Alicia May O’Reilly

Nancye O’Reilly was bracing herself for a grim winter’s night. Dark clouds were rolling in and although it wasn’t raining just yet, the council-owned house in Avondale, Auckland, where the 27-year-old single mum was living wasn’t built for stormy weather. It was a turn-of-the-century villa with a single hallway running through the middle, connecting the front and back doors. Draughts of wind would come up straight through cracks in the floorboards, which Nancye tried to cover with mismatched squares of carpet to keep the heat in. Several layers of wallpaper were glued to the scrim lining sagging away from the 12-foot stud walls. The toilet was outside. The lawns were long. The place was in a dreadful state, but it was all Nancye could afford. She lived there with her daughters Juliet and Alicia, aged 8 and 6, and Isobel, an 18-year-old boarder who helped look after the girls. It was August 15, 1980, a Friday night, and Nancye and Isobel had cooked dinner for their boyfriends, Nigel and Jimmy. Nigel and Jimmy were staying the night and both couples planned to visit the Victoria Park markets in the morning. When no one was looking, Alicia tipped her meal out of the window. She didn’t like chow mein. As the two girls were getting ready for bed after watching The Dukes of Hazzard in front of the fire, Nancye spotted Alicia walking down the hallway with her dressing gown wrapped suspiciously around her body. “Alicia, you’re not taking the cat to bed,” called out Nancye, and there followed a thud as the 6-year-old dropped the cat on the floor. Alicia ran down the hallway, asking her mum to tuck her under her ballerina quilt. Nancye got distracted by the movie on television, so both her girls had fallen asleep by the time she came into their bedroom to say goodnight. Nancye kissed Juliet and Alicia, and went to bed. It was the last time she’d see Alicia alive. The rain bucketed down on the tin roof overnight, the soothing sound drowning out any other noise in the house. Nancye got up around 7.30am on Saturday to find Juliet playing with her dolls in front of the heater in the lounge. She thought that was odd; Alicia was always up first. And if she was awake, everyone would be awake. Nancye sighed with relief, she could go back to bed to have a cup of tea and read the newspaper. Her bedroom was across the hallway from the girls’ room, so she could see the lump of Alicia’s body under the blankets. She went back to reading the paper until another friend of the flat, Jim, came by to pick up some tobacco he’d left behind. As Jim went to leave, Nancye asked him to check on Alicia, so he walked into the girls’ bedroom. “I saw the look on his face, then he yelled ‘Nigel, can you come here!’ I just jumped out of bed, I knew something wasn’t right,” Nancye says. Nigel's words were followed by a long silence. Alicia had an obsession with pills and tablets. Nancye raced into the dining room to check a cupboard, high out of the reach of children, where all the medicines were kept. Nothing had been touched. Nancye went back to the bedroom and pulled back the covers. The Paddington Bear sheets were covered with blood, and she couldn’t understand why. Alicia’s face was purple and swollen. Nancye was repulsed by the ugliness of her beautiful little girl. She stumbled into the hallway and could hear a woman screaming hysterically. People walking past the Canal Rd house to the nearby Avondale Racecourse stared at her. Nancye realised she was the one crying in anguish. Ambulance staff and police officers appeared from nowhere, to ask questions and take notes. Cameras flashed. Nancye was taken by police officers to the Auckland Central station, through a back door and into a lift. When the elevator opened, a sign on the door opposite read “O’REILLY HOMICIDE”. She was taken into a neighbouring room and sat down at a table, before a police officer sternly delivered a terrible truth. “Mrs O’Reilly, we need to tell you your daughter has been brutally murdered and severely sexually assaulted,” Nancye recalls word-for-word nearly 40 years later. It was a gut punch. “I just put my arms around my stomach and I just kept rocking and making an awful, awful noise … and then the policeman said: ‘Keep your voice down, your other daughter is in the next room’." Source: A Broken Angel by Jared Savage https://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/news/broken-angel/index.html

All little girls should be safe in their beds. Nancye O’Reilly was hopeful, of course, that whoever took the life of her daughter would be caught. Weeks went by without an arrest, then months slipped by, which turned into years. Tragedy would again strike for Nancye, who has experienced more grief and heartache in her lifetime than most people could endure. She’s 67 now and battling cancer. The pathologist who wrote the post-mortem report concluded Alicia was suffocated. He found semen in her body and determined her injuries were caused by sexual assault. Fingerprints and a partial palm print were found by police, and cross-checked with 200,000 sets of prints. There were no matches. Pubic hairs were sent for testing in Australia, which identified the killer’s blood type and as likely being of Pacific Island or Māori descent. The hair follicles revealed another circumstantial clue. The strands were contaminated with five elements of the periodic table: antimony, cobalt, chromium, barium and iron. This indicated the killer probably worked in a ceramic or paint industry. In the 1980s, Avondale was a working-class suburb where many residents worked at industrial factories along Rosebank Rd in nearby New Lynn. Nigel and Jimmy, the two men who stayed the night with their girlfriends Nancye and Isobel, were also ruled out. Source: A Broken Angel by Jared Savage https://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/news/broken-angel/index.html

See also:

• Radio New Zealand. Crimes NZ: The Alicia O'Reilly cold case https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/20187644...
• https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/police-review-cold-case-homicide-inve...