Yesterday’s landmark Supreme Court decision quashing the conviction of Christchurch Civic Creche childcare worker Peter Ellis brings an end to three decades of injustice. But for the child who was considered the “most credible and compelling” witness who then recanted her story, it’s been a haunting journey. In a Newsroom exclusive, she gives her first interview. This is an extract from our new series, 'Peter Ellis, the crèche case & me', starting Monday.
In 30 years no one has listened to her. No one has even talked to her. In 1994, an 11-year-old girl who had been the star witness in the case that convicted Peter Ellis told her mother she had lied, that she had never been abused by Ellis or anyone else from the creche.
Instead of being believed, she was ignored by those charged with ensuring truth and justice were upheld.
The police. Crown Law. The Ministry of Justice. Social workers. Expert child interviewers. Even an esteemed former judge who helmed the only inquiry into the safety of Ellis’ conviction. Not a single one has ever contacted the one person who could have told them what happened.
Read more:
‘Peter Ellis did not abuse our child’
‘They were looking for a monster’
‘Peter was a goldfish in a shark tank’
“I think that if they’d spoken to me, they’d know that I wasn’t in denial, that I’d come forward to tell the truth.”
For Ruby*, now a mother herself, to have been disbelieved and shunned for all this time has taken a huge toll.
In an exclusive interview with Newsroom’s Melanie Reid, who has reported on the Ellis case since the beginning, the woman at the centre of one of this country’s most notorious cases speaks publicly for the very first time.
“I think about it every day,” says Ruby, “I feel a lot of guilt about it and just how sad it was that an innocent man had to go through what he went through.”
Rewards for right answers
Ruby was nine years old when Ellis was sent to prison. She had been through four or five evidential interviews with sexual abuse specialists from the Department of Social Welfare before she made her first formal disclosure, and describes the pressure to tell them what they wanted to hear.
“I can particularly remember the woman who was interviewing me and she was giving me all these dolls with genitals and stuff. So it was quite obvious what she wanted to hear from me. You don’t normally give a child a doll with genitals. They were leading questions for sure, because I didn’t come up with it by myself. I had no knowledge of this sort of thing until I was questioned about it. It was very obvious what people wanted to hear, you know?”
Ruby says she was also given rewards like clothes, toys or fast food whenever she finished an interview, something she now feels upset about, despite being a child when it happened.
At least 116 children were put through the extensive evidential interview process, and any child who had been at the creche since Ellis started there in 1986 was subject to attention. In the end it was the testimony from just seven children that convicted Ellis - Ruby was described as the oldest and “most compelling”. In fact it was said there wouldn’t have been a case without her.
She describes the expectation that grew around her as a circus, with a rotating cast of adults coming in and out of her house. She remembers the Crown Prosecutor stopping by wearing his judicial wig, and the social worker assigned to her family visiting every week.
“I remember that people came to our house a lot at that time and lots of conversations going on about me, around me.”
She also remembers Detective Colin Eade from the police child abuse unit, who was in charge of the case, stopping by her house more than once.
“He had a very strong presence and was quite authoritative. I can remember him having an argument with my mum at some stage.”
Ruby didn’t know it at the time, but this event was a crucial turning point in the case. Her mother wrote of the incident to then-justice minister Simon Power in the early 2010s in one of many attempts to have Ellis’ conviction overturned: “Colin Eade got drunk at our home and abused us verbally when we expressed concern about the whole investigation and the doubts that we had about the direction it was going in.
“He told us that if we withdrew from the trial that we would be as ‘perverted as Peter Ellis’ and that we would be responsible for a ‘filthy bastard kiddie f*****r going free’. He insisted that [Ruby’s] evidence was the most credible and believable of all the children interviewed and that the trial would be seriously compromised without her.”
As their star witness, Ruby was vital to their case, and as a child she just wanted to please all of these adults.
Invasive medical examinations
Some of the testimony children gave in their formal interviews included Ellis inserting needles, sticks and food into children’s genitals, and, along with other creche workers, was said to have made children kick each other in the genitals.
As part of their process of collecting evidence to prove Ellis’ guilt, Crown Law arranged to have some of the children undergo invasive medical examinations.
Ruby still remembers what the examination was like as a little girl: “It was basically like when a woman has to have a pap smear. I remember my mum being quite upset too.”
But that wasn’t all. Ruby’s mother, who spoke to Newsroom in an interview earlier this year, said Eade told her Ellis had HIV and that her daughter needed to have a blood test to see whether she did too.
“The doctor couldn’t find a viable vein in Ruby’s arm. She had to be held down and her femoral artery was tapped for blood. This artery is at the top of the thigh, close to her vagina. Her father could hear her screaming from the waiting room. What was the abuse? I would say it was the fervent delusion of a mad detective, determined to find Peter guilty.”
None of the examinations found any conclusive evidence the children had been abused, and Ruby did not test positive for HIV.
An inconvenient truth
The day the lie became too great for Ruby to carry on any longer, she was in the car with her mother as they drove home from her nana’s house and on the radio was a news segment about the case.
It was 1994, a year after Ellis had been imprisoned, and the beginning of his first Court of Appeal hearing.
“Hearing on the radio that I was the most credible, that I was the most compelling … that was the moment when I said to my mum: none of this happened. Those two years before were really rough because I was often told that my testimony was the strongest testimony, that I was the reason he was put into jail. So I was living with a lot of guilt.”
Her parents, though in shock, believed her and contacted those involved in Ellis’ appeal to tell them their daughter had retracted. But any relief Ruby felt at unburdening herself was short-lived when it became apparent no one else believed her.
Rather than sending a social worker or child psychologist, a senior barrister was sent to her family to assess the situation. It was to be the one and only time following Ellis’ imprisonment that anyone related to the case spoke to Ruby, and they concluded the girl was simply in denial.
“They didn’t believe me. They said that I was just in so much trauma that - I don’t know if they said that I’d forgotten it had happened, or that I was just trying to block it out - but anyway, they didn’t believe me that it hadn’t happened.”
The three charges in relation to her testimony were quashed as a result, but it made no real difference to Ellis’ fate, and the train kept rolling.
“I thought that if I told the truth, then Peter would’ve come out of jail,” recalls Ruby of her child’s thinking at the time. “Because even after I retracted he was still in jail, it didn’t get rid of the guilt that I felt.”
So she was believed when she lied, but when she told the truth she was ignored and gaslit by the same authorities who held her up as a hero for helping to imprison an innocent young man.
Ruby still blames herself and wishes she could have apologised to him in person before he died of bladder cancer in 2019.
“I wish I’d talked to him. It would’ve been nice to say sorry. Just sorry that I was part of it. I don’t see myself as the victim in this. He’s the victim in this.”
Peter Ellis, though, has always seen the children as the victims, as he told Melanie Reid in one of their many interviews: “I have spent years fighting for them just as much as I have been fighting to clear my name ... that is what being a childcare worker is, standing up and saying to the children it didn’t happen and it’s not fair on you and it’s not fair on your parents.”
*Ruby is a pseudonym we have used for legal reasons
