A violent death in paradise

By ALISON HORWOOD

Delaware Bay is the land where Keri Stephens grew up and, 56 years on, drew his last breath.

A sheltered beach on the eastern shoreline of Tasman Bay, 25km northeast of Nelson, this is the land that belonged to his ancestors.

His home, nestled into the hills above the bay, is held in the bosom of 2300ha held by the iwi he led.

It is a land he called paradise, where his neighbours are his whanau. It is not the place where you would expect an execution-style murder to be carried out.

But on Tuesday, February 13, Mr Stephens, a respected Ngati Tama iwi leader with a chequered past as a founding member of the Lost Breed gang, and his third wife, Bridget Stephens, returned home after dining at a Japanese restaurant in Nelson.

Not long afterwards, at 11.55 pm, they noticed headlights. Further up Maori Pa Rd, without a full moon that would illuminate even the curve of the track, a neighbour looking for a lost dog also saw lights.

Within minutes there was a knock at the door.

Mrs Stephens answered and a balaclava-clad man with a long firearm entered the house. He had a distinctive tattoo of a band of thorns or barbed wire on his upper right arm. Mrs Stephens would later describe him as Pakeha.

The man pushed past her and a few words were exchanged, but police will not say what they were. What they will say is that it is clear the man was after Mr Stephens.

From the doorway, Mrs Stephens noticed a second man outside.

The first man found Mr Stephens in the bathroom area, apparently marched him into the bedroom, and shot him. He and his companion then fled in the vehicle outside.

Police say the time the man spent in the house was a matter of minutes.

Mrs Stephens called police at 12.09 am. She was unharmed but terrified the men would return to kill her.

One of the first officers to get near the scene was a dog-handler from Nelson. At 12.20 am he was approaching the turn-off from Highway 6 on to the 10km of dead-end road to Delaware Bay when he pulled over a motorcyclist.

The motorcyclist said that 1km from the highway turn-off he had passed a black or dark-coloured vehicle, possibly a Nissan, speeding in the opposite direction towards Blenheim. It appeared to be in a hurry and was straddling the centre-line.

Detective Inspector John Winter says the location and timing of the vehicle make it crucial to the investigation. Despite public appeals, no one has come forward to be eliminated from the inquiry.

"Every day those people do not come forward it goes up a little in significance for us."

Roadblocks were set up an hour away near Havelock but the vehicle was not stopped and no other motorist had seen it. It may have been hidden along the way or turned off the highway.



Now 11 days into the inquiry, Detective Inspector Winter believes the key to the killing lies in the past fortnight of Mr Stephens' life. Police are reconstructing it with the help of his widow, a 36-year-old health worker whom he married last Labour Weekend, and his son, Andrew, who lived nearby and worked by his side in Maoridom.

Police are always reluctant to estimate how long an inquiry will take, but Detective Inspector Winter says this one could be shaping up to be a long one.

"You are not dealing with an ordinary person. You are dealing with Keri Stephens, who has had an interesting life and been involved in lots of things."

Some people would go further and say the motivation for killing a man like Mr Stephens was greater than for your average Joe Bloggs.

There is his role within Maoridom as chairman for the past year of the Ngati Tama Manawhenua Ki Te Tau Ihu Trust and the Huria Matenga Wakapuaka Estuary Trust, an umbrella body for four separate trusts representing Ngati Tama interests.

The iwi says three land court judgments between 1883 and 1997 give ownership of the estuary below high-tide to the interests of Ngati Tama but a legal challenge is pending on whether the customary native titles that give Maori ownership still exist.

Mr Stephens raised the ire of many local boaties by blocking access to the estuary with a heavy metal chain, which was replaced at least six times after being hacked through with bolt-cutters. Police say there was also tension between Ngati Tama and Ngati Koata, who had made a claim for Delaware Bay.

They are also investigating the suggestion of death threats made against Mr Stephens at the Whaling Conference last year.

Dr John Mitchell, claims history researcher and Ngati Tama trustee, says Mr Stephens had been involved in "heavy debate" during Waitangi Tribunal hearings, but nothing more controversial than in other parts of New Zealand.

Police are also looking at the possibility that Mr Stephens' past with the Lost Breed may have returned to haunt him. He was once considered one of the area's most notorious criminals, and a magistrate in the 1970s described him as having received all the punishments the courts could impose.

His criminal record dated back to 1959, and in 1979 he was jailed for three years for his part in a major gang brawl in Nelson between the Lost Breed and Highway 61.

Police say he does not appear to have offended since 1997 - when he was convicted of ACC fraud - and had hung up his gang patch. But his underworld affiliations remain.

The Lost Breed gang is understood to be carrying out its own investigation into his murder.

But as a friend of Mr Stephens since childhood says: "If he had been killed 20 years ago, I would have said, it does not surprise me at all, it's gang-related. But I find it hard to believe now. It's just too far down the track."

Police believe his involvement in the Nelson area, and the good knowledge his killers appeared to have of his hard-to-find property, points to the murder being a local issue.

While they say they don't want to make assumptions, they feel the killing is not the work of professionals. The offender inside the house was not wearing gloves, and he took a risk by not cutting the phone lines or immobilising Mrs Stephens.