Top New Zealand fashion designer Dame Trelise Cooper. Photo / Supplied
Top New Zealand fashion designer Dame Trelise Cooper. Photo / Supplied
On a Friday morning in November 2020, two-and-a-half weeks after high-end fashion designer Dame Trelise Cooper lost $750,000 worth of clothing in a brazen burglary of her headquarters, Andrea Nicole Edwards hailed a cab in Auckland's CBD and loaded a large number of suitcases into the boot.
The florist directed the taxi to a storage unit, where she unloaded the suitcases. Just a week later, a police search of the storage unit and her CBD hotel room would result in the recovery of $136,780 worth of the looted clothing.
Edwards was set to go to trial in the Auckland District Court on Monday for receiving stolen property over $1000, which carries a penalty of up to seven years' prison.
She instead pleaded guilty before Judge Kristen Lummis.
The October 17, 2020, burglary of Cooper's Newmarket office left the internationally acclaimed designer without any of her 2021 spring and summer samples - a setback she described at the time as "kick in the guts".
"I feel violated," she said of the roughly 2000 items that went missing.
The $750,000 value placed on the items only included the cost to manufacture them, according to court documents released on Monday after Edwards' guilty plea.
"Only a portion of the stolen clothing has been recovered by police," the summary of facts for the case states.
Earlier this month, defendant Nicholas James Bush, a former television industry worker described in court documents as an "associate" of Edwards', was sentenced to two years and five months' imprisonment for his part in the scheme.
Nicholas Bush was sentenced earlier this month to more than two years in prison. Photo / NZME
An empty bottle of San Pellegrino sparkling water discovered by one of Cooper's employees at the break-in site was found to have his DNA on it, it was revealed at his sentencing.
Bush was with Edwards as police raided her hotel room on the morning of November 12, 2020, arresting them both.
"During a search of the room, police located 16 of the stolen Trelise Cooper branded clothing items," the summary of facts states.
Roughly an hour later, the search of the storage unit in Edwards' name resulted in the discovery of "several suitcases containing numerous stolen Trelise Cooper-branded clothing items" .
Edwards is set to be sentenced in April.
Meanwhile, a cake decorator and private investigator, Kathy Yu-Jen Stephens, is set to stand trial on Wednesday in the Auckland District Court. She denies having received a relatively small portion of the clothes.
A fourth person, a woman in her 20s, was also charged last May with allegedly receiving some of the clothing.
None of the four people who have been charged had any connection to Cooper or her business - a point Cooper has stressed in the past after it was previously suggested on social media that the heist might have been an "inside job".
Cooper said in a victim impact statement at Bush's sentencing earlier this month that the burglary has caused "massive reputational damage" to her business and has had a "long-lasting and far-reaching effect" on her personally.
