An officer who's spent over 30 years as part of New Zealand's police force has detailed his experience in a new book.
David 'Chook' Henwood was a key part in the development of criminal profiling in New Zealand – a game changer for policing in the nation.
He retired in 2007 and has now shared his story, and his thoughts on policing, in his new book Unmasking Monsters.
He says he witnessed the factors that led to generational crime - which go deeper than upbringing.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Dave Chuck Kenwood was one of New Zealand's finest and
most respected police officers and investigators. A South Auckland officer
for thirty seven years, Chuck held the rank of Detective sergeant.
He was a key part in developing criminal profiling in
New Zealand, a game changer for our police force, and
he's one of our most decorated officers, with the record
(00:33):
three Silver Merit Awards, the highest Police Commissioner's award available
to investigators. David retired in two thousand and seven and
he's now shared his story and his thoughts on policing
in his new book, Unmasking Monsters and David Chuck Henwood
joins me.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Now, good morning, Good morning, Francisca.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
What do you prefer David or Chuck?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Chuck? Probably gives that few.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
People that are probably just learning that your name is
actually David, right now, are they? Do you think? Probably
DARMI What drew you to the police force?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, I think just by chance. Really, like a lot
of people, when you're sitting in the sixth form at
high school, not knowing where you're hiding, just by a chance,
bump into somebody who points you in a direction, and
that where it ended up at trenthen.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It was a long and varied and often challenging career.
What did you love about it?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I think helping victims it was the main thing. The
pleasure of locking up offenders and putting puzzles together. The
satisfaction is enormous. And I think the other thing that
people don't realize is we deal with a lot of
evil and brutal stuff, but there's so much good stuff
(01:54):
going on in the background and a lot of areas
and I worked themselves open for my whole career and
I saw a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Did you ever think I can't do this anymore?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Not really.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So much violence and chaos chuck, you know, was it
could were you sort of taught how to deal with
some of the horrors that you saw.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I don't think you can't be taught. You've got to
live it, really and it's sure it hardens you up,
but it also makes you probably a more complete person.
You know, you see a lot more and you know
you just put on your arm or when you go
to work and deal with it.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Over the years, you dealt with a lot of recidivist
criminals or criminal families. Was that frustrating?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Oh? Absolutely, But you can see where it comes from.
I mean, you walk into these houses and you see
the poverty or parent poverty, and you see these kids
growing up and three or four year olds will come
to the door and tell you to I f off
and kick you in the shens And what are they
going to turn it like? I mean, you can see
(03:05):
it happening, and shure you lock up the parents, the
grandparents of the grandkids later on if you hang around
long enough.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Because you describe your upbringing in the book as simplistic
and stable and that it gave you a solid foundation.
So how important do you think that is for young
people these days?
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Too? Wow? The beginning defines the end, doesn't it end?
It's so important. I mean, it wasn't until later on
that I when I hit the streets, I realized people
had this terrible kind of upbringing, brutal and and you know,
later on, when I was dealing in the profiling unit,
(03:44):
I realized that it wasn't just the brutality and the
criminality of what you grow up around it's quite oft
an abandonment and neglect at a very early age, you know,
and that it was common to all those serial rapists
and offenders that I profiled at the end of my career.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Chuck, I don't know if you're going to you can
answer this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
How do people reach the point when they are able
to violently end someone else's life?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
An excellent question. I don't know. I think it basically
comes down to some people just don't have a stop button.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Dealing with victims or victims, families, people in the middle
of what is often the worst moment in their lives.
Is this another thing that you just have to experience
in order to learn how to do?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Absolutely, it's all really about communication, and you've got to
be able to speak to all types of people in
different circumstances, victims and informing people of deaths of children,
and then dealing with rape victims that have just gone
through an absolutely brutal, traumatic moment in their life and
(05:02):
trying to get a statement from them or gets some
sort of indication from them where our inquiry is going
to head to is something you learn and you have
to learn it on foot. You can't read it in
a book, but you're guided by senior officers, and if
you're fortunate enough to have good ones who show you
(05:22):
the show the ropes, most people will pick it up
and run with it. But compassion, you know, for victims,
very big with me and has been all the way
through the career, really.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Because you're write in the book that the real point
of your duty and service is to make a difference
for the victims. Do you think we forget that, this
forget that these days?
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Well, certainly if you read the media and what is reported,
you would think so, wouldn't you. And but we've certainly
made changes and we've improved things as far as the
victims concerned, especially in courts and the process, particularly with
serial rapes and or rapes, And we've improved things along
(06:07):
the way, and I certainly spent a lot of time
trying to do that, help do that. But you're never
ever going to have the perfect picture, really, and we've
got to remember that the court system is set up
to make sure that the defendant gets a fair hearing,
and that's got to be what the court court's there for.
So you know, we're pushing the boundaries all the time
(06:30):
to have more input for victims, and that's only right.
I mean, they're a big part of what's going on
and they've got to live with it for the rest
of their life. And people view it that, you know,
if an offender goes on, he goes to prison for
two years and the victim's got to live for the
rest of their life, it just doesn't seem very fair,
does it. Know.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Hey tell us about Operation Park and the hunt for
notorious rapist Joseph Thompson and how that investigation changed the
way police work.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Your Operation Park keept off and for me anyway, and
Operation and as an operation in nineteen ninety three, men
are we had a number of stranger and true to
rapes were quite brutal, and we we tried all your
normal procedures of investigation, and over the next year these
(07:22):
rapes just kept coming and we managed to link a
number of other and another other, another number of rapes
from previous from the previous decade by behavior analysis. You know,
all all these files out and looked at them, and
you could quite once you've examined a rape scenes closely enough,
(07:42):
you can actually see the similarities sticking out at you.
And it's a bit like reading a book written by
your favorite author, and if I was to take the
cover off it and you were to read it, you'd
know who the right was because the way it's put together.
And that's what was like reading a lot of these
(08:03):
old rape files that were sitting there unsold. So we
ended up with forty odd rapes that we believed were
committed by one offender. A number of them by this
stage were linked by DNA.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
I had to then look at how we were going
to catch the offender because we were going nowhere. And
it was at a point in ninety four when John
Manning had taken over the control of the operation that
we went to criminal profiling. And what I mean by
(08:39):
that is by analyzing the files, we can link crimes
to crimes and crimes to offenders. But criminal profiling is
that a different kind of thing that comes that comes
out of the behavioral analysis, and that is to try
and sift through thousands of people's names and try and
find out trying and find the offender from all those
(09:03):
and we found that we weren't finding the offender now
in the in the present time. So the idea was
to go into the past, draw up a profile of
the offender and look in the past to find him.
He can't change the past. And that's where we found
Joseph Thompson. In all the hundreds of East like folders
(09:25):
that I had leading up to a criminal profile and
process being put in place, Joe Thompson's name never featured once.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
That highlightl It was a mammoth task, wasn't it. And
you know the one thing that you talk about as
you sort of got this criminal profiling unit set up
and things over time, was you know, you it was
just so hard to get enough staff on the job.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Well, I think that's always going to be the problem
in the police. I mean there's never enough policeman. There
never has been. As far back as when I joined,
we never had enough. So and you just deal with
what you've got and battle and fight for fight for staff,
take that little piece to the pie that nobody else
wants to let up. You know, we don't get We're
(10:12):
never going to have enough place, certainly Wascation in South Auckland.
I think it's across the country these days.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
How much has policing changed over the years since we
new started.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Oh a lot you know, it's always changing, and we
got used of changes as we went along. You know,
small changes here, they're small changes everywhere in the way
we interview, the way we deal with victims, the way
we deal with interview offenders or suspects. They're always changing.
(10:43):
And one of the big changes, of course is forensics.
You know, DNA, and so when you hear about a
homicide these days, or a cereal rape or whatever, the
first thing you hear about is DNA. You hear about
CCTV footage and telephones and different interviewing procedures, which, of course,
(11:05):
way back in the nineteen sixties and seventies it was
completely different work. I remember a very share attempted murdifier
where the victim was buried and managed to scramble out
of her grave, and the forensic report was one page long,
(11:26):
and half of that was the credentials of the person
writing it. These days that what we would have got
out of that rhyme scene was potentially enormous.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Do we expect it?
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
No, it has, it's changed, and it's fascinating reading those
how things progressed in your book as well. Do we
expect too much of police these days?
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I don't think so. Our mission is has always been
the same I had when I was in CIB that
don't get too big and think you're going to change
the world. We just went battles and for individuals and
for people that your victims, and my creator was always
(12:12):
find the truth, look after your victim of compassion, and
then hunt down the offender with a passion to just
stick with them. But they've all changed, every one of them.
Each one of those elements has changed over the years.
But that's still the same. We're still at the same
job to do and CIB as investigators.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So yeah, how important was it for you to get
justice for Tenapora and Susan Buddett.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Well, yeah, they were both tied together, wasn't they Because
we had to get through the Raver trial first ninety
ninety eight, and and I gave evidence there of his
behavior in court. But afterwards it was always known to
(13:05):
a number of us, or believe by a number of us,
the tainer porter was never at the crime scene. And
I didn't base that on anything apart from the behavior
of Malcolm ray But I knew Malcolm Raye was never
going to take a young seventeen eighteen year old blabbermouth
little fellow along to just a thief, along to a
crime scene who was going to commit a rape where
(13:27):
he was going to expose his fetishes and his failures
as a person and to display his behaviors. After all, he,
Malcolm Raver was didn't only cover the eyes of the
victims when he was committing his offenses. He didn't do
(13:50):
that just to prevent them identifying him. He did that
to prevent them seeing all his different behaviors that he
needed to go through his little fantasy. So why would
he take an eighteen year role along to watch that?
You know, I mean, it didn't make any sense to me,
and I've always kind of believed that in all that
(14:13):
beliefs of this day.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Thank you so much for giving us some of your
time this morning, and for an incredible career. It makes
for a fascinating read.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Thank you very much, Francisca, love you to.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Talk to you. That was Dave Chuck Henwood. His book
Unmasking Monsters is in stores this week.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to news Talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio,
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Dave Chuck Kenwood was one of New Zealand's finest and
most respected police officers and investigators. A South Auckland officer
for thirty seven years, Chuck held the rank of Detective sergeant.
He was a key part in developing criminal profiling in
New Zealand, a game changer for our police force, and
he's one of our most decorated officers, with the record
(00:33):
three Silver Merit Awards, the highest Police Commissioner's award available
to investigators. David retired in two thousand and seven and
he's now shared his story and his thoughts on policing
in his new book, Unmasking Monsters and David Chuck Henwood
joins me.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Now, good morning, Good morning, Francisca.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
What do you prefer David or Chuck?
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Chuck? Probably gives that few.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
People that are probably just learning that your name is
actually David, right now, are they? Do you think? Probably
DARMI What drew you to the police force?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, I think just by chance. Really, like a lot
of people, when you're sitting in the sixth form at
high school, not knowing where you're hiding, just by a chance,
bump into somebody who points you in a direction, and
that where it ended up at trenthen.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It was a long and varied and often challenging career.
What did you love about it?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I think helping victims it was the main thing. The
pleasure of locking up offenders and putting puzzles together. The
satisfaction is enormous. And I think the other thing that
people don't realize is we deal with a lot of
evil and brutal stuff, but there's so much good stuff
(01:54):
going on in the background and a lot of areas
and I worked themselves open for my whole career and
I saw a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Did you ever think I can't do this anymore?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Not really.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So much violence and chaos chuck, you know, was it
could were you sort of taught how to deal with
some of the horrors that you saw.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
I don't think you can't be taught. You've got to
live it, really and it's sure it hardens you up,
but it also makes you probably a more complete person.
You know, you see a lot more and you know
you just put on your arm or when you go
to work and deal with it.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Over the years, you dealt with a lot of recidivist
criminals or criminal families. Was that frustrating?
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Oh? Absolutely, But you can see where it comes from.
I mean, you walk into these houses and you see
the poverty or parent poverty, and you see these kids
growing up and three or four year olds will come
to the door and tell you to I f off
and kick you in the shens And what are they
going to turn it like? I mean, you can see
(03:05):
it happening, and shure you lock up the parents, the
grandparents of the grandkids later on if you hang around
long enough.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Because you describe your upbringing in the book as simplistic
and stable and that it gave you a solid foundation.
So how important do you think that is for young
people these days?
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Too? Wow? The beginning defines the end, doesn't it end?
It's so important. I mean, it wasn't until later on
that I when I hit the streets, I realized people
had this terrible kind of upbringing, brutal and and you know,
later on, when I was dealing in the profiling unit,
(03:44):
I realized that it wasn't just the brutality and the
criminality of what you grow up around it's quite oft
an abandonment and neglect at a very early age, you know,
and that it was common to all those serial rapists
and offenders that I profiled at the end of my career.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Chuck, I don't know if you're going to you can
answer this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
How do people reach the point when they are able
to violently end someone else's life?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
An excellent question. I don't know. I think it basically
comes down to some people just don't have a stop button.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Dealing with victims or victims, families, people in the middle
of what is often the worst moment in their lives.
Is this another thing that you just have to experience
in order to learn how to do?
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Absolutely, it's all really about communication, and you've got to
be able to speak to all types of people in
different circumstances, victims and informing people of deaths of children,
and then dealing with rape victims that have just gone
through an absolutely brutal, traumatic moment in their life and
(05:02):
trying to get a statement from them or gets some
sort of indication from them where our inquiry is going
to head to is something you learn and you have
to learn it on foot. You can't read it in
a book, but you're guided by senior officers, and if
you're fortunate enough to have good ones who show you
(05:22):
the show the ropes, most people will pick it up
and run with it. But compassion, you know, for victims,
very big with me and has been all the way
through the career, really.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Because you're write in the book that the real point
of your duty and service is to make a difference
for the victims. Do you think we forget that, this
forget that these days?
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Well, certainly if you read the media and what is reported,
you would think so, wouldn't you. And but we've certainly
made changes and we've improved things as far as the
victims concerned, especially in courts and the process, particularly with
serial rapes and or rapes, And we've improved things along
(06:07):
the way, and I certainly spent a lot of time
trying to do that, help do that. But you're never
ever going to have the perfect picture, really, and we've
got to remember that the court system is set up
to make sure that the defendant gets a fair hearing,
and that's got to be what the court court's there for.
So you know, we're pushing the boundaries all the time
(06:30):
to have more input for victims, and that's only right.
I mean, they're a big part of what's going on
and they've got to live with it for the rest
of their life. And people view it that, you know,
if an offender goes on, he goes to prison for
two years and the victim's got to live for the
rest of their life, it just doesn't seem very fair,
does it. Know.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Hey tell us about Operation Park and the hunt for
notorious rapist Joseph Thompson and how that investigation changed the
way police work.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Your Operation Park keept off and for me anyway, and
Operation and as an operation in nineteen ninety three, men
are we had a number of stranger and true to
rapes were quite brutal, and we we tried all your
normal procedures of investigation, and over the next year these
(07:22):
rapes just kept coming and we managed to link a
number of other and another other, another number of rapes
from previous from the previous decade by behavior analysis. You know,
all all these files out and looked at them, and
you could quite once you've examined a rape scenes closely enough,
(07:42):
you can actually see the similarities sticking out at you.
And it's a bit like reading a book written by
your favorite author, and if I was to take the
cover off it and you were to read it, you'd
know who the right was because the way it's put together.
And that's what was like reading a lot of these
(08:03):
old rape files that were sitting there unsold. So we
ended up with forty odd rapes that we believed were
committed by one offender. A number of them by this
stage were linked by DNA.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
I had to then look at how we were going
to catch the offender because we were going nowhere. And
it was at a point in ninety four when John
Manning had taken over the control of the operation that
we went to criminal profiling. And what I mean by
(08:39):
that is by analyzing the files, we can link crimes
to crimes and crimes to offenders. But criminal profiling is
that a different kind of thing that comes that comes
out of the behavioral analysis, and that is to try
and sift through thousands of people's names and try and
find out trying and find the offender from all those
(09:03):
and we found that we weren't finding the offender now
in the in the present time. So the idea was
to go into the past, draw up a profile of
the offender and look in the past to find him.
He can't change the past. And that's where we found
Joseph Thompson. In all the hundreds of East like folders
(09:25):
that I had leading up to a criminal profile and
process being put in place, Joe Thompson's name never featured once.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
That highlightl It was a mammoth task, wasn't it. And
you know the one thing that you talk about as
you sort of got this criminal profiling unit set up
and things over time, was you know, you it was
just so hard to get enough staff on the job.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
Well, I think that's always going to be the problem
in the police. I mean there's never enough policeman. There
never has been. As far back as when I joined,
we never had enough. So and you just deal with
what you've got and battle and fight for fight for staff,
take that little piece to the pie that nobody else
wants to let up. You know, we don't get We're
(10:12):
never going to have enough place, certainly Wascation in South Auckland.
I think it's across the country these days.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
How much has policing changed over the years since we
new started.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Oh a lot you know, it's always changing, and we
got used of changes as we went along. You know,
small changes here, they're small changes everywhere in the way
we interview, the way we deal with victims, the way
we deal with interview offenders or suspects. They're always changing.
(10:43):
And one of the big changes, of course is forensics.
You know, DNA, and so when you hear about a
homicide these days, or a cereal rape or whatever, the
first thing you hear about is DNA. You hear about
CCTV footage and telephones and different interviewing procedures, which, of course,
(11:05):
way back in the nineteen sixties and seventies it was
completely different work. I remember a very share attempted murdifier
where the victim was buried and managed to scramble out
of her grave, and the forensic report was one page long,
(11:26):
and half of that was the credentials of the person
writing it. These days that what we would have got
out of that rhyme scene was potentially enormous.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Do we expect it?
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
No, it has, it's changed, and it's fascinating reading those
how things progressed in your book as well. Do we
expect too much of police these days?
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I don't think so. Our mission is has always been
the same I had when I was in CIB that
don't get too big and think you're going to change
the world. We just went battles and for individuals and
for people that your victims, and my creator was always
(12:12):
find the truth, look after your victim of compassion, and
then hunt down the offender with a passion to just
stick with them. But they've all changed, every one of them.
Each one of those elements has changed over the years.
But that's still the same. We're still at the same
job to do and CIB as investigators.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
So yeah, how important was it for you to get
justice for Tenapora and Susan Buddett.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Well, yeah, they were both tied together, wasn't they Because
we had to get through the Raver trial first ninety
ninety eight, and and I gave evidence there of his
behavior in court. But afterwards it was always known to
(13:05):
a number of us, or believe by a number of us,
the tainer porter was never at the crime scene. And
I didn't base that on anything apart from the behavior
of Malcolm ray But I knew Malcolm Raye was never
going to take a young seventeen eighteen year old blabbermouth
little fellow along to just a thief, along to a
crime scene who was going to commit a rape where
(13:27):
he was going to expose his fetishes and his failures
as a person and to display his behaviors. After all, he,
Malcolm Raver was didn't only cover the eyes of the
victims when he was committing his offenses. He didn't do
(13:50):
that just to prevent them identifying him. He did that
to prevent them seeing all his different behaviors that he
needed to go through his little fantasy. So why would
he take an eighteen year role along to watch that?
You know, I mean, it didn't make any sense to me,
and I've always kind of believed that in all that
(14:13):
beliefs of this day.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Thank you so much for giving us some of your
time this morning, and for an incredible career. It makes
for a fascinating read.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Thank you very much, Francisca, love you to.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Talk to you. That was Dave Chuck Henwood. His book
Unmasking Monsters is in stores this week.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to news Talks. It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio,
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