Book of the Week: In praise of Chook

Every single day the New Zealand police perform acts of unequivocal goodness, stepping in and accepting the potential for danger to sort shit out. Every single day they also get it wrong. Among the very best and very worst of New Zealand policing are revealed in Unmasking Monsters, the juvenile but fairly accurate title of the new memoir by the best bylined author in the world, Chook Henwood, a former Detective Sergeant who served in the ghettos created by colonialism and the labour market in South Auckland. Henwood caught Joseph Thompson. To identify and apprehend the worst serial rapist in New Zealand history was an act of unequivocal goodness almost without parallel in New Zealand policing. Henwood also caught serial rapist Malcolm Rewa. God knows Rewa was the dregs, a cruel and lying sack of shit, and yet his removal from the streets came too late for Teina Pora, who the police falsely, blindly, and determinedly prosecuted for the murder of Rewa’s victim, Susan Burdett.
Henwood’s career was obviously more than these two arrests. His book charts his service from joining the Ōtāhuhu police station in 1971 aged 19 (“South Auckland would remain my patch for the rest of my career”) through to his later years stationed in Papakura, working on burgs in the Manurewa Enquiry Office before joining the CIB. There are some good yarns. The writing is plain. We meet cops nicknamed Catfish, Spud and Lambo. We also meet Dan Dudson, a professional burglar who Henwood clearly liked and even admired, up to a point; he acknowledges the misery his burgling caused to countless families. He devotes a chapter to this villain  and regrets that Dudson died, in 2020, before finishing the memoir he was writing. It probably would have made for a more colourful book than Unmasking Monsters. Henwood quotes a sentence from the manuscript. It is one of the great sentences in New Zealand demotic literature: “The difference between a long-term winner and a short-term loser is the ability to keep one’s composure when the teeth of tension are lunching on your arse.”
A bunch o’ yarns and some amusing nicknames only go so far, which is to say not all that far. The first 100 pages of Unmasking Monsters is a routine read of cops and crooks. It’s all a bit ZZZZ. And then the book takes off. The rest of his book deconstructs his two famous arrests. His editors have fashioned a very compelling narrative out of it and much of the final 150 pages are the gold standard in any kind of literature: unputdownable.
Henwood’s great and enduring contribution to New Zealand policing was his pioneering work alongside other detectives to develop the quasi-science of criminal profiling. He recounts the early days of it like a man stumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch. Team leader Detective Inspector John Manning attended a criminal profiling seminar in Australia, and learnt from the FBI behavioural science group. Now and then Hollywood creates a detective who reads books, like Morgan Freeman in Se7en; it’s likely as rare in real policing life, but Henwood and cohorts spent hours sitting around with their noses in books including Criminal Shadows by British psychologist David Canter, Mindhunter by an FBI agent describing criminal personality profiling, and Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding, about the first person to be convicted of rape and murder on the basis of DNA testing. “I purchased all these books myself and still have those copies, along with many more published since.”
Henwood gives a thumbnail sketch of what profiling set out to achieve: “We would build a ‘profile’ of the likely offender from a synthesis of his criminal past and his characteristic behaviour at a rape scene. By creating this profile from past behaviour, we could search for the offender in the present.” He joined Operation Park, the police investigation into a series of appalling rapes in South Auckland. “Not only were we trying to solve the rapes already committed, but also, at the same time, trying to prevent any more from occurring. And we were coming second on both counts.”
No violent crime is more awful than another – it’s not a competition – but one story in Henwood’s book is particularly vile. “The youngest of the rapist’s victims was a very pretty and clever little ten-year-old Māori girl … She was snatched from her home while others slept nearby, and marched a kilometre up the railway lines in the pouring rain before being raped at a nearby railway station and then released. Her feet got cut on the stones as she wandered back along the railway lines to her home in the still-pouring rain.”
Operation Park drew up a preliminary list of 4600 suspects. It was narrowed down to 2500. Then less than 100. “Meanwhile, the rapist kept attacking. One rape in Māngere in late 1994 took place after the usual heavy rainstorm, which seemed to trigger some subconscious spark within him. When I attended the scene, the mist was lifting after the overnight rain; it was an eerie and macabre scene, like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. He had set up a makeshift bed in a neighbour’s backyard, using linen from the victim’s house and ties for her hands and ankles, and a knife from her house was found in the fence nearby.”
Police worked 24/7 to stop this happening again and they finally got their break when ESR scientist Sue Vintner made a DNA match from saliva taken at a crime scene. “He turned out to be a smallish, recently married man called Joseph Stephenson Thompson.” Henwood knocked on his door. Thompson opened it. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you guys. Come in, I’ll just have a wash. I’ll need a jacket, too.” God almighty.
Henwood and others eventually set up the Criminal Profiling Unit, now known as the Behavioural Science Unit. After the Thompson arrest, he worked on Operation Atlas, which led to the arrest of Malcolm Rewa – for serial rapes, but not for the murder of Susan Burdett, beaten to death with a baseball bat in her home in Papatoetoe on  March 23, 1992. Teina Pora gave a bullshit confession to the murder in an interview that was full of inconsistencies but police saw an opportunity to fuck him over and they took it with the full might of the law.
Henwood writes, “From the outset, I spoke out against Pora’s involvement in the Burdett murder. It was Rewa’s behaviour that made it clear to me that Pora had not been there with him at Susan Burdett’s house.” I wondered if this was self-serving and thought to check on Henwood’s bona fides with a key member of the team who campaigned for Pora’s release. The texted response was – that word again; it’s a perfect fit – unequivocal: “Hey mate. Yep he stood up as per the book. Helped us out and got in the shit for doing so.”
Henwood writes of standing up and getting in the shit as per that text. He gave an interview to legendary Herald journalist Phil Taylor. It was a historic interview and has previously been recounted by Michael Bennett in his  book on Teina Pora’s persecutions, In Dark Places. In Bennett’s version, Henwood did not immediately start talking when Taylor phoned: “There’s a moment or two of umming and ahhing.” In Henwood’s version, he gets straight to the point. Well, same difference; he said to Taylor, “I believe Rewa committed the crime alone and that Pora was innocent.” The front-page story duly blew up. Henwood received a lot of support from fellow officers but also a lot of hissing and sniping that he was a traitor. Most of all he heard a lot of silence, even after Pora was cleared of the crime that put him in jail for 20 years: “I never heard a word from anyone in the police hierarchy to acknowledge that I had been right and they had been in the wrong.”
Henwood doesn’t blame anyone. Surely he feels something like contempt for someone on the police team but he is too discreet to name names, other than this rollcall: “‘Ruthers [Detective Steve Rutherford] was the boss, and he was strongly supported by Detective Sergeant Mark Williams, who managed the file regarding Pora’s involvement … It was not vindictive; they sincerely believed that Pora was present at Burdett’s murder.” These comments are not an apologia; but I sincerely doubt Henwood has nothing stronger to say, in private, about a disgraceful arrest and disgraceful prosecution and disgraceful omertà.
The author was a good cop. What’s he like as a person? Dunno. It’s an impersonal book. A general sense of his character comes through but there’s only one moment when Henwood actually reveals something about himself, gives away a detail, allows a look into his life outside of policing the streets and criminal profiling and bonding with Catfish, Spud and Lambo. He writes about one of Rewa’s victims, “One lady wore her favourite rose into the witness box, and was surprised to discover that I could immediately identify it as French Lace. Obviously she had not imagined that a hard-nosed detective sergeant would have an interest in roses when, in fact, I had over 200 growing at home in a garden that had become part of the local garden ramble scene. French Lace was one of these roses.” Chook, pruning his roses; Chook, with his library of true-crime books; Chook, adding to that library with his often harrowing and well-told memoir.
Unmasking Monsters by Chook Henwood (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.