Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer and I'm Steve Drisan. So far, we've told you false confession stories that span the United States, from urban Chicago to rural Nebraska. Today, we'll take you across the globe to New Zealand with a story that still hits way too close to home. A sixteen year old boy who confessed to a rape and murder he didn't commit.
His wrongful conviction allowed the real offender, a prolific serial rapist, to assault dozens of other women, while a teenager languished behind bars after making a murderer. Came out season two, Steve and I have had an opportunity to travel around the globe talking to audiences about the problem of false confessions and the need for criminal justice reform. We've spoken everywhere, you know, from the United States to the United Kingdom, to Ireland to Australia. Do you remember this guy, Steve,
who traveled around Australia with us? Oh God, this guy was This guy was beautiful. What was his name? His name was Simon. Simon. Simon was like a roadie from the nineties seventies, always wearing black t shirts and deep into the heavy metal scene. Somehow, poor Simon gets a signed to the lawyers who are traveling around talking about false confessions. One of my personal points of pride though, is that by the end of this trip around Australia, he seemed to like what we were trying to do,
so we had a great time with him. But Simon kept asking us, as did everybody else we met around Australia, have you heard about Tana Poora. Have you heard about New Zealand's Brendan Dassy And that's exactly who Tana is. Police officers around the world are often trained in very similar ways about how to interrogate suspects, and so I expected and was beginning to discover false confessions in places like Japan, in Korea, and other Commonwealth countries like Australia
and New Zealand and Canada. These are stories that hit home around the globe, whether it's for you know, social justice driven lawyers or heavy metal roadies. You know Tanapoura, Brendan Dacy. We all know someone vulnerable like them, and we can all see them need to do justice in cases like these. Tana Pura's story starts about eight thousand miles away from where Steve and I are sitting right now in the United States. It starts in South Auckland. That's an urban area on the southern edge of New
Zealand's largest city, Auckland. It's home to a large minority population, including Mao Reads, the indigenous Polynesian population of New Zealand. Parts of South Auckland can have negative connotations too often, it's associated with poverty and crime. When our story starts in South Auckland was home to a three nine year old woman named Susan Burdette. Susan lived alone in a
tidy house on Paw Road. She worked days as an account's clerk at a chemical manufacturing company, and on the evening of March Susan leaves her weekly bowling league meet up and drives home under a night of beautiful stars. Susan's a hard worker, so when she doesn't show up at work the next few days, her colleagues get concerned. They call her friend Steve eventually to find out if
he knows where she is. Steve gets worried and he ends up going over to Susan's house that Wednesday, March at about p m. He finds the front door unlocked, goes inside and is greeted with a horrible sight. Susan is lying horizontally on her water bed and she's clearly dead. The upper half of her body is wrapped in a duvet and there's a wooden baseball bat lying on the bed next to her. Her legs are dangling off the side of the bed and they're crossed. Someone who ever
did this had positioned her that way. The police arrived, they removed the duvets, and they find that Susan had been beaten badly about the head, very likely with the baseball bat. She had also been sexually assaulted, and there's plenty of DNA left behind semen, as well as a bloody smudge mark on a light switch. Susan's hands were covered with defensive wounds, which indicates that she had fought back against her attacker, and her friends later identified the
baseball bat as belonging to Susan. She had kept it next to her bed for her own protection. The police begin by investigating Susan's other friends, but DNA and alibis clear them all and the investigation quickly stalls. The pressure is building building, that is until about a week after the murder. That's when police get a call from a woman named Terry McLoughlin, and she tells them a story about her then sixteen year old nephew, a shaggy haired,
baby faced Mauori kid named Tana Pora. Now let's talk about Tina for a bit. Tina had it rough growing up. His mother died when he was a young boy, and his father left shortly afterwards, and then got passed around from family member to family member and ultimately ended up in his aunt Terry's house. A few days after Susan Bardette's murder made headlines, Tina and some friends found a baseball bat in the local park and they were joking
about it being the murder weapon. Back at Aunt Terry's house, Tina kept talking about the bat. Tina had a history of run ins with the law, nothing really serious, but enough for Terry to want him out of her house. She called the police over and over, insisting the Tina knew something about Susan Burdette's murder. But police quickly come to the conclusion that Tana and his buddies were just
over excited teens who are talking shit. They interview Tina they take his d n A. They even execute a search warrant, but Tina and his friends are ruled outcome conclusively as Susan Burdette's killers. The DNA doesn't match, the search warrant turns up nothing, and while Tina does have a record, there is nothing in his background that would suggest this level of violence or depravity. Now let's fast
forward almost exactly twelve months to March eighteen. We're almost a year out now from the discovery of Susan Burdette's body. In the course of police investigations. That's a lifetime and this is the only unsolved homicide from Tina. Porra is seventeen years old. Now he still has that baby face, but his police record has grown. During a routine interview with Tina about a car theft, police get an anonymous
phone tip about Susan Burdette's murder. This collar links the murder to a local gang called the Mongrel Mob, a gang Tana is rumored to have connections with, so the police decide to keep him at the station for questioning. His interrogation begins at nine am and continues for the next four days. The police have Tana pour in the
interrogation room, and he's telling multiple different stories. The stories don't make any sense, and it's not an interrogation with banging of the table or raised voices or threats or even promises. You're a comment that you're gonna sell us more. Is that correct? Okay? Well, tell us this is a seventeen year old kid who is highly suggestible and eager to please the authorities. They're plying him with cigarettes and fast food and drinks. You had spring row chips and correct.
The detectives even mentioned twenty dollars as a reward for information about Susan Burdette's rape and murder. Tina's story keeps evolving and the camera keeps getting turned on and off. You said you're gonna tell us everything. First, Tina tells the police that he drove two other men to Susan's house and waited outside while they went into attacker. You were telling us about a person called dog raping this woman. Did you hear anymore or see anymore? It's outside. Eventually
he changes that story. I thought what you've said so far that you climbed in the bedroom window and you've gone through to open the door up for the other two. Now he's climbing in through one of Susan Burdette's windows and letting the other two in through the front door. So when you were in there, you could see quite clearly what was happening. Is that right? It's just watching
and you were just watching. And in the end, after four days, Tina confesses to being in the room, to actually holding Susan down while his two associates raped her. And you were in the room some of this time while this was happening, that right, you were holding Susan down? Is there? And that last story, the one that ultimately seals Taina's fate. It comes after a break in the tea room, where of course, the cameras are turned off
at the suggestion of the police. Taina identifies this to supposed accomplices as senior members of the Mongrel Mob, that local gang. The police bring in those two individuals the Taina had named, but their DNA doesn't match the DNA found on Susan's body. They're cleared and they're released. Things don't go as smoothly for Taina. He's arrested based on
his confession. He's charged with Susan Burdette's rape, and murder, and fourteen long months later, prosecutors try Tina Pora for participating in the murder of Susan Burdette along with two unknown accomplices. And let's stop right here for a minute. This is round one of the battle of these two titans of evidence, confessions versus d N. A DNA seemed to clear Tina Por of any rolling this cry, but
it's the confessions that ultimately lead to his conviction. On June sixteenth, a jury took less than ninety minutes to convicting a Pora of rape and murder. He received a life sentence and was shipped off to prison. At the same time, the New Zealand police are beginning a focused investigation into six rapes that had occurred between night and
nine two in the Auckland area, including Susan Burdette's rape. Now, these attacks were all similar enough that some police officers began to worry that they had a serial rapist on their hands. All of them involved a lone wolf attacker who broke into women's homes, wrapped their heads in blankets or debay's, and repositioned them so that they lay sideways
across the edge of the bed. During the Attack Act, and by April nineteen ninety six, a few years after Taina's conviction, the investigation into these rapes linked them all, including Susan Burdett's attack, to the DNA of the same person, a man named Malcolm Raywa. Now, who is Malcolm Raywa? First of all, He's twenty years older than Tana Poorra. And while I usually try to avoid characterizing my fellow humans like this, ray What is a monster. He's a
terrifying figure, a prolific serial rapist. He's the kind of predator that women worry about. He's the worst nightmare. Ray What committed his first rape in the nineteen seventies. His wife was in labor giving birth to their child at the time, so ray What took the opportunity to sexually assault a nurse in a hospital bed. Four and a half years in prison he spent for that awful crime. So ray What gets out of prison and apparently rapes
again from then on. Over the dozens of rapes that he went on to commit, ray Was started developing a pattern and m o. He'd carefully select his victims who tended to be single women, professionals who are home alone. He'd stake out their homes in advance and plan his attacks meticulously, and then always the same thing, a surprise attack after the woman had fallen asleep, a physical attack first to subdue her, then the blanket or duvet around her head, and a rape at the side of the bed,
and we we would hide in their homes. He would wait for them to get into bed and begin to fall asleep, and then he would attack. Rea apparently suffered from erectile dysfunction, which is why he positioned his victims in a way that allowed him to maintain sexual contact during his attacks. That's also why he acted alone. He didn't exactly want an audience. Ray was arrested on May six. It's a pretty dramatic sting operation. Actually, the police have
been planning this for quite some time. When he tries to run, police dogs wrestle this guy to the ground. Now, the police remember that Tina Pora had already confessed to one of the rapes to which Rewa is tied by DNA, so they immediately asked him if he knows Tana Pora. Rewa is crystal clear never met him. Based on the arrest of Malcolm Rewa, the Court of Appeals throws out
Tana's conviction never met him. Now, at this point in time, where you have a prolific serial rapist operating in the same neighborhood as the Burdette murder and his DNA is at the crime scene and he's telling you I don't know Tana Pora, most prosecutors and police officers would throw their hands up and say, we can't go forward with a reprosecution of Tina Pura. We have to free in. But instead Tina is retried, and if you've listened to
this podcast, you know what's coming. Prosecutors change their theory of the case and argue at Taina's second trial that he and Rewa raped and killed Susan Burdette together, even though Rewa had denied knowing Taina, even though Rewa always acted alone, and even though Rewa would never have wanted some teenager there to witness his sexual dysfunction. So now we have round two of a battle between confession evidence and DNA evidence, except this time we know whose DNA
it is. It's the DNA of a serial rapist named Malcolm Rewa. Will Taina's confession bring him down or with the jury side with the science and recognized that Tina Pourra and Malcolm Rewa had never met. Sure enough, despite all hopes that the DNA evidence would be an enough to clear Tina, Tina was convicted a second time of raping and murdering Susan Burdette and sent back to his
life sentence. Meanwhile, Malcolm Raa himself stood trial for three months on what amounted to forty five counts of rape involving twenty seven different women. His trial ended with convictions for sexually assaulting twenty five of them, including Susan Burdette. Just like Tina, he was shipped off to prison for decades. Now, this is justice for Rewa, but for Tina Porra it's
anything but. And for years, Taina served as time with little hope of freedom, and things might have stayed bleak for him had it not been for a man named Tim McKinnell. Now, who is Tim McKinnel At the moment, I'm of self employed, private and vistigheta. But when I
finished university I joined the police. As a twenty two year old, Tim McKinnell started out his career as a cop, A good cop, one of the best cap Tim had become a member of the South Auckland Police Force in the late nineteen nineties, eventually rising to junior detective by the year two thousand. That year, the force had been divided over the case of Taina Pora. A lot of chat went on and the police bar at the time, and there was a real disconnect between two different groups
of people. People that thought China Porta was a guilty man and had been involved in the ripe and murder of Susan Badett, and there was another camp of experienced police officers who thought that he was an innocent man. In fact, Tim remembers seeing all manner of drunken arguments at police bars and he was struck by the passion of those who believed in Tina Pora. Tim never forgot those arguments or his own growing doubt about Tana's guilt, even after he eventually left the police force, and as
many retired officers do, he became a private investigator. Now, in two thousand seven, Tim attended a local conference on wrongful convictions and false confessions and that conference brought up those old lingering questions that Tim had about Tina's case. The last straw came when Tim was diagnosed in his thirties with a rare blood disorder. Not exactly a death sentence, but the kind of health scare that led him to reevaluate his priorities and seek out more meaningful work like
freeing the innocent. Eventually, Tim decided to take the plunge. In two thousand nine, he visited Tina Pura, who was then thirty four years old in prison. Taina was no longer that teenage car thief Tim had read about. He was polite, well mannered, surprisingly gentle, even warm. Tim begins to feel an urge to help this guy. But there's the matter of Taina's confession. Tim starts by digging up videotapes of Taina's interrogation, and they're not easy to find.
They're on old VHS tapes in boxes and police departments, but he gets them and he sits down to watch them, and he is blown away by what he saw. When you examine what he was able to say on day one, in the first few interviews on tape, and you compare that to what he was able to say four days later, there are marked differences. There were some very particular things that happened in Susan's house that the offender would know, and it's clear from the interviews that Tina Porter had
no idea about any of them. Despite four days worth of trying, Tina just was not able to tell a story that matched what actually happened. When police asked him to describe Susan Burdette, he says she was chubby, even though she was actually quite athletic. Tina is asked to draw a picture of how he left Susan's body. Remember, she'd been found horizontally with her legs dangling over the side of the bed, but he draws her lying vertically
on the bed. When he was asked whether there was anything special about Susan's bed, Tina can't come up with the fact that it was a water bat, and so one of the questions that arises about that is how did he come to know things on day four that he didn't know on day one? The interrogator's take Tina on a field trip to Susan Bridette's street so that he can point out details of the crime to them
in person, and they videot the whole thing. He started giving them directions that were taking them away from her house, so though helpfully tried to direct him back towards her house. It was pretty clear on tape that he still had no idea where he was going and I wasn't able
to identify anything familiar. In the end, they took him to the outside of the house where Susan had been raped murdered and asked him if you recognized anything, and again he didn't, so the police officer and it's really chilling, really chilling to watch it. He said, Look, it's clear you don't recognize what it is you're looking for, So do you think it would help if I showed you house? And that's an extraordinary thing for a police officer to do.
For Tim, that's it. This was a false confession. He was motivated, fired up, and he would not rest until Taina Poorra was cleared. But he needs to present more evidence to the lawyers and other people he wants to get involved in this case. So Taina's case isn't one that was only scarred by false confession. There were the other issues that we're beginning to arise with the involvement of Taina's family. Tina's cousin became a key witness for
the prosecution against Taina. She claimed that she had seen Taina with Raiwa on multiple occasions, including once to tain his girlfriend's home. But Tim was able to discredit Martha's testimony. There was evidence of paid witnesses, including his cousin and his auntie. Those family members gave evidence against him, and we know that at least one of them was paid
five thousand dollars for her trouble. Tim tracks down Fiona, Tina's girlfriend, and Fiona says that she has no idea who Malcolm Rawall was and that he was never in her home. From his time on the police force, Tim was well acquainted with the various gangs operating around South Auckland, so for him, one piece of the prosecution's argument was
clearly ridiculous. Malcolm was a senior member of the Highway sixty one motorcycle Club, mortal enemies of the Mungrel Mob, and certain a porter somebody who was supposedly involved with the Mungrel Mob going to Susan Burdett's house late one night with a senior member of the Highway sixty ones to commit a brutal rape and murder. Anybody that knows anything about gang culture in New Zealand will tell you
that that's just nonsense. Tim doesn't stop there. He also starts assembling an all star team of experts, starting with an Icelandic professor and former detective himself, Gisley good Johnson, who was a professor by that time in London. Now, Gisley essentially created the field of false confession science. He's the father of everything we're talking about during this podcast.
And after Tim sends him tain his interrogation videos, Gisley agrees to write a report deconstructing Taina's statements and deeming them unreliable. Next, Tim enlist the help of respected local New Zealand journalist named Phil Taylor. Phil had questioned the stage case against Tana for years and is happy to help,
and Phil delivers. In two thousand and twelve, as the case for Taina's innocence is building, Phil releases a bombshell article titled Innocent Man in Jail for twenty Years and in it, Choke Henwood, the detective who had developed the original criminal profile of Malcolm Reywa, says the cops got it horribly wrong in Susan Burdette's case. Taina had nothing
to do with this. Now this is a huge deal because Choke Henwood is the most famous criminal profiler in New Zealand, a bit like John Douglas of the mind Hunter fame. For somebody like Choke Hinwood come out and express a family health conviction that Tina Porto was innocent was hugely important in terms of public perception and momentum
for our appeal work on Tina's case. And in the middle of this, there's this remarkable moment when Susan Burdette's brother Jim comes forward and says, I too believe that Tina Porra is innocent, and he actually meets with Tina Porra. It's this incredible moment of reconciliation and grace. Momentum is building across the board, but there's still one more piece. Can Temp provide a better understanding, a better explanation of
why Tina confessed to a crime he didn't commit. We a documentary maker called Michael Bennett making a documentary about Tina's case. Perhaps the most significant development in twenty years occurred because the person that had been watching it was a woman called doctor Valerie McGinn. Dr McGinn provides Tim with the answer he needs. She writes a report saying your clients. Mr Tina Porra sounds very similar to many
people with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. She even attaches a journal article that details how individuals with f A s D are at an increased risk of getting arrested. And more importantly, people that have it can be impulsive, the suggestible, that eager to please figures of authority. So when you look at those types of behaviors and then you consider the position Tainer was in when he was in the police station in it almost makes it inevitable that he
was going to confess to something. Dr McGinn confirms categorically the Tina suffers from an f A s D disorder. He was uniquely susceptible to falsely confessing in the interrogation room. One of the things that really bothered me about Tana's cases we could never understand why he did what he did, The things he said, and the people he implicated, just none of it made sense to us, and we couldn't
explain that to the courts. And so once we got this diagnosis of fetowell whole spectrum disorder, it all became clear. It was the final piece of the puzzle and we finally understood what it was we were dealing with, and that does it. All the pieces are assembled for Tim and his team to appeal Tana's conviction and they bring the case in November to the Privy Council in London, the final Court of Appeal where Commonwealth countries like New
Zealand can bring cases like Tina's. It's the court of last resort and it's staffed with senior judges, some of the best and brightest minds in the entire Commonwealth. Now this is Tina's last shot, and his lawyers put his essay s D Disorder at the front of their case, arguing the judges in and two thousand trials weren't aware of his disability and if they had been, they would
have ruled differently. There was a big group of people that gathered at Michael Bennett, the documentary maker's house, waiting for that decision to be announced, and it was an extraordinary moment. We only got to tell Tana about an hour before the whole world found out that he had his conviction quashed and he was no longer a rapist and murderer. That was incredibly emotional for him. On March three,
in the case of Porra versus the Queen. The Council of rules that Tina's confessions must be thrown out, and they quashed his conviction for the rape and murder of Susan Burdette. Two weeks later, the Crown prosecutors dropped their case and declined to retry Tina, and after more than twenty years, Tina Poorra was officially exonerated. You know, what his first concern was for was for the police officers that had interviewed him. He didn't want their reputations to
be tarnished because of what had happened. One of his first thoughts was for other people, and that was that was pretty cool. In so many of these wrongful conviction cases, you see people go through so much pain, and they have every right to be bitter, resentful, angry, all of those things, but so often you see them express, at least publicly, these incredible acts of grace. It's almost as though they've lived through so much pain they don't want
to cause anymore. In Tina received a sum of money to compensate him for the time he had spent in prison for a crime he did not commit. He also received an apology from the new Zealand government. Taana grew up in prison. He was there for twenty two years and he struggles every day. We keep in contact, but life isn't great for him. The money makes some things easier, but it doesn't repair the psychological damage. It doesn't bring the years back, and it doesn't like his life easy now.
Is incredibly difficult to watch him struggle through life after everything he's been through. Tina, we salute your sheer endurance. You will to keep on fighting and surviving and living through this ordeal from the other side of the planets. Know that we won't forget your name or what you've been through, and all of us together, we're fighting to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that's the story
of Tana Pora. Next week's episode takes us to El Paso, Texas, where a total stranger became invested in the case of Daniel Viegas and turned out to be his savior until then. Thanks for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jayson Flam
and the team at Signal Company Number One. Executive producer, Kevin Wardace Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me on Twitter at
s driven. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction