This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we re-visit six of the year’s biggest criminal trials.
How a family’s new life in Timaru descended into tragedy and heartbreak
Day six of the Dickason family’s new lives in Timaru was coming to a close. The three girls had eaten supper, been showered, and the twins who had just had their first day in preschool were watching TV in matching pyjamas along with their big sister.
Their dad, Graham Dickason, sat with them on the couch before getting up to get dressed and brush his teeth.
About 7pm, as he walked out the front door, his wife of 15 years, Lauren Dickason, was standing next to the kitchen countertop.
Graham drove to a local steak restaurant to join his new colleagues’ journal club, where members took turns reading an orthopaedic journal.
Once dinner was done, he headed home, where he anticipated his three daughters would be fast asleep.
Instead he walked into their home - and found each of his three girls dead.
The move to New Zealand was supposed to be a new beginning for the Dickason family, full of promise in a town more than 11,000 kilometres from home. Within a week of arriving, the couple’s three beautiful daughters were dead, their mum charged with murdering them, while their father tried to process the unfathomable. Senior crime reporter Sam Sherwood reports.
No body, no gun - the murder of Mike McGrath
She had always adored and respected Mike, a kind, good-looking fella who cared about her and her children.
She asked him if he would teach her how to kiss and be touched. They discussed whether getting together would ruin their friendship. Mike said they could be soulmates.
Once she got her own wee rental, Mike would bike round for tea. Sometimes after the kids went to bed. He would park his bike in the kitchen “just in case we got busted”. Nobody knew anything. But they worried Ted was watching.
Mike never stayed the night and they didn’t always have sex.
But one day, April 30, one of her daughters saw them kissing. She told her dad. Ted told a mate he was pissed off.
After that moment, Ted’s “world changed”, the Crown alleged. The next day, he called in sick at work. He rang his lawyer, his doctor. Tearful and lonely, he phoned Jo’s sister Toni, one of the few people he ever opened up to, and said he had lost everything.
On May 2, Ted went to see a counsellor. The break-up had left him lost, confused, and lonely. His health was going downhill, he wasn’t sleeping or eating. He told her about their assets, the rents. He felt shafted, a word she underlined in her notes.
Then Ted said one of his mates was starting to see Jo now – Mike.
He wanted to “annihilate” him.
It was the murder mystery with no body and no weapon - but plenty of motive. Sam Sherwood and Kurt Bayer tell the full story, including how Dave “Ted” Benbow’s wife Jo Green got together with his old friend Mike McGrath soon after she walked out on him.
Mama Hooch ‘predators’: The life and crimes of the Jaz brothers
On a Saturday in July 2018 Katherine and Penny met with a friend at Venuti for dinner.
Penny had turned 18 that week and the girls were out to celebrate.
During the night they shared a bottle of wine and took a dose of MDMA between them. They were coherent and functioning.
After dinner Penny drove to Winnie Bagoes bar in the city for a gig, reuniting with Katherine at Mama Hooch later in the night.
Katherine invited Penny to come with her to Venuti for a drink.
She explained that Roberto had invited her down there, that she used to work for him, and it would be fine. Safe.
Penny was reluctant, she thought it was “weird” the chef was showing interest in them because he was “old”.
But she agreed to go with her friend.
When the trio arrived Roberto locked the doors, “poured a white substance onto a table” and used an Eftpos card to cut it into lines.
Katherine and Penny both - repeatedly - asked Roberto what he was offering them.
He assured them it was MDMA.
They had no reason not to trust him and took turns snorting the powder.
Immediately, they both knew something was very, very wrong.
“Predatory” rapist brothers Roberto and Danny Jaz, responsible for a long-running campaign of drink spiking and sexual assaults at Christchurch bar Mama Hooch, were sentenced earlier this year to hefty jail terms - the most significant for such offending in New Zealand.
Judge Paul Mabey KC sentenced Roberto Jaz, 38, to 17 years behind bars for offending against eight women.
His older brother Danny Jaz, 40, was jailed for 16 and a half years.
Both men were ordered to serve a minimum of half of their sentences before they are eligible for parole.
Senior crime reporter Anna Leask recounts the story that shocked the country.
Sir James Wallace unmasked: The inside story of a rich-lister, arts philanthropist and criminal
Wandering about the corridors of Auckland’s historic High Court, an elderly grey man in a grey suit, a bright pink shirt and a red tie admires the artwork which adorns the walls.
His somewhat frail figure gives no indication of the money and influence he holds. But it is also this power that he wielded against his victims.
That man is Sir James Wallace, who for more than five years was described in news stories as the “prominent businessman” accused and eventually convicted of indecently assaulting three men and attempting to pervert the course of justice.
In June, the 85-year-old’s name suppression order, which had been constantly opposed by the Herald, lapsed.
Wallace, one of New Zealand’s leading arts and film philanthropists, was identified as the former rich lister convicted of indecently assaulting three men and attempting to pervert the course of justice. Sam Hurley investigated and reported on Wallace’s court case since 2018.
From Grammar boy to drug cartel kingpin: The rise and fall of Xavier Valent
As Xavier Valent travelled the world living in the lap of luxury, he claimed his millions came from astute bitcoin trading.
In fact, he was the kingpin of a syndicate which brought tonnes of drugs into New Zealand during its heyday, netting the young Kiwi tens of millions to fund his lavish lifestyle.
Valent, formerly Harry Whitehead, was a relatively small-time drug dealer when he was arrested and jailed over a decade ago, aged only about 20 and an alumni of Auckland Grammar.
During the 34-year-old’s six-week trial at the Auckland High Court, culminating in guilty verdicts on dozens of serious drugs charges, a jury heard there was a good reason prison is known as “university” in the underworld.
Valent made the connections in prison and learned the tradecraft needed to establish his sprawling cartel.
A jury took a little over two days to agree with prosecutors that Valent was the expatriate mastermind of one of New Zealand’s largest-ever drug syndicates. Herald reporter George Block covered the marathon trial charting the rise and fall of a homegrown cartel boss.
How David Hawken nearly got away with 1995 murder
He was the man with a plan, a deal, an angle. Million-dollar dreams in five-dollar strip joints. Snappy suits in a shady world of leather vests and grubby denim. Brick phone at the ear, scheming, hustling, always armed with hope, aiming high, with scant regard for those he trampled, or stomped on, along the way.
Christchurch in the 1990s: Beyond its meandering river and Edwardian homes festered a seedy and violent underbelly. Dave Hawken was running at its dark heart.
Gangs were rife. The Highway 61s, white-laced skinheads, romper-stompers, Road Knights, Epitaph Riders, Devil’s Henchmen, Mongrel Mob, Black Power and the wild Harris gang. But it was the Templars MC gang that Hawken was aligned with. He was never a patched member – the associate stood out in his two-piece suit - but he was undeniably one of them, strolling inside the Templars’ fortified clubhouse on Rotherham St unimpeded and unquestioned.
A self-confessed “two-bit hood”, he was tight with the bikie gang’s president, the peg-legged Robert “Red” Williams and his feared enforcer, sergeant-at-arms Ross “Oscar” Hesselwood. They flatted together at 445 Cashel St, where Hawken ran his debt collection business. Nobody wanted those guys knocking at their door.
Hawken was also hired muscle at a strip club. At that time, the Garden City had a burgeoning red-light district, well beyond its Manchester St prostitutes. Massage parlours and strip clubs, with brash neon lighting up the city: Atami Bath House, Route 66, Felicity’s on Hereford St, Regal Lounge, Jojo’s, Firecats, Charlie’s, Femme Fatale, Wicked Willies.
It was in that world that Hawken would first meet a young dancer called Angela. A former glue sniffer, she was dabbling as a stripper at Wicked Willies, owned by notorious Christchurch sex industry kingpin Terry Brown.
She’d fallen in love with the quick-tempered Willie Blackmoore who was working as a bouncer at another of Brown’s strip clubs, Crazy Horse. They were tight circles and Hawken also knew Blackmoore, through an old schoolmate, and he soon discovered Blackmoore owned properties, had some money. He sensed an angle, and he edged in, all banter and elbows.
Another young strip club doorman was around at the time: Jeremy Powell, cosy with a dancer who went by the name “Biscuit”, aka Rebecca Wright. Biscuit would also have an on-and-off sexual relationship with Angela.
It was a whirlwind of clubs, pubs, booze, sex and drugs, dodging the law and the tax man.
But on the night of August 17, 1995, things took a sinister, unimaginable twist, that would put that murky underworld into a tailspin.
For more than 20 years, David Hawken tried to put his dark past behind him. Once a feared hoodlum in Christchurch’s rampant gang underbelly, he had moved to the wilds of Central Otago to live a quiet life. But his new world came crashing down three years ago when he was arrested for the 1995 murder of young Christchurch mum Angela Blackmoore. On December 8, he was found guilty. While awaiting trial for murder, he spoke to Herald senior journalist Kurt Bayer in a series of interviews, claiming his innocence and talking candidly about the dark and violent world he came from.
