The Listener
Volume 189 No 3298
July 26-August 1 2003
Published July 19 2003

Reasonable Doubts
Letter to the Editor
by Alison Hanham (Palmerston North)


At the heart of the case against Peter Ellis (Editorial, July 12) has always been the question of the veracity of the children whose stories obtained his conviction.

If they were untrue, how did they come to invent them?

The way in which one boy evolved his increasingly bizarre tales under adult pressure was revealed in 1997, when his mother published A Mother’s Story (Howling at the Moon Press, Auckland) under the pseudonym Joy Bander.

But it seems from Lynley Hood’s A City Possessed that no background evidence so damaging to the prosecution’s case was presented to the jury.