Wuti Waa spent 35 years locked up. Photos Dean Purcell / Supplied
Earlier this month a man died while appearing before the Parole Board in Auckland. Who was he, why did he spend more than 30 years in prison and was he guilty of murder? George Block investigates.
After a life spent locked up, Wuti Wellington Waa died just before his chance to make a bid for freedom.
The 58-year-old was serving a life sentence after a conviction for the 1988 killing of Northcote Motel proprietor Rex Bell during an armed robbery gone wrong. The conviction came after a trial featuring evidence from a controversial jailhouse snitch, a frequent flier in the witness box at the time, who also testified at the trial of David Tamihere.
The Herald on Sunday has reviewed court files dating back to the 1980s and spoken to Waa’s family and friends to piece together the story of his life spent largely confined to institutions.
Those institutions spanned the boys’ homes and borstals he first entered as a ward of the state aged 9, to the Auckland South Corrections Facility at Wiri where he died.
People who knew Waa in prison or met him during his brief periods on the outside described him as a gentle but stubborn man, who felt unfairly persecuted by the system.
Apart from a brief period on release in 2002, Waa had spent the past 35 years in prison.
He continued to pursue various avenues of appeal more than three decades later and would not admit his culpability for murder, even if it would have meant another shot at parole.
He refused to go before the Parole Board for more than a decade after his recall to prison, preferring to try to fight the system while maintaining his innocence, people who knew him said.
On Friday July 7, Waa was in an interview booth at the private prison, from which he was set to appear via video link, waiting for a parole hearing to begin, when he collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack.
It is unknown whether Waa planned to avail himself of his right to seek parole at the hearing. His most recent lawyer wouldn’t comment.
At a hearing last year he did not seek release as he had no accommodation on the outside and continued to deny his offending.
As a lifer, he would have been subject to restrictions for the rest of his days as a condition of parole.
Instead, he sought a transfer to a prison in the Wellington region where he believed he could better argue his appeal.
“He wanted to come out on his own terms,” said William Cullen, convicted alongside Waa in 1990 for the murder of Bell.
Waa spent his early years in Wainuiomata, one of eight children. By the age of about 9, he was in state care and soon progressed into boy’s homes.
“He was a product of the system,” said Cullen.
The pair first met in the mid-1980s when Waa started hanging around Cullen’s place in Te Atatū. While he was tough, even then Cullen said he remembered his friend as polite and softly spoken.
“He was the gentleman. I was the a**hole.”
Cullen met some of Waa’s long-lost relatives who came to pick up his body ahead of his tangi.
“His family that came to collect him, they hardly knew him. I’m the closest thing that he had to family.”
Among those family members who came north to Auckland to collect their estranged whanaunga was his oldest sister, Rangi Simmonds.
She understood Waa had suffered harrowing abuse during his time in state care.
She said she did not know Waa growing up but had met him during his brief time on parole more than 20 years ago.
“He had a lot of trauma,” Simmonds said. “
You could see it. But he spoke so gently to me.
“He had a hell of a life.”
In recent years, after her return from Australia, she had sent a message to Waa via the prison, expressing interest in reconnecting.
He had signalled in reply that he had received the message and was keen to catch up.
But earlier this month came a phone call from the prison advising they had sensitive news they could not share over the phone. A police officer arrived at her home to break the bad news.
Waa’s whanau took his body back down to their marae at Tokorangi, northwest of Feilding near the Rangitikei River, where, after a tangi, he was buried in the same urupa as his ancestors. He is survived by a daughter.
In 1984 Waa appeared before Justice David Tompkins in the Hamilton High Court to appeal against his sentences for charges of car conversion, burglary and aggravated assault, court files show.
Tompkins said Waa, then just 19, had spent half his life in social welfare homes and prisons.
“He expresses a wish to go back to the community and lead a normal lifestyle.”
The judge declined the appeal and upheld the sentence of 18 months in prison.
Waa wound up in Auckland and met Cullen out west at his home in Te Atatū. A few years later came the robbery in Auckland which would keep Waa locked up for most of the rest of his days.
On the evening of December 19, 1988, two men armed with shotguns and wearing balaclavas burst into the owners’ section of the Northcote Motel.
Inside were Rex Bell, his wife and daughter. One of the men demanded money. The daughter tried to escape and Bell was shot.
His wife was struck in the head when she approached one of the intruders. They ransacked the property and left with money and jewellery.
Waa and Cullen were jointly charged with murdering Rex Bell, causing grievous bodily harm to his wife and aggravated robbery.
After a trial, they were convicted on all charges and jailed for life.
Court documents state Cullen told his girlfriend that while he was out of the room, a shot was fired when Bell “grabbed for the gun” that Waa was holding.
During their trial, a forensic expert said Bell could have accidentally caused the gun to fire by deflecting the barrel.
But it was not enough to sway the jury from convicting both men of murder.
Bell’s then 23-year-old daughter’s glasses case was found at Cullen’s house. A shoe print formed in blood was found on a piece of paper at the motel.
The print matched a pair of shoes taken from Waa after his arrest.
His trial heard evidence from a jailhouse snitch dubbed Witness A, who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1989 for importing heroin and who had an appeal scheduled for shortly after Waa and Cullen’s trial.
The witness said that while they were on remand together in Mt Eden prison, Waa had admitted to shooting Bell.
Witness A also gave evidence at several other high-profile trials including that of David Tamihere for murdering Swedish tourists Urban Hoglin and Heidi Paakkonen. Tamihere has always maintained he is innocent.
Another prison informant, known as Witness C and later revealed as convicted murderer Roberto Conchie Harris, was found guilty in 2017 of perjury for giving false evidence in Tamihere’s trial. Harris died in 2021 in prison.
Witness A also claimed that Waa had admitted he was responsible for the Red Fox Tavern murder of publican Chris Bush in 1987, a claim for which there is no evidence.
The two men sentenced to life in 2021 for that murder more than three decades ago, Mark Hoggart and a man with name suppression, earlier this month failed in a bid to overturn their convictions for the Red Fox Tavern killing.
The use of jailhouse snitches like Witness A is frequently criticised because of their incentive to give the evidence prosecutors are looking for in exchange for reduced sentences or immunity from further prosecution. They have been involved in many identified cases of miscarriages of justice in the United States.
In 2018, Waa launched his own appeal bid.
He argued that Witness A’s evidence was unreliable and should not have been admitted, and that his trial should have been heard separately from Cullen’s case.
Waa also argued that the references to the Rex Fox Tavern murder were highly prejudicial and should have been inadmissible.
In explanation for the long delay in lodging an appeal, Waa said he did not want to draw attention to himself until an arrest was made in the Red Fox case, which finally came in 2017.
The Court of Appeal rejected this, saying there was no evidence he was ever at risk of prosecution for the Red Fox murder. The court said that, unlike Harris, Witness A was never prosecuted for perjury.
Witness A died in February 2021 so his evidence could no longer be tested, the court’s 2021 judgment said.
It dismissed Waa’s application for leave to appeal, saying the directions given to the jury in his trial were orthodox and consistent with the law as it stood in 1990.
The appeal judgment charts Waa’s troubles during his brief release in 2002.
He was recalled to prison for burglary and stealing a car and was also convicted of illegal possession of a shotgun, reckless driving and assaulting a police officer using a vehicle.
Waa was then in prison until his death.
Following his recall to prison he made two appearances in front of the Parole Board before the fateful hearing a fortnight ago.
A hearing in January 2022 was unsuccessful. He did not seek parole.
The board’s written decision said Waa was not interested in co-operating with Corrections or Serco, the company that operates the Auckland South Corrections Facility, where he was held with a minimum security classification.
“He behaves well within the prison overall but simply says that he has no trust in either Corrections or Serco,” the decision said.
Waa denied all the offending for which he was convicted and wanted to be transferred to Rimutaka Prison in Upper Hutt to better continue his appeals.
Psychological reports assessed him as being at a high risk of re-offending and said he remained an undue risk for release.
Waa’s friend and supporter Shane White was meant to be at the parole hearing earlier this month.
White, now a project facilitator at Hoani Waititi Marae, who runs programmes for prisoners, was locked up in the 1980s for shooting his sister’s rapist.
He served time with Waa in maximum security. In recent years, the pair had reconnected, with White visiting him in prison and speaking to him on the phone.
White said Waa was a quiet, private and gentle man in prison. He tried to steer clear of the gang scene and was more interested in reading and improving himself.
“Initially he had hope,” White said. “He could see a possibility of getting out and having a life.”
White said he was not sent a link to join the Parole Board hearing remotely.
“I tried and tried … and then I realised that it’s not gonna happen, and then a couple of hours later they rang me back and said … he passed away,” he said.
White said he felt like he had let his friend down.
“Once again he was all alone facing the system with no help.”
White told the Herald on Sunday that when he and Waa were in prison in the 1990s, all their friends were in gangs.
“We stayed in the middle and tried to be ourselves and not have to dislike someone because they were wearing red or blue.”
He respected Waa for that.
“That was the good thing about Wuti, we didn’t have to play the game of being a tough guy in jail.
“He had no ego. It wasn’t about pushing himself forward in any way and trying to be something more than he was.
“He was just a really quiet keep-to-himself fella who just tried to get through with his sentence as painlessly as possible so you can get out at the other end.”
While he did not know about Waa’s upbringing, White said the early life of boys’ homes and borstals was unsurprising.
“You know… it’s a common story in there, about starting off in state care and then going into the boys’ homes and then graduating up into youth imprisonment and into adult prison.”
After they reconnected about five or six years ago, White said the pair would reminiscence about their time in maximum security and express a desire to reconnect to their roots.
“That was quite a common story in there. People who didn’t know where they came from.”
Waa expressed a desire to get out but knew it would be a long process due to his various appeals and the fact he denied his offending, White said.
“Because he was challenging the whole system. He felt there’d been a whole lot of mistakes made. He did have a feeling of being unjustly dealt with in there, always persecuted.”
When someone is brought up in state institutions, White said, you always had to try and find some element of hope to cling on to.
“So I think, ‘You finally got out, Wuti.’
“You finally got out.
“Now they’ll let you go.”
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