John Campbell: Rachel Molloy died a terrible death – how well did police investigate it?

From the beginning there were questions surrounding 30-year-old Rachel Molloy's supposed fall to the foot of her own front steps, but was her mother, Mandy Molloy, the only person asking them? As the police launch an independent investigation into their own response to Rachel's death, John Campbell tells the story of this mysterious case, the horrible crime that preceded it, and the tenacious mother who would not accept police silence.

Late on the night of May 4, 2022, almost exactly four years ago, Rachel Molloy was found at the bottom of the ten concrete stairs that ascended to her Auckland flat.

Her skull was smashed. Blood was pooling on the hard, grey surface beneath her. She was 30. And her short, kind life was coming to an end.

Watch the new series of The Woman at the Bottom of the Stairs on TVNZ+.

At 5:54am on the morning of May 5, with her overnight shift winding up, one of the police officers who’d been dispatched to that terrible scene emailed a colleague.

“Just letting you know we attended an incident tonight, where Rachel Molloy appears to have been drunk and fallen down the stairs to her unit. She has received critical injuries and will not survive.”

Bad news can travel by email, and it can arrive in person, 550 kilometres south.

“I think it was quarter to five in the morning,” Rachel’s mother, Mandy says. “A policeman knocked on our door. We were asleep. My partner answered the door, and they asked for me, and he told me that Rachel had this catastrophic fall and wasn't expected to survive.”

Fall.

Not yet, not quite so soon, but within days, particularly after, she says, a police officer told her the death was being treated as a possible crime, Mandy Molloy would wonder how they had decided it was a fall? How did they know? Four years on, she still doesn’t have an answer to that question.

Mandy, and Rachel’s dad Leon (non-biological, but her father in every lived and loving sense of that word) drove from Levin to Wellington, then flew to Auckland.

Imagine that trip. The panic. The howling confusion. The grief.

“The doctors are keeping her on life support until her family arrive from Levin,” the email between police continued.

And then there was a personal moment, cop to cop.

“I see she is a victim of yours, so just giving you a heads up.”

If the story of Rachel Molloy feels familiar, it’s perhaps because I’m returning to it, as we return to things that trouble us or feel unanswered.

At the end of 2024, we released a six-part series about Rachel Molloy and her mum on TVNZ+, called The Woman at the Bottom of the Stairs, with an accompanying feature on 1News.co.nz.

That feature relays how I was first contacted about Rachel Molloy in May 2023. Almost three years ago – a long time in journalism.

Earlier this year, my friend, colleague and former boss, Carol Hirschfeld, asked me what it was that kept me circling back, and back again, to a story where there’s no obvious denouement, no resolution.

In short, it’s the silence. And how loud the silence has been.

I explore this in detail in the second series of The Woman at the Bottom of the Stairs, which has just been released on TVNZ+. It’s a work of care and laborious scrutiny. Please watch it.

But everyone closely familiar with this case – Mandy herself, the woman who first contacted me to tell me about it, the highly experienced Victim Support worker who cared for Mandy and Leon in Auckland, the neighbour who found Rachel at the bottom of the stairs, then phoned 111, then watched (for days) to see what, if anything, police did – has explicitly expressed disquiet or bewilderment about the extent of the initial police investigation into Rachel’s death.

Which is not to say Rachel didn’t have a drunken fall. That’s entirely possible.

But it is to ask the questions Mandy has been asking police for four exhausting years now: how do you know it was a fall, and how did you exclude other possibilities?

Answers to those questions may be coming.

Since I began this work, the case has come before the Independent Police Conduct Authority, and as a result of that, police themselves have begun a form of reinvestigation, retracing their own steps, or lack of them. The Coroner’s Office is standing by, awaiting the outcome of that work before progressing its inquiry. And all of this, it seems fair to say, has happened because Mandy kept asking and asking and asking those questions.

But Mandy’s voice may have never been heard if she hadn’t been introduced to me by a friend.

And there’s something arbitrary about that. Happenstance. Lucky, or unlucky, dip. Policing by lottery.

Mandy sees media attention that surrounds the deaths of some young women, the candlelight vigils attended by high profile police officers, and she wonders where any of this treatment was for her daughter? Twice.

Yes, if we return to the 5:54am police email, we will remember that echoing line: “I see she is a victim of yours...”

Rachel became a “victim” in June 2020 – two years before she died.

At the time of her death, a trial was pending which related to those events. Some of the offenders against Rachel had already pleaded guilty. This is important. It meant Rachel was in the police system as a “victim”, a status clearly flagged on the night she was found dying.

Back in 2020 Rachel lived in a high-rise, central Auckland apartment building. One evening, as she exited the main door, a woman approached her, claiming to be in distress and asking for help. Rachel, with her trademark empathy for the underdog, invited the woman upstairs to her apartment. That kindness changed the course of her short life.

“She was drugged and sexually assaulted, and everything she owned was stolen,” says Mandy. (The sexual assault charges relating to that night were dropped after Rachel’s death.)

I remember Mandy first telling me this, as we sat in her living room in Levin. In that moment I was swamped by the tide of it all, and I’m not sure I fully understood what it meant. It wasn’t until I read the police Summary of Facts and the transcripts of police interviews with two of the offenders that I began to truly comprehend the magnitude of it. And how it must have impacted Rachel. And her mum.

The description below, of what happened to Rachel, is derived from security camera footage, from police interviews with two of the accused, from other police documents, and from the guilty pleas of four of the 2020 offenders.

The first woman, in “distress”, went inside with Rachel, as Mandy described. Some time later, four more people were let into Rachel’s apartment by that first woman. By this stage, we now know, Rachel was unconscious.

“We went in, this lady was out cold like she was crashed out, wazed out,” one of the offenders told police.

Some time later, Rachel regained consciousness. She was alone. Her apartment had been emptied out of almost all her possessions. She remembered letting the first woman in, but nothing after that.

She asked to see the building’s security cameras, one of which looked from the lifts directly down the corridor to her door. What she saw was so shattering she never fully recovered from it.

Rachel saw herself arrive with the first woman. Time passed. She saw the first woman leave and return with four more people. Time passed. She saw them all taking property out of her apartment (those four would later all plead guilty to various property theft and burglary charges). Then she saw four of the five leave for the last time. But the sole male offender remained behind.

Time passed. The male left.

We will never know what did (or didn’t) happen when he was alone with an unconscious Rachel Molloy. He was only ever charged with property offences.

Some of the co-offenders who, according to their police interviews, thought they were committing an opportunistic property crime, were disturbed by the lingering presence of the male offender and the possible seriousness of the crime in which they were now involved.

“I just kind of had this dark vision of, what the f*** is he doing there?”

“This lady crashed out, well, she was wazed and when you’re wazed you don’t know what, you know, you can’t feel nothing.”

“And I was ‘where’s, where’s the male’ and they said he was still upstairs. I was like ‘f***ing bro. Sister go up and get the bro’ and she goes ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, he’s alright’ and I was like ‘nah f***’ and then I got scared.”

These are the verbatim quotes to police of people who were there. Co-offenders.

Imagine being Rachel, watching that footage. Watching the minutes pass. Knowing it was you in there. Alone with them. Unconscious.

At first, Rachel felt unable to persuade police that what had happened was potentially much more serious than a property crime.

“Is anyone going to come fingerprint my apartment,” she emailed police.

Police wrote back: “If you remember who it was that came into your house please advise police and we will reopen the case.”

When Mandy first told me about that letter from police, I wasn’t sure that I completely believed her. I have it now and it really does say those words.

How could Rachel remember? She didn’t know who the first woman was and she was unconscious when the other four were there.

Five weeks later she received a written apology.

“As I stated in our conversation there was miscommunication between police workgroups that has contributed to the below standard service that you initially received. Please accept my apology on behalf of police for the level of service you received at that time.”

Service.

The subsequent police investigation was concerted, heartfelt and largely successful. Four people pleaded guilty to various burglary charges.

And while the man who stayed behind after the women had left was never charged with anything more serious than burglary, the first woman, who was allegedly a kind of Trojan Horse for the others, was set to go on trial in June 2022 on charges of sexual assault of Rachel. Those charges were based on the woman’s police interviews.

The trial never happened. Rachel Molloy was found at the bottom of the stairs the month before it would have occurred.

With no victim and no central witness, the charges against the one remaining alleged offender were dropped. The woman with whom this all allegedly began is the only one of the five people involved to have not been convicted of anything.

And so Rachel was a “victim”, as stated in that internal police email. And the police officer who received that message, and who was prosecuting the sexual assault case, seems to have been deeply upset by her death.

“I’m absolutely devastated at this news,” he wrote at 11.04am on Thursday, May 5, 2022, five hours and ten minutes after he received the 5.54am email telling him what had happened.

“Her matter was due in court at the start of the year but was delayed due to Covid. We were due back in court next month, but it appears Rachel will never get to see justice delivered for the horrible crime committed against her.”

And here’s where the questions hang, or did for Mandy.

If a “horrible crime” was committed against Rachel, and if that “horrible crime” was in Rachel’s own home, and if a trial was pending, to what extent would police want to eliminate the possibility of any connection between that 2020 crime and Rachel’s sudden and violent death, also at home, (although, a new one) two years later?

Is that an unreasonable question for a mother to ask?

And when Mandy didn’t receive answers she found even remotely persuasive, was it unreasonable of her to keep asking?

“We need to ensure she does not play the both of us off,” a senior police officer emailed to a colleague after Mandy Molloy had approached them separately.

What was she supposed to do, a swimming instructor from Levin, with limited income, no legal experience, no establishment connections, and no experience of using the Official Information Act? What else could she do but keep asking questions? And keep asking them, when the answers seemed absent or inadequate?

To keep asking police, had they spoken to the 2020 offenders? Even if only to support the “fall” scenario by eliminating any possibility of foul play?

Had police done that? No.

It took a long time for Mandy to know that.

On December 18, 2025, three years and seven months after Rachel died, a detective senior sergeant emailed Mandy.

“At this stage we still only have two statements from the five individuals involved in the home invasion. The other three have all been approached but are now avoiding any follow up contact.”

Just over a month later, in January this year, an email update confirmed that four of the five offenders had been spoken to and denied any involvement with Mandy’s fatal fall.

But how is it possible that these emails arrived over three and a half years after Mandy’s death? Why had so much time elapsed before this was done?

Was Mandy Molloy right when she insisted, repeatedly, that too little had been done to persuade her, with certainty, that Rachel’s death was a fall?

On January 13 of this year, Mandy Molly received an email in response to her requests for police to model or reconstruct Rachel’s fall to demonstrate how it’s possible to fall down ten concrete stairs, smash your skull in a fatal head injury, and have no other visible injuries on your body.

“Regarding the scene reconstruction,” a detective emailed back, “having had time to review the file and visit the scene, there are too many unknowns to accurately complete a physical reconstruction at this time as to how Rachel has fallen down the stairs.”

Too many unknowns?

For four years, that, exactly, has been Mandy Molloy’s point.

And so here we are.

Riding in the wake of Mandy Molloy’s tenacity and love, waiting to see what washes up.

Did police do enough, at first? And if they are doing more now, why? And what does that tell us about the initial investigation?

I’d like to ask police that. I’d like to ask what, exactly, was done at the scene, after Rachel Molloy was found?

I’d like to ask why two different people, Mandy, with Leon as a witness (and this is recorded in a formal statement taken from Mandy by police at the Auckland Central Police Station) and the neighbour who found Rachel on that terrible night, are both adamant that police officers told them Rachel’s fatal injuries were being treated as a possible crime?

What changed? And why so fast?

But police won’t talk to me. Nor will they answer written questions.

The first reference to me in the police emails I’ve obtained via an OIA is in June 2023. In the almost three years since then, I’ve repeatedly been declined interview requests.

Internal police correspondence from September 2024 makes this seem almost wilful, pointed, controlled.

“Defer JC pls,” one text begins. And the text ends: “Long delay pls.”

Mandy Molloy is exhausted now.

Her campaign has achieved significant victories – including an Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) investigation – police looking back over what they did and didn’t do.

But where once Mandy was galvanised by the loud silence, made singular and determined by it, speaking out against it has begun to take its toll.

I went to see her in Levin at the beginning of March. For the first time in my dealings with her, she seemed flat.

On March 13, I received an email “to be attributed to” Detective Inspector Chris Barry, District Manager, Criminal Investigations, Auckland City Police.

I hadn’t dealt with DI Barry before, or often seen his name in the police correspondence I’ve obtained. He appears not to have been involved in the investigation. But I’m told he’s highly regarded as a voice of reasonable oversight.

“Police notes TVNZ’s request for an interview around the investigation into the death of Rachel Molloy in 2020,” the email begins.

(Rachel’s death was in 2022, by the way. 2020 was the “home invasion”.)

The email continues...

“As you will be aware, Ms Molloy’s death remains an active Coronial matter.

"A complaint was also filed with the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) in 2025. This has resulted in Police carrying out some reinvestigation into Ms Molloy’s death.

"Police are continuing to engage with the IPCA through that process, and we are awaiting its findings to be issued.

"We consider it would be inappropriate to comment prematurely before due process is able to be carried out.

"Police is open to engaging in an interview around our investigation once this process is complete.”

I note the IPCA investigation that was cited as a reason to not talk to me arose in 2025. I’d begun asking for interviews long before that.

Due process? Or overdue?

None of this means that Rachel Molloy didn’t drunkenly fall to her death.

Rachel was self-medicating with alcohol. She was on prescription drugs for anxiety and depression. The autopsy report from 2022 states: “The circumstances and injuries are consistent with falling backwards down a flight of stairs.”

But then, immediately, the same report says: “However other scenarios may also provide an explanation for the injuries sustained.”

How hard were those “other scenarios” explored in 2022?

After the 2020 crime Rachel had moved home to Levin from Auckland. But she was lost, even when she was with her family.

And when she moved back to Auckland, for work, for the big city life she’d dreamed of, to get ready for the impending trial, she was a shadow of herself. She hated leaving her new, Mt Eden home. She was terrified of anyone young who walked towards her.

She would not have gone outside, Mandy insists, on a dark, May night. Dressed in almost nothing. With no phone, no wallet, and no keys.

She would not have locked herself out. (Her door was found to be locked.)

She would not have fallen to her death down ten concrete stairs without bruising, scrapes or abrasions on her hands, elbows or back.

Mandy tried to explain this to police. She begged for details about what forensic examinations they’d done.

It’s not that Mandy Molloy doesn’t believe Rachel fell to her death. It’s just that she doesn’t understand how police are so sure.

The silence. The long, loud silence.

“I'm not stupid,” she told me. As Rachel looked down on us from photos on the walls.

“I know my daughter better than anyone, and they weren't listening to me, and they keep telling me the same thing over and over with different scenarios. It just felt so insulting. You know, she tried to climb on a balustrade. Why would she do that? You know, she, she locked herself out. Why would she do that? Why was she outside? You know that I haven't been given those answers.

“It just feels like they came along, made the decision, packed up and went home.”

Watch the new series of The Woman at the Bottom of the Stairs on TVNZ+.