Notorious criminal insists he isn't guilty of knifepoint attack

Sunday, 5 January 2025

Frainkie Edwards’ case is the fourth potential wrongful conviction sent back to the courts by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Frankie Edwards admits he’s committed some horrendous crimes. But not this one. As Mike White reports, the official wrongful conviction body agrees.

The attacker spied the woman as she returned to her car.

In an instant, he’d leapt into the passenger seat, produced a knife, and said he would kill her family if she didn’t drive away and follow his instructions.

Terrified, the 42-year-old did what he said, heading along Gillies Ave in Epsom, Auckland.

But when she reached traffic lights she took her chance, and after a brief struggle, escaped from the car and fled.

The attacker slid into the driver’s seat and sped away with his victim’s car and belongings, later abandoning it.

The day before, on April 9 2006, a woman had just got into her car in Henderson when a man ran up, smashed the driver’s window with a spanner, and grabbed her round her throat, before running off with her handbag.

On May 26, a man leapt into a car with an 18-year-old in Mangere, held a screwdriver to her and made her withdraw cash from ATMs.

He then raped her, and stole her jewellery and phone.

Six days later, a man abducted a 17-year-old girl and her 12-year-old sister, threatened to stab the younger girl with a screwdriver, then raped the older girl twice.

Alan Hall, who was convicted of murdering Arthur Easton, spent 19 years in jail for the crime. His conviction was quashed by the Supreme Court. Stuff followed Alan and his family during the process. (First published in June 2022)

The next night, an attacker forced a 29-year-old to withdraw cash, then raped her.

Police quickly arrested well-known criminal Frankie Edwards for the five attacks, which had clear similarities, and he pleaded guilty.

But it was only as he was being sentenced that Edwards realised he hadn’t in fact committed one of the crimes - the kidnapping of a woman in Epsom, where the victim escaped at the traffic lights.

For this crime, he was charged with kidnapping, threatening to kill, and car conversion.

Edwards says his protests were ignored, and he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 10 years.

But the Solicitor-General appealed the sentence, and the Court of Appeal re-sentenced Edwards to preventive detention, meaning an indefinite time in prison.

He remains in jail.

However, Edwards has never accepted responsibility for the Epsom attack, believing police lumped it in with his four other crimes, because of the similar timing and method.

He applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the authority established in 2020 to review potential wrongful convictions, and it has just referred Edwards’ case back to the courts.

While admitting other serious crimes, Frankie Edwards insists he isn’t responsible for kidnapping a woman at knifepoint.

Its six-month investigation raises serious concerns with the police inquiry into the Epsom attack and charging Edwards for it.

The victim described her attacker as being part-Caucasian, with dark skin. Edwards is Māori.

She said he had a tattoo across his stomach in 12cm high black and green English lettering. Edwards has no such tattoo, or any sign of laser removal.

She also said her attacker had no distinguishing marks on his hands or arms. Edwards has clearly visible tattoos on his hands.

Moreover, despite Crown submissions suggesting the victim identified her assailant, this wasn’t true, and police didn’t undertake any form of identification procedure.

When police interviewed Edwards about some of the other attacks, they didn’t question him about the Epsom crime, giving him no opportunity to deny it, until, he says, it was too late.

Officers also claimed Edwards left the victim’s car near his sister’s house. However, CCRC investigations show police got the sister’s name wrong, and Edwards’ sister actually lived nowhere near where the car was abandoned.

Moreover, Edwards sustained a serious injury to his hand in the April 9 attack when he smashed the car window, which eventually required hospital treatment.

Colin Carruthers, KC, former chief commissioner of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who oversaw the investigation into the Frankie Edwards case.

The CCRC says this makes it less likely he could have committed the Epsom attack the following day, but police failed to carry out “obvious lines of inquiry” about the injury.

“The investigation by the Commission did not find any evidence that [Edwards] had committed the offences, and concluded that he did not commit them,” the CCRC said in a statement.

Former CCRC chief commissioner, Colin Carruthers, KC, who oversaw the referral of Edwards’ case to the courts, says the concern is that police bundled the Epsom attack in with other crimes Edwards had confessed to, without adequate investigations.

“If police had really done a methodical inquiry about the evidential sufficiency, they should have reached the conclusion there just wasn’t enough to warrant the charges.”

But as well as Edwards potentially being convicted of crimes he didn’t commit, Carruthers says they have referred his sentence of preventive detention back to the Court of Appeal.

At the 2007 Court of Appeal hearing that replaced his 16-year jail sentence with an indefinite one, Edwards’ denial of the Epsom attack was raised as a factor in whether he might reoffend, given he was not taking full responsibility.

Carruthers says the CCRC wants the Court of Appeal to reconsider the preventive detention sentence, in the light of the new information.

Despite Edwards’ other serious crimes, Carruthers says it remains vital any injustice is exposed and rectified, no matter what people thought of criminals like Edwards.

University of Otago Law Professor Andrew Geddis.

“It’s not a waste of time at all.

“In the end, a man has been sentenced to a very severe sentence. And while the commission recognises he has committed other crimes and he should serve the sentence for those crimes, he should not be serving a sentence or any part of one, for crimes he didn’t commit.

“That really strikes right at the heart of our system of justice.”

Otago University law professor Andrew Geddis says it is important to know whether Edwards has been punished appropriately or not.

“As a simple matter of justice, you should be sentenced for the things you did, and not things you didn’t do.

“That’s the basic bargain on which our criminal justice system rests: that those people who are definitively proved guilty can be punished using state power, because we are using the state’s most extreme power - to take away people’s liberty, and in this guy’s case, potentially forever.

“And any time we gloss over that, or say, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ we’re undermining that fundamental basis on which our system rests.”

Auckland KC Marie Dyhrberg, who is representing Frankie Edwards.

Geddis says if Edwards didn’t commit the Epsom attack, then the victim hasn’t received justice either.

“The victim, in essence, lives under a lie. They’re told, ‘We’ve dealt with your offender, and we’ve punished them,’ when in fact, that hasn’t happened.

“Furthermore, if he is genuinely innocent, that means there’s an offender out there who has not faced justice for this.

“But as long as he’s convicted of it, no one is looking for that offender. As far as the system is concerned, the issue is over.”

If we denied people like Edwards his day in court, then we were abandoning a fundamental social foundation, Geddis says.

“We’re doing this not just for Frankie Edwards. We’re doing this for the person who suffered the offence, and we’re doing it for us as a society and the system of criminal justice that we think is important.”

While Carruthers labels the police investigation into the Epsom attack as “poor”, police have refused to comment on the quality of their inquiry.

Nor would they say whether they will oppose Edwards’ appeals; if they believe they had wrongly charged him in relation to the Epsom kidnapping; if they had informed the victim; or whether they were reinvestigating the case to ensure the correct perpetrator was held to account.

“At this point we are unable to comment further until the court has heard the matter,” a spokesperson said.

Edwards will be represented at his appeals by top Auckland KC Marie Dyhrberg.