Convicted child sex offender Peter Ellis' appeal from beyond the grave has resumed in the Supreme Court, with the Crown arguing the court should accept a new allegation against Ellis as part of evidence in the substantive hearing in October.
The complainant alleges she was sexually abused by Ellis when she was five, while he babysat her in Christchurch in 1983 — an allegation the Crown acknowledges is uncorroborated.
The complainant said the first person she told about being abused was her boyfriend at the age of 15 in 1993. Shortly after, she told her mother, sister and spoke to a police officer, but didn't name Ellis as her abuser. There is no record of that police interview taking place.
Ellis was first accused of sexually abusing children at the Christchurch civic creche in 1991 and in 1993 was convicted on 16 sexual offence charges against seven children. Three counts were later quashed by the Court of Appeal.
The Crown said it wasn't until 2007, when the complainant watched a documentary about Ellis, that she recognised him as the person who abused her. She spoke to police and asked not to press charges.
The complainant alleged she was abused by a babysitter called "Uncle Peter" who told her that if she disclosed anything to anyone "she would die, and witches and demons and monsters would come".
Ellis died in 2019 but the Supreme Court allowed his appeal to continue.
Ellis' link to the family could not be substantiated.
Crown lawyer John Billington QC said although the allegation is different in time and place from the creche offending, there is a similar modus operandi.
The first evidential police interview took place in February 2019 but police didn't investigate any further because Ellis was terminally ill. Ellis was never told of the new allegation and he died in September 2019. That prompted questions over fairness from the judges' bench.
The lawyer representing Ellis, Rob Harrison, said his client was still lucid at the time.
"The shame of it is he would have been able to answer," said Harrison.
The former Christchurch Civic Creche worker, found guilty of child molestation in 1993, always maintained his innocence.
The substantive hearing of Ellis’ appeal in October centres on memory and whether the techniques used to the interview the children at the time were flawed, leading to unreliable evidence and an unsafe verdict.
The Crown said it is up to the judges to decide if the lack of corroboration is a concern and if the new allegation is helpful to them in hearing the wider appeal. But Billington accepted there’s difficulty with the evidence.
"It could be credible, it may not be credible," said Billington.
But Harrison argued the evidence isn’t reliable. He said there’s nothing to link Ellis to the complainant's family and pointed to contradictory statements by the woman about identifying Ellis as the abuser.
He said if the allegation is admitted as evidence it could not go before a court without being challenged.
The case is breaking new ground in the development of law in New Zealand, with Ellis the first person granted a posthumous criminal appeal.
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