The fire on Castle Hill, Canterbury continues to burn as it has since Thursday this week. Labour continues to press the governments policies as Franklin road prepares to re-open.
Earl Campbell was jailed this week for more than 15 years, with no chance of parole for 10 years, for a ram raid and raping a teenage girl. But it’s not the first time he has been behind bars – he has a complex criminal history spanning over 20 years. Ric Stevens takes a look at the life and times of the notorious criminal who has put his own spin on the phrase ‘courtroom drama’ and once described himself as the ‘happiest crim alive’.
Self-proclaimed “real gangsta”, drug dealer, armed robber and convicted sex offender Earl Strathern Campbell has been in and out of jail since he was a teenager.
It wouldn’t be the first time he had driven a vehicle into the front of a building or pulled off a dramatic heist.
But another raft of charges marked a step into more serious offending for Campbell.
Months after it happened, a young woman told police that after the ram raid, Campbell had taken her to a motel and subjected her to what she called “two horrendous days of hell” by raping and sexually violating her.
Meanwhile, Campbell’s partner, a former probation officer three decades older than him, is serving her own prison sentence for perverting the course of justice in trying to exert pressure on the young woman to get Campbell off the hook.
Earl Campbell appears in High Court at Napier December 3, 2024 for sentence on rape, kidnap and burglary charges. Photo / Ric Stevens
Early crimes were small-scale, but escalated
Campbell’s criminal history now stretches back more than 20 years.
His early crimes were small-scale – taking cars that didn’t belong to him, driving charges, and obtaining cash by deception – but he sometimes did them in dramatic fashion.
One night in 2003, when he was 18, Campbell overtook a vehicle at speed in central Hastings, lost control and skidded 20 metres before he crashed through the front of a fish and chip shop.
No one was in it at the time. Campbell caused $10,500 of damage to the Kippers takeaway shopfront. He pleaded guilty to dangerous driving.
Six months later, Campbell became aggressive in the Hastings Police Station, activating a supposedly tamper-proof sprinkler and flooding the cell block where he was being held.
Campbell went to prison for intentional damage to the sprinkler system and receiving stolen vehicles – part of a pattern of offending that saw him receive a short prison sentence every year for various crimes from his late teens until he was well into his 20s.
These crimes soon escalated to burglary, and then to robbery with a firearm.
In 2010, by which time he had racked up 47 convictions, Campbell and another man committed a gunpoint robbery of an Armourguard van outside a Hastings bank.
They got away with $156,000. Both men were caught and Campbell was sent to prison for nearly 10 years.
That sentence also accounted for the arson of the stolen getaway car, which had been burned after the heist.
Campbell was by now putting his own spin on the phrase “courtroom drama”.
Courtroom brawl erupts
At a 2010 pre-trial hearing for the Armourguard robbery, Campbell leapt from the dock in the Napier District Court and, with his brother, became involved in a courtroom brawl with security guards.
Tables were overturned and lawyers’ documents were strewn across the floor before Campbell made an unsuccessful break for the door, and his brother was rendered unconscious.
Having been foiled in his escape bid and remanded in custody, Campbell pleaded guilty to the security van armed robbery on the first day of his trial in 2010.
Police at the scene of the Armourguard van robbery in 2011. Photo / NZME
But at the same time, he pleaded not guilty to other serious charges – kidnapping, threatening to kill, sexual violation.
The complainant was a young woman who, the courts were told, had sought out Campbell after hearing he was involved in the Armourguard heist and had access to large amounts of money.
On the couple’s first date, she broached the subject and later testified she let him buy her jewellery, lent her $10,000 for a car, and paid off her brother’s $14,000 drug debt.
Then she alleged that Campbell had kidnapped and sexually violated her.
Campbell’s defence was that text messages the woman sent to her friends - “SOS. Big trouble. Been kidnapped” - were a fabricated ploy to get him arrested so she would not have to pay back the money he had lent her.
“She said to me she couldn’t pay back the money, so she sent those texts to her friends knowing they would call the police,” Campbell told his trial on the kidnapping and violation charges.
“I would get arrested and she wouldn’t have to pay me back.”
The court was also played a sinister recording in which Campbell told a friend in Clive to start digging a grave – whether it was for the woman or her brother was a point in contention.
Campbell said he was suffering from a “mania” at the time.
A jury deliberated for more than seven hours before finding Campbell not guilty of kidnapping, threatening to kill and sexual violation of the woman.
After the verdicts were announced, Campbell yelled out to the court: “Hell, yeah, justice has been served.”
“I may be a bad guy but at the end of the day you made the right decision – crime pays all day,” he said.
Campbell’s next courtroom outburst came during his sentencing hearing for the Armourguard robbery, in December 2010.
The texts showed Campbell saw himself as a “real gangsta” who would live and die by the gun.
One said he was “high an[d] happy now off tha[t] power thrust and exhilaration of shooting guns”.
Fast-forward to 2022 and guns were at the centre of another of Campbell’s trials.
This concerned a home invasion in which an elderly Havelock North man was badly beaten by two men who broke into his house at night and stole his firearms.
The assault was beyond brutal. The 72-year-old homeowner was bashed with a hammer and his cousin found him afterwards drenched in blood, with only the whites of his eyes showing.
Earl Strathern Campbell's criminal history stretches back more than 20 years. Photo / NZ Police
Campbell was charged with, and later acquitted, of aggravated robbery and burglary, but found guilty on other charges that showed he had a connection to the crime.
He was convicted on five charges of unlawfully possessing firearms, including weapons taken from the man’s house which were later found in a bivouac in the bush behind Campbell’s mother’s house at Tuai, northern Hawke’s Bay.
By this time, Campbell had evidently spent long enough in court to try a spot of DIY lawyering. He represented himself in the five-day trial.
He was helped by his partner, Linda Kelly, who acted as his “McKenzie friend” - a lay assistant in the court proceedings.
Couple from different worlds
The pair presented as a companionable couple in the breaks between evidence, and before Campbell was taken back to the courthouse cells, but they came from different worlds.
Kelly is much older than Campbell – 32 years older.
She has a master’s degree in psychology and was intending to complete a doctorate before being deterred by the financial cost.
In her professional life, she briefly worked as a secretary for the former prime minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, and later as a probation officer and a facilitator of rehabilitation programmes.
A van driven by Earl Campbell crashes through the door of the Pettigrew Green Arena in Napier in November 2020.
They met at Waikeria Prison – Campbell was an inmate and Kelly was staff.
In the 2022 trial, she was a steadfast advocate for Campbell in and outside the courtroom. As later events would prove, she was also prepared to break the law for him.
Campbell’s self-conducted defence in the home invasion trial employed a tactic that he was to use again later.
He freely admitted to illegal activities for which he was not actually charged.
Perhaps this was intended to show the jury that, although he was not a person who lived within the law, he was someone who told the truth.
In the 2022 trial, he freely admitted to being a “regular” cannabis dealer.
In this way he explained the movements of a van linked to him, and to the robbery.
The jury was presented with tracking data from roadside cameras and cellphone towers which showed the van was driven from Tuai to Havelock North on the day of the attack and returned in the early hours of the morning after it.
Campbell said he had lent the van to a customer of his drug-dealing business, so that person could drive to Hastings and pick up six ounces (170g) of cannabis which Campbell had sold him for $1500.
Judge Bridget Mackintosh at this stage advised Campbell that any admissions he made in court could lead to further criminal prosecution and asked him if he wanted to proceed or take legal advice.
“We will just proceed, Your Honour. I am aware of my rights,” Campbell said.
Later in the trial, Campbell called his alleged cannabis buyer to give evidence via an audio-visual link from Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison.
The man, whose name was suppressed, told the jury that he was one of the two robbers who kicked down the victim’s back door and dragged him from his bed on the night of January 29, 2021.
“I hammered him in the head. He then got defensive, so I hammered him again, in the arm,” the witness said. “He then gave up the keys to the gun safe.”
Crown prosecutor Clayton Walker accused the witness of lying, saying that he had “rehearsed” the evidence with Campbell while they were in the same prison wing together in the days before the trial.
“I swore an oath. What I said is the truth and nothing but the truth,” the witness replied.
The jury deliberated for six and a half hours before finding Campbell guilty of the firearms charges, but not guilty in respect to the home invasion.
Judge Mackintosh sent Campbell to prison for 30 months. He had already spent 15 months in jail on remand.
He was not released before more serious charges were laid – meaning that he stayed in jail while these were being dealt with.
And this time, Campbell was facing accusations of kidnapping, sexual violation and rape.
Sports centre ram-raided
The complainant was a girl who was just 15 years old when she got into a van with Campbell one night in 2021 and was in the passenger seat when he drove it through the locked glass doors of a Napier sports centre.
Campbell was after an ATM machine inside the Pettigrew Green Arena. He drove the van down a corridor, turned it around and then steered it directly into the ATM, knocking the machine off its floor mounts.
Campbell then got the girl to help him put the ATM in the van, which he drove to his father Ricky’s house in Hastings. The machine was opened up with grinders and $19,800 was taken from it.
In addition to the cash, the $2500 ATM was not replaced, and Campbell caused $155,000 of damage to the sports centre.
About 18 months later, the police found the girl and interviewed her about what happened that night.
They were not expecting to hear what she told them – they had gone to interview her about a ram raid and found themselves talking to a rape victim.
Had they known this would happen, police said later, they would have prepared their interview with her differently.
The young woman told police that Ricky Campbell had locked her in a room at his house after the ram raid. Then, over the next 48 hours, Earl Campbell took her to a motel room, where he raped and violated her.
Still in jail for the firearms offending, Earl Campbell was now facing new charges of committing sex crimes.
At his trial on for that offending, Campbell represented himself once more, again confessing to the jury that he was a drug-dealer – an offence for which he had not been charged.
He said he had known a relative of the girl for many years and “the nature of that relationship is drug-dealing, by and large”, he said.
At the same time he denied the 11 charges which had brought him before the court, including rape, sexual violation, kidnapping, strangulation, burglary, possession of a firearm and conspiring to pervert the cause of justice.
Linda Kelly was also on hand, not as a McKenzie friend this time, but as a witness for the defence.
She told the jury that she had been with Campbell, at her home on the night the sports centre was raided, and at the motel when her boyfriend was allegedly there with the girl.
Campbell, for his part, said that he had never been alone with the teenager.
No prospect of parole for 10 years
The jury believed the Crown’s version of events to find Campbell guilty. He was sentenced to 15 years and eight months in prison with no prospect of parole for 10 years.
Whatever course Campbell chooses to take in future, it is the sex crime convictions that will define him as something other a mere gun-loving drug-dealer.
He said during his latest trial that there were two types of people he could not stand: “narks” who inform on fellow criminals, and “kiddy-f***ers”; people who sexually offend against children.
He now has a conviction for raping a 15-year-old girl on his record.
Ricky Campbell appears in the High Court at Napier for sentencing. Phoro / Ric Stevens
Campbell’s latest trial heard a videotape of her and two others trying to coerce the girl, by that time 17 years old, into withdrawing her evidence against him.
For that, Kelly, the woman who once earned herself a seven-year good conduct award from the Department of Corrections, was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
A first-time offender, she was sentenced to two years and five months in jail.
Ricky Campbell was charged as an accessory both to the 2010 armed robbery and the 2021 ram raid. For locking the girl in the room, he was also charged with kidnapping.
He was sentenced alongside his son to one year and seven months in prison.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of front-line experience as a probation officer.
