Otago Daily Times
October 1, 2001

Shortage of evidence of Ellis' guilt, author says
by Kay Sinclair

Dunedin author Lynley Hood believes there is evidence pointing to the innocence of Peter Ellis, quite apart from the lack of evidence of his guilt.

She did not start investigating the Christchurch Civic Creche case to prove Ellis was innocent but rather to find out what did or did not happen, Ms Hood told the Otago Daily Times .

However, by the end of seven years of research and writing, what she found convinced her the whole case had been "constructed out of thin air".

"I was thunderstruck to find there's just nothing," she said.

Ms Hood, whose book on the creche case, A City Possessed, is being launched today, knows she will be accused of "having an agenda".

But she says the biggest struggle she had while researching the book was that she had probably received "just as much aggro" from Peter Ellis' side of the case as from the prosecution.

By nature she was not one to take sides, Ms Hood said. With her other books, she had always steered a course where she found everybody's point of view was valid. She expected to find this with the creche case.

"When people go marching past carrying placards, I'm the one on the side of the road saying `How can you be so sure?'" she said.

"So, it's totally out of character for me to find myself saying `You're wrong, wrong, wrong'. But it would be intellectually dishonest, when I've found what I've found, to do anything else."

As evidence supporting Ellis' innocence, Ms Hoods points to the fact he hated toileting children and would do anything to get out of it. That was acknowledged by everybody he worked with. He was at the centre for almost six years and no parent or child noticed anything.

"And these were sex abuse worker parents and kids who had been trained from birth to scream blue murder if anyone touched them inappropriately."

She also points to Ellis' refusal to accept the $10,000 repeatedly offered to him by the Christchurch City Council to "go away quietly".

He kept telling the council he wanted his job back.

"If he was a paedophile who'd almost got caught, he surely would not have done that," Ms Hood said.

Asked whether, if there was insufficient evidence of Ellis' guilt, the case could have been stopped, she said the Crown prosecutor probably could have refused to lay charges.

But given the climate which had developed in Christchurch at the time, that would probably have led to cries of "conspiracy and cover-up", she said.

And, while she reached her own conclusions about the case after her seven-year investigation, people were not going to be told the answer, Ms Hood said.

"By writing this book, I'm asserting my right to freedom of speech. I'm not demanding people believe what I say but inviting them to read the book and make up their own minds."