Crime

New Zealand’s Muslim community suffered an horrific attack when a self-proclaimed ‘white nationalist’ opened fire on worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch. Fifty people were killed and 41 wounded, one of whom died six weeks later.

The 96 medals, including nine Victoria Crosses, two George Crosses and an Albert Medal, had been stolen from the Waiōuru museum early on the morning of 2 December 2007. The VCs included those awarded to Reginald Judson, Keith Elliott and Henry Laurent.

The small seaside township of Aramoana, near Dunedin, was the scene of what was then the deadliest mass murder in New Zealand history.

Lorraine Cohen was sentenced to death by a Malaysian judge for heroin trafficking. On appeal her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The trial of Lorraine and her son Aaron, who was arrested at the same time, gained worldwide attention.

An attempted hijacking of an Air New Zealand Boeing 747 at Nadi airport, Fiji, was thwarted when a member of the cabin crew struck the hijacker on the head with a whisky bottle.

Caretaker and unionist Ernie Abbott was killed on 27 March 1984 when a bomb exploded inside Trades’ Hall on Wellington’s Vivian St.

The gangland murder of ‘Mr Asia’ (Marty Johnstone) led to the demise of one of New Zealand’s largest ever drug rings. Johnstone was killed on the orders of drug lord Terry Clark. Divers found his mutilated body in a flooded quarry in England.

Eighteen-year-old Mona Blades was last seen sitting in the back seat of an orange Datsun station wagon. Her body was never found and her disappearance has never been explained.

On a rainy night in Wellington’s Aro St, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) gatecrashed a meeting between William Sutch and Dimitri Razgovorov. They believed Sutch, a prominent economist and former senior public servant, was passing information to Razgovorov, a Soviet diplomat.

Waikato farmer Arthur Allan Thomas was found guilty – for the second time – of the 1970 murder of his Pukekawa neighbours Harvey and Jeanette Crewe.

The bullet-ridden bodies of Frederick George Walker and Kevin James Speight were found in a house on Bassett Rd in Remuera, Auckland. A team of 32 detectives began enquiries that led to the arrest of Ron Jorgensen and John Gillies.

George Wilder was a burglar who left apology and thank-you notes for his victims. He was at large for 65 days, becoming a folk hero in the process.

Edward Te Whiu was one of the last four people executed in New Zealand. He admitted to killing 75-year-old widow Florence Smith, but his underprivileged background and childlike mental state led some to question the appropriateness of the death penalty.

Pauline Parker, aged 16, and Juliet Hulme, 15, were convicted of the murder of Pauline's mother Honora at Christchurch on 22 June. Their story was later the subject of Peter Jackson's acclaimed film, Heavenly creatures.

Armed with a brick in a stocking, 16-year-old Pauline Parker and her best friend Juliet Hulme, 15, became two of New Zealand's most notorious female murderers when they killed Pauline's mother, Honorah, in Victoria Park, Christchurch.

Dairy farmer Stanley Graham killed seven people in Kōwhitirangi on the South Island’s West Coast.

As well as (temporarily) doing away with capital punishment for murder, the Crimes Amendment Act 1941 abolished judicial provision for flogging and whipping.

Charles Ewing Mackay, the disgraced former mayor of Whanganui, was shot dead by Berlin police during May Day riots in the German capital.

A generation after the hanging of the infamous Minnie Dean, the murder trial of Daniel and Martha Cooper revealed that ‘baby farming’ and illegal abortion were still regarded as solutions to the problem of unwanted children in New Zealand.

James Liston, the assistant bishop of Auckland, was found not guilty of sedition following a high-profile court case.

In what may have been a world first for a capital crime, the conviction of Dennis Gunn was based almost entirely on fingerprint evidence.

The victim of the shooting, poet Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, alleged that Mayor Charles Mackay had made homosexual advances towards him in the mayoral office and panicked when faced with the prospect of public exposure.

Joseph Pawelka’s escape from Wellington’s Terrace Gaol was the last of three bold but seemingly effortless prison escapes he made over a period of 18 months.

The Tasmanian-born confidence trickster topped a long career impersonating well-off men for financial gain by claiming to be a sheepfarmer and the nephew of a bishop.

The murder of retired miner Joe Kum Yung by white supremacist Lionel Terry in Wellington’s Haining Street highlighted the hatred some felt towards New Zealand’s small but long-established Chinese community.

In 1895 Southland’s Williamina (Minnie) Dean became the first – and only – woman to be hanged in New Zealand. Her story exposed the stark realities of paid childcare and the lack of choice for many women in this period.

Tuhiata (Ngāti Ruanui, Tītahi; known as Tuhi) was hanged in Wellington for the murder of the artist Mary Dobie at Te Namu, near Ōpunake. He wrote to the governor of New Zealand a few days before his execution, asking that 'my bad companions, your children, beer, rum and other spirits die with me'.

Hamiora Pere was hanged at the Terrace Gaol, Wellington. He is the only New Zealander to have been executed after being convicted of treason.

The murder of five men on the Maungatapu track, south-east of Nelson, in June 1866 shocked the colony.

Slave trader Captain Thomas McGrath skippered the winning whaleboat in a race on Lambton Harbour which carried a £10 prize

In March 1855, shepherds searching for 1000 missing sheep in the upper reaches of the Waitaki Valley apprehended suspected rustler James Mackenzie, one of New Zealand’s first and most enduring folk heroes.

A Māori raid on the Gilfillan farm at Matarawa, just east of Whanganui, left four members of the family dead. The artist John Gilfillan and one of his daughters were severely wounded.

17-year-old Maketū Wharetōtara was hanged in public, at the corner of Queen and Victoria streets in Auckland, for the 1841 murder of Elizabeth Roberton, her two children, and two other adults. 

Maketū Wharetōtara, the 17-year-old son of the Ngāpuhi chief Ruhe, killed five people at Motuarohia in the Bay of Islands. In March 1842 he became the first person to be legally executed in this country.