This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including investigating the state of our mental health in the Great Minds series, how NZ can rebuild stronger post-Covid with The New New Zealand and how to minimise the impact of living in an Inflation Nation.
We also tackled our literacy crisis in our Reading Block series, while dogged investigative reporting by Kate McNamara resulted in an investigation into the awarding of contracts to businesses associated with family members of Cabinet minister Nanaia Mahuta.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2022. Today we take a look at four compelling true crime cases.
Cold case: Who killed Japanese tourist Kayo Matsuzawa?
Kayo Matsuzawa was on her dream trip to New Zealand where she planned to study, work and perfect her English. But the 29-year-old was murdered just two months before she was due to return home. Twenty-four years later, police have still got their sights set on finding whoever is responsible. Anna Leask reports.
He was there to test the fire alarms. He’d been there before, made his way through the rabbit warren-like Centrecourt building, up the staircase to the utility cupboard off to the side.
Getting a key from the building manager was a pain, so he’d worked out a way to jemmy the door latch open with his screwdriver. Pop the door, check the alarm, move on to the next job. That’s how it usually went.
But September 22, 1998 was different. When Dennis Groves opened the cupboard door, he knew instantly something was not right. He looked down and saw what he initially thought was a mannequin lying on the floor. To his horror, he soon realised he was looking at the naked and badly decomposing body of a young woman.
Groves backed slowly out of the stinking space and pulled the door shut. He made his way back out to Queen St, undoubtedly sucking in as much fresh air as his lungs could take once he was in the open. He pulled out his cellphone and called 111.
Neither Groves or police knew at the time, but that call marked the beginning of one of New Zealand’s most bizarre unsolved crimes.
The ‘Innocent Agent’ sent on a revenge mission that turned fatal
Steve Braunias follows the strange and tragic case of an intellectually impaired loner procured to burn down a house – but who set himself on fire, and died in agony.
He finished his drink just after 2am in a dark and fairly dingy sports bar with a low ceiling, and set off on his mission. He was a lonely little man whom no one ever noticed, an outsider drifting through the streets of Auckland at all times of day or night, on foot, one of the city’s living ghosts – not homeless, not some lowlife drunk or addict. Stephen Ewart was functioning, just. He was 58 years old and had an address on Queen St.
The bar was in Kingsland. Ewart walked the dark streets for 90 minutes that Friday night on December 9, 2017, to a block of flats that backed on to the wide green fields of Keith Hay Park in Mt Roskill. He crept beneath unit three, put on his headtorch, and poured petrol into 16 plastic bottles of milk. Police later found two cigarette lighters on the ground. The idea was to burn it down or at least cause significant fire damage but he made a terrible hash of it and burst into flames. One neighbour heard him screaming; pitifully, another neighbour heard him crying – really, he was a child. His body stopped growing when he was about 12 and his intellect, too, remained fixed at that age. He burned to death in agony on that sunny Saturday in summer nearly five years ago. He was there, but it was as though he wasn’t there, made invisible; in a remarkable piece of criminal law, his actions were viewed as belonging to someone else nowhere near Mt Roskill. A 32-year-old woman was sentenced to eight years and three months imprisonment for arson and manslaughter in the High Court at Auckland on Friday morning.
NZ pornographer on FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list
9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden once featured, so did notorious serial killer Ted Bundy and Dr Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray. And now, a Kiwi sex trafficker and pornography crook has made the infamous FBI Top 10 Most Wanted list. Agents worldwide are hunting fugitive Michael James Pratt, who warrants a US$100,000 bounty, faces decades in prison, and a US$20 million lawsuit. But could he be hiding out in his homeland? Kurt Bayer reports.
Mike Pratt made a run for the border. The Mexican gateway city of Tijuana has sheltered runaways, bandits and renegades for more than a century. With its feared drug cartels, 2000 annual homicides, and oft-cited “most crossed border in the world”, authorities did not notice a stubbly, burly New Zealander slip quietly through.
From there, under an unknown identity, he jetted for his homeland, 11,000km and half a world away. This was pre-Covid and pre-federal arrest warrant issued in the United States District Court, Southern District of California.
The gig was up. He could sense the feds circling. The lucrative pornography production company and websites GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys, where he tricked women into becoming online porn stars, had raked in more than US$17m ($30m). But now, he needed to cash in the proceeds of his seedy empire or urgently convert them to cryptocurrency. If they caught up with him, he might never see daylight again.
And so, Pratt, one day, simply vanished. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) nor, allegedly, any of his family, haven’t seen him since. He is a ghost.
Kingpin bowled: Inside the downfall of a Kiwi drug lord
The mastermind of a major meth smuggling syndicate faces a lengthy stint behind bars after a spectacular downfall. Kurt Bayer reports.
With steam rising, bare-chested Sami Zagros, aka Saman Ahmad Khan Bigy, leaned back and unwound. The sauna was hot and things were good, better than good, mint. The drugs had rolled in. He had stacks of cash and was looking sharp. The new Mercedes was legit. The Bitcoin hit was a downer but he had plenty more where that came from.
Yeah, things were real good.
Confident the audio jamming device “Bug Hunter” was corrupting any potential police intercepts, he used one of two burner phones with him at the inner-city luxury hotel sauna to fire off a message. Ping.
A suited man emerged through the mist. He stood in front of him.
“Is your name Sami Zagros?” he asked, flashing a badge.
Zagros replied that he was.
And with that, his empire came crashing down.
