Black Sheep

"Four shots, and then another one" - that's how the story of Alice Parkinson begins as the 25 year old waitress gunned down her fiancé, Bert West, in the middle of a street in Napier. So why did thousands of New Zealanders sign a petition demanding her release?

In 1916 John Cullen led a small army of police deep into the forests of Te Urewera to arrest the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana - his crime? Preaching that his followers shouldn't sign up to fight in the First World War. But the raid is a complete disaster. Cullen oversees the shooting of two men in cold blood and the whole case against Rua unravels due to a huge legal blunder.

Arthur Worthington was a con artist who travelled the USA, marrying rich women then abandoning them and stealing all their money. With private detectives hot on his tail, he jumped on a ship bound for Christchurch where he set up his own religion and his own church.

Annie Aves was a famous abortionist from the 1930s. She was tried four times but each time the jury failed to reach a verdict. Her career finally came to an end when she was shot and killed by the boyfriend of a woman who'd sought her services.

Hongi Hika is a man with a difficult legacy. He's one of the greatest figures in New Zealand history, but he's also often held responsible for starting the Musket Wars.

Did you know that after WWI New Zealand established an official eugenics board? We tend to think of eugenics as being something the Nazis invented but really it was embraced all around the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this episode of Black Sheep historian and disability researcher Hilary Stace traces the history of New Zealand's eugenicists.

The worst kind of villain in New Zealand history was... an Auckland property speculator.

In the 1880s Austrian naturalist and ethnographer Andreas Reischek stole four mummified Māori corpses and smuggled them out of the country so they could be displayed at a museum in Vienna. He also shot hundreds of native New Zealand birds to preserve them "for science".