Half a century to start coming right after attack

Rachel was the sweetest child. Then she was sexually violated by Peter Holdem, a dangerous psychopath who went on to murder a 6-year-old girl.

Rachel is approaching 50. Until recently she hardly ever left her house. She pretty much confined herself to one room of her Ka¯ inga Ora unit and kept the curtains drawn.

Progress for her is being able to roam around the house without crippling anxiety.

She gets her shopping delivered but struggles with cooking because she does not trust herself enough to prepare a meal.

She has plenty of time to think about her life, which, to put it mildly, has been something of a disaster. Her three siblings lead happy, productive lives but Rachel has been stuck. Stuck in a past that, after 40 years, she is only starting to get to grips with.

She spends her time reading statutes and law books, determined to sue the Government for her lost years, but mostly she wants to tell her story. She wants people to know what happened to her and the importance of ensuring people like her get help when they need it. We cannot use her name because as a victim of a sex crime, she has automatic suppression.

She is intelligent, articulate and has a wry sense of humour. Approaching Stuff to tell her story is part of her recovery, she says.

‘‘I am on a mission to improve myself. ‘‘I want to be somebody.’’

The day life changed

Rachel’s story starts in Sydenham, Christchurch. Her mother was Pa¯ keha¯ and her father was part-Ma¯ ori, although she had little to do with her Ma¯ ori side of the family. Her childhood was not straightforward and what she calls ‘‘undesirables’’ often came to the house.

It is hard to escape the impression Rachel would always have had a difficult life. By the time she was 10, she knew about molestation, and not talking to the police was instilled in the family culture.

She traces her descent to a Monday in March 1982. Before then she was a relatively normal school girl who was smart but quiet and lacking confidence.

She and two of her friends were on their way home from school when they saw a man wearing a brown suede jacket, blue jeans and a checked shirt, standing by the toilets in Milton Rd near Bradford Park. He had been released from jail that morning and was jangling coins in his pockets.

His name was Peter Joseph Holdem, then aged 26.

He asked the girls for some help with his rabbits and guinea pigs and offered them money. It was a trick he had used before. He led the girls across Bradford Park to an almost derelict house in Angus St. They all went into the house but Rachel’s two friends became hesitant and went home.

That left Rachel alone with Holdem. He took her to a disused coal shed attached to the rundown house and told her to lie on a red religious vestment.

He then covered her head with his jacket and tried to rape her.

Rachel did not tell her parents but told some children at school and blurted out the whole story to the headmaster a few days later. She then provided police with a detailed and accurate account of the incident and the surroundings.

A detective found Holdem at 10pm the same day.

At an interview at the police station, he denied the offending, saying he was a born-again Christian and would not lie.

At another interview the next day, he confessed to everything Rachel had alleged but in court pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted rape.

Two days into his trial, his confession was ruled admissible and his lawyer threw in the towel.

It was too late for Rachel to avoid the court ordeal. She gave evidence and pointed out Holdem.

‘‘That man there. He did it,’’ she said.

Holdem was sentenced to five years’ jail by the High Court on September 1, 1982. He already had nine convictions for indecency against young girls and in one incident in 1974 left a girl tied up in a ditch filled with water in Hagley Park and said he hoped the child would die.

Rachel feels let down, a feeling that permeates her life, by people who saw her and her friends with Holdem.

‘‘I remember their faces. They looked at us and looked away. I remember it plain as day. It was kind of like, this is how human beings are, they do not look out for each other.’’

On October 15, 1986, Holdem was on parole after serving time for the attempted rape of Rachel. That day he kidnapped Louisa Damodran, 6, as she was walking home from school. He took her to the Waimakariri River where he throttled and drowned her. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and remains in jail.

Rachel believes she could have ended up like Louisa.

As they left the derelict house, she saw a funny look on Holdem’s face.

‘‘I could see him thinking: what is she going to, what is she going to say.’’

She acted like nothing had happened and asked him for the coins in his pocket.

‘I thought the world was after me’

After the attempted rape, Rachel’s world changed.

‘‘I did not feel safe. I felt like I was in a glass bowl looking out.

‘‘Everybody was an enemy, and my school work and my friendships suffered. ‘‘I stopped growing as a person.’’ Her father said she would get help. But no help came and she stopped trusting the process, stopped learning. Things started to go downhill. She began wagging school and getting into arguments.

‘‘I began developing and I did not want to look like a woman. I did not want to wear a bra because I did not want men

looking at me. My breasts were sore all the time.’’

She wanted to be a good student but did not want to be noticed.

‘‘It was like there were two people inside me.’’

Her family moved to the West Coast when she was about 14. Her dad had a government job and was highly regarded.

But when he came home from work he would drink heavily. Later he took to cannabis. Her parents’ marriage, which had always been volatile, disintegrated.

Rachel also started drinking and left school soon after the family settled on the Coast.

‘‘I drank to make me forget and felt my parents did not care. I was not able to talk to people. I thought the world was after me and that people were out to get me.’’

She had developed a sort of social phobia that made it extremely difficult for her to communicate. She did various odd jobs but lasted longest at a job in a sphagnum moss factory where she could work without having to talk to people.

She looks back on the 10 years after the incident with Holdem as the worst of her life. To the outsider, the next 30 do not appear to have been much better.

Cycle of violence

Rachel’s relationships over the past 30 years have been soul-destroying.

The men were often violent, addicted to drugs and alcohol, petty criminals and controlling. She was a frequent visitor to women’s refuges and spent time on the streets. ‘‘I ended up with these type of men because I did not want to be by myself. I was easily led. I wanted to be led.

‘‘When I tried to go out on my own, they said: you are not good enough. Where do you think you are going to go without me? I kind of believed it.

‘‘It was something I knew. I was more scared of people than those sorts of relationships. I knew about violence.

‘‘I knew about abuse but I did not know about these strange people just looking at me expecting me to be perfect. That is what I thought in my head.’’

She fell in love with a man who had green eyes, long hair and spoke politely.

They lived near the piggery where he worked. When she was 20 she had a baby girl but the baby was taken away after three months. ‘‘I did not know what I was doing. We were arguing, smashing windows and the neighbours heard a lot of noise. The police were called and what the social workers said went in one ear and out the other. She was crying all the time.’’

One of her relationships was with a man 25 years older. Police shot him when he cut loose with a rifle.

Most of the time she was on a sickness benefit and she went from caseworker to caseworker. She tried to get help for her alcohol addiction and other issues but something always got in the way. Sometimes she lacked a fixed address. One time her partner intervened to stop any help. Visits to doctors would result in prescriptions for antidepressants but ‘‘all I needed was two weeks of love’’.

Her happiest time was when she had a job in a fish factory’s cold stores.

‘‘It was like I had died and gone to heaven. Everyone wore a mask, a hat, overalls, apron, gloves and gumboots, so you were blind to other people. No-one could see the real you.’’

She lost the job when the factory closed for refurbishing.

Learning to trust herself

Rachel feels she is slowly getting better by trusting herself. She is taking driving lessons and has gone out of the house to get vaccinated. She emails politicians and says she has got the Human Rights Commission interested in her case.

ACC pays her 80 per cent of the minimum wage and backdated the entitlement to 1989, although she had to pay back all the money she received as benefits over the years. She still believes that if she had received help after the attempted rape, she would have had a very different life.

She has stopped thinking she is worthless and not worth helping. She has realised she can help herself.

‘‘Things improved this year. I started to get confidence. It came from deep inside myself. I used to be a good kid even though I used to see bad things happening around me. I kind of tell myself to hold on to that. I was the nicest, sweetest person.

‘‘I have been like that all my life. It is only my reactions that changed.’’