Undetected: How Angela’s killers nearly got away

Tuesday, 9 April 2024

This story is featured on Stuff’s The Long Read podcast. Check it out by hitting the play button below, or find it on podcast apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

They were young, hedonistic, and living in a seedy world. In that cesspool a murder was hatched. Only developments 24 years later would lead to its resolution. MARTIN VAN BEYNEN reports.

Friday night and Jeremy Powell, a fitter and welder for a company making wood burners, had gathered with a few mates to relax before the weekend.

The 45-year-old lived alone in a granny flat on his parents’ large property in Oxford, a rural area north of Christchurch, and was widely regarded as hard working, kind and supportive of others.

He was on his sixth bourbon and coke and feeling even better after a few lines of MDMA when he got a phone call.

It was police detective Tom Fitzgerald. The call was no surprise because police had phoned about a week before to arrange an interview on the Saturday. They wanted to talk about a cold case in which he apparently had some peripheral involvement. But this call was more urgent.

The cold case was the murder of Angela Blackmoore on August 17, 1995. She was found about 11.20pm that night by her fiancé, Laurie Anderson, when he got home from work.

She lay in a corner of the kitchen’s dining area, in a pool of blood, near a blood-smeared door. Her death had been brutal. She had sustained 39 stabbing/slashing wounds and been repeatedly hit on the head with a hard object.

Two chest stab wounds would have been enough to kill her but the attacker had finished her off by stabbing her in the forehead with a long blade, penetrating the brain. The blows to the head had not knocked her unconscious. Slashing wounds to her arm showed she tried to defend herself.

She was about nine weeks’ pregnant and her 2-year-old son was sleeping down the hallway when she was attacked. The last person to see her alive before her murder was a delivery driver who dropped off a pizza about 9pm.

Blackmoore grew up in the worst of circumstances. She was sexually abused by her stepfather and removed from home to be placed with foster families. She ended up on the streets as a sex worker and eventually got a job in the kitchen at the Crazy Horse strip club. There she met William Blackmoore, the club’s bouncer, and was soon pregnant to him. They were married in 1993 and bought a rundown house in Cashel St, Christchurch. William already had a commercial section in Ferry Rd, near the central city, which he bought with an ACC payout.

William worked as a tow truck driver and Angela, to a fashion, looked after their son Dillon. The marriage was troubled and allegedly violent and William literally tossed in his ring in August 1994. Angela left their Cashel St house, taking Dillon, and the couple began an acrimonious squabble about custody and matrimonial property.

By the time of her murder, Angela was looking forward to a more promising future. She had met Anderson through William, who worked as a driver for Anderson’s small taxi company. Anderson was a hard worker. He also had a full time job as a laboratory technician and assistant librarian at Canterbury University. By night he was a tow truck driver.

He offered a sympathetic shoulder after Angela’s marriage break-up and she quickly moved in with him. Anderson, about 10 years older, was a broad-minded man. Angela was bisexual and he gave her time to decide what direction she wanted to take. He helped her with Dillon and, as she was illiterate, assisted with the custody battle and the matrimonial property dispute. They were scheduled to begin a 10-day live-in parenting course a few days after she was murdered. On successful completion of the course, Angela would have been granted full custody of Dillon.

She retained a few relationships from her past life. One would be fatal.

A cold case breakthrough

By 2019, the Blackmoore murder was one of those dog-eared cold cases that had been around so long, it had exhausted public interest. The chilling aspects of the murder had lost their impact. Barring a confession from a perpetrator with a guilty conscience, it seemed police had long run out of leads and the culprits would go to their graves without sanction.

One detective, however, never gave up. Detective Sergeant Todd Hamilton was part of the original investigation team and became officer in charge of the file. Over the years, he thought he was on the verge of solving the case many times. In 2019 there were developments that would make his 24-year dedication to the case worthwhile.

Stuff’s Blair Ensor was a dogged crime reporter who was the driving force behind a project called the Homicide Report, which collated killings in New Zealand since 2004. His interest was piqued by the older unsolved Blackmoore murder. When police raised the prospect of a $100,000 reward to crack open a cold case, Ensor suggested the Blackmoore killing, which he had already researched thoroughly.

The upshot was a major feature story accompanied by another article publicising the police reward.

Not long afterwards Witness X came forward with some startling information, which prompted police to start re-interviewing some of the people they talked to in 1995.

Hence the phone call made by Detective Superintendent Fitzgerald to Powell on the Friday night - October 25, 2019. He asked Powell if he could come to the Sydenham police station more or less straight away for his interview. Powell mentioned he had been drinking and couldn’t drive, but Fitzgerald offered to pick him up.

MDMA is not a truth drug but it can make consumers euphoric, confident, energetic and affectionate to others.

Powell raised no objection to the sudden request, taking the step that would change his life dramatically.

Discovering the seedier side of Christchurch

Powell had every advantage that Blackmoore did not. He was brought up in a stable Christian family in rural Oxford and appears to have had a happy, normal childhood. He moved to town at 18 to work as a roofer and met a stripper called Rebecca Wright at a party in 1994. A strong sexual attraction prompted them to move in together almost straight away. It wasn’t long before he introduced her to his family. His parents didn’t like her one bit.

It was Powell’s first real relationship and Wright opened his eyes to a seedier part of Christchurch life that revolved around the sex industry, motorbike gangs and drugs.

In turn Powell introduced her to a complicated board game called Dungeons and Dragons where players entered a world of demons and heroes to combat evil.

Players took on characters and reacted to a narrative provided by the game’s master, a role that Powell often undertook because he was good at it.

He certainly looked the part. He had very long hair and wore a grey trench coat that reached down to his combat boots.

The sessions could go on all day and participants easily became addicted, engrossed in their pretend characters and the scenarios they encountered. Wright was consumed by the game.

They broke up in 1996 after Powell found Wright in bed with another man, although they continued having the occasional liaison and the following year Wright had their daughter. She would later refer to Powell as the “sperm donor”.

Wright was friends with the Blackmoores. She claimed to have found a dirty, hungry and tired Angela on the streets, and to have taken her home for a shower and a meal. She said Angela stayed and she taught her life skills such as cooking, washing and putting on make-up. She also got her the job in the kitchen at the strip club. Angela, however, apparently told Anderson she and Wright had worked the streets together and were sexual partners.

They kept seeing each other up to the time of Angela’s death and, although Powell would sometimes visit Angela with Wright as the dutiful boyfriend, he had hardly spoken to her.

That wasn’t to change much, but he was building up to a more devastating encounter.

Seeking the truth

Powell tried to pull himself together for the interview he had agreed to put forward.

He did not know he was central to a careful police strategy. Fitzgerald, then the police liaison officer in Canberra, had flown in specially for the interviews, which were meant to sync with an eavesdropping operation.

On the morning of October 25, 2019, he assembled a team of detectives schooled in an interview technique called The Complex Investigation Phased Engagement Model (CIPEM) that he had developed. The model was designed to elicit information and confessions by interviewing in a relaxed environment where the police interviewer established a rapport, repeatedly emphasised the cathartic and practical benefits of telling the truth, and then took a tougher line.

At the morning meeting chaired by Fitzgerald, the team was briefed on the case and planned out the interviews and the approach.

Powell was in place at the Sydenham police station at 7.03pm. Fitzgerald, Detective Sergeant Maania Piahana and Hamilton were upstairs in the monitoring room.

The person chosen for the Powell interview was Detective Pete Boyd, a veteran officer with a cheerful friendly disposition regarded as a skilled interviewer.

For the first 40 minutes, Boyd threw the CIPEM book at Powell as though the various exhortations were incantations casting a magic spell.

“We said we wanted to make the truth and we get it out now and get it sorted and get it done,” he told Powell.

“You know the truth, I know you know the truth. I can see looking at you, you know the truth…

“We’re talking to a lot of people so I’m really giving you an opportunity to front foot things here tonight to help us out and help yourself at the same time…

“You know you’re getting left out in the cold here mate. You need to tell us what exactly happened As I’ve said I’ve spoken to Rebecca…

“Sometimes we do things that aren’t quite normal when we look back on and think ‘f… I’d never do that again’.”

‘He’s going down too’

Powell also didn’t know that before his interview, police had brought in his ex-girlfriend (now Rebecca Wright-Meldrum due to a previous marriage), a beneficiary living in South Brighton on a property she inherited from her father. Among the muddle and clutter, she kept chickens, a kune kune pig and a rabbit called Fuzzle. The property stood out in the neighbourhood due to a large former Christchurch commuter bus parked in the front yard. Like Powell, she had been interviewed in 1995 and not thought to be involved.

Police had obtained an interception warrant on her phone and were listening in to see how she would react when asked to come to the police station to talk about the Blackmoore case.

She immediately rang her partner, Paul Briggs, to tell him if she didn’t come home, he should assume she had been arrested.

The interview was largely unproductive with Wright-Meldrum claiming she had nothing to do with the murder and even shedding a tear at the sound of Angela’s name.

When her interviewer, Maania Piahana, said police knew what she had done, she replied: “I didn’t do anything or know anything.”

She was driven home with police still monitoring her phone calls.

At 5.30pm she called her daughter Alice.

“Well they told me if I don’t sing like a f…ing canary I’m going down for it. And I’m not. I don’t sing,” she said.

She also told Alice to “get hold of Jeremy because he’s going down too”.

A couple of months later she would tell her ex-partner in an intercepted call:

“Yeah well I need this whole thing squashed - made to go away. Cos they all think it's gang related. It has nothing to do with any f…ing gang. The police are always, gang, gang, gang, gang, gang. It has nothing to do with any f…ing gangs. While they were sniffing at gangs we were safe… now we’re f…ed.”

Crown prosecutor Pip Currie later described the call as a “slam dunk”.

The calls also contained denials of involvement in the murder and assertions she couldn’t remember.

Many of her conversations showed she expected to be arrested and go to jail. Someone who had never been to jail nor been convicted of any crime was Jeremy Powell.

Questioned again

Despite Boyd’s best efforts, Powell stuck to the account he gave police in 1995, although this time added a few comments about his ex.

He said Wright-Meldrum wasn’t a good lady at all but was “hot”. She had opened his eyes to a world of druggies, strippers, career dole bludgers and “f…ing seedy guys” who ran strip clubs.

After he started going out with her, he began drinking heavily and using drugs. Although the relationship was lots of fun, she had turned out to be “emotionally toxic”, “psycho” and the most “vicious, vindictive lady” he had met.

In response to prompting by Boyd, Powell also explained how a man called Dave Hawken fitted into the picture.

He got on well with him apart from the fact he kept “hitting on Bex (Wright-Meldrum)”.

Hawken was a swindler and “into anything that could make a quick buck”, Powell told Boyd. He was also funny and “a good guy to hang around with”.

“Always happy to shout you a drink.”

After a break, during which Boyd went to get Powell’s 1995 statement, the interview resumed at 7.43pm. By now Powell was very aware police did not believe him.

Boyd began the new session with another appeal for Powell to tell the truth and told him “from what we know now, things don’t weigh up”.

Almost to placate Boyd, Powell said he might have been evasive about Hawken in his interviews in 1995.

Boyd thanked him and said police knew that.

A sinister side

Hawken had figured large in the original police investigation, which believed he and his bikie connections might be linked to Angela’s death.

The Templars motorcycle club (later the Devils Henchman gang) became the focus of the investigation and considerable heat was applied, which didn’t make Hawken popular.

Powell got to know Hawken through Wright-Meldrum, who remained friendly with both the Blackmoores after their split. Hawken and William Blackmoore had been mates at Hamilton Boys’ High School and Hawken looked him up when he moved to Christchurch to work in the sex industry. He fancied himself as something of an entrepreneur, with several businesses on the go, none successful. He was a great talker, and, it was said, could sell “ice to the eskimos”.

After the Blackmoores broke-up in 1994, he moved into the Cashel St house using it as his office for his debt collecting company.

His pregnant girlfriend, Toni Parris, moved in with him in March 1995 and Hawken organised some work to make the house more comfortable.

Parris, who had a full time job, paid all the household expenses because, as she said, Hawken never had any money.

He could be caring and loving but had a sinister side, later admitting to being a “horrible bastard” at the time. According to Parris, he often talked about having people “whacked” and allegedly claimed to be responsible for six murders in the North Island.

Hawken was not good partner material and Parris’ parents loathed him. He slept with other women and was out most nights drinking with his motorbike gang mates.

The relationship broke up in 1997 with Parris so scared of him, she barricaded herself in when she went to bed.

Hatching a plan

Hawken’s financial situation was precarious. He owed money all round the place, and, on the books, his businesses were barely breaking even. An angry former landlord was determined to bankrupt him and he was under close scrutiny by his bank over a personal loan. His only official income was a benefit of $164 a week.

Yet he remained optimistic.

He had plans to buy land on Moncks Spur in Christchurch’s Port Hills, which he believed he could get cheap at $650,000. He planned to subdivide it into 40 sections, expecting to make a $2 million profit despite having no property development experience. He needed to borrow to fund the land purchase and wrote up loan applications after Angela’s death in which he listed the Blackmoores’ Cashel St house, and the Ferry Rd section they also owned, as his assets. He had been expecting an ACC payout of about $30,000 for a back injury, but that was declined in May 1995.

Hawken had made himself useful in the matrimonial property dispute between Angela and William. William, who struggled with reading and writing, had appointed Hawken as his representative in the dealings.

By early 1995, the mortgage over Cashel St was in arrears and the bank was preparing to sell it in a mortgagee sale.

Hawken had got Angela’s approval to sell the Ferry Rd section, the proceeds of which were to be used to pay her about $4500 to settle her claim and he was hoping to take over Angela’s share in the Cashel St property. He persuaded the bank to delay any sale although it was pressing him for a formal proposal.

‘He made me murder Angela’

A certain amount of exasperation was creeping into Boyd’s interview with Powell who after talking about Hawken, said he was trying “to think of anything relevant but…”.

“How can I put it lightly cos I, I see you’re a good bloke…,” Boyd said.

“Just give it to me straight man it’s…,” Powell replied.

“Well we’re speaking with Darren at the moment.”

“Darren Surch?” (Surch was Powell’s best friend.)

“Yeah… And Darren knows what happened and he would want the best for you.”

Police were not actually speaking to Surch “at the moment” and he certainly hadn’t told them he knew what happened.

In fact, police would months later receive a letter from Surch’s lawyers saying Surch couldn’t help them.

Boyd continued.

“And your mum and dad would want the best for ya. And what you’re doing now is painting yourself into a corner… Do you think we’re not going to find out what’s happened now? Do you think we’ve just suddenly come back to see you?” Boyd said.

That seemed to do the trick.

Powell seemed ready to capitulate.

“I’ll have a drink of water now… Dave was a scary guy. He wanted something done and it had to be done. He would've killed me and would’ve killed Bex if I hadn’t of. He made me murder Angela Blackmoore.”

“How’d you do that mate?”

Powell said he knocked Angela down with a bat and stabbed her in the head.

“Thanks for that mate, it will feel good to get it off your chest,” Boyd said comfortingly.

“Not really, no,” Powell said.

Wright-Meldrum had played a pivotal role, he went on to say.

“Bex got her into the kitchen… I remember swinging the bat and Bex wiping things down and cleaning up and I remember throwing the stuff in the fire.”

Wright-Meldrum had knocked on the door and Angela let them in, he said. He had the bat and the knife under his trench coat.

Wright-Meldrum wanted the murder “done properly” and made him “sort of step it out, plan it out”.

He remembered her telling him not to touch anything after they had finished with Angela. Afterwards, she was supportive and coached him in what to say to police.

Boyd asked about Hawken’s motivation.

“There was the life insurance policy or the house. Willy (William Blackmoore) was going to get a shit-ton of money and Dave was going to get half of it.”

The plan is executed

His memory about the murder was cloudy, he told Boyd.

“It was just flashes, it was like a dream afterwards, it felt completely unreal.”

Although Powell didn’t mention it during the interview, he later explained that he and Wright-Meldrum had, about a week before murdering Angela, parked outside Angela’s house ready to kill her. Powell “chickened out” and Hawken then issued his first threats.

“If I did, I get 10 grand, and if I didn’t, one day I’d wake up, Bex will be dead and I’d never wake up again.”

Boyd then arrested Powell for murdering Blackmoore and Wright-Meldrum was arrested on the same charge later that night. Hawken, who was running a firewood business in Wānaka, wasn’t arrested until May 5, 2020.

Powell pleaded guilty on February 28, 2020 and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 10 years in April that year.

Friendships unravel

On November 11, 2023, Powell appeared in the High Court again to give evidence against Hawken and Wright-Meldrum who were charged with being parties to a murder. His evidence was crucial as no forensic evidence linked Meldrum to the murder and the evidence about how Hawken would benefit from Angela’s death was murky.

The Crown alleged he intended to manipulate the simple William Blackmoore to get a stake in the Cashel St property, which he could then leverage to borrow money and use to house his family.

The defence said Hawken only stood to get a small fee from the dealings if Angela’s claim was satisfied. For Hawken to get any benefit, Angela had to remain alive, it said.

Hawken stayed at the property until 1997 when William tried to evict him for not paying rent. Hawken allegedly threatened him with telling police he (Hawken) had got Angela murdered at the “ex-husband’s” request. Hawken registered a caveat against the property based on a claim he lent William and Angela $7000. William, who denied receiving the sum from Hawken, eventually paid him $3000 to release the caveat.

During his testimony, Powell provided more details about the murder. He said the baseball bat, bought from The Warehouse, broke when he hit Angela.

When they were cleaning up afterwards, Wright-Meldrum made a point of putting away three coffee cups set out on the bench as that would show Angela was making coffee for three people, he said.

Over the years, he loathed hearing about the murder and drank heavily when it came up, while Wright-Meldrum seemed excited by it and kept a scrapbook, he said. When the murder was coming up on shows like Sensing Murder, Wright-Meldrum rang him to let him know.

“I would hang up.”

‘Yeah, we killed someone’

Other than Powell and the phone calls, the strongest evidence against Wright-Meldrum consisted of a witness who recalled Wright-Meldrum, Powell and Hawken meeting behind closed doors several times in the lead-up to the murder and the recollection of a woman who played Dungeons and Dragons with Powell and Wright-Meldrum in 1995.

Tina Cartwright, a student at Canterbury University who would go on to write fiction and teach creative writing, said the group gathered several times a week in her dingy flat to play the game. They sat on the floor with bottles of coke and packets of chips to enter a world of evil and heroes.

In one such session in mid-August 1995, Cartwright was waiting with Powell and Wright-Meldrum for her flatmate to join them. Cartwright tried to fill an awkward silence by asking if they had done anything exciting lately. “Yeah, we killed someone,” Wright-Meldrum blurted out.

That shook Cartwright even though she knew Wright-Meldrum was prone to saying “inappropriate” things. As she questioned them it seemed like they were trying to convince her it was true.

When she asked how they could continue as normal, Powell said, “You’re meant to carry on as normal”, Cartwright said.

They said they stabbed the person, who they knew and who had let them into the house. She asked why, and Wright-Meldrum said: “Would you do it for $10,000?”

Powell couldn’t remember the incident and said he would have no reason to confide in someone he hardly knew.

Cartwright conceded her account may have been influenced by what she had read about the case but didn’t think so.

‘I’d had enough of holding it in’

Powell came across as a calm, steady witness, ready to concede that he was a liar and a murderer and the killing had been cruel and cold blooded. He was unshaken by determined cross-examination by Anne Stevens, KC, for Hawken and Phil Shamy for Wright-Meldrum. He conceded inconsistencies in his account and accepted his fixation with weapons and killing was not healthy. The defence lawyers accused Powell of shifting the blame to get a lighter sentence and also to “make you feel less guilty”. Not true, he said. Dobbing in his co-offenders had no upside.

He denied being a depraved psycho-killer who enjoyed killing Angela for his own gratification, as suggested by Stevens.

He hadn’t wanted to kill Angela and did so initially for the money and to impress Wright-Meldrum and then because of the threats made by Hawken.

When told driving the knife through her forehead and brain was completely self indulgent, he said: “It was to make sure she was dead.”

He agreed he was surprised he confessed in the police interview.

“I think that I’d had enough of holding it in.” Relief came a lot later, he said.

He was also quizzed on the titles of sadistic, violent and pornographic videos found on his devices by forensic computer experts. The videos had been deleted but the titles and some clips remained. Powell explained the remnants were due to “accidental” downloads or were already on his devices, which were bought second hand, he said.

A defence expert explained how this could not be true.

“Another lie,” Shamy said.

Powell agreed the murder did not make sense, but he was not lying. Shamy asked Powell why Hawken would get a “country boy and a stripper” to kill Blackmoore when he had “apparently killed six people”.

“You were just a muppet, you didn’t know what you were doing,” Shamy said. Powell agreed Hawken was running a huge risk.

*****

The jury began its deliberations at midday on December 6, 2023. They would have to travel back 28 years to a time when the people they would have to judge were young, stupid and already burdened by mistake-prone lives.

The key question was whether Powell was an honest witness.

It took the jurors about 14 hours to decide he was. They returned guilty verdicts against both Hawken and Wright-Meldrum who were convicted of murder and remanded in custody.

Their pasts had caught up. Justice for Angela Blackmoore was slow but it had finally arrived.