Grief and tragedy bound two mothers together after their daughters were murdered by the same man two decades apart. This week their heartbreak and devastation is being heard at the opening of a joint inquest in Christchurch.
For four consecutive years the parents of murdered Hokitika woman Kimi Schroder begged the Parole Board not to release their daughter’s murderer. Yet in 2011, despite their vehement insistence he would do it again, Paul Russell Wilson, who changed his name to Paul Tainui, was released on parole.
Just seven years later, another young woman was dead, murdered in the same way by the same man. She was 27-year-old Nicole Tuxford.
Three days after Nicole was found dead, Kimi Schroder’s father Gary, grief stricken at the news of Nicole’s death, took his own life.
This week a long-awaited joint inquest began in Christchurch before coroner Marcus Elliot, which will look at the deaths of both Nicole and Gary, including the decisions the Department of Corrections made in relation to its identification and management of risk of re-offending of Tainui, and the support provided to the Schroders following Nicole’s death.
In a heart-wrenching video made in 2019, the year after Nicole was murdered, Newsroom Investigates spoke to the two mothers about their shared grief, and about their devastation that the Parole Board didn’t heed their warnings.
“Oh we were just gutted, absolutely gutted, it was like it had happened to us all over again, and it was it. What can you do? We knew the Parole Board were responsible for it for letting him out. They were the first words we said: ‘It’s the Parole Board's fault for releasing him when we told them ‘No’,” Nancy Schroder, Kimi’s mother, told Newsroom.
The details around the deaths of the two young women are brutal.
On May 18, 1994, Tainui entered 21-year-old Kimi Schroder’s flat, tied up her male flatmate before torturing, raping and killing Kimi. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a 15-year non-parole period, which was later reduced to 13 years on appeal.
In January 2011, despite the protestations from Kimi’s parents and friends, he was released on parole from prison after telling the Parole Board he was sorry.
But Nancy Schroder and Kimi’s friend Jenny both told Newsroom he was never remorseful.
“He still believed he’d still had consensual sex with Kimi. There were red flags all the way through, every Parole Board meeting that we went to. There were red flags up showing that this man was never going to be ready to go back out into the open and in amongst the community again,” said Jenny.
Seven years later and still on parole, on April 7, 2018, Tainui broke into Nicole Tuxford’s Christchurch flat and lay in wait until the morning when she arrived back from staying at her boyfriend’s house.
Nicole worked as a receptionist at a scrap metal yard where then 55-year-old Tainui was a labourer. When Nicole entered her house, Tainui attacked, tortured and raped her, before slitting her throat. It was identical to Kimi’s murder.
In a terrible twist, before he broke into Nicole's house, Wilson had been picked up for drink driving at a police checkpoint. He was over the limit and was found to have knives in his car. Police took his keys, secured the knives, and despite his criminal record and lifetime parole, let him leave in a taxi.
“The system failed because they had someone in the car who had knives, who has murdered before, and they let him get away,” Nicole’s mother Cherie Gillatt told Newsroom.
“They need to lock these people, especially the likes of Paul Wilson, up and never let him out because he’s so evil. He was never going to be one of these people that can be rehabilitated. He was just too evil."
