When the two rapists walked into the Christchurch District Court last week, they never looked back.
The men fixed their eyes straight ahead; the eyes of dozens of women in the public gallery fixed on the back of their heads.
For nearly five years, the pair had fought any suggestion they systemically drugged and sexually assaulted women at Mama Hooch bar and a local restaurant in Christchurch.
At trial, in February and March this year, their lawyers had repeatedly scrutinised the victims.
Their questions ricocheted across the legal benches at Courtroom 19: How much did you have to drink that night? You were flirting, weren’t you? Why didn’t you tell your boyfriend?
But last Friday, the charade was over. Over the course of 10 minutes, Judge Paul Mabey KC said the word “guilty” 47 times.
The men didn’t react, as they were found guilty of drugging and raping a woman at a restaurant.
The younger of the two – aged 37 – didn’t flinch as he was found guilty of filming the graphic sexual assault.
“One for the collection,” a man had been heard saying on the recording that night.
They didn’t even look at each other as they were found guilty of drugging 17 women, many by slipping drugs into drinks.
Now, they were amassing a different kind of collection: the verdicts rushing in as a flood.
Rape? Guilty. Stupefying? Guilty. Indecent assault? Guilty. Disabling? Guilty.
In the back of the court, two women held each other, sobbing quietly. Others looked at the ground, emotionless.
Their long journey to justice was over: the truth emerging at last.
Deny, deny, deny: Five years of lies
Over six weeks of evidence at trial, the Crown prosecutors painted a picture of two sexual predators trying to flee responsibility for their crimes.
The prosecution brought allegations from 30 women, in the end proving 17 were either stupefied or disabled by the two men at the popular inner city Christchurch bar Mama Hooch, and a nearby restaurant, between 2015 and 2018. Of those 17, 12 went on to suffer sexual assaults, from indecent assault to rape.
But the denials from the now-convicted rapists stretched on for five years, beginning on the very first day the police became involved.
It began in a police interview on July 16, 2018, where - sitting in a small interview room, in a black puffer jacket - one of the men denied all impropriety.
At that point, he’d been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting two women, who we’ll refer to as Charlotte and Madison, in a horrifying incident, where the women repeatedly blacked out at a restaurant in the city near Mama Hooch.
Both women described losing pieces of memory after consuming what they thought was MDMA, provided by one of the men.
One woman told police she was left feeling like a “walking doll”.
“Seconds after taking it, it felt like I’ve dived into a pool, like I was underwater, like I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, I was not in control of my body,” she said as she gave evidence in court.
“I just kept screaming at him, ‘what did you give me?’”
Later that week, the denials rolled in from Interview Room 1 at the Christchurch Central Police Station.
Asked if he had been supplying drugs, the man seemed shocked.
“Definitely not me,” he said.
“Why do you think people would come and tell us that?” Detective Roger Carran replied.
“I’ve got literally no idea, this is what I’m trying to establish as well,” the man responded.
He admitted walking with the first woman – Charlotte – between Mama Hooch and the restaurant, but denied Madison was even there, and tried to convince the investigator Charlotte had romantic interest in him.
“If we could keep this confidential, she said to me she likes me, she’s attracted to me,” he told the detective.
“She began obviously to kiss me and stuff and then you know obviously it was a bit awkward and then from that point on she snapped out of it.”
His neck was covered in scratches: the man claiming they were left by the passion of the exchange. Later, he even suggested Charlotte had groped him, rather than the other way around, saying “one thing led to another”.
Interpol warned: Rapist arrested at airport
But when news started leaking out a month later, in August 2018, the same man had a sudden desire to take an international holiday.
On August 23, police issued a media release after discovering they had 24 reports of stupefying in their database, linked to Mama Hooch.
The man, who attempted to board a flight to Sydney at 5.35am the following day, pinged an Interpol alert. Within a few minutes he was speaking to police.
“He informed me that he had taken a break and had intended to visit a friend in Sydney, before returning next Wednesday,” said the officer on duty, John Laugesen.
“I further informed him that he was wanted to be arrested.”
Before the morning was out, he was at the Christchurch police station. Within two months, on November 15, 2018, it was the police who were up early in the morning.
They knocked on the door of the rapist’s home at 6.45am. He answered wearing his pyjamas and was promptly arrested for sexual violation, as the police seized his phone, trawled through his belongings, and found drugs hidden in an old CD case in his bedroom.
Rapists binned phones, deleted apps
Soon the case was expanding to involve a second man, with police seizing evidence across four properties.
The pair of rapists – arrested alongside a third person, who also faced charges – were suspected of binning some of their devices, potentially hiding incriminating material, as the police closed in.
Investigators seized 46 electronic devices in total, including cell phones and camera SD cards. But they soon noticed some cellphones were missing, leaving them to suspect a “black hole” in the evidence.
“That black hole strongly supports the inference that the defendants deleted apps from their phones and or dumped phones following [their] arrest, and seizure of [one man’s] phone in July 2018 in order to destroy potentially incriminating evidence against them,” Crown prosecutor Andrew McCrae told the court.
But there was still plenty for police to go on: included on one of the rapist’s phones was a Whatsapp chat log with more than 20,000 messages, where the two men repeatedly targeted women at Mama Hooch bar.
On at least 10 occasions, they provided photos of potential targets, writing comments like “boys, who wants it?” or “this one’s for you”. At one point, they shared nude images of a woman they all knew, stolen from her phone.
Later, they joked about a date-rape drug, saying “I just roofied [a woman’s] drink”. A friend responded: “Did you buy her a “Roofiecolada”?
Data from the phones showed they had also deleted several apps on various devices, including Whatsapp. But not everything stayed hidden: police uncovering a secret mobile app called “HideItPro”.
The hidden folder contained 44 sex videos, some modified and edited, including a graphic video taken during the rape of a woman who had been drugged.
According to the prosecution, the folder was a way for the rapist to revisit the night: a “trophy”.
‘I consented to nothing’: A barrage of questions in court
By the time the trial began in February this year, the two men were ready to take their fight on the offensive.
In six weeks of evidence in the Christchurch District Court, involving more than 130 witnesses, their lawyers repeatedly questioned the women about their alcohol and drug use.
The questions would follow a familiar formula, all variations of the same thought: “How much did you have to drink that night?”
Over and over again, women were asked to specify their exact level of intoxication. How many wines did you have before you left? How many wines did you have at the bar? Is it fair to say you drank more alcohol than you normally would?
In one case, a lawyer for one of the men accused a woman of providing drugs to her client.
The woman – who we referred to as Charlotte earlier in this story – had described losing control of her body and being graphically sexually assaulted, after her attacker gave her a substance he told her was MDMA.
But Charlotte had also consumed MDMA with friends on her own account, earlier in the evening.
The crime is now a proven fact – the man would later be convicted of drugging and sexual assault – but when she arrived in court, the victim was accused of lying.
“[I’m] suggesting to you that he did not kiss you without your consent,” the man’s lawyer said.
“I consented to nothing,” the woman replied, speaking from the witness box.
The lawyer repeatedly challenged the sexual assault victim’s version of events.
“[I suggest] that he did not pull your hair?,” she said.
“He was pulling my hair,” the woman responded.
“He did not bite you?”
“He was biting me.”
“He did not touch your vagina?”
“He was touching me everywhere.”
By the end of the trial, their defence was successful in some cases, with the Crown unable to prove whether some of the women had been drugged, and by whom.
The associate of the two rapists, who was on trial at the same time, walked away with just a minor charge of supplying a Class B drug; the judge finding him not guilty of stupefying, rape, and sexual violation.
The Crown weren’t successful with all the charges brought against the men, with the judge finding the men not guilty of or discharging several allegations where women had described feeling drugged after consuming drinks at Mama Hooch bar, but were not sexually assaulted.
But the evidence on others were overwhelming: with guilty verdicts or guilty pleas reached on around two thirds of the charges, including some of the most graphic accounts of sexual assault.
The truth at last
At the end – after the years of denials, the police interviews, the exhaustive court process – the women showed the dignity they had been denied.
Gathered in court to hear the decision, many had never met each other. Their stories, eerily similar; their experiences endured alone.
Sometimes verdicts are a time when victims voice their criticisms in court, yelling across the legal benches as attackers head to the cells.
But as the hammer fell in Courtroom 19, silence settled on the public gallery. There was silence, too, among the gathered police officers.
It’s now very likely that the men will be jailed when they appear for sentencing in July. Their name suppression may lift too, with arguments to be heard in the High Court following an appeal.
Together, the assembled crowd had stopped two prolific predators, their days of hunting young women brought to an end.
And as they filed out of Courtroom 19, none of the women looked back.
Their ordeal over; their eyes fixed straight ahead.
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