Gabriel Hikari Yad-Elohim was a patient at Auckland District Health Board's acute mental health unit before he killed Michael Mulholland. Photo / Brett Phibbs
Gabriel Hikari Yad-Elohim was a patient at Auckland District Health Board's acute mental health unit before he killed Michael Mulholland. Photo / Brett Phibbs
New evidence has come to light in the case of Gabriel Hikari Yad-Elohim, who was convicted of murdering Michael Mulholland in 2017.
Now the Supreme Court has now suggested he seek a recall of that decision after being shown a video of an anime TV series with similarities to the killing.
A convicted murderer may have been acting out a scene from a Japanese anime TV series when he beat a man to death.
New evidence has been produced in the case of Gabriel Hikari Yad-Elohim, who killed Auckland man Michael Mulholland in the stairwell of his Western Springs flat in 2017.
The 36-year-old, who is now serving a life prison sentence, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and his lawyers have argued he was insane when he killed his victim.
At his trial the court heard how Yad-Elohim inflicted an estimated 90 blows on his 69-year-old victim over several minutes, including kicks and stomps to the head. Mulholland died from blunt force trauma to his face, head and abdomen.
Yad-Elohim was found guilty and unsuccessfully challenged his conviction in the Court of Appeal.
Now he’s gone to the Supreme Court, which was recently shown a video from a Japanese animated series called Bleach, 366 episodes of which first ran on TV Tokyo between 2004 and 2012.
Bleach tells the story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a Grim Reaper-style character who defends people from evil spirits and guides souls to the afterlife.
Forensic psychiatrist James Cavney discovered the scene some weeks after Yad-Elohim’s High Court trial in 2018, after being told he had been acting as an anime character.
Gabriel Yad-Elohim, pictured on CCTV the day of the killing. Photo / Supplied
He noticed there were similarities between the scene in the video and the attack.
It also tallied with a monologue Yad-Elohim gave in the Japanese language in a police interview room on the day after Mulholland was killed.
Similarities between video and fatal attack
“We have considered the video and the transcript of Mr Yad-Elohim’s monologue,” the Supreme Court justices said in a recent decision.
“Dr Cavney identifies several similarities between the video and the attack on Mr Mulholland and there are similarities also with Mr Yad-Elohim’s monologue.
“The argument is that the video and the transcript together justify the inference that Mr Yad-Elohim was in the grip of a delusion when he attacked Mr Mulholland.”
The delusion was that he was a character from the anime.
It has been reported previously that Yad-Elohim was hearing voices, seeing ghosts and thought he was an anime character at the time of the attack. However, the contention that he may have been acting out a specific scene appears to be new.
Yad-Elohim pleaded not guilty to murdering Mulholland on the grounds of insanity at his High Court trial in 2018. He had been assessed and found fit to stand trial twice.
The jury rejected the insanity defence, and Yad-Elohim was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for 13 years.
He then sought leave to appeal the conviction in the Supreme Court on the grounds that a miscarriage of justice had occurred.
The Supreme Court last month said there would be no justification for granting leave to appeal, if it were not for the new evidence contained in an affidavit from Cavney.
“The evidence is significant and appears credible, but on a leave application it is difficult for us to gauge its impact on the other expert evidence led at trial and on appeal, and on its implications for the verdict,” the Supreme Court justices said.
A promotional image for the Japanese anime series Bleach. New evidence suggests convicted murderer Gabriel Yad-Elohim may have been acting out a scene from the show when he killed Michael Mulholland. Image / TV Tokyo
They said these matters would be better assessed in the Court of Appeal and Yad-Elohim should seek a recall of the Court of Appeal decision that upheld his conviction.
“His application for leave to appeal to this court is dismissed, without prejudice to his right to seek leave to appeal [to the Supreme Court] after the Court of Appeal has considered any recall application.”
Lawyer reveals true identity
Yad-Elohim was tried under that name, which he adopted in 2012, although he told a series of health assessors he was Japanese and his name was Yuuki Watanabe.
During his trial, a Korean lawyer contacted his defence counsel to advise that Yad-Elohim was Korean and was formerly known as Jung Hoon Song.
Yad-Elohim had never met Mulholland before the day he killed him.
He had gone to the apartment building with a female sex worker he had met to buy some methamphetamine, his 2018 trial was told.
The woman told him to wait downstairs, then fled from the scene with Yad-Elohim’s $200 from an upstairs balcony.
Yad-Elohim then went to Mulholland’s apartment, confronted him, and killed him in a brutal attack, kicking and stomping on him for about seven minutes.
Much of the trial defence focused on Yad-Elohim’s time as a patient at the then Auckland District Health Board’s acute mental health unit, Te Whetu Tawera, from which he was released just before the murder.
When Yad-Elohim was asked at his sentencing hearing in 2018 if he had anything to say, he replied: “I was mentally ill when the incident happened.”
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.
