question, you should be a bit diplomatic.
“I tend to say what’s on my mind - and get myself into a bit of trouble.”
Unmasking Monsters, by Chook Henwood (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is released on August 6.