The Huntly cat killings that shocked the nation

Wirimu Karena (left) and Sahn Papa's attitudes in court shocked people almost as much as their actions in burning the three cats.

He liked cats. Well, he was kind to her cats and dogs. He would buy the dogs Schmackos and always fed the cats. He would cuddle them and say "these cats are hungry" and he would feed them. He was never cruel to them.

She was pretty upset when she found out he had been arrested for setting fire to three wild cats. "Yeah, he was a good kid until that happened ... "

The woman wanted to be known only as a relative of Sahn Papa. Eighteen-year-old Papa is in jail with his partner, some say leader, in crime, 17-year-old Wirimu Karena. Karena is cocky where Papa is quiet. Karena boasted of being the junior president of Black Power in Huntly.

It was Papa's first offence. Karena has a list of offences but police say Papa is the bigger concern. The only remorse he showed was for getting caught, they say.

Their crime horrified the nation, not just because it was so ghastly although in itself it was not so special. There are regular accounts of horrific animal cruelty and neglect in New Zealand.

This one hit a chord partly because the offenders were caught on video and the video was played on television.

Appalling too, was the behaviour of the pair after they were caught. They did not appear to give a damn, posturing and gesturing and laughing for the camera at their various Huntly District Court appearances.

Their coldness raises questions - are these young men psychopaths and, if so, what made them that way? And will they progress to even more horrific crimes against people?

Huntly is about an hour south of Auckland and 30 minutes north of Hamilton. It is the kind of small town where the main street is called Main St. Although it is surrounded by pleasant green hills, the twin chimneys of the power station are the real landmark. They are a bit like Auckland's Sky Tower and can be seen from almost anywhere in town.

A reminder of what the young men did is still here. The bars guarding the back entrance of one of Main St's shops are black with soot. The young shop assistant points to a new water pipe poking out from the concrete.

The feral cats were there, caught in a council trap. The intensity of the fire burned through the old pipe and water sprayed everywhere, otherwise half the street could have gone up in flames.

It is a sunny day but if you listen closely it is possible to imagine a sound that, once heard, is hard to forget. A hidden video camera in a window captured the action, although the cats were just to the right of it and cannot be seen. They can be heard though. It is the sound which is most disturbing.

Karena and Papa rode up on their bicycles, had a brief chat and cycled away. They returned and Karena poured a highly flammable glue on to the cats.

Papa then came forward and flicked a lighter. There was a boom and the pair scarpered, not sticking around to watch the cats burn or listen to the terrified miaowing or the thumping and rattling as they desperately thrashed against the cage.

Two of them had to be put down as they did not die quickly.

If a story could get even more disturbing, this one does. Blair Donaldson is a friendly sort, a police officer for 25 years, nine of them in Huntly. He bought a cat for his kids at Christmas.

The acting senior sergeant was the investigating officer in the burning of the cats. He does not really want to talk about poor Patsy, named after Patsy in the television show Absolutely Fabulous, because she was a "hard-case cat".

Patsy was found dead, in two pieces, near the Police Station shortly before the sentencing this month. It is still raw. "It's just unfortunate she had to take the rap."

He thinks he knows who did it but cannot say. It is hard to believe it is not linked to the case, though.

Donaldson believes Papa and Karena are likely to pay a high price for their crime at the hands of other inmates in prison.

He says Karena is not junior president of Black Power in Waikato and the gang will not like that he talked himself up. Cat killing is not really a Black Power kind of crime and the gang may not like being associated with it.

"They might rape and pillage and wreck someone or have gang warfare and that but I believe that [cat torture] is a different psyche."

He singles out Papa as the one to watch in the future. "Papa actually set fire to the cats. Karena said, 'Papa only did it 'cause I told him to, he wanted to impress me cause I'm the junior leader of Black Power'.

"That's not what Papa said. Papa sat down and says, 'Yeah, I set them alight, so what?' Just as cold as that and as forthright as that."

He says Papa is more introvert more calculating and smarter than Karena, yet he is a follower, not a leader "which makes him even more dangerous".

The young men have a reputation among young people in Huntly. One youth said while Karena was not scary, he could be violent and came from a "harsh" neighbourhood. He got into fights and was known as a Black Power prospect.

The youth said Papa was "unsettlingly quiet" although "not in a sitting there about to explode, violent kind of way. In a cool kind of way, like in a thinking way."

He, too, said Papa was a follower. He had never been in trouble at school and was usually better turned-out than his peers. He would never have picked Papa to do what he did. "They don't see it as bad though, I guess."

Police have the pair's DNA, a fact which pleases the Sensible Sentencing Trust. It wants a law change so people convicted of violence to animals can be forced to give DNA.

It cites research on American serial killers, saying most have animal cruelty in their pasts. Animal cruelty is also said to be an indicator in domestic abuse cases - if you beat the kids you are more likely to beat the dog.

A Unitec study showed veterinarians are seeing a steady stream of the deliberate abuse of animals in New Zealand.

Sensible Sentencing's Russelle Knaap says it is important to track and trace animal offenders through DNA because, "You don't just wake up one morning and be a mass murderer, like William Bell [the RSA killer.]

"The signs are usually there from childhood and we largely ignore them. The worst aspect of it is children. If children wilfully harm or torture animals they don't have to have counselling, they're not regarded as victims and yet it's a symptom of something seriously wrong in the household."

Some experts here challenge research that finds animal cruelty is a definitive link to serial killing and future serious offending.

Victoria University lecturer Dr Devon Polaschek, a clinical psychologist who works with hard-end offenders, says animal abuse is certainly a marker of serious offending but it is one of many.

"You would have to take everyone who has ever been cruel to an animal and see how many of them turn into serial killers to know what importance that symptom has," she says. 

She says she is not trivialising animal cruelty. She was horrified by the video, but people who have done bad things to animals as children have also grown into good, law-abiding citizens.

"On its own it doesn't account for these men [hard-end offenders]. I mean, when you dig into their past they have done lots of stuff that is harmful to animals, people, property, even themselves for that matter. They are enormously destructive."

Just looking at the animal abuse made no sense in understanding the behaviour of the cat killers.

Sandy Simpson, head of the Mason Clinic, the forensic unit in Auckland for mentally ill offenders, says animal cruelty is not a common issue among mentally ill people who offend, although it sometimes comes up within subgroups of offenders.

"There are said to be links between cruelty to animals and serious anti-sociality. It is probably not as strong a link as was thought at times but there is probably something in there."

People who have had cruelty inflicted on them can learn to be cruel to other living things and take a certain pleasure from it.

When told Papa was described as unsettlingly quiet and asked whether we should look out for him in the future, he said: "I think you can reasonably say it's a mark of emotional disturbance that someone should look at."

Not getting what he needed emotionally as a child could have contributed to Papa's apparent lack of empathy but it was a complex equation of temperament, needing the context of his upbringing, other problems he might have and knowledge about what he had seen and experienced. "Without this information it's very hard to speculate."

Some of New Zealand's worst killers have animal cruelty in their past, including Taffy Hotene. Already a convicted rapist, five years ago while on parole he raped and murdered Auckland journalist Kylie Jones, stabbing her repeatedly.

The Weekend Herald understands as a child he strangled kittens and mice. He was also violent to other children. Perhaps surprisingly, the lawyer who defended him, Roger Chambers, who is still moved by Jones' awful death, feels sorry for Hotene. 

Chambers has defended many men who have been cruel to animals, some of the cases as horrific as the Huntly cat killers.

Most popular are small animals, small rodents, because they are the most vulnerable, he says. "I've had kittens who have been caught and dragged behind motor vehicles. I've had kittens and cats and puppies that have had petrol thrown on them and burned."

For some of the perpetrators it was a bit of a laugh, and not all appeared to have come from miserable backgrounds. But Hotene came from an appalling upbringing, suffering beatings and sexual abuse in different foster homes.

Chambers suspects some offenders visit on defenceless animals what may have been done to them as children.

What Hotene did to Jones and other women was "unconscionable, unthinking and frankly appalling. But I did feel sorry for him because the seeds of his offending were set as a child in a community that exacted terrible violence on him as a kid. He never had a chance."

The country's first Commissioner for Children and tireless child advocate and researcher, Ian Hassall, admits to feeling pity too.

He points to research on the development of the brain in which scans demonstrate the brains of severely neglected and abused children are smaller than the brains of loved and stimulated children.

He believes psychopaths can be bred and are being bred. Babies learn not to be responsive and not to draw attention to themselves. It's called "frozen watchfulness" and is a sign of neglect and abuse.

They cover by being polite and quiet but Hassall says some of the most brutal domestic abusers are the most well mannered.

He believes inequalities in society matter and can contribute to violence. The more that people grow up in squalor, the more they do not believe they have a place in the world and that they can do what they like.

"They can be pissed every day and take dope and beat their kids around because it all doesn't matter. That kind of giving up on the world is one of the things that's at the heart of it."

The assumption that cruelty of the kind in which cats are burned alive comes out of nowhere "is naive and stupid".

Papa's relative said Papa loved skateboarding and riding his BMX and would hang out with his friends at the skate park near the Huntly domain.

He had never been in trouble and had been led astray, she thinks. She thinks he was ashamed of what he did and felt "ratshit" about it.

But a friend of Papa's was asked if he was shocked that his mate would burn cats alive. The skinny teenager hitched his thumbs through the loops of his low-slung black jeans and seemed to struggle for words for a minute. Then he said "nah".

What he was shocked about was that Papa had gone to jail for it.