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peterellis Home / abuse allegations / Neville
Collins Home Neville Collins - News reports
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Neville Collins considered himself
"the face" of St John, but this week any veneer of respectability
the former camp leader and ambulance officer may have had disappeared when he
was found guilty of years of sexual abuse of boys. The 44-year-old's trial was
conducted in a quiet courtroom in the High Court at Rotorua, with barely a
spectator, other than the officer in charge of the case and, later in the
proceedings, Collins' wife and a supporter. Apart from the judge and lawyers,
there was no one else to witness his reaction to the jury finding him guilty
on every one of 37 charges of sexual offending and assault he had denied ever
happened. But while Collins is now behind
bars awaiting sentence, police fear some of his crimes may have gone
unpunished. "We believe there could well
be other victims out there," said Detective Mark Duytshoff, who has been
compiling information about Collins for several years. "If they do come
forward, we will look into it." Collins, a bespectacled,
grey-haired father of two, fought hard to distance himself from publicity
about the case, appealing against decisions to lift name suppression and join
allegations made by each of his six victims into a single trial. But determined efforts by the
Crown led to his catalogue of abuse being put to the jury as a package rather
than separate indictments, making it difficult for the sinister patterns of
his offending to be ignored. Collins picked his victims when
they were prepubescent or pubescent boys and befriended them, and often their
parents, through his work as a Boys' Brigade leader in Auckland and later as
organiser of a camp called Exercise Novice Warrior in Waiouru. "Not only was he their hero,
he was their abuser," Crown prosecutor Rob Ronayne told the jury.
Collins would organise to sleep next to the boys on camps, and take them on
road trips or to his house to abuse them. He told the boys that the abuse
was "just something that friends do". He argued, categorically, that the
incidents never happened. "No, I certainly did not," he repeated
every time an allegation was put to him in the witness stand. The abuse spanned 14 years, to 1998,
and initially involved five complainants. But another came forward after the
Herald published Collins' name when suppression was lifted in October - more
than a year after charges were first laid. Collins had spent the 12 years to
July 2005 working as an ambulance officer and sales rep for St John in
Tauranga, calling himself "the face" of the organisation and
arguing that publication of his name would result in the loss of his job. He was stood down as soon as the
organisation became aware of the allegations, and will be sentenced in
September.
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