William Bell was born in Mangere in 1978. Both his parents had gang connections and neighbours have described the household as the real Once Were Warriors. Bell was a precocious offender from the age of 8 and by the time he was in his twenties he was serving a 5 year sentence for the vicious aggravated robbery of a service station. Bell was on parole in 2001 when he carried out his violent attack on 4 people at Mt Wellington, Panmure RSA. He killed Wayne Johnson, Mary Hobson and Bill Absolum. He left Susan Couch for dead.

Jules Mikus was born in Wellington in 1958. His parents came to New Zealand as Hungarian Refugees and Mikus’s father would later be convicted of rape and accused of several sex offences against young girls. Mikus even claimed that he’d been abused between the ages of 5 and 12. Jules Mikus served time for an attempted rape of a young Naenae girl and then, in 1987 he raped and Murdered Teresa Cormack in Napier. Because of errors in the police investigation, it took 14 years to bring him to justice and Mikus but in 2002 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Paul Bailey was born in the English Midlands and was problem to his family from the beginning. As he grew older he became a thief and a drug addict who surrounded himself with younger people he could control. In the small town of Ettrick in Central Otago, he repeatedly raped a 12 year old girl, but went undetected until the attempted rape of an older woman in 1991. While out on bail for the latter offence he abducted 15 year old Kylie Smith in Owaka, South Otago. She was brutally raped and then shot in the back of the head as she was dressing.

Terry Clark wanted to be a gangster and, by the end of his short career he had caused dozens of deaths and amassed a major fortune from drug dealing. His story is one of a bad boy gone worse – as a boy he was cruel and manipulative and, as a man, he extended his repertoire to include torture and murder. In 1980 he was convicted of the murder of his former partner, Martyn Johnstone and sentenced to life imprisonment in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. He died mysteriously 2 years later.

Taffy Hotene was born in Murupara in 1970, but was brought up in a chaotic and abusive foster home in Mangere. By the age of 16 Hotene was being arrested for attempted rape and when he got out of prison he immediately offended again with a series of brutal attacks on women in Wanganui. Hotene was sentenced to 12 years for these attack and, only seven weeks after being released on parole in 2001, he raped and murdered Auckland journalist, Kylie Jones in a frenzied attack in a Glen Innes park.

Bruce Howse was born in 1963, and brought up in the small Hawkes Bay town of Dannevirke. He was the youngest of six children in a very dysfunctional family and he started thieving at an early age. He had children to two partners and he was known to abuse both the children and their mothers. On the 4th December 2001 he murdered Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson in the sleepout at their Masterton home.