New Zealand cop makes stunning killer admission
In a world obsessed with true crime and ‘monsters’, a cop in charge of hunting down dangerous offenders has revealed a shocking truth.
In a world obsessed with true crime and ‘monsters’, you might expect the man in charge of hunting New Zealand’s most dangerous offenders to be a particularly hardened cop.
Surprisingly however, it’s the softness that Detective Senior Sergeant Chris Blake has managed to hold onto that he believes makes him good at his job.
Detective Blake manages the New Zealand Police Behavioural Science Unit – the real-life equivalent of the FBI division made famous by the Netflix series Mindhunter – and has been intimately involved in some of the country’s most heinous cases.
“Nineteen years and my career hasn’t been coloured by what I’d say a lot of evil,” Blake reveals on this week’s episode of Gary Jubelin’s I Catch Killers podcast.
“I’ve never sat across an interview table from someone and gone: ‘you are just one hundred per cent bad.’ It’s far more: ‘you’re a human being and you’ve made some mistakes’.”
In fact, Blake argues that dismissing these unspeakable crimes as ‘evil’ actually ignores the complex reality of human violence.
The ‘toolbox theory’ on why some violent killers snap
Blake uses the analogy of a toolbox to explain why some people ‘turn’ bad.
“Your toolbox for dealing with hard things is not the same as my toolbox,” Blake explains to Jubelin, “whose fault that is, who knows … by and large, if someone commits a murder, they didn’t wake up that morning … [thinking] ‘I’m gonna kill somebody this afternoon’. But it ends up that way.”
It’s an uncomfortable position to consider: that a violent rapist or killer might have more humanity than initially thought – but holding this nuance has allowed the seasoned investigator to solve several high profile cases – including the murder of Jasmine Cooper.
A 26-year-old mother living in the small town of Te Hana, Cooper was brutally murdered two days before Christmas in 2013 by her ex-partner, Gene Hepana. The case shocked New Zealand, particularly for the heartbreaking detail that Cooper had sent a desperate text to her sister about someone “creeping around” her house just hours before her death, and the brutality of the crime itself, in which Hepana beat Cooper to death with a rock.
Called in to interrogate Hepana while he was in custody, Blake recalls going into the initial interview knowing next to nothing about the case.
“I couldn’t even make a plan because I didn’t know about it,” he says.
“But I’d just come off an advanced interviewing course, and that had taught us a lot about just zeroing in and forgetting about the wider pressures of homicide investigations and court and who’s going to be watching and all that kind of stuff,” he says.
“It was about just focusing on the fact that all an interview is, is a conversation with someone else. You don’t have to know everything before going in. Just go into it and have a chat with the person. That was another light bulb moment for me.”
With this in mind, Blake spent the first few hours of his interview with Hepana simply having a conversation.
“We just talked about nothing for a couple of hours in the interview room, cause there was nothing I knew about the case to raise with him,” he recalls.
“He denied it all, of course. But after a couple hours of chatting, he just sits there and he goes: ‘Oh, well, I guess I should probably tell you the truth now.”
Hepana would go on to plead guilty to Cooper’s murder – he is currently serving out a life sentence.
This approach of humanity over aggression has continued to serve Blake in his career with the New Zealand Police Behavioural Science Unit, established in the nineties following the crimes of serial predators Joseph Thompson and Malcolm Rewa, in which authorities realised they needed a cohesive network between policing districts.
At the unit, he leads a team of psychologists and analysts that supports major criminal investigations, including homicides and sexual assaults.
One of his main gripes is with the ‘rigid thinking’ he still sees in policing across the board.
“You get so many [police officers] where they’re like: ‘OK, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to smash in their doors at 6am with the armed offender squad. We’re going to rip them out of their bed. We’re gonna throw them in the car, get them in a cell.”
“OK,” Blake continues, “but are you going to lose anything if maybe you don’t smash his door in? Or if you actually go see him at 3pm?”
“It’s such rigid thinking, and if you [take a step back] you’ve got so many more safer options for better outcomes a lot of the time.”
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Originally published as New Zealand cop makes stunning killer admission
