Peter Ellis with his mother in 2000 after being released from prison. Photo: Getty Images / Paddy Dillon
Peter Ellis’ parole officer, interviewed for the first time over the Christchurch Civic Creche cases, says he doesn’t think Ellis was an abuser of children.
Childcare worker Ellis was at the centre of sexual abuse allegations made by children at the creche who claimed he abused them between 1986 and 1992. In 1993 he was convicted of child sex offences which saw him spend seven years in prison, but continued to proclaim his innocence.
Rick Lewis served as Ellis’ parole officer upon his release in 2000 and spoke to RNZ’s podcast Conviction: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case.
“I gradually, very gradually, came around to thinking that it seemed highly unlikely that he was guilty of those offences,” Lewis said.
Just over a year ago, the Supreme Court quashed all his convictions and found a “substantial miscarriage of justice", but it came too late for Ellis, who died of cancer at age 61 in September 2019.
Listen to the podcast: Conviction: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case
Lewis notes that his opinion “comes with a caveat, I guess, that I wasn't in court and I didn't hear the evidence”.
Lewis received permission from Corrections and his current employer to speak about Peter Ellis’s case.
Conviction podcast host and producer Alexander Behse said he looked for new voices to speak to in the process of re-examining the Christchurch Civic Creche case.
“I was, for a long time, chasing around to speak to inmates and people associated with the prison system, who met Peter while he was there.
“On Monday August 5 2019, I wrote an email to Rick Lewis. Feels ages ago now and crazy to realise how much this story has taken over my life.”
Behse went to Christchurch to meet Lewis and hear his story.
“I was sad to hear about Peter's poor health,” Lewis said. “I was certainly involved (then) and it was a very interesting case indeed.
“I was a probation officer in Christchurch,” he said.
“In 1999, I moved here. I was allocated his case... That's when I first met him.”
Ellis was released from prison in 2000 and never stopped trying to clear his name until his death.
Lewis said that Ellis “was given one year of parole supervision out of the 10-year sentence, from memory”.
Peter Ellis’ probation officer has spoken for the first time, to RNZ’s Conviction podcast. Photo: Trajan/RNZ
“The way it works is that, I get allocated a case and then go and meet the person before they leave prison, just to try and set things up, make sure everything's OK for when they go.”
Lewis admitted he knew little about Ellis’s controversial court case before taking him on.
“I knew nothing about him. If anything, I got the sense that he was a little bit offended that I knew nothing about him when I met him.
“But as far as I was concerned, he was a file. He was just another child sex offender on parole. And that's how I treated him.”
Ellis was “very talkative, very open, very happy to discuss his circumstances in the situation. Quite funny,” Lewis said.
He had a distinctive personality that was “a little bit on the outrageous side”.
“An example, the very first time I met him. He asked me if I had children of my own.
“And you know, having worked with a lot of sex offenders, I think there's an unwritten rule that that just crosses a boundary really between the personal and professional. You just wouldn't ask your probation officer if they've got children. But he did and he thought nothing of it. And I think that's just his way.”
Behse asked Lewis what made him think Ellis might not have abused the children?
“There's a whole range of factors and risk factors that you would take into account when you're assessing a sex offender. None of them were apparent during the year that I knew him.”
Those risk factors include an anti-social personality disorder, sexual preoccupation or a criminal history, he said.
He does admit that he may not have the complete picture of Ellis’s life, though.
“Any opinion I have is really only based on knowing Peter for a year, knowing what I know about sex offenders and the risks that they pose to the community and knowing something of the allegations and the context of the time in which he was convicted.”
Lewis said he felt Ellis did not have some of the typical factors he felt sex offenders had.
“He maintained a consistent story throughout. There was no evidence of lying and manipulation. The kind of manipulation that you would normally find with convicted child sex offenders.
“What you often find is that they will show one kind of face to the world which is not real.
“Peter was just consistently himself as far as I could tell.”
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