By PATRICK GOWER
Nicholas Paul Alfred Reekie got a new pair of pants when he left prison just before Christmas 2001.
The next morning, they were torn to shreds and Reekie was covered in scratches. A day later he returned home with even more scratches.
Within weeks, a massive police hunt was under way after he grabbed a 23-year-old woman off a West Auckland street and subjected her to a 17-hour rape ordeal.
Reekie was yesterday convicted of this rape, a failed attempt to grab a young Korean student the next day and the kidnapping and rape of a 69-year-old woman.
The Weekend Herald has learned that he could be responsible for at least five other attacks during the two-month spree that were not reported to police. During that time, he was heard talking about getting away with attacks on prostitutes from Karangahape Rd.
Reekie's deviant past extended back nearly 10 years; a DNA "hit" after his arrest for the spree last year linked him to the kidnapping and rape of an 11-year-old girl in 1992 for which her neighbour David Dougherty was wrongly convicted.
Four months after raping Dougherty's neighbour, Reekie was caught after kidnapping two girls aged 6 and 8 out of their beds at another West Auckland address. He admitted it straight away.
Sentencing him to 10 years in jail, the judge noted that although Reekie, then 22, had an "appalling" list of 57 previous offences "it was with a measure of relief" that he saw it did not include sexual offending.
Science has now revealed that he actually had committed a sex crime, and the reason for abducting the two girls is no longer a mystery - the screams of the second sister saved them from possible rape.
But Reekie's stay in jail was shortlived; within months he had broken out of Mt Eden Prison and spent 12 days on the run. That earned him nine more months behind bars.
Fellow prisoners spoken to by the Weekend Herald remember Reekie as "the worst of the worst". They also recall how he kept two lovebirds as pets in his cell.
Reekie was briefly paroled in the late 1990s; he was soon caught for a burglary in which he attacked an elderly homeowner who disturbed him.
On his Christmas 2001 release, he apparently immediately breached parole by not staying at the Salvation Army address where he had been told to live.
They could not control him; he tried to strangle his mother and it was at her house that he raped the 69-year-old. The mother told the court she heard the sounds from the room - but says they were far from unusual for him at the time.
Reekie's foster grandmother was Mary Meek, the so-called "Supermum" who had also raised his mother among about a hundred other foster children at her Panmure home. A Herald report of her 1997 funeral described how a handcuffed and tearful Reekie was the last to leave her graveside.
His family are now uniformly disgusted by his crimes.
As a convicted child abductor and triple rapist, Reekie is a prime candidate for preventive detention and unlikely to be released from prison to offend again.
Reekie: a decade of deviance
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