LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018JANE USSHER; NZ HERALD/MARK MITCHELL; DOMINION POST
30YEAR FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
Why it took so long
The six-year-old’s killer had an alibi for the
timeframe police were considering.
A
fter Jules Mikus was convicted,
in October 2002, of Teresa
Cormack’s murder, inquiry head
Brian Schaab conceded that the
initial police concentration on a narrow
timeframe for the 1987 abduction may
have been a mistake.
The focus from 8.45am-9.15am – after
the little girl had apparently decided to
return home after reaching Richmond
School – meant that anyone who could
produce an alibi for around that time
was downgraded on the suspect list.
“We weren’t considering the widerpicture perhaps as much as we should
have been,” Schaab told the Listener’s
Denis Welch after the verdict.
Mikus had been able to place himself
on the other side of town between 9.30am
and 10.00am. Even the fact that he had
repainted his Vauxhall Viva car was not
seen as unduly sinister.Schaab told Welch there was never
enough hard evidence at the time to
pin the crime on Mikus. “Unless this
guy had coughed or ... someone had
been able to tell us something about
him, we still wouldn’t have been able to
do something until last year anyway.”
The evidence that finally sealed
Mikus’ fate would have to wait 14
years in a plastic bag in a coldstore. It
included two pubic hairs found by a
forensic scientist examining Teresa’s
panties and smears of semen
taken from her body.
A month after the
murder, police were no
closer to finding Teresa’s
killer but were getting blood
and hair samples from
anyone remotely consid-
ered a suspect – just in case,
one day, a way might be
found of linking the killer to
evidence left on the body. Mikus gave a
blood sample to a doctor at the Tamatea
Medical Centre in Napier on July 20,
1987.
But DNA testing had been invented
only in 1985 and none of the con-
ventional methods used in 1987 were
capable of establishing a link. The
country’s first DNA testing lab would
not open until 1989.
Police and scientists could only sit
back and wait as DNA testing tech-
niques evolved. In February 2002, at
the ESR institute in Auckland, forensic
scientist Susan Petricevic was working
her way through blood samples given
by 845 “key suspects” in the Teresa
Cormack case, looking for a match to a
DNA sample obtained 11 months before
from semen found on Teresa’s body. She
tested more than 750 samples before
finding a match. The DNA profile
she held in one hand, extracted from
Mikus’ blood sample, matched exactly
the DNA profile in her other, extracted
from traces of semen stored for years in
a Wellington lab.
To make sure that the case against
Mikus was watertight, Schaab took the
pubic hairs to the US for further analy-
sis, where it was found the pubic-hair
DNA matched Mikus’ blood sample
DNA.Jules Mikus, far left, and Detective Sergeant
Brian Schaab, who headed the police inquiry.DNA testing advances
would inally identify
Teresa Cormack’s killer.DNA testing had only
just been invented and
there wasn’t enough
conventional evidence
to identify the killer.