“I’m not qualified” — former Civic Creche detective’s response to call for him to read research into the injustice his work created

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EXCLUSIVE

One major player in the Christchurch Civic Creche injustice whose actions deserve scrutiny is former detective Colin Eade, the officer who drove the case and was effectively in charge of it. For a policeman, Eade developed surprisingly close ties with some of the complainant mothers in the case, even having relationships with two of them (of which more below). He left the force in the mid-1990s and now works as a probation officer.

Recently, Wellington researcher Ross Francis, who wrote two Law Journal articles late last year scrutinising the Civic case, sent copies of his articles to Eade, who was not impressed.

By a return email to Francis, which was posted in a Civic case discussion group, Eade said: “Thank you for forwarding your research to me, however it isn’t for me to comment on your research as you will understand that I am not qualified to do this [emphasis added]… I have not read your research and I do not intend to. I am sure that there are many qualified people who have the required skill and interest in this area to comment on your work. Please do not contact me again.”

It is relevant here that Eade says he is “not qualified” to comment on Francis’s research. In December 1991, after the first baseless complaint was lodged against childcare worker Peter Ellis by a mother who claimed her son had been abused at the Civic, Eade most definitely held himself out to be qualified to comment on Ellis’s alleged unsuitability as a childcare worker.

Peter Ellis was convicted in 1993 on 16 charges of molesting children at the Civic, a popular Christchurch daycare centre. Since the trial, the evidence has become overwhelming that no children were abused at the Civic by Ellis or anyone else. The belief that abuse happened was created by parental hysteria, fuelled by the actions of social workers and the police.

In December 1991, Colin Eade had arranged for a number of Civic pre-schoolers to be interviewed by Sue Sidey, a Social Welfare specialist services worker trained for sexual abuse investigations. Sidey’s interviews elicited no allegations of abuse from the children concerned. Eade stated this in a letter to Christchurch City Council group manager metropolitan services Rob Dalley on December 20 1991. The city council was the Civic’s owner and employer of its staff. Ellis had been suspended the moment the mother complained

In the context of Eade’s recent email to Ross Francis, the relevant part of Eade’s letter to Dalley is: “It is clear to me that Peter Ellis should not be involved in any way in the supervision or care of children. I believe that we were very lucky to have this brought to our attention at this stage. If he had continued on at the centre, things could have got worse.”

The “things” which “could have got worse” that Eade was opining on were his claims in the same letter that “the children had a general fear of Peter Ellis. It is possible that this fear may affect their behaviour for some time to come. It also appears that he has handled some of these children roughly.”

Eade’s opinions in that letter, which he felt qualified then to give, ensured that Ellis did not get his job back. They were also highly questionable. Many Civic children liked Ellis very much, while others did not. Ellis did indeed like getting into rough-and-tumble play with the children and some of them probably did find it frightening. The fact remains that many of the Civic parents, then and right to this day, approved of the way Ellis interacted with their children. He was one of the most popular workers at the centre with children and parents. Videos still exist showing him playing joyfully with happy children.

To reinforce his December 1991 findings that Ellis had committed no sexual abuse, Eade’s letter added: “It is possible that Ms Sidey will be contacted by other parents in the future but it is unlikely that these children will disclose sexual abuse.”

In fact, what happened after Eade wrote that letter is that the mother who made the original complaint refused to accept either Eade’s findings of no abuse, or her own son’s repeated statements, from which he never waivered, that Ellis had not acted improperly or abused him. This mother withdrew her son from the Civic and put him in another daycare centre, and promptly accused a male worker there too of abusing him, an allegation her son also denied and which was also found to be unfounded upon police investigation. The mother spent much of the summer telling every Civic parent who would listen to her ravings that their children were being sexually abused, and continued to do so for the whole of 1992 and 1993.

This woman, who was a self-proclaimed sexual abuse counsellor, determinedly and single-handedly created the panic that swept through the Civic community, panic that led to the mass questioning of children by terrified parents who continually swapped rumours and fears with each other and sent their children to be interviewed by Sue Sidey and her specialist services colleagues.

These interviews were noted for their insistent, repetitive questioning of those small children, by interviewers primed by parents with what to ask, leading to many children eventually making bizarre claims about abuse that were almost identical to the bizarre claims made in the many similar daycare centre cases in America that happened before the Civic affair. Those cases were well known to a number of the Civic parents, who got hold of “satanic abuse” literature from America and circulated it to other Civic parents.

As I reported in December, Professor Harlene Hayne, the head of the Otago University psychology department, has analysed the Civic interviews and compared them with the closely similar American Kelly Michaels “Wee Care” case, whose interviews are accepted by many experts as having been “the worst of the worst” for eliciting accurate testimony from small children. Professor Hayne’s research found that the Civic interviews were worse than the Kelly Michaels ones and even less likely to have elicited accurate testimony.

Colin Eade stood outside the room where Sue Sidey and other interviewers recorded their question and answer sessions with Civic children on videotape (the videos were used, highly selectively, as the main “evidence” against Ellis in court). Eade listened to the answers as children gave them, and passed notes under the door with suggestions for additional questions, based on information he had been given by parents before the interviews. This bizarre note-passing was noticed by many of the children being interviewed, as the transcripts of the sessions quote them asking about it and being told the notes were from Eade.

Amid the hysteria being fomented in the early months of 1992, numerous parents took their children to Sidey for interviewing. On March 30, the eve of an electric meeting of Civic parents, Eade formally arrested Ellis over comments made in one such interview. Eade had become a true believer in the guilt not just of Ellis, but also of some of the women Civic workers, four of whom were also later arrested, though the equally fanciful charges against them were dropped just before Ellis’s trial began.

Eade became part of what amounted to a support group for a corps of complainant parents, and continued to give some of them support even after he left the police. Some were so close to him that when I went to talk to one of them about the case, she phoned Eade immediately to seek his advice, (which was to say nothing).

Such support might seem like him just being a good officer and friend, but he also went on to have relationships with two of the mothers and one of Sidey’s colleagues. Additionally, one night he approached another complainant mother by telephone after he had been drinking, and she reacted by withdrawing her child from the case.

A 1998 police investigation into these matters cleared Eade. Conducted by Christchurch-based Detective Superintendent Jim Millar, it found: “Undoubtedly Eade suffered from stress as a consequence of his involvement in this protracted, difficult and controversial investigation,” but his judgment “was not impaired in any significant way… It is possible that the stress he was suffering manifested itself in a number of ways,” including his “inopportune comments” to the mother he telephoned. As for his relationships with the two mothers and the interviewer, Millar said: “These were social contacts he made long after the investigation . . . each strongly denies that there was impropriety on the part of the detective.”

In a curious twist, the mother who withdrew her child after Eade’s phone call was the one whose child Ellis was first arrested over on March 30 1992. This child had not even attended the Civic, and the charge related to Ellis allegedly indecently touching her on a visit to the creche while her mother fetched another child. Ironically, this was one of the least-bizarre charges in a case where the allegations eventually included a child sacrifice, imprisoning of children in cages suspended from the creche building’s ceiling, children taken through tunnels beneath Christchurch to be abused by Japanese tourists, children forced to stand naked while women creche staff danced in a circle around them, Ellis forcing children to eat his faeces and drink his urine, and much, much other palpable nonsenses.

Footnote: Peter Ellis was released from prison in 2000 after serving the full non-parole term of his 10-year sentence. As a result of Harlene Hayne’s research, Ellis’s lawyer, Judith Ablett Kerr,QC, is seeking a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the case. She is also currently preparing an appeal to the Privy Council, which is possible because cases predating the establishment of the New Zealand Supreme Court in 2004 can still go to the Privy Council.

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