Larnoch Road murders

The Larnoch Road murders is a controversial murder case involving the 1989 deaths of Deane Wade Fuller-Sandys and Leah Romany Stephens in Auckland, New Zealand. It led to a miscarriage of justice for four defendants, two of whom – Gail Maney and Stephen Stone – were convicted of murder in 1999. Maney spent a total of 16 years in prison; Stone spent 26 years inside and was released on bail a few days after the convictions of all four were overturned in October 2024.

On 21 August 1989, Fuller-Sandys, a 21-year-old Auckland tyre-fitter, left home to go fishing. He never returned. His body was never found and authorities initially believed he probably drowned after being swept out to sea at West Auckland's Whatipu Beach, where his car was discovered shortly afterwards. An old friend of Fuller-Sandys later told police that he may have committed suicide, as he had just broken up with his girlfriend.

Five days later, on 26 August 1989, Leah Stephens, a 20-year old Auckland sex worker, also disappeared. Her skeletal remains were discovered in a forest near the Muriwai Golf Course three years later, in June 1992. Police enquiries at the time did not lead to an arrest in her case either. In 1997, a witness being interviewed by detective Mark Franklin linked the deaths of Fuller-Sandys and Stephens after previously denying there was any connection. After a two-year investigation, Gail Maney, who said she never even met Fuller-Sandys, was convicted of commissioning Stephen Stone, a gang member, to kill him over what the police portrayed as a drug-related dispute. Maney's conviction depended on the testimony of four people who allegedly witnessed the murder of Fuller-Sandys. All four were granted legal immunity despite their participation in an alleged murder, and two of them subsequently recanted their testimony, saying they were coerced by police into making false statements.

The case was controversial because eight years elapsed after Fuller-Sandys and Stephens died before the police decided to investigate possible links between the two deaths; because convictions were secured without forensic evidence and four alleged witnesses were granted legal immunity; and because two of those people later recanted their original trial testimony. Even after she was released from prison on parole, Maney continued to state she was innocent and that she never even met Fuller-Sandys. After 30 years, Stephen Stone also appealed his convictions. Private investigator Tim McKinnel said the case could be "the greatest miscarriage of justice ever seen in New Zealand". In July 2024, the Crown prosecutor conceded that a miscarriage had occurred, and in October 2024, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of all four defendants, and ordered a retrial for Stone.

Police investigation

Eight years after the two deaths, Auckland police received new information about a burglary which had allegedly occurred at Gail Maney's rental home at 22 Larnoch Road, in the Auckland suburb of Henderson, two weeks before Fuller-Sandys disappeared. Based on information provided by a neighbour who said she had witnessed the burglary, the police claimed that Fuller-Sandys had previously sold drugs to Maney; that he then returned and stole them back off her; that Maney believed the burglary was committed by Fuller-Sandys – although she consistently denied ever meeting him – and then persuaded Stone, who was a gang member, to kill him there at Maney's rental home.

Another witness made eight different statements to the police without mentioning the alleged conversation indicating that Maney asked Stone to kill Fuller-Sandys. She also claimed to have witnessed his murder, but subsequently recanted this portion of her testimony. Based on the testimony of this witness and three others who were granted immunity from prosecution, the police concluded that Fuller-Sandys was enticed to come to Larnoch Road on 21 August 1989 on his way to go fishing. When he arrived, he was allegedly attacked by Stone, who then shot him in front of Maney and seven other witnesses, among whom was Leah Stephens.

Stone allegedly passed the gun to each of four male witnesses, including Maney's younger brother Colin Neil Maney (born c. 1971) and a mutual acquaintance, Mark William Henriksen (born c. 1967), and directed them to fire bullets into the body to make them complicit in the murder. The men allegedly disposed of Fuller-Sandys' body in Woodhill Forest. His remains have never been found. His vehicle was supposedly left at Whatipu Beach to make it appear he had drowned there.

The police claimed that five days later, Stone, believing that Leah Stephens was likely to inform police of the murder of Fuller-Sandys, raped and then murdered her with a knife at the house on Larnoch Road. During the investigation, the two men who were granted immunity gave police three different accounts of where Stephens was murdered: a car park in Queen Street, Buchanan Street in the suburb of Kingsland, and finally Maney's home on Larnoch Road.

Mark Franklin, the lead detective on the case, was the officer who tried to link the two murders together. During the investigation, he was discovered by other police officers sharing a joint in downtown Auckland. The incident could have ended Franklin's career, but he was let off with a warning. After his retirement from the police force, he was jailed for selling cannabis in the Cook Islands.

The investigation took two years, after which Maney and Stone were arrested and charged with the murder of Fuller-Sandys. Stone was also charged with the rape and murder of Stephens. Colin Maney and Mark Henriksen were charged with being accessories to the murder of Fuller-Sandys. All four denied the charges.

First trial

The trial was held in March 1999 at Auckland's High Court. The Crown prosecutor was unable to produce a body (in the case of Fuller-Sandys) or any forensic evidence such as DNA, blood-matches or weapons. The prosecution case was based entirely on the testimony of four people who claimed to have been present: two men and two women who were interviewed eight or more years after Fuller-Sandys and Stephens disappeared. They were all granted name suppression and immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. One of them was given $30,000 and a new identity.

Based on their testimony, the Crown claimed that Stone shot Fuller-Sandys with a handgun in a small garage, with the door open, with eight witnesses; and that he then passed the gun to four other men to fire shots into the body, so they would be implicated as well. Two men who claimed to have participated in the shooting of Fuller-Sandys also testified they had disposed of Stephens' body at Muriwai.

During the trial, lead investigator Mark Franklin was strongly challenged by defence lawyers over whether he had bullied witnesses, or pressured them to change their stories to match a predetermined police narrative. Although he denied these allegations, private investigator, Tim McKinnel, subsequently said: "There are concerns around some of the witnesses and their credibility and reliability. There are a number of wavering versions of events before a final version of events is settled on and we've seen that in cases before … Those sorts of things are concerning and I have questions around the way those statements and that evidence was collected over a period of time."

Verdicts

After two days' deliberation, the jury found Stone and Gail Maney guilty of the murder of Fuller-Sandys. Stone was also found guilty of the rape and murder of Stephens. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Stone also received a 10-year concurrent sentence for raping Stephens. Colin Maney and Mark Henriksen were convicted of being accessories to the murder of Fuller-Sandys by helping to dispose of his body. Henriksen was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, while Colin Maney (the youngest of the accused) received a two-year suspended sentence.

Subsequent events

Appeals and retrial

All four defendants attempted to appeal their convictions, but only Gail Maney and Mark Henriksen were successful in obtaining a retrial, on the grounds that the original trial judge had not adequately summed up the case for their defence to the jury. However, both were again found guilty at their retrial in June 2000. During the retrial, one of the key male witnesses with name suppression was asked by a defence lawyer whether he had ever asked for $30,000 to come back from overseas to give evidence. The witness said "Yes... to cover my costs, losing work."

In 2005 and 2007, Gail Maney filed furthers appeals (to the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, respectively) after one of the key female witnesses recanted her original trial testimony implicating Maney, but both appeals were dismissed.

Three prominent defence lawyers, criminal barrister Julie-Anne Kincade, Nicholas Chisnall, and Aieyah Shendi, agreed to represent her as she continued trying to clear her name, and private investigator Tim McKinnel agreed to assist too. In December 2023, a recall application was filed on Maney's behalf asking the court to retract their 2005 decision dismissing her original appeal against her murder conviction. In addition to two key witnesses recanting, McKinnel said one of the most concerning aspects of the appeal in 2005 was that "the trial judge from her 1999 trial, who was criticised in her 1999 appeal appeared on the appeal bench in 2005."

Parole

Maney was released on parole in 2010, but recalled to prison two years later. She was re-released in 2016, and recalled for a short period the following year. Corrections alleged she breached a condition not to possess or consume alcohol or illicit drugs. She served a total of 15 years in prison.

Although Stephen Stone admitted to the killing of Fuller-Sandys during a restorative justice meeting with Fuller-Sandys' family in 2010, he later told the facilitator that he had only confessed because it would improve his chance of getting parole. Stone was declined parole in December 2017, and was to be eligible to apply for parole again in November 2019. In August 2020, he filed an appeal against his convictions.

Media interest

In 2018, Radio New Zealand and Stuff released a podcast documentary about the case, Gone Fishing. Subjects interviewed included Gail Maney, some of the key witnesses, and the former detective who led the police investigation, Mark Franklin.

Court of Appeal 2024

In February 2024, the Court of Appeal agreed to hear the case for a third time. Then in July 2024, the Crown agreed that the convictions constituted a miscarriage of justice because two crucial documents, which should have been provided to the defence team at the trials in 1999 and 2000, were not turned over.

One of the documents was a fax which lead detective Mark Franklin sent to Barry Hart, the lawyer for one of the key witnesses. It contained the full statement of the other key witness (whose name is suppressed). Soon after the fax was sent, Hart's witness "made drastic changes to his own statement", so that it described the same version of events as the other witness. Stephen Stone's lawyers said the fax was a "smoking gun" because it showed how two witnesses ended up with near-identical accounts of the murders when their previous statements had been wildly divergent. His lawyers also said it implied that Franklin lied in court when he denied the two witnesses had seen each other's statements.

The other document was a job sheet which showed that Franklin was also having secret meetings with another key witness (whose name is also suppressed) but that Franklin had not logged those meetings appropriately. These documents were withheld from the defence team by the Crown at the trials in 1999 and 2000 and were only disclosed in May 2024.

At the start of the hearing in August 2024, Stone's lawyer Paul Wicks KC, said "any retrial would be 36 years after the murders, two of the four pivotal witnesses in the case had now recanted their original statements to the police and the evidence of the two remaining witnesses was both contaminated and unreliable." One of Maney's lawyers, Jack Oliver-Hood pointed out at least nine instances where police informed a witness or a suspect that it was Fuller-Sandys who had been murdered, before the witness ever mentioned his name.

At the Court of Appeal hearing, the lawyers for Stone and Maney argued a new trial was not feasible because the police had "bullied" witnesses into what to say, and failed to disclose documents describing their procedures, leading to a miscarriage of justice. The Crown conceded it had no case against Maney for the alleged murder of Fuller-Sandys, as the only witness who implicated her at the original trial had subsequently disavowed the statements she made to the police and died in 2023. The Crown agreed the convictions of all four defendants should be quashed; however, it desired a retrial for Stephen Stone.

In October 2024 the Court of Appeal released its decision, overturning the convictions of all four defendants and ordering a retrial for Stone. The Auckland Crown Solicitor will determine whether there is sufficient evidence for Stone to face a jury again.

Controversies surrounding the case

Lack of forensic evidence

Fuller-Sandys' body has never been found. Despite a two-year investigation (eight years after Fuller-Sandys' disappearance), the Crown was unable to produce any forensic evidence such as DNA, blood-matches or weapons. Lead investigator, detective senior sergeant Mark Franklin, said "This was a case where there's no forensics; we didn't have scenes, we didn't have bodies, and [for] the evidence we relied totally on criminal associates who were involved in the crimes. That was probably one of the most challenging things." According to Tim McKinnel, who had worked to overturn the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora: "There is not a scrap of physical evidence to support the contention that Fuller-Sandys was murdered..."

Participants granted immunity

Two men who claimed to have participated in the murders were granted immunity and given name suppression. In the podcast Gone Fishing,  they were referred to by the pseudonyms "Neil" and "Martin". Martin was also given $30,000 and a new identity under the witness protection scheme. At the trial, the two men testified they were among the people in the garage in Larnoch Road when Fuller-Sandys was shot. They said they helped bury Fuller-Sandys' body in dense bush somewhere in West Auckland and claimed to have been present when Leah Stephens was raped and murdered.

Doubts about the reliability of their evidence were raised because both men provided conflicting versions of events; they gave the police different locations for the murder of Leah Stephens, and only reached agreement after police showed them parts of each other's video interviews and statements. "Martin" initially denied knowledge of two murders. However, at one point during the investigation, he spent half an hour alone with lead detective Mark Franklin and immediately revised his statements to say he remembered both killings – which helped the police tie the two cases together. Speaking to Stuff for the podcast Gone Fishing in 2018, Martin attributed this to recovered memory syndrome.

Tim McKinnel wondered whether the Solicitor General was aware that Neil and Martin had given between 15 and 20 different versions of events before granting them immunity for rape and murder. Law professor Kris Gledhill said that Neil and Martin appeared to have "participated in more criminality than was alleged against [Gail] Maney" and questioned whether immunity should be granted to those who could be a greater risk to public safety than the person they are giving evidence against.

Recantations of two alleged witnesses

Two women who testified that they were present when Fuller-Sandys was killed later retracted their statements. In February 2005 at a Court of Appeal hearing, Tania Wilson said she gave false evidence at Maney's two trials, which implicated Maney in the killing of Fuller-Sandys. She said the police put her under pressure to testify against Maney. The court decided she was unreliable, believing she may have colluded with Maney and 'cooked up' this story while they were in prison together in 2000. The Crown produced an affidavit from a police Inspector, Bill Searle, who said that a Corrections Officer, Dave Kupenga, had called him, warning that the two women were in adjacent cells in Mt Eden Women's Prison.

Kupenga subsequently told RNZ "I never did anything of the sort," suggesting someone had either impersonated him or used his name to provide false evidence. Prison documents obtained by RNZ also revealed Maney was "in an entirely different part of the prison" to Wilson and the two would have had "no opportunity to have any interaction". The Court was unaware of this at the time and dismissed Maney's appeal. Wilson died in late 2023.

In July 2019, a second woman, who has name suppression and gave evidence in the trial that convicted Gail Maney, said she lied that she was present at the shooting of Fuller-Sandys after being "threatened and harassed" by police. She said police did not interview her until 1997, eight years after Fuller-Sandys went missing, and that police pressured her by coming to her house in "marked and unmarked cars, sometimes in large numbers... They would search my house, [and] told me that they were going to make my life a misery if I didn't start playing ball, which meant admitting to my so-called role in his murder." She said she gave a false statement after police threatened to take away her young child but added: "My view was that he wasn't murdered and he was washed off the rocks fishing."

The second woman's story has been corroborated by Andrew Thompson, a former Henderson Police officer, who picked up the witness after she was interviewed by detectives investigating the death of Deane Fuller-Sandys and drove her to the airport. Thompson said she told him during the drive that she and the other woman had lied to detectives about being present when the alleged murder took place. Tim McKinnel told The New Zealand Herald he believed Thompson's account because it was consistent with other information he has.

Detective convicted of drug dealing

Detective senior sergeant Mark Franklin smoked cannabis during his time as a police officer, including while working on this particular case. He took early retirement on psychological grounds and, in 2013, was sent to prison in the Cook Islands for nine months for selling cannabis. His lawyer told the court that Franklin had been a long-time user of cannabis, and smoked it to deal with job-related stress. He was subsequently deported back to New Zealand.

When interviewed for the Gone Fishing podcast in 2018, Franklin claimed he was "very focussed" during the investigation into the case, but added: "I'm not saying the police got it 100 percent right."

External links

• Gone Fishing, 2018 Radio New Zealand documentary about the case.
• Leah Romany Stephens at BillionGraves