Sentencing notes from recent murder cases reveal common backgrounds, where the killers experienced violence and deprivation in their childhoods. Some of the convicted killers were very young, in their teens or early twenties. Many had troubled upbringings and gang associations. Ric Stevens looks into the backgrounds of some of the people who are now behind bars after intentionally taking another person’s life.
Violence, abuse, deprivation, rejection, absent parents, and exposure to gangs, alcohol and drugs - it’s no real surprise that these themes commonly run through the backgrounds of some of our worst criminals.
A detailed examination by Open Justice of judges’ sentencing notes for people jailed for murder in 2024 revealed those were the factors that cropped up time and time again.
Unsurprisingly, mental health issues sometimes played a part too, but they were commonly triggered by, or linked to, those other overriding factors.
Some of the murderers were also very young – in their late teens or early 20s.
Take, for example, Justice Williamson-Atkinson, who was only 15 when he stabbed Adrian Humphreys, a man he did not know, at a campground. He was jailed for life at the age of 17.
Hastings murderer Alizaye Todd was 19 when he beat Darcy Strickland to death as Strickland was walking home from a birthday party.
Mongrel Mob prospect Billy Tama Rielly was 22 when he received a life sentence for his part in the killing of another gang member, Eli Johnson, who had given evidence against a Mob captain.
Violence, neglect and dysfunctional upbringings
But these four young men had other things in common apart from their youth – they all had violent or neglectful upbringings.
Billy Rielly was taken away from his mother when he was 4 years old and had a “traumatic” upbringing in state care.
He was also indoctrinated into gang culture at an early age, finding what a pre-sentence report writer said was a “brotherhood of love and family” that had been lacking in his own life.
But his gang associations would also prove his undoing.
He and an older Mongrel Mob member, Quayde Hulbert, stabbed Johnson 13 times, turning Rielly into a killer while he was still in his teens.
Hulbert’s childhood was also blighted. He met his father only twice, was subjected to violence when living with extended family members, was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 3, and deemed unfit for mainstream schooling.
He followed what his mother described as a “violent and destructive path” into gang life.
Regularly beaten by gang members
Soldier Huntley witnessed his dad beat up his mum so badly that his father went to prison for it.
He was himself regularly bashed by the gang members his methamphetamine-addicted mother brought back to the house.
He, too, was placed into the care of another family member, only to experience more beatings.
Perhaps inevitably, the young Huntley drifted towards gang life, associating with the South Auckland-based Fitus gang, which in turn was affiliated with the Crips and the Rebels motorcycle club.
He was with other Fitus associates when they waded into a crowd celebrating a Samoan rugby league victory in East Tamaki, Auckland, in the early hours of November 13, 2022.
Huntley stabbed three people with a 30cm kitchen knife, including Taeao Ola, striking him in the heart. He then filmed himself making gang-related comments while standing over the dying man.
Huntley’s blighted childhood does not excuse him.
Nor do the difficult upbringings of any of the other murderers justify their later crimes.
Plenty of people grow up knowing poverty, or even violence, and go on to lead honest and useful lives.
However, the courts recognise that a deprived background – referred to by judges as “personal circumstances” - can be considered when people are sentenced.
In Huntley’s case, his personal circumstances worked in his favour and he did not get the usual life sentence for murder. He got 16 years instead.
Youth trying to escape
However, youth did not save Justice-Williamson-Atkinson from a life prison sentence – with a minimum of 11 years without parole – after he became a killer while still a child, at the age of 15.
Williamson-Atkinson was trying to escape from a youth justice programme that was conducting an outdoor experience at the Bushlands Campground at Tāngarākau, Taranaki, in May 2022.
Humphreys was also at the camp. He just happened to be there; he had no connection to the youth programme.
Williamson-Atkinson snuck into Humphreys’ camper overnight to steal his car keys and then stabbed him five times.
Williamson-Atkinson’s short life to that point had been an obvious example of how not to raise a little boy – reports to the High Court provided a catalogue of neglect, poor hygiene, lack of food and inadequate clothing.
His schooling was patchy. He attended 13 different schools, where he suffered bullying and rejection and was violent towards others.
He was stood down from school four times for that violence and suspended once. He even brought a knife to school to intimidate other students.
At the age of 10, Williamson-Atkinson was diagnosed with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He also suffered from depression and anxiety.
A psychologist said that the anxiety made him angry sometimes. He coped with his past rejection and failure through bravado.
Parents killed in car crash
By contrast, another murderer, Tamati Wilson-Tipa, had enjoyed some successes in his life.
He had been a school prefect, studied at Massey University, learned te reo and got a job teaching social workers.
But four of his close family members died between 2017 and 2020, and he turned to alcohol and drugs to cope.
This seemed to open up wounds from his own difficult childhood.
Wilson-Tipa’s parents were killed in a car crash when he was six months old. He was raised by other family members and suffered violence and abuse.
In adulthood, he developed a tendency to manage relationships through power and control – something that a forensic psychiatrist said was understandable given the way he was brought up.
That tendency also led Wilson-Tipa to terrorise his flatmate, Lionel Peat, a man with intellectual and physical disabilities, for more than a year.
Then, on December 2, 2022, after an evening of watching television and hanging Christmas decorations, Wilson-Tipa beat his 59-year-old flatmate to death as Peat pleaded for him to stop hitting him and let him live.
In the High Court at New Plymouth in March last year, Wilson-Tipa was jailed for life with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years.
A random encounter
Tamati Simpson is another killer who showed promise at school and in sport – an indication perhaps of a life he could have lived had he not been exposed early on to that common trifecta – violence, substance abuse and gangs.
Simpson was 21 when he killed a man in a random encounter in 2019.
He got into an argument with Faaifo “Joe” Siaosi, 23, a stranger who was standing outside his home when Simpson passed by.
Siaosi had turned and was walking away from the argument when Simpson shot him.
As a younger man, Simpson had excelled at rugby and league, and gained NCEA Levels 1 and 2. His sentencing judge acknowledged he had the “capacity to make a positive contribution to your family and to your community”.
But Simpson was another with a “challenging” upbringing.
He had a poor relationship with his father, who was violent towards his mother. They separated when Simpson was 10 but his mother still struggled with alcohol and drug abuse.
It was little surprise that Simpson joined the Killer Bees gang at the age of 15.
Extreme violence and brain injury
Wire Reddington, 32, is another killer with a deprived and neglected upbringing, punctuated by extreme violence and abuse.
“You were, in Crown counsel’s words, set up to fail,” Justice Jason McHerron told him when he sentenced him to life with 14 years without parole for murdering Jamie Gill at a house in Carterton after a two-day drug and alcohol bender.
Reddington stabbed, beat and suffocated his victim. He chewed off parts of his ears.
The jury rejected his plea of insanity but the court heard that Reddington’s background left him a legacy of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, suicide attempts and possibly schizophrenia.
Reddington’s mother abused drugs and alcohol during her pregnancy. Both his parents went to prison in his early childhood.
“You describe yourself as being ‘passed around, like a paycheque’ to wider whānau members who did not care for you,” Justice McHerron said.
“Throughout the trial, the court heard first-hand accounts of the suffering and ongoing violence within your whānau.”
‘Paroxysms of rage’
Jaykob Tutai, 30, was imprisoned for life with a minimum non-parole period of 13 years for stabbing his ex-partner Nazia Hai to death in Auckland.
Tutai was raised by a grandmother, partly to protect him from his mother’s unstable relationship with his father, due to alcohol abuse.
His mother described him as an introvert who sometimes displayed “paroxysms of rage” from an early age. Tutai told a psychiatrist that this reflected his long-standing resentment towards his parents for sending him away.
With limited parental supervision, Tutai’s “conduct-disordered behaviour” during childhood included shoplifting, inflicting cruelty on animals and lighting fires.
He began using drugs while still at school, leading to a long history of substance abuse, including solvents, alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamine.
Killers sentenced after 29 years
The common “personal circumstances” that put people on a pathway to becoming a killer are not a new phenomenon.
In fact, they were also found in a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago, but for which the killers were only sentenced last year.
Rebecca Wright-Meldrum and David Hawken were sentenced to life imprisonment in April for their part in the murder of Angela Blackmoore in Christchurch in 1995.
Blackmoore was stabbed 39 times. The motivation was to get her out of the way to free up a property deal; Hawken was offered $10,000 to kill her.
Rebecca Wright-Meldrum’s mother died when she was 6 and she suffered abuse as a child from another family member.
She left school without any qualifications and began working as a stripper at the age of 17.
She had two children but was unable to keep them in her care.
Wright-Meldrum lived a “disordered” life as a young adult and was hospitalised for overdosing.
Meanwhile Hawken was said by his sentencing judge to have “no moral compass” after the brutality he experienced in his early life.
Hawken’s father was violent towards him and his mother. His childhood memories were of anger, violence and rejection.
When Hawken was 15, his father kicked him out of home, dropping him off at school with two suitcases and then driving off. He was on his own from that moment, and soon had to give up school in Hamilton to support himself.
He had met William Blackmoore, later to become Angela’s husband, and followed him down to Christchurch. He was still under-age when he started working in bars there.
After Blackmoore’s murder, Hawken moved to Wānaka and got involved in community groups, supporting others.
He and Wright-Meldrum now have to serve at least 10 years in prison before they can be considered for parole.
‘Bleak reading’
A judge said the reports prepared on Alizaye Todd for killing Darcy Strickland made for “bleak reading”.
Like other murderers, Todd was exposed to family violence from his earliest years and separation from his parents.
“The fact that your father was in the Mongrel Mob meant that gratuitous violence was normalised for you,” Justice Peter Churchman said in sentencing Todd to life imprisonment with no parole for 12 years.
“Both of your parents were incarcerated for most of your life.
“You were moved around many family homes reportedly because of your difficult behaviour. You were subjected to violent discipline in the various homes you were placed in,” Justice Churchman said.
“You began to commit crimes to obtain the things you didn’t have and to provide for yourself, and began using alcohol and drugs at a young age.”
Todd was placed in state care from the age of 13, and did his first stretch in an adult prison from the age of 16.
He has since been diagnosed with PSTD and ADHD. When he killed Strickland, he was off his medication for these as he did not know how to obtain it when he wasn’t in jail.
In the days before the murder, Todd was abusing substances: cannabis, alcohol, methamphetamine and MDMA.
The judge also noted that, for Todd, the norms and values of gang culture had superseded any positive influence he might have been able to get from tikanga Māori.
Keontay Wayne Chadwick was also involved in Strickland’s killing, but was convicted of manslaughter, not murder.
He too was alienated from te ao Māori. His father, a senior Mongrel Mob member, spent much of his son’s childhood in prison and made physical discipline the norm when he was home.
Chadwick had a severe addiction to methamphetamine, which he began using as a teenager, and to alcohol. He has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Lauren Dickason was convicted of murdering her three children. Photo: Pool
Mental health, drugs and alcohol
When blighted childhoods were apparently absent from the backgrounds of convicted killers in 2024, there were two other common factors that came into play – mental health issues and the abuse of alcohol or drugs.
Mental health problems were clearly an issue in the case of Lauren Dickason, who killed her three young daughters in Timaru, and a case with name suppression in which a young mother was convicted of the infanticide of a 15-week-old baby girl.
Christian Eteuati was charged with murdering a man he did not know, Tom Coombes, but was found not criminally responsible on the grounds of insanity. He was ordered to be detained in a hospital as a special patient.
Andrew Lamositele-Brown grew up in a relatively happy household, but began sniffing petrol from about the age of 12. By 20, he was using methamphetamine and then got into criminal activity to finance his habit.
He moved to Melbourne, became president of the Hell’s Angels, was deported back to New Zealand as a 501, and on Boxing Day 2021, killed gang prospect Petau Petau.
Lamositele-Brown was sentenced to life imprisonment with no parole for 12 years and eight months.
Ethan Dane Dodds. Photo: Dean Purcell
‘Extremely dysfunctional’
Ethan Dodds and Julius Te Hivaka were convicted of the shooting murder of a low-level drug dealer, Benjamin Mcintosh, for his stash and pokie winnings.
Both had difficult childhoods. Dodds, who pulled the trigger, was described as having an “extremely dysfunctional” home environment growing up and was involved in criminal activity from an early age.
At 25, when he became a killer, Dodds had spent most of his young life either in state care or prison.
His lawyer told his sentencing judge that he had rarely spent three months outside a prison or youth justice facility after the age of 11.
