Gone Fishing: The curious case of former cop Mark Franklin

By Amy Maas and Adam Dudding

* Warning: If you haven't yet listened to the Gone Fishing podcast, please be aware there are some spoilers in this article.

It was a Friday night in central Auckland. Mark Franklin, a social cannabis user, was strolling down an alley, sharing a joint with some friends, when they bumped into some police officers.

It was a terribly awkward moment for Franklin. He knew these cops: after all, he was a senior officer himself - a detective senior sergeant in west Auckland.

No-one was arrested, but Franklin talked to his supervisor about it after the weekend, to avoid putting those officers in a tricky situation. He got a warning and nothing came of it.

It could have been much worse. Franklin was in the middle of one of the most taxing and complex investigations he'd ever conducted. It would have been a serious matter if the media found out the cop leading the hunt for the killers of Deane Fuller-Sandys and Leah Stephens was a stoner.

That was around 1998. The media didn't learn about the senior cop's reefer madness till many years later, long after the trials were over and the guilty verdicts recorded.

Read and listen:

RNZ and Stuff's interactive long-form write-up: Gone Fishing: Murder, mayhem ... maybe

Recently, though, Franklin found himself on the defensive at the suggestion that his cannabis use had an impact on how he conducted the high-profile investigation.

"Yeah, there could be the allegation that 'he was smoking weed - he got this wrong'. Well, that doesn't wash with me," said Franklin.

"I'm very, very focused. I believe I did an extremely good job in the New Zealand Police."

The reason Franklin found himself defending his record on a decades-old case is that he agreed to be interviewed for a new podcast from Stuff and RNZ.

Gone Fishing, which is also being broadcast on RNZ Nights, digs into a case that Franklin ranks as one of the "most difficult and complex" he ever ran.

Two missing persons files from August 1989 - that of west Auckland tyre-fitter Deane Fuller-Sandys and Karangahape Rd sex worker Leah Stephens - were wrapped together into a single case almost a decade later, in a two-year investigation that finally led to a trial in 1999, a successful appeal, a retrial in 2000, and an unsuccessful appeal after that.

West Auckland mother Gail Maney was jailed for having commissioned gang member Stephen Stone to kill Fuller-Sandys.

Stone, too, was found guilty of Fuller-Sandys' murder, as well as the rape and murder of Leah Stephens, who he'd feared would tell police about the first murder. Two other men were found guilty of helping dispose of Fuller-Sandys' body.

Gone Fishing investigates the mysteries surrounding the case, and looks especially closely at Maney's claim that she is innocent - and never even met Fuller-Sandys.

Franklin left the police more than a decade ago, and was under no obligation to talk to us about an old case. But where the New Zealand Police proved extremely unhelpful when asked for documents and information, Franklin was very happy to discuss the case. It was a career highlight.

"If someone asks me what was your most interesting case or the most fascinating, well, this is it... It's not a run of the mill homicide; it's quite unique in a lot of ways.

"This was a case where there's no forensics; we didn't have scenes, we didn't have bodies, and [for] the evidence we relied totally on criminal associates who were involved in the crimes. That was probably one of the most challenging things."

'I'd never go back'

Franklin is in his late 50s. He was in the police force for 27 years. As a homicide detective he worked on a number of high-profile cases, including that of Delcelia Witika, the two-year-old killed by her mother and stepfather in 1991, and of Marie Jamieson, who was abducted off the street and murdered in 2001.

The stress of the job was huge. Even now, Franklin told us, "I still have nightmares - not about the gory stuff, just the pressures of working in police. I'd never go back."

In 2004, by then a detective inspector, Franklin was seconded to the Cook Islands to review an old homicide.

He fell in love with the place. He was in a position to take early retirement on psychological grounds so he made the leap, and set up a new life there.

Franklin's a musician too - he plays the guitar and has a deep gravely singing voice. In Rarotonga he gigged at resorts and bars. But he also fell back into policing - mentoring and training local officers, and investigating some serious fraud and corruption cases.

"I shouldn't have been doing it over there really."

In 2010, Franklin was diagnosed with throat cancer. He received treatment in Auckland before heading back to the islands.

Then in May 2011 police officers with drug dogs raided Franklin's home, and he was arrested, and later convicted on drug charges.

As Franklin told Stuff reporter Tony Wall in a 2013 interview conducted inside Rarotonga's Arorangi Prison, his crime had been to sell a few small packages of cannabis to an undercover police officer.

The way Franklin told it, the officer hung around Franklin and his band "pestering" him for weed, until one night Franklin "caved in", and bought $50 worth of drugs for the man from his regular supplier, and later another $100-worth.

When the story was reported in New Zealand, there were references to a "major drug ring", but Franklin said the quantity of drugs involved was small, and he didn't even know most of the other people arrested.

He believed his arrest was in fact connected to his police work. He'd run an investigation that led to charges against MP Norman George, and Franklin thought George may have tipped off police that Franklin was a social cannabis smoker.

We made calls to Franklin in Rarotonga in mid-2017, hoping he could shed light on some troubling aspects of the case against Gail Maney, and discovered he'd recently been deported back to New Zealand.

We then visited him at a property north of Auckland, where he was staying with friends.

He told us he'd already picked up some local music gigs, and was doing other odd jobs such as labouring and driving a van for a junk-pickup service. He was finding it pleasant enough being back in New Zealand, though he wasn't enjoying the cold, and he hoped to get back to the islands eventually.

He said he'd had to leave Rarotonga for "immigration reasons", but the background to it was "very political too, to be quite honest".

As we started asking him about the nitty gritty of the Gail Maney case, it was obvious that it was still fresh in his mind. He rattled off the dates Fuller-Sandys and Stephens disappeared. He recalled many witnesses' names.

We challenged about a few important discrepancies between his recollections and the official records of police and courts, but as Franklin said, "the difficulty for me is [that] I'm relying on what I think's correct from my memory".

During the trial, Franklin's investigation was strongly challenged by defence lawyers. He was asked whether he had bullied witnesses, or pressured them to change their stories to match a predetermined police narrative.

Back then, and again in his interviews with us, Franklin totally rejected the idea. Bending the rules during witness interviews would have been self-defeating.

"I know that witness is going to be giving evidence under oath under cross-examination and I'd be cutting my own throat if I said or did anything to jeopardise that case."

When asked about one particular interview, where a witness suddenly linked the Fuller-Sandys and Stephens murders after consistently denying any connection, Franklin was more explicit:

"If there's allegations that I pressured him or thumped him, did something that was not correct ... there's no point me doing that because if I'd done that it jeopardises one of my key witnesses."

Franklin is proud of his work leading a highly complex investigation - one that resulted in guilty verdicts at trial and survived subsequent appeals. But he's also candid about the difficulties he faced. There was a near-absence of forensic evidence, so the case was built on witness testimony from people who in many cases were caught lying.

That means Franklin can't be certain the police got every detail right. Yet all the same, he said he was "100 per cent convinced that Deane Fuller-Sandys was killed and that Stephen Stone was the killer, and that Leah Stephens was killed and that Stephen Stone was the killer."

Franklin said the case against Gail Maney was also solid, despite the potential flaws in the witness accounts presented to the jury. But if the publicity surrounding the Gone Fishing podcast threw up new evidence about the case, he would expect the police to welcome that information with "open arms".

"At the end of the day, we're not out to convict innocent people."

To find out more, you can subscribe to the full eight-part Gone Fishing series at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or any other podcast app. Or, you can go to the RNZ homepage and click on Podcasts.