Peter Ellis (childcare worker)

New Zealander wrongfully convicted of child abuse (1958–2019)

Peter Hugh McGregor Ellis (30 March 1958 – 4 September 2019) was a New Zealand childcare worker who was wrongfully convicted of child sexual abuse. He was at the centre of one of the country's most enduring judicial controversies, after being found guilty in June 1993 in the High Court on 16 counts of sexual offences involving children in his care at the Christchurch Civic Creche and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment. He maintained his innocence until his death 26 years later and was supported by many New Zealanders in his attempts to overturn his convictions, although others believed he was guilty. Concerns about the reliability of the convictions centred on far fetched stories told by many of the children (alleging Satanic ritual abuse) and the interview techniques used to obtain their testimony. In 1994, Ellis took his case to the Court of Appeal which quashed convictions on three of the charges but upheld the sentence. His conviction and sentence were upheld in his second appearance before the Court of Appeal in October 1999. In March 2000, former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum was appointed to conduct a ministerial inquiry reviewing the children's evidence. His report upheld the guilty verdicts. The same month Governor General Sir Michael Hardie Boys rejected Ellis' third bid for pardon on the advice of Justice Minister Phil Goff, who was satisfied with Eichelbaum's finding that Ellis had failed to prove his convictions were unsafe. Ellis refused to attend parole board hearings while in prison because he would have to confess to the crimes in order to obtain early release. Ellis was eventually released in February 2000 after serving seven years in prison. After his release, he continued campaigning to clear his name. In 2019, nineteen years after he was released, he appealed to the Supreme Court to have his conviction overturned. Although he died of cancer before the appeal could be heard, the Supreme Court allowed the appeal in the interests of justice and delivered a judgment in October 2022. The Supreme Court quashed Ellis' convictions, finding that there were problems with the evidence of the main prosecution witness, a psychiatrist, and the jury had not been fairly informed of the risk of contamination of the children's evidence. This marked the first time that a conviction has been quashed posthumously in New Zealand. The Ellis case was one of several similar high profile child abuse cases around the world in the 1980s and early 1990s as part of the Satanic panic, and has been mentioned as a cause in the decline in the number of male teachers in New Zealand schools. Two books and numerous articles have been written about the case.

Ellis was the eldest of four children. His parents were teachers who separated when he was nine. He left school in 1975 to take up tobacco picking in Motueka. After two years overseas, he returned to New Zealand. He then had a part time job in a bakery in the 1980s which eventually became full time. When he left this job and applied for unemployment benefits, authorities discovered he had received dole payments to which he was not entitled. He was prosecuted and convicted in 1986 of "misleading a social welfare officer" and sentenced to 80 hours community service. Ellis carried out his community service at the Christchurch Civic Creche. His supervisor, Dora Reinfeld, later reported that "Peter provided some hilarious puppetry shows – one of which we had to abandon as staff and children 'got out of hand'". Ellis became a relieving worker, and Reinfeld's next monthly report said: "Peter Ellis has fitted in extremely well and puts lots of energy into programme planning. Fantastic team spirit." Ellis's pre sentencing report said, "The overall picture gained of Peter Ellis is that of an outgoing, uninhibited, unconventional person given to putting plenty of enthusiasm and energy into his work and social activities, sometimes to the point of being risqué and outrageous." Before his imprisonment, Ellis had sexual relationships lasting for periods of two to five years with both men and women. He told Lynley Hood, "In a relationship with a woman I was, for want of a better word, bisexual, and with a man I was monogamous." Ellis was described by Hood as appearing "blatantly homosexual", due to his bright clothes, long hair, makeup and demeanour. After his release, he lived an isolated life, settling in the small community of Leithfield Beach in north Canterbury. In July 2019, Ellis was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died on 4 September 2019 while appealing his conviction at the age of 61.

Ellis loved animals and kept rabbits, cats and dogs as pets. In late September 1991, the mother of a four year old boy at the creche, a social worker who had herself recovered memories of sexual abuse, bought a black puppy from him. Ellis showed her son how to identify the puppy's gender. A few months later, in November 1991, the mother alleged that her son said he "didn't like Peter's black penis". His mother, who had written a handbook on sexual abuse, concluded her son had been sexually abused. She made a formal complaint to the creche in November 1991. After a brief investigation, the police decided there was no case to answer, but Ellis had already been suspended from work.

Even though police concluded no abuse had occurred, some parents started asking their children about what went on at the creche and then shared these stories with other parents. The Department of Social Welfare was called in to conduct formal interviews with many of these children. A social welfare psychologist, Sue Sidey, initially revealed that there were six children for whom she felt there were grounds for concern, although the children made no disclosures of any indecent touching by a creche staff member. More parents became concerned that something must have happened. As the social welfare interviews continued, claims about bizarre sexual abuse incidents began to surface. Altogether, at least 127 children were interviewed. Some detectives believed that up to 80 had been abused. Ellis was accused, among other things, of "sodomising children, forcing them to eat his faeces, urinating on them, suspending them in cages, taking them on terrifying trips of abuse through tunnels, ceilings and trapdoors". Other allegations included children being forced into a steaming hot oven or buried in coffins; one boy claimed he had his belly button removed with pliers. Allegations which emerged later as the interviews progressed included "Asian men dressed as cowboys, Masonic lodges, cemeteries, the Park Royal Hotel and private houses far from the creche", and "the notorious 'circle incident' where Ellis and his co workers supposedly took a group of children to 404 Hereford St on the other side of town and made them stand naked and kick each other while the adults danced around them Alleged by one parent, was the sacrifice of a boy called Andrew." No child was actually reported missing by anyone involved. The allegations were similar to those made in other Satanic ritual abuse cases.

The police arrested Ellis on 30 March 1992, charging him with the first of what would eventually be 45 counts of sexually abusing 20 different children at the creche. By the time the case went to trial, the Crown had reduced the number of charges to 28, involving 13 complainants. Finkelhor's work has since been discredited. After Smart's report was completed in July 1992, a copy was given to police. Detectives said her report was central to their decision to investigate four of Ellis's female colleagues at the creche. Their houses were searched for everything from pornography to babies' bodies. Nothing was found. In September 1992, the Ministry of Education suspended the creche's licence and it was closed. The four female staff members were arrested on 1 October 1992 amid considerable televised publicity. At depositions they faced 15 charges that included sexual violation, indecent assault and one charge of performing an indecent act (having sex with Ellis) in a public place. Judge Williamson subsequently discharged them on the basis that the evidence against them was of "insufficient weight" and that the publicity meant their chances of a fair trial would be prejudiced by their association with Ellis. Although the charges were dropped, their careers were ruined.

Corrections officers who sat through the trial with Ellis did not think he was guilty and let that be known at Paparua prison. As a result, Ellis was not subject to any ill treatment by staff or inmates in prison. Ellis refused to attend parole board hearings while in prison because he would have to confess to the crimes in order to argue for early release.

In the years preceding the first allegation of abuse against Ellis, there had been a number of high profile child abuse cases in Christchurch involving "highly suspect interviews of children", "mistaken mass diagnosis of children" and other "highly questionable claims". The case has also been linked with the day care sex abuse hysteria, a moral panic about alleged sexual abuse and Satanic ritual abuse that originated out of California in 1982 and that existed throughout the 1980s. It has also been cited as a major cause in the decline in the number of male teachers in New Zealand schools. From September 1991 (two months before the first allegation against Ellis), there was "continuous publicity of sexual abuse and ritual abuse of children in the local press or in national media." On 4 September 1991, a Wellington sex abuse counsellor, Anne Marie Stapp, told the Christchurch daily, The Press, that "New Zealand was fast approaching the level of ritual abuse awareness found in the United States." North and South Magazine reported that it was common knowledge around town that "various Christchurch police officers were hunting for a near mythical pornography paedophile ring alleged to involve judges, Freemasons and prominent businessmen, though it was never found." On 3 November 1991 the Sunday News quoted the police as saying that "Satanism was rampant in New Zealand and linked to child pornography." Seventeen days later, a Christchurch mother rang Gaye Davidson, the supervisor at the Civic Creche to make the first complaint about Peter Ellis. When making his appeal to the Supreme Court announced in July 2019, Ellis' former lawyer, Nigel Hampton QC, said he wants the Supreme Court to take the moral panic of the '90s into account in its decision making.

At least 118 children were interviewed as part of the second investigation into allegations of sexual abuse. Social Welfare psychologist, Sue Sidey, conducted most of the evidential child interviews used at the trial, although she had no formal qualifications in child psychology. In December 1991, Sidey conducted a number of interviews with children which failed to turn up any statements consistent with abuse. Nevertheless, that month, she made a statement that "Peter Ellis is not a suitable person for a child centre" – before any formal allegations of abuse came to light. However, as more parents became concerned, some children were subsequently interviewed up to six times and began making bizarre allegations. The children's stories "were hardly ever challenged, no matter how fanciful their answers. If the answers were inconsistent or incoherent, then they would be asked again in more elaborate form until an acceptable answer was elicited." Specific questions were employed to elicit allegations that children had apparently made to their parents, contrary to best practice guidelines. The interviewers generally did not check with the children to find out whether their parents had said things to them about Peter Ellis or about the creche to eliminate the possibility of parental contamination. One mother even admitted in court that she encouraged her son to come up with new information by cuddling him, praising him and "telling him how brave he was after he revealed more and more details of his abuse". Michael Lamb, a leading authority on the interviewing of child abuse victims, was asked to review the interviewing process the children endured. In addition to the problems caused by multiple interviews, he noted that there were substantial delays between the alleged events and the formal interviews which were conducted up to 18 months later. Lamb wrote that during this time, the children were exposed to conversations with their parents, social workers and other children and "were likely to have adopted recently acquired information about the events in question". Stephen J. Ceci, a psychologist at of Cornell University and an expert in children's suggestibility and children's courtroom testimony, also studied transcripts of many of the children's evidential interviews. In July 1995 he said the interviews "were not conducted in accordance with currently understood interviewing principles." According to Ceci, it is impossible to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate allegations when children are suggestively and repeatedly interviewed over a long period.

A number of people who were involved in the case believed Ellis was convicted because he was homosexual and was the only male worker at the creche. At the trial, he was portrayed as sexually deviant and perverted, which was held to be somehow consistent with the makeup of a child molester.

One parent, Malcolm Cox, who had three children at the creche suggested that some parents may have been motivated to make claims that their child had been sexually abused because the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) automatically awarded $10,000 to anyone claiming to have been abused. He said that he and his wife were visited by a council social worker with ACC claim forms and told "we had to get in quick to claim the money because lump sums were being abolished". In the end, ACC paid more than $500,000 to about 40 parents of Civic Creche children. Generally parents received a standard $10,000, "but in cases where Ellis faced multiple charges relating to a single child, some parents claimed for each alleged incident of abuse" (McLoughlin, 1996). One child's parents allegedly claimed five payments, while another claimed four. According to North and South Magazine, "ACC didn't require a conviction before paying out. It paid up without so much as charges being laid in respect of some allegations. The police even wrote letters to ACC supporting compensation claims."

A number of irregularities in the trial were publicised in a 20/20 episode which aired on TV3 on 16 November 1997. The programme alleged that the jury foreman had been the celebrant at the wedding of the Crown Prosecutor Brent Stanaway 15 years earlier. It was also alleged that a female juror had had a sexual relationship with a co worker of the mother of one of the children involved. The programme also put forward statements that most of the children who made allegations of sexual abuse withdrew their accusations at various times during proceedings but that social workers conducting the interviews treated this as a symptom of 'denial'.

The 20/20 programme also claimed the main investigating detective, Colin Eade, had a history of mental health problems. Eade told interviewer Melanie Reid he was "burnt out" before the case started and 'beyond repair' by the time it was over. He left the police force in 1994 suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. In an interview with Sean Plunkett on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report on 20 November 1997, Eade admitted that after the trial he had sexual relationships with two of the mothers involved in the case and that he had propositioned another mother during the course of the investigation when he was drunk. New Zealand First MP Rana Waitai, who was a former police commander with 31 years' experience, said "If half of what was on the (20/20) programme is true, Peter Ellis must immediately be released and hugely compensated for the devastation that has been done to his life." The child has continued to maintain that she fabricated her allegations and there was no abuse. Her family say they were pressured by the police and crown prosecutor in an unprofessional manner. They also say the Ministry of Justice has never contacted them about their daughter's retraction.

In November 1998, Ellis presented a second petition to the Governor General seeking a Royal Commission on Inquiry into his case, and either a free pardon or for the whole case to be referred back to the Court of Appeal. The Secretary for Justice sought advice from Sir Thomas Thorp on the second petition. His advice concluded that the terms of reference should be expanded. In 1999 the Ellis case was referred to the Court of Appeal for a second time. The Crown presented the expert opinion of Constance Dalenberg. The court concluded that they were not persuaded that a miscarriage of justice had occurred but suggested a Royal Commission of Inquiry could better examine some of the issues raised. Ellis immediately presented a third petition to the Governor General.

In 1999, a retired High Court judge, Sir Thomas Thorp, was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice to examine a petition for the royal prerogative of mercy lodged by Ellis's counsel, Judith Ablett Kerr QC. She commissioned and supplied reports by experts that were based on selective information, for Thorp to consider. Despite the limitations of the reports, Thorp considered they raised serious concerns that should be investigated further. He wrote that the interview transcripts revealed that on more than one occasion, one child claimed to have seen serious abuse committed against another child, but the second child denied anything happened. Thorp said there was no evidence that the interviewers or the police or did any cross checking before presenting abuse allegations to the jury. He was also concerned that the more bizarre allegations made by children were not put before the jury, arguing that "the jury had to see that the children were capable of outrageous and fanciful allegation". Thorp stated that the central concerns were "the claims of defective interviewing techniques the risk of contamination of the children's evidence (and) the exclusion of evidence necessary to a proper assessment of the children's reliability". He added that if the opinions of Barry Parsonson, Stephen Ceci and Justice Wood were found to have substantial support, it would "be difficult to argue against the existence of a serious doubt about the safety of the Petitioner's convictions."

In March 2000, Phil Goff, then Minister of Justice, established a ministerial inquiry into the conduct of the interviews, headed by Sir Thomas Eichelbaum. This was undertaken in response to Justice Thorp's report He was also required to appoint two international experts to provide written reviews of the interviewing techniques that had been used to seek information from the children. He appointed Graham Davies of the University of Leicester and Louise Sas, from London, Ontario, Canada. In his evaluation, Graham Davies wrote he would not "pronounce on the reliability of individual children's accounts." Michael Corballis, psychologist at Auckland University, subsequently questioned the credentials of both these experts asking of Sas, "Can she really be considered an expert?" Released in March 2001, Eichelbaum's inquiry concluded that the interviews were of good quality overall, and that though excessive questioning by some parents could have led to some contamination, this would not have been sufficient to affect the convictions. Eichelbaum did not say how he determined the children's evidence to be reliable.

In June 2003, two petitions called for a royal commission of inquiry into the case. The first, organised by then National Party leader Don Brash and MP Katherine Rich, had 140 highly prominent signatories. They included two former prime ministers (David Lange and Mike Moore), four former Cabinet ministers, 26 MPs, a retired High Court Judge (Laurence Greig), a retired District Court Judge, 12 law professors, 12 Queen's Counsel, former Auckland police chief Bryan Rowe, historian Michael King, psychology professors, professors from other disciplines, lawyers, child protection workers, psychologists, social workers, therapists and counsellors. In August 2005, Parliament's justice and electoral select committee reported on the petitions. The committee had several concerns with the way the case was prosecuted. It recommended several changes, although it acknowledged that changes had already been made to the way that children were now interviewed. It also suggested that the testimony of expert prosecution witness Karen Zelas would not be permitted if it were presented now. The committee noted that "The operation of the legal system in respect of this case did not inspire adequate public confidence in the operation of the legal system. A justice system should lead to certainty. In this case it seemed to increase the sense of uncertainty." However, the committee rejected the petitioners' call for a commission of inquiry, concluding that it was not practical to hold such an inquiry. In December 2007 University of Otago psychologist Harlene Hayne conducted research which compared the standard of interviews conducted in the Ellis case with those of the Kelly Michaels case in the United States. Empirical analysis allowed Hayne to conclude that there was a "strong risk that the evidence of children who told of sexual abuse by Ellis was contaminated by the way the interviews were carried out," and that, contrary to Eichelbaum's conclusions, "the standard of the questions in Ellis was not substantially better than those in Michaels." Francis's articles and Hayne's research were cited in January 2008 by Ellis's counsel when making a renewed request that the Ministry of Justice establish a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the case, but Associate Justice Minister Rick Barker rejected this approach in March 2008. A further call for a Commission of Inquiry was made by former National MPs Katherine Rich and Don Brash and author Lynley Hood in November 2008, and the new Minister of Justice Simon Power said that the government would reconsider the issue. He later declined their request for an inquiry, on the grounds that Ellis still held the right of appeal to the Privy Council and an inquiry therefore could not achieve finality. In late 2010, Ellis announced his intention to lodge a fourth petition to the Governor General seeking a full pardon.

On 25 July 2019, Ellis, aged 61, lodged an appeal to the Supreme Court. However, by this time he had been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer and was not expected to live. In August, the Supreme Court said it would consider hearing Ellis' appeal even if he died before the scheduled hearing date in November 2019. Ellis died on 4 September 2019. Courts in Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand, have traditionally ruled that an individual's interest in any judicial hearing ends if they die. On 1 September 2020 the Supreme Court granted leave for the appeal to be heard despite Ellis's death. The Court said the reasons for their decision would be released along with their ruling on the appeal. Defence lawyer Robert Harrison commented, "I think it's fantastic news If the Supreme Court has gone down that particular path they're saying there's a value here that deserves to be respected and it means that there is valuing [sic] in continuing the appeal."

A hearing was held in November 2020 regarding allegations of a historic sex offence by Ellis in the early 1980s, and adjourned so that further investigatory work could be done. The complainant allegedly first approached the police in 1992 or 1993, though there is no record of this. The complainant's claims were supported by her sister. The Crown took responsibility for the delays caused by the complaint not previously having been investigated. Ellis's defence lawyer Robert Harrison expressed concern about the new evidence's credibility. Defence lawyer Rob Harrison told the court that the women's evidence was not relevant to the appeal, and if the evidence was admitted it would expand the scope of the appeal to challenge its reliability, through ACC and other records. He said there was no corroborating evidence and it was unfair to admit her statement now given Ellis could no longer respond to it. Crown lawyer John Billington admitted there were inconsistencies in the woman's statement and no corroborating evidence to support it. On 16 June 2021 the Court dismissed the application for the women's evidence to be used in the appeal, concluding it was inadmissible.

The appeal hearing began on 4 October 2021. The Supreme Court took the unusual step of hearing new evidence. Experts from both sides, some from Australia and the US, gave evidence in a panel setting by video link. Counsel for Ellis, Rob Harrison, said the appeal would focus on four issues: the questioning and risk of contamination of the children's testimony; that the jury was inappropriately assisted by the expert testimony of the period; that an expert witness's claims of symptoms exhibited by children being linked to abuse were without scientific foundation; and that the trial was inconsistent with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and unfair due to sanitisation of charges. The experts for Ellis' case were memory researcher Harlene Hayne, vice chancellor of Curtin University, Perth, Australia (and former vice chancellor of the University of Otago), University of Otago clinical psychologist and memory scientist Deirdre Brown, New Zealand clinical psychologist Tess Patterson, and memory expert Mark Howe from Canada. The Crown experts were Gail Goodman, a memory researcher from the University of California, Frederick Seymour, the former head of the clinical psychology programme at Auckland University, and Auckland clinical psychologist Suzanne Blackwell, who often gave evidence in court about the reliability of sexual abuse accounts. Crown expert Gail Goodman conceded that the contamination of the children's accounts and the long delay between the time of the events and their recounting made it impossible to know what had happened. Seymour and Blackwell also agreed there were opportunities for contamination and the interviewing approach may have been sub optimal in some respects. However, in a combined statement, the psychologists said that "while it may be the case that children were impacted by parents' cross talk and interaction, there is no evidence available to show that this is the case". Bridget Irvine, counsel for Ellis, said in further submissions that the interviews of the children were below best practice, pointing out that the children being subjected to a high level of suggestive questions (for example, 46 abuse related questions in the case of Child 1) before making their first allegations against Ellis. Hayne's data showing the number of suggestive questions children were asked before their formal interviews were "a nonsense". Crown counsel John Billington argued that Zelas had given admissible evidence and if she had been cross examined on the letter, she might have endorsed the interviews that took place prior to the cancelled one. He further claimed that although Zelas' cluster evidence could be said to be wrong science, it was not so factually and scientifically flawed to undermine the verdicts. This was the first time in New Zealand history that a conviction had been overturned posthumously. During the appeal, Ellis' lawyers, including Natalie Coates, had argued that the Court should overturn Ellis' conviction on the basis of Tikanga Māori (the customary rules which govern Māori life), arguing it gave him the right to clear his name and restore his mana (prestige) posthumously. Coates later said: "although tikanga had not been the deciding factor in the [Court's] decision, it had affirmed its relevance in the legal framework". The Supreme Court's decision was welcomed by Ellis' family and supporters as a vindication of several years of efforts to clear his name. By contrast, the parents of some of the alleged victims issued a statement expressing shock and sadness that the Court had allegedly favoured a convicted criminal and ignored the victims by quashing his convictions. Hood argued that the professional careers of experts benefited from the case while more than 100 children were subjected to unpleasant, repetitive and psychologically dangerous procedures for no good reason. In 2006, Brash cited the case when supporting calls for an independent body investigating miscarriages of justice in New Zealand. On 17 December 2014, Brash and author Lynley Hood again called for a review of the case by way of an independent inquiry led by an authority from outside New Zealand. The appeal was made to Amy Adams, the newly appointed Minister of Justice for the National Party led government returned in the 2014 General Election.

According to Greg Newbold, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Canterbury, even cynical journalists like Frank Haden, David McLoughlin, Melanie Reid, George Balani, and Martin van Beynen – the only journalist to have sat right through the trial – agree that Ellis is not guilty. Newbold notes that "it was a politician who saved Arthur Allan Thomas, but the Ellis case is different from Thomas's, because Ellis lacks government support." In 2000 (after Ellis' failed appeals) he wrote: "at the moment the judiciary is turning away from the plight of a man impugned by some of the most absurd testimony ever heard in a New Zealand court."