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North and South
February 1998
A Plea for Peter Ellis
Editorial by David McLoughlin
At last, there is some traction with the Christchurch Civic Creche case,
possibly the worst miscarriage of justice since Arthur Alan Thomas was
wrongly convicted of the Crewe murders in 1971.
Justice Minister Doug Graham is considering a petition from Judith
Ablett-Kerr QC to pardon Peter Ellis, the creche worker jailed for 10 years
in 1993 on multiple charges of abusing children. More, there is suddenly
political interest in the plight of Ellis. MPs from several parties have
publicly expressed concern that Ellis might have been wrongly convicted. The
chairman of Parliament's justice and law reform committee, Rana Waitai, a
former police district commander, has visited Ellis in Rolleston Prison and
wants a judicial inquiry into the
Civic affair.
The interest was caused by TV3 journalist Melanie Reid's 20/20 documentary, which raised new issues of concern beyond the
already highly suspect "evidence". She revealed the jury foreman
had been the Crown Prosecutor's marriage celebrant. Another juror lived with a woman who worked
at the same desk as the mother of the Crown's prime witness. Detective Colin
Eade, the officer most involved in the investigation, had propositioned one
creche mother during the inquiry and had relations with two others after it.
He also had a relationship with one of the Social Welfare interviewers
employed to elicit evidence from the creche children.
I'm pleased so many politicians are now publicly expressing the disquiet
which they previously expressed only in private. It's a pity it took them
until Melanie Reid's account of jury irregularities and a policeman's private
life. For more than two years now, they've had access to material casting
serious doubt on the actual evidence in the case. That material featured in a 1995 Assignment programme (which I helped
to produce) and my August 1996 North
& South cover story. Both demonstrated the implausibility of police
claims that Ellis (and his women co-workers) committed vile abuse against
dozens of young children for five years without one parent noticing or one
child showing the slightest sign of it, let alone complaining.
Virtually all the allegations against Ellis were driven by two obsessed
mothers who whipped up hysteria in the creche community. Their absurd claims
of paedophile rings and Satanic abuse (deliberately kept by the Crown from
the High Court jury) prompted alarmed parents to interrogate their children
about unlikely events. Their children
later regurgitated these tales to Social Welfare interviewers and Ellis and
four women creche workers were arrested as a result. There was not a shred of medical or
forensic evidence that children were raped, sodomised, defecated on and made
to eat faeces and drink urine, but Ellis was charged with doing this and
more.
One of the obsessed mothers, using the pen name Joy Bander, has now written a
book, A Mother's Story. It repeats fanciful tales which one of the
welfare interviewers, Sue Sidey, realised were so suspect she declined to
reinterview the boy making them until told to do so by the police.
On a recent visit to Ashburton, I chanced across Detective Senior Sergeant
Neville Jenkins, one of the officers who worked on the creche inquiry. He
told me I didn't know half of it. On the other hand, he also told me he knew
the allegations by "Joy Bander" and her son were
"rubbish". That Ellis was convicted on three charges involving that
boy didn't seem to concern him, as he told me there were more
"credible" children whose allegations he was sure were correct.
Each time I have written about the Civic, one Patricia Smart of Lyttelton has
written to the editor accusing me of "errors, innuendoes and emotive
accusations.. The Civic's attendance registers, which I have been perusing,
show a woman by the same name visited the creche at least 64 times between
May 25 1989 and June 26 1991. Did she find the creche a den of debauchery on
any of those occasions? Another letter please. Like many others, her opinions
seem based on unswerving belief rather than hard evidence.
This almost religious belief that Ellis is a monster and the creche a
latter-day Sodom
is held in some very high places, by people with the most extraordinary
connections with the Civic.
For example, Labour list MP Lianne Dalziel is one of the most outspoken
parliamentary believers in Ellis's guilt. A close acquaintance of hers had
children at the creche (they were the subject of charges which fell over
before the final verdict). That acquaintance was one of the women Melanie
Reid revealed had a relationship with Colin Eade. Curiously Dalziel's partner
is Rob Davidson, the former husband of the creche supervisor, Gaye Davidson,
one of the four women charged alongside Ellis.
Rob Davidson is convinced there was no abuse at the creche. "It's
absolutely preposterous," he told me just before Christmas. "The whole thing was like Salem revisited. We have
a huge state machine that has destroyed so many people's lives and nobody can
stop it." Davidson has, however, not been able to persuade Dalziel.
"I've discussed it with her, but I don't get anywhere."
When someone in a position to have known about the Civic as closely as Rob
Davidson can't convince the woman he lives with that the allegations were
false; when one of the police investigators candidly admits that one boy's
allegations are wrong even though Ellis is in jail partly because of them;
when scores, probably hundreds of people closely connected to this case are
still debating it furiously years later; when many families are still
traumatised by their experiences; when there is doubt of the most serious
kind that Ellis is guilty as charged, there is a desperate need for a
commission of inquiry into what went wrong.
I've requested Doug Graham to authorise one.
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