Part 2 of the Newsroom series Peter Ellis, the creche case and me
‘Reputations were going to be made by this’
In never-before-seen footage and interviews, our new series takes you inside one of New Zealand’s most controversial legal cases, when a kind of madness gripped Christchurch, resulting in a miscarriage of justice that would take 30 years to put right.
It’s quite possible the whole Christchurch Civic Creche case might never have happened if Peter Ellis hadn’t decided to fight for his job.
It was Christmas 1991 and despite allegations against him, the few children who had gone through evidential interviews made no disclosures of sexual abuse.
Christchurch Detective Colin Eade closed the case - but advised the city council, the creche owners, that Ellis should not be working with children.
Ellis had been suspended a month earlier, when the first allegation was made, and two days before Christmas he was advised by the council, that he was being dismissed.
Ellis was dumbfounded. He loved his job, and hadn’t done anything wrong.
Perhaps if he had just taken the not-insignificant $10,000 severance payout the council offered and if he had slipped quietly away, we would never have known the name Peter Ellis.
But instead, he turned down the cash and fought for his job.
“I pushed for reinstatement and it was almost like I’d pushed the start button again. It’s like I turned around and said ‘right, I haven't done it, I want my job back.’ And the answer suddenly was, ‘oh, let’s go round up a few more,’” Ellis told Melanie Reid in one of their secret early interviews in the 1990s.
In March of 1992 Ellis was arrested, on his birthday, and charged with one count of indecent assault against a girl who had never attended the creche.
The next night, at a parents' meeting in a Christchurch city hall, pamphlets were handed out, hotlines were set up, everyone was encouraged to take their kids to evidential interviews being set up by social welfare.
An epidemic of child abuse allegations that had been sweeping the world had landed in Christchurch, at a civic child care centre. Detective Eade was convinced Ellis was not acting alone, that more than 10 other offenders were also involved.
Rob Harrison, Ellis’ lawyer, was famously quoted about the parents' meeting saying : “It’s like a Ministry of Works lure. You light a stick of gelly. You toss it in the river and it explodes. Down below you’ve got these nets. The fish just come floating down to you.”
And float down they did. The police were inundated with frantic parents, and close to 120 children would be put through evidential interviews.
One of the parents said: “They were saying that hundreds of children possibly been abused. They were saying that this was the biggest thing ever in New Zealand. They were saying that children who were showing no signs of being abused, none of the classic symptoms, were actually disclosing. I got the impression that reputations were certainly going to be made by this. And it was actually on one level very exciting.”
The central detective, Eade, certainly believed he was onto something big.
So big, that it temporarily engulfed him as well, with allegations being made against Eade involving the mother of a complainant child.
* For more on the wild early days of the Peter Ellis case, watch Melanie Reid's second episode of the series, Hysteria and an arrest above. *
Next in the series: Police, Parents, Process
