Colin Jack Mitchell was on trial for 12 days for kidnapping and assaulting a woman at a Riverhead quarry. Photo / File
Colin Jack Mitchell was on trial for 12 days for kidnapping and assaulting a woman at a Riverhead quarry. Photo / File
Today a jury found Colin Jack Mitchell guilty of kidnapping a 23-year-old woman from central Auckland, driving her to a deserted quarry west of the city and assaulting her. Senior crime and justice reporter Anna Leask looks back at the trial and tells the story of the fateful night a young woman crossed paths with her attacker, and how she got away.
It was dark.
Silent.
She had no idea where she was and the fear hit her as soon as she came to.
Her back was bare, the space where her dress should have been covering her skin pressed into cold, pricking gravel.
She could feel something warm running down one side of her face and knew - though she knew little else about her situation at the time - that it was her own blood.
She looked up and saw him.
He stood over her, a weapon that looked like a bat in one hand, a mask covering his face.
There were a few people there, a few laughs had, a few drinks consumed.
By the victim's recollection she had about half a bottle of wine at the house - two of her mates finished off a litre of vodka between them.
They headed to Ponsonby Rd and parked up at Chapel, a popular bar in the middle of the iconic street.
The victim was wearing a light, floaty floral dress and sandals and her girlfriend had applied some glitter to her skin by way of a sparkly glue-filled pen in honour of the pride parade.
At Chapel the good times kept on rolling and the group had more drinks - described in court as "glittery cocktails" - as the parade meandered past them, the vibrant floats adorned with anything and everything that represented the LGBT+ community.
When the parade finished, Ponsonby Rd roared into life. The victim and her friends crossed the street to popular restaurant Mexico to have dinner, and more drinks - as you do on a Saturday night out.
And that's the last thing the victim remembers until she woke up in the dark, silent quarry, a world away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
After she was found by police, after she was stripped almost naked, beaten with a weapon and threatened by her attacker, investigators began to fill in the blanks of the night.
Through her friends and CCTV cameras positioned around Ponsonby, police were able to piece together just how she fell into the clutches of Mitchell.
She left Mexico with her mates and headed towards Ink Bar on Karangahape Rd where she had arranged to meet some others.
Colin Jack Mitchell was on trial for 12 days for kidnapping and assaulting a woman at a Riverhead quarry. Photo / File
It was a 1.4km walk along a route still packed with revellers and an abundance of police on duty.
As she walked the victim met a man and started talking to him.
She was lagging behind so her friends went on without her, saying they would meet her at Ink.
CCTV footage from the Mobil station at the corner of Ponsonby and K Rds show her staggering along with the man, leaning on him for support.
He walked her to Ink and then - he may have chatted to her mates or even had a drink with them, their recollections vary - the man made his way off into the night.
It would later emerge that this man, who has name suppression, was a convicted rapist.
He admitted in court that he'd thought about having sex with the victim, but that never transpired.
There was no suggestion of any intention on his part to harm her or take advantage, the Crown said.
It was just unfortunate that on that particular night, she met that particular man in her travels.
Up at K Rd, the victim never made it into Ink, she was too intoxicated and the bouncers refused her entry.
She sat outside and was filmed using her phone intermittently, speaking to her friends as they came in and out of the bar to check on her, and finally, walking off.
Police released this image of the car believed to be connected to the kidnapping. This car was later identified as Colin Mitchell's. Photo / NZ Police
No one heard from her after that.
It's likely she decided that if she wasn't getting into Ink, she was going home.
She decided - as many of us have after a few too many - to walk, and made her way back along K Rd, crossing over the Newton Rd intersection and along Great North Rd.
It's likely she was heading for Bond St, its overbridge leading straight to Kingsland.
It's likely she would have made it home safely - if not for one thing.
Colin Jack Mitchell.
CCTV cameras show the victim staggering along Great North Rd.
It's not a dark or dingy stretch, it's well lit, usually busy and would have been heaving with traffic that night - taxis, people going to and from the parade and other events in the city.
The victim was seen in various footage, collected later by police as part of the investigation, walking along Great North Rd holding or using her phone.
At 1.12 am she was filmed walking near the 24-hour McDonald's.
And then, nothing.
The trail ended, there was no further trace of the 23-year-old.
She was gone.
At 1.12am, not far from the McDonalds, a silver Ford Mondeo turned into Great North Rd and travelled towards where the 23-year-old was walking.
It turned into McKelvie St, but less than a minute later, spun around and headed back onto Great North Rd.
Soon after, the car travelled down Bond St, crossing New North Rd onto Sandringham Rd.
The Crown theorised that perhaps the driver offered the victim a ride home, headed towards Kingsland where she lived and then took advantage when he noticed she passed out, emboldened to head further away and assault her.
They quickly focused their attention on that Ford and within a matter of days, established that there was a high likelihood it belonged to a man named Colin Jack Mitchell.
Mitchell was 59 at the time.
He lived in Onehunga alone - he never married, didn't have a partner or kids - and worked as a truck driver.
"My left leg is partly numb at the bottom, one side's okay, the other's not - pinched nerve," he would later tell the jury.
He strenuously denied going anywhere near Great North Rd or Riverhead, but admitted in court that after going to the water he drove to a park in Avondale that he liked, to rest his legs and relax.
He hated crowds, heavy traffic - despite being a professional driver - and would never have ventured into the city fringe on a busy Saturday night.
But cellphone records put a pin in that defence.
Cellphone data later obtained by police showed a phone belonging to Mitchell in the Mt Eden area minutes before the victim was kidnapped.
His phone would later be tracked to an area in West Auckland with Riverhead smack bang in the middle.
Mitchell still denied any involvement - even when CCTV at the quarry where the woman was assaulted turned up images of a silver car, highly likely a Ford Mondeo, entering and leaving the area.
That footage, the last in a string of images used by the Crown as evidence against Mitchell, was eerie.
The silver car creeps into the quarry about 1.45am.
The quarry sits at the end of Sawmill Rd in Riverhead and is about 25km from Great North Rd - a 23-minute drive at normal speed with average traffic.
At 2.01am the same silver car belts out of the quarry, visibly much faster than when it went in.
Just metres away, in the dark silence of the same quarry, covered in her own blood, scrambling over loose gravel to get away from the man she feared would end her life, the 23-year-old called 111.
The woman was driven from Grey Lynn to Riverhead and assaulted. Photo / Google
When the victim woke for the first time, her attacker had been standing over her with a weapon, a mask covering his face.
The jury heard her harrowing story - the first time the full details of her ordeal had been made public.
"I woke up in a gravel area and I can remember feeling this side of my head was just covered in blood.
"I think I had my undies on but I'm not sure, I definitely didn't have my dress on.
"And there was a man with a mask and some kind of softball or baseball bat and I was crunched up on the ground.
"I don't really remember what he was wearing, I know he had some kind of bat and I have an inkling that it was a baseball bat, thin at one end and thicker at the other.
"He kept asking me to turn around, he was standing about a metre away from me … I just knew this wasn't going to happen to me, so I just refused everything.
"He sounded very strange and he wanted me to turn around and I refused and I just kept begging.
"I just said 'no, I'm not, I'm not, this isn't going to happen to me'.
"I think I was saying to him 'you don't have to do this, you don't have to be this person'.
"I don't know if he said 'you are going to get yourself killed' or 'I'm going to kill you' but he was threatening me with the bat."
"I just kept begging and begging and begging and begging and just saying this wasn't happening … and I remember him hitting me across the face.
Remember, she had been drinking - too much, conceded the Crown - but she'd also been struck at least twice times across the head with a substantial weapon.
It's no surprise she had no memory of the sequence of events.
When she came to the second time she was frantically scrambling across loose gravel, terrified she was being followed or that she would hurtle down into the quarry holes below.
Before she even realised she was conscious, she was on the phone to a friend, begging for help, saying she'd had to play dead to get away.
It was close to the victim's shoes that presumably fell off as she made her escape.
It was close to drag and claw marks, the result of the victim being dragged through dirt and gravel from her attacker's car and trying to get away from him.
It was close to her cellphone, found lying in the dirt where it fell as she fled.
The glove was tested by forensic experts and the DNA found on and inside it matched a sample taken from Mitchell's house when police searched it.
But Mitchell had a different tale to tell.
He was not, he claimed, the Riverhead quarry attacker.
It wasn't him, it wasn't his car - he simply was not on Great North Rd that morning and he certainly wasn't at Riverhead.
A year to the day of the attack, he spoke for the first time.
After 10 days sitting in the dock in Courtroom 6 at the High Court at Auckland, listening to witness after witness give evidence in the Crown case, it was Mitchell's turn.
His appearance has changed markedly since his first appearance in court last year - he's lost weight and his already white hair and beard seem a much paler shade.
Ryan asked Mitchell: "Did you travel to the Riverhead area that night?"
"No, I've never been up there in my own car," Mitchell asserted.
He responded similarly, with a firm "no" when Ryan asked if he had travelled near Great North Rd the night of the attack - and to the most important question.
"No, I didn't. I think these ones were too expensive," he claimed.
He later said the gloves were "not satisfactory to what I wanted to have" so he "hung them back up and kept going".
Ryan claimed that the "real" attacker must have purchased the exact same pair and left them at the quarry.
Mitchell was also adamant that the car in the CCTV footage in the city and at Riverhead was not his.
But, after more than two weeks of evidence including police first to the scene, those who undertook the scene examination, cellphone, car, DNA experts and that crucial CCTV footage, the jury simply did not believe him.
Despite his lawyer pulling the Crown case apart, strand by strand - rejecting the "unreliable" cellphone evidence, denying his client's car was the offending vehicle and doing his best to convince the jury that the glove DNA was coincidental - the jury believed it.
