RSA killings survivor relishes reading son stories

By SCOTT MACLEOD

More than 18 months after she survived one of New Zealand's most brutal killing sprees, Susan Couch is still on the long road to recovery.

The sole survivor of the Mt Wellington-Panmure RSA killings has trouble controlling her body temperature, is weak down her left side and is unable to keep weight on.

But those problems are a vast improvement over her condition in December 2001, when she lost 80 per cent of her blood from a bashing that shattered the butt of William Bell's shotgun.

The attacks left club president Bill Absolum, member Wayne Johnson and cleaner Mary Hobson dead. Ms Couch's condition was so bad doctors thought of switching off her life support machines. But after a week, they decided she might survive.

In her first major interview since the attack Ms Couch, 38, told the New Zealand Woman's Weekly she sits beside her son Jackson's bed every night and reads the 4-year-old Thomas the Tank Engine books.

Her voice, weakened by the bashing and from having a medical pipe inserted in her throat, grew stronger when she read to her son, she said. And her soft words forced him to cuddle closer.

Ms Couch said one of the hardest parts about the bashing was "the effect it's had on my relationship with Jackson". Her mother, Judy, cared for Jackson after the attack. He did not visit his mother in hospital.

After seven months, Ms Couch left hospital in a wheelchair. She now hopes to improve so she no longer needs a walking stick.

"I've been told that after a head injury you should give yourself two years to get back as much as you can and I'm working on it. I go to the gym twice a week and see my physiotherapist."

Ms Couch was determined to confront her attacker in court without needing her wheelchair, but was forced to use it when she gave evidence against Bell in the High Court at Auckland last November.

She told the jury she and Mary Hobson wept as Bell laughed during the attack and taunted them, saying: "Are you ladies crying?"

Bell then told them: "You will tell it was me, won't you?"

Ms Couch told the magazine she was proud of the way she gave evidence in court, for "holding myself together and going through with it".

She had worked part-time at the RSA after giving up a job as a computer network administrator. She was now doing a writing course and dabbling in poetry.

Yesterday she told the Herald she did not want to talk about the attack again.

Bell was jailed for 30 years.