Hope-Smart report backs police

BY MICHAEL BERRY

The Independent Police Complaints Authority report into police handling of the murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope is the first official recognition that mistakes were made, says the father of the man convicted of the murders.

The complaints authority launched an inquiry into the police investigation, known as Operation Tam, after it received complaints from journalist Keith Hunter and Scott Watson's father Chris.

The authority released a four-page summary of the findings on Friday.

The 36-page letter by authority chairwoman Justice Lowell Goddard, obtained by The Marlborough Express at the weekend, was sent to the two men in May.

Mr Watson said yesterday: "If one was to believe the media release, everything in the garden is rosy ... [but the full letter] is quite critical and radical and they have let some important cats out of the bag.

"They [the authority] criticise the record-keeping quite fiercely – a lot of times she [Justice Goddard] says she couldn't say whether the police had done wrong because there was no record."

Olivia Hope's father Gerald had read only the four-page summary of the findings, but said he was pleased the police had been vindicated for a difficult case.

The letter concluded that some police actions "fell short of best practice, and at their most serious had the potential to influence witnesses".

Hunter's suggestion was that these failings amounted to a deliberate attempt to skew the evidence towards pre-determined outcomes.

However, Justice Goddard said she accepted that mistakes were made due to the nature of the investigation, and were compounded by the actions of others, including the media.

Mr Watson said the criticisms raised in the findings were the same points before the Governor-General for a mercy petition for his son. The petition was with the Justice Ministry.

Scott Watson was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years after being found guilty of killing the two Blenheim teenagers after they went missing on January 1, 1998 in the Marlborough Sounds.

Many of the criticisms centred on Deputy Commissioner Rob Pope, who was a detective inspector in 1998 and led the inquiry.

A spokeswoman at Police National Headquarters in Wellington said they had received only a copy of the public release and would not comment on the authority investigation or the findings.

The authority letter says the affidavit signed by Mr Pope to obtain search and interception warrants for Watson contained errors and fell short of the accuracy required by police. However, the errors were a result of human error rather than malice.

The investigation also found police gave a profile of Scott Watson to a group of civilian searchers in early March 1998. Copies of the profile ended up with the Hope and Smart families and the media.

This was careless and should not have happened, the letter says.

The profile named Watson as the owner of Blade.

"It detailed his past criminal convictions and described his character as being that of a `loner'. He was also described as having `a chip on his shoulder, hates the world, surly, explosive temper, lacks social skills, smokes cannabis. Known to climb on to other boats at night, people on them or not."

The authority could find no other profiles like this among more than 50 used in the case.

"The Scott Watson profile contained significant information that had the potential to influence witnesses, with consequences for any subsequent trial," the letter says. "The release was both careless and highly undesirable."

However, there was no evidence that the profile had been distributed on Mr Pope's instruction or with his knowledge; or that it had been produced to circulate rumours about Watson, it says.

Olivia Hope's father, Gerald Hope, is pleased the police have been vindicated for a difficult case carried out under enormous pressure from the public, the Government and the media, he says.

The Independent Police Complaints Authority finding meant the conviction of Scott Watson on the evidence still stood, and he believed the right man had been convicted, he said.

Watson was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years' jail after being found guilty of killing 17-year-old Olivia Hope and 18-year-old Ben Smart who went missing in the Marlborough Sounds on January 1, 1998.

However, Mr Hope said he still had doubts about the identification of "the mystery man" and the ketches that were not eliminated at the start of the investigation.

"What you're left with is a murder mystery, that is real life, and has not come up with anything other than circumstantial evidence.

"We're looking for the hard evidence.

"Obviously, if we could find Ben and Olivia that would be tragic but wonderful; because it would bring closure that none of us have been able to achieve."

He had not known what questions had been asked in the complaint until reading the report at the weekend and found them "quite searching", he said.

The authority had taken the complaint seriously. The three years it had spent in the authority's offices was only one testament to that, he said.

He was surprised the authority had not contacted his family or the Smarts during its investigation.

"We knew intimately what the police were doing and thinking [during the police investigation] and were privy to information that was not public," he said.

- The Marlborough Express