Naomi Morrison's life was dominated by two things: drugs and drama.
She needed them both equally, and they were inextricably linked.
In July 2020, Morrison was sentenced in the Dunedin District Court for earlier turning up at an ex-partner’s home, just weeks after giving birth, drunk on home-brewed bourbon.
She grabbed a knife and threatened to self-harm, wounding the man when he intervened, then tried to hit him with a large pot.
Morrison, the judge said, was "quite literally out of control", but a report put her at low risk of reoffending.
A little more than a year later she stabbed her friend to death.
After consuming alcohol and cannabis with 41-year-old Ameria Whatuira, Morrison inflicted numerous wounds to her chest and head.
It was not a fight or a spat between mates that suddenly turned violent.
A post mortem showed no signs of defensive wounds to Ms Whatuira.
Morrison taped a rubbish bag over her victim’s head, wrapped her in bedding and left her body on the deck outside the Dunedin home where she was house-sitting.
A week later, she enlisted the help of another drinking buddy, Tialoren Topping, to help bury Ms Whatuira in a shallow grave in the steep, dense bush beside the house.
Cold-blooded murder, cold-hearted disposal — but why?
When she was sentenced in the High Court at Dunedin last month to life imprisonment with a minimum of 12 years three months behind bars, the futility of the killing was painfully plain.
If the public gallery, packed with members of Ms Whatuira’s whanau, was expecting a revelation, a reason for their grief, they would have been disappointed.
"She’s genuinely at a loss to explain why this occurred," said Morrison’s lawyer John Westgate.
Speaking to the Otago Daily Times on condition of anonymity, he described living with Morrison for nearly a year, trying to help her shake her substance-abuse demons.
Viewing her actions through a lens of logic and rationality was inherently flawed, he said.
"She’s so damaged, she’s able to turn anything she imagines into a new reality.
"It’s impossible to take what she says and know whether it’s true or not."
Leaving a corpse on her deck metres away from where she ate and slept might seem unconscionable to most people.
"Naomi is quite different," he said.
When it came to Morrison’s reactions, there was no typical cause and effect.
"It’s just this chain of events that gets worse and worse.
"It’s just no surprise that she would find some drama and someone was going to get killed."
If there was no conflict in which Morrison was embroiled, she would manufacture it herself.
She complained to Harry about being abused on Facebook and suddenly he started receiving the threatening messages, too.
After initial worry, he recognised the vocabulary, the oddly idiosyncratic language of the threats used.
Harry knew he could not confront Morrison, it would simply cause more of the drama she craved.
The pair met at Geeky Gecko Backpackers in mid-2020.
Harry had recently moved to Dunedin and had taken a room there in exchange for his role as factotum.
The place suddenly became a halfway house, filled mainly with those down on their luck and short of options.
Harry, though, saw Morrison as different.
"I thought here was more to her than meets the eye. I try not to judge people," he said.
"I didn’t perceive her as being particularly harmful."
But before long he got a taste of Morrison’s penchant for petty squabbles and her willingness to resort to violence.
He recalled one of the residents put on an impromptu magic show, and when making the big reveal he accidentally elbowed Morrison, who was standing behind him.
The profuse apologies were not enough.
"She gets really upset then fumes and comes back and she clobbers him, leaves him with a black eye, because she was quite convinced that if something happened to her it had to be deliberate.
It was his first insight into how Morrison could warp most situations in order to dwell on this sense of victimhood.
"Things go wrong because other people make them go wrong and it’s never accidental, it’s never her fault and it’s always somebody else’s — and they need to pay," he said.
"My biggest fault is I’m a rescuer and I saw this person I thought I could help," Harry said.
Morrison was adamant she wanted to change and convinced him if they left the backpackers she would have a better chance.
It made sense.
"There was no way she was going to stop taking lots of drugs and doing dumb s... if she was in an environment where there were people doing lots of drugs and dumb s... ," Harry said.
With help from Morrison’s mother, he found a place in Glenleith for them to house sit, which seemed ideal.
For Morrison, however, it was little more than a change of scenery.
Harry said a typical day featured her doing as little as possible — B-grade horror movies and takeaways.
And there were the drugs that underpinned her existence.
Morrison was prescribed seven different types of medication for her various issues, he said.
"They were supposed to be taken on a regular basis and not stockpiled and then taken in a binge with all sorts of other things."
So what was Morrison’s drug of choice?
"What wasn’t her drug of choice? Anything. Alcohol, speed, spiced with a large dose of insanity."
Another of Morrison’s ex-partners spoken to by the ODT confirmed her multiple addictions.
He labelled her as "very insecure and jealous" and outlined her erratic behaviour.
"[She] could have laughs ... but sometimes she would sit outside her home crying," he said.
In May last year, after several months at Tanner Rd, Harry "exploded".
He attacked Morrison and was jailed for more than two years.
"I’m not proud of this but I had all I could put up with," he said, now on parole.
Although he served a total of 18 months behind bars, the alternative would have undoubtedly been worse, Harry said.
"If [the assault] hadn’t happened and I didn’t get arrested I would have either been killed or got involved in a murder, whether I wanted to or not.
On August 6 last year, a couple of weeks after Harry was sentenced, Morrison fatefully invited Ms Whatuira to Tanner Rd for a drinking session that would end with murder.
Whether or not they knew it, the women had much in common.
They both knew grief, particularly Ms Whatuira who lost a child to suicide in 2017 and three family members to murder.
One of Morrison’s family members was also murdered in recent years, the court heard at sentencing.
Both had young children growing up out of their care as well.
Whanau members spoke about Ms Whatuira’s desperation to turn her life around so she could regain custody of her child and commit to motherhood.
Tragically, though, she suffered repeated setbacks.
Morrison was not the only one to inflict violence against her.
In February this year — as Morrison languished behind bars before pleading guilty — 28-year-old Maui Kereopa Rangitoheriri appeared in the Dunedin District Court for two assaults on Ms Whatuira.
Judge Michael Turner temporarily suppressed the details of the case, but they can now be revealed.
In January 2021, about the same time Morrison moved into Tanner Rd, Rangitoheriri and Ms Whatuira began a brief and ill-fated relationship.
Within days of knowing each other his paranoia and jealousy arose.
The man kicked her door in after wrongly believing she had taken his wallet and despite the outburst, the victim helped tidy his room before his impending eviction.
Rangitoheriri repaid her kindness later that day by pushing her on to a bed and trying to force himself on her as she curled into a ball.
When she kicked out at him, he pushed her hard, slamming her head into a wall.
Rangitoheriri was jailed for six months.
The court heard he planned to rejoin his family in the North Island and "be a father to [his] children".
While Harry was at the Otago Corrections Facility, he received a letter from Christchurch Women’s Prison.
A narrow strip of torn blue paper, stuffed inside an envelope.
After requesting he hang on to some of her possessions, Morrison added: "You will be out of prison before me I’d say."
An understatement.
She signed off: "anyway thanks for all the good times we had," a cutesy heart penned above her name.
Harry was utterly flummoxed and believed the letter could only be a bid to entice him to breach the protection order the court had made in Morrison’s favour at his sentencing.
"I think it serves two purposes. One is to annoy me, the other is to see if I’d be stupid enough to reply.
"Despite all the madness there’s an absolute cunning to have people set up," he said.
The letter was buried deep in a box of personal papers and communications, the sole document in a file marked "Naomi".
"I like to refer to her as a runaway train and the trail of disaster is wide and long," Harry said.
"I don’t have a lot of regrets in life — you do dumb things but you always move on — but I totally regret meeting her."
*Name changed to protect the source.
