Dauntless Donna

August 20 1996, 9.30am. Donna Chisholm, five months pregnant, drives into the outer precincts of Mt Eden prison. The Sunday Star-Times assistant editor is the only reporter allowed within the gates. She shares the car with David Dougherty’s girlfriend who’s stood strongly by him through his 38 months in prison for an abduction and rape he didn’t commit. 

The day is bitter and drizzly and Chisholm is edgy, nagged by doubts that still something might go wrong despite the Court of Appeal having quashed Dougherty’s convictions and ordered his release. 

The car pulls up near the prison door. Dougherty, looking shell-shocked, steps through the doorway, carrying a cardboard box of belongings. Chisholm has met this man just once, very briefly a month earlier in a covert prison visit which was quickly aborted when guards recognised her. 

As they walk to the car she puts her arm around his shoulder and squeezes. 

She’s waited nine months for this moment. Nine months of constant phone contact, updating him on his defence team’s progress and supporting him through the depths of depression. 

Since March, she has driven a Star-Times campaign generating public pressure for Dougherty’s second appeal, working closely with scientist Dr Arie Geursen and lawyer Murray Gibson. Week after week her stories have explained how experts are adamant the crucial DNA evidence, used in court to convict Dougherty, actually rules him out and implicates another, as-yet unknown man. 

Driving from the prison grounds, they pause briefly for Dougherty to answer questions from the dozen reporters and photographers clustered at the gate. Chisholm and Star-Times photographer Phil Doyle are in the front, Dougherty and his girlfriend in the back. 

The car turns south down the motorway. There is an uneasy surreal quiet. Dougherty phones his mother; his voice is low and whispery. They listen to a radio report of his release. 

Fifty kilometres south they reach Hotel du Vin at Mangatawhiri where the Star-Times has paid for Dougherty to spend his first few days of freedom. No friends or family wait to greet him — right now he couldn’t cope with their attention. 

Chisholm takes Dougherty into a quiet room and does a one-hour interview for the front-page story she’ll write the next day. Dougherty, who became a Christian in prison, shows her Bible passages he’d underlined to help sustain him through his ordeal. Interview over, the two talk through the day and into the evening until Chisholm, exhausted but buzzing, finally heads back to the city at 9pm. 

She thinks her campaign for Dougherty is over. Maybe now she can sit back a bit, lighten the load a little, put her feet up before the impending birth. She never imagines the fight will last another five years, ending finally in September 2002 when another man is charged with the rape. 

There’s not a thought that this story will become the story of her career: the one that makes her truly proud. 

YOU might expect her to be a somewhat grim, hardened campaigner — all outrage and earnest intensity — given her 27-year record as a newshound. But meet Donna Chisholm and she’s fresh, girlish and happy to confess she still adores journalism — “What’s not to love about it?” 

Despite the “purgatory” of being on the other side of the note pad, she’s affable, direct and unaffected. She laughs a lot and fidgets occasionally, seeming much younger than her 45 years. Shoulder-length, red-shot dark brown hair frames her face in loose waves. 

She worries if her life is interesting enough to fill an article and appears embarrassed by the attention necessary for a profile story. After an interview in her city office she herds me down the stairs, out of sight of the newsroom, so she won’t look “wanky” in front of her workmates. 

She’s been an assistant editor at the Star-Times since its inception in 1992, and before that for its predecessor, the Sunday Star. Much of her 48-hour working week in recent times has been spent attending editorial meetings, proofing articles written by others. But there are changes afoot at the country’s leading Sunday newspaper and by year’s end Chisholm had handed over responsibility for the paper’s “Focus” feature section so she could stretch out and do more writing. The instincts are still sharp, she insists, as she opens a new notebook and prepares to step back to the future. 

Auckland’s One Tree Hill has always been home and a constant beacon in Chisholm’s busy life. The comfortable character house she shares with partner Barry Lichter, Sunday Star-Times racing editor, and their seven-year old son Jay, is only a few streets away from her own childhood home. Jay attends the same primary school, Cornwall Park District School, she did four decades ago. 

Her father, Graham, trained gallopers and her mother, Gwytha, worked part-time as a dressmaker. They had horses grazing regularly in the backyard. Small wonder then that these days Chisholm and Lichter jointly own three horses — standardbreds — with her dad and brother. 

Chisholm says her abiding sympathy for the underdog and wariness of authority probably grew from her parents’ strong sense of social justice. 

“Dad always had a very healthy disrespect for institutions and overbearing authority. He had no time for some of the methods police would use to get a conviction. Mum and Dad had a house they owned next door and charged almost nothing for rent if they could see it was helping out the tenants… Money was never important to them.” 

An adolescent interest in journalism at Penrose High School was squashed by a careers advisor who thought she was “too lazy” for such a taxing occupation so she took secretarial subjects, left school at 16 and became a typist in a real estate agency. A year later, in 1974, childhood friend Shona Martyn began the six-month journalism course at the Auckland Technical Institute, which she recommended to Chisholm. Restless, Chisholm applied, was accepted and landed a front-page Auckland Star story two days into the course. 

Tutor Geoff Black had asked students to interview someone and write a story. Chisholm hit on the boy she was dating, Gavin Muldoon, then-chairman of the Tamaki Young Nationals and son of Robert Muldoon, newly-appointed Leader of the Opposition, asking Gavin what he wanted to achieve with the organisation. “He went through a list of things like better rubbish collection, and about fourth was ‘legalise marijuana’. I didn’t think much of it.” 

However, tutor Black “just about had a heart attack” and swiftly dispatched her and Gavin to the Auckland Star Shortland Street building. Gavin took the front-page coverage in good grace, says Chisholm, though “the relationship was short-lived”. 

From the course, she walked straight into an Auckland Star cadetship during the paper’s heyday. “It was hugely exciting,” remembers Chisholm. “There was [deputy editor] Pat Booth, Warwick Roger, Robert Gilmore, Noel Holmes — huge names in journalism, and I was so lucky to be there.” Recalls Martyn, “As Star cadets, we wore groovy clothes, drank ghastly cocktails in sleazy pubs (though we must have been underage) and hung out with each other at parties at the weekend.” It was 1979, at the Star where she met and began going out with Barry Lichter. 

Serendipitously, this was the era of two major Star investigative campaigns masterminded by the wily Pat Booth. One, dubbed “Mr Asia”, was an inquiry into the international drug syndicate led by Singapore-based Aucklander Martin Johnstone, the other a seven-year investigation into Pukekawa farmer Arthur Allan Thomas’ conviction and nine-year imprisonment for the double murders of Jeanette and Harvey Crewe. The Star campaign spearheaded a series of legal appeals that finally overturned Thomas’ conviction and freed him in 1979. Twenty years later, Chisholm would call Booth to discuss strategy and compare experiences during her six-year campaign for Dougherty. 

The investigations infused the Star newsroom with an air of cloak and dagger. Johnstone — “Mr Asia” — was found in an English quarry, shot dead with his hands chopped off, in 1979. New Zealand police informed Booth a contract had been taken out on his life. Recalls Martyn: “Senior journalists would be overheard arranging secret rendezvous on Mangere Mountain and the like.” There were even bomb threats to the Star building. Chisholm remembers police dogs zeroing in on her desk during one — only to find a rotten egg sandwich in her drawer. 

Bomb scares aside, the atmosphere in the newsroom was still very traditional — in Martyn’s words, “a hard-drinking, cigarette-filled world of clattering manual typewriters [where] senior men would rush to assist if they saw a female cadet struggling to carry a typewriter”. But the Star was also a liberal paper and women were starting to have more of a presence. Martyn: “Senior journalists — including women — were breaking hot stories. Suddenly being female was no impediment; we were highly competitive.” 

Chisholm’s secretarial background had equipped her with deft shorthand skills and she was soon deployed to court reporting. Says Martyn: “She developed great contacts among young lawyers [the likes of former Prime Minister David Lange, now High Court judge Rhys Harrison, and QCs Peter Williams and Kevin Ryan]. She was gorgeous, smart and enquiring. I think sitting through the local court cases — always a depressing experience — fired up the sense of injustice which is the hallmark of her journalism.” 

An early flaring of this sense generated another front-page story in 1977, when Chisholm, still a junior reporter, broke a story about a Niuean youth charged with stealing a comb from his work. She’d been at the Auckland Magistrate’s court the day Iki Toloa, a 17-year-old factory-hand, appeared charged with theft as a servant for allegedly pilfering a comb worth 15 cents from the factory. Two young constables had stopped Toloa walking home from work the previous night and searched him, finding the comb. They asked him where he’d got it and when he said “from work” arrested him for theft. 

Sensing something wasn’t right, Chisholm ran back to the Star office to tell Booth. It turned out the comb was a reject Toloa had retrieved from the rubbish bin. 

Toloa’s story highlighted a dubious police attitude to Polynesian migrants then flocking in unprecedented numbers to New Zealand, particularly Auckland. “It got huge traction,” says Chisholm. “A university lecturer went to the police station and gave himself up, said he’d stolen a university pen and wanted to be arrested and charged with theft as a servant. The police eventually relented and dropped the charges. That was my first experience of being able to right a wrong.” 

Next came a stint as health reporter. Former Listener editor Jenny Wheeler, who joined the Star as a journalist in the 1980s and became editor of the paper’s Sunday edition, the Sunday Star, in 1986, says Chisholm was “the most outstanding health reporter New Zealand’s ever seen. At one stage there couldn’t have been a health story Donna didn’t know about.” 

Chisholm’s expertise also caught the eye of publishers Reed Methuen who asked her to write a biography of pioneering heart surgeon Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes. 

She started the book aged 24 and wrote it in the evenings over five years. It’s not a work she remembers fondly. “I was too young for such a project. I doubt I did Barratt-Boyes justice.” 

In 1986, Chisholm became the Star’s first female chief reporter. The next year she made deputy news editor and published the biography. In 1988, she was sent to the Seoul Olympics. Until then her experience in sports reporting totalled one netball game, but the paper wanted to see what extra dimension a news reporter would bring to the coverage. 

Chisholm focussed on news and human interest angles, averaging seven stories a day and three hours’ sleep a night.

In one story she wrote of the celebrations the night after equestrian Mark Todd won gold. The story told of Todd, wearing pink fluoro shorts and smoking a cigarette, riding Charisma out of the barn at midnight and Mark Phillips (then Princess Anne’s husband) being thrown in a water trough. 

On her return she stepped down the corridor to join the Sunday paper under Wheeler’s editorship. The paper was thinly staffed and writers had to be prolific — one of Chisholm’s fortes. In 1990, she became Sunday Star assistant editor. 

While Chisholm’s career went from strength to strength the Auckland Star had begun its inexorable decline. Over the 1980s, the paper’s readership and reputation dipped. There were several waves of redundancies. Brierley bought out NZ News Limited, the Star’s owners in 1987. Two years later Brierley was about to close the paper when Rupert Murdoch majority-owned Independent Newspapers Limited (INL) bought it, along with the Sunday Star and Suburban Newspapers Ltd. A last-ditch effort to save the once-great daily failed: INL closed the Auckland Star in 1991. 

In his autobiography My Story: Deadline, Booth argues the paper was a “victim of world trends against evening papers, ill-advised management decisions and a lack of creative policy”, topped off by the two buyouts. 

The Sunday edition was kept alive and Chisholm retained her position. In 1994, INL merged the Sunday Star with another of its Sunday papers, the ailing Wellington-based Sunday Times, an offshoot of the daily Dominion. Again, amid the turbulence, Chisholm stayed on as assistant editor of the new paper. 

Meanwhile, she was dealing with upheaval at home. In 1990 a kitchen fire destroyed half the One Tree Hill house she and Lichter had bought a year earlier. “We were cooking for guests. I was in the lounge listening to ‘Eternal Flame’ by the Bangles when we heard a crack and the chips were ablaze.” The house was rebuilt and they still live there today. 

Certain stories stand out in her memory. Like the piece she wrote on Sacha Horstmans, the three-year-old girl who died after receiving one of New Zealand’s earliest bone marrow transplants (it won Best Story of the Year in the 1981 Qantas Awards). Or the story she got by masquerading as a visitor to a jailed union leader during Auckland’s general strike in February 1981 — a story that never ran because that night the newspaper’s delivery drivers joined the strike. 

Then there was her part in the coverage of the 1979 Mt Erebus disaster, and the so-called “death knocks” she made while a young Auckland Star reporter — “fronting up, unannounced, on the doorstep of someone who’d just lost a loved one in terrible circumstances and trying to get them to talk to you”. Now standard practice, death-knocks were uncommon in the early 1980s. Always terrifying, she recalls, they also proved “surprisingly easy because people wanted to talk and in the old days of journalism nobody had asked them”. 

She’s had to learn to balance head and heart. “You always need to retain the capacity to be outraged and compassionate. Once you lose that you may as well get out of the job.” But, this needs to be tempered with a journalistic appraisal of what sells papers. “I can see the flip side of tragedy is a good story — if tragedy happens, it’s awful, but if it has to happen I hope it happens in time for us rather than the Herald [the Star-Time’s Auckland competitor].” 

Also handy is a thick skin. “I don’t think there are many other jobs — apart from parking meter attendants and traffic cops — that cop so much abuse.” She grins mischievously. “It almost gives you your first adrenalin rush of the day when you get your first abusive call.” 

Chisholm’s strengths, say colleagues, include her speed, intelligence, tenacity, boldness, a pedant’s attention to detail and an infallible nose for a good story. Says Geoff Chapple, a friend, one-time workmate and former Listener deputy editor, “she’s brave and stroppy and humorous, easy to work with and doesn’t baulk at difficult jobs. And, this strikes us all: she just stays fresh.” 

Anyone who’s been in journalism a long time knows you can lose heart, you can burn out, but she doesn’t.” 

Wheeler agrees. “She’s like an apple who’s going to bob up on the water no matter how many times she’s pushed down. She has an irrepressible quality that people can’t resist.” 

Chisholm’s also known for her no-nonsense approach and a sense of humour so black it has earned her the nickname “Morticia” at work. Explains Chapple, “Donna’s always very much a realist and she likes cutting things down to size, cutting the bullshit out. She’s suspicious of things that people hype too much and has a mordant, sardonic edge. You mustn’t think she’s somehow clenched in, though. She’s funny the way she approaches things and can see through pretensions.” 

If she’d tried her luck overseas, Martyn, who went on to edit the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend and HQ magazines, vouches Chisholm “would have been celebrated and a hot property”. 

Chisholm was offered both a magazine and newspaper editorship in the early 1990s. She won’t name names but says neither product was “her” and besides, she was “terribly loyal to my paper and couldn’t imagine going to the competitor”. So she declined. “Stupid, eh?” she laughs. A brief pause. “If I’d taken either job I wouldn’t have done Dougherty and if I look inside myself I’d rather have done Dougherty than be editor of anything.” 

By the time Chisholm learned of David Dougherty’s plight, he’d been in prison more than 18 months. His ordeal began in October 1992, when an 11-year-old girl was abducted from her New Lynn home and raped. The girl claimed Dougherty, a new neighbour, was her attacker and police arrested him. At the time, Dougherty, 26, was working in a beverage factory and living with his partner. 

Protesting his innocence, Dougherty volunteered DNA samples to test against residue on the girl’s underwear and body. The DNA evidence was inconclusive because of the technical limitations of the tests available at that time. In June 1993, a High Court jury found him guilty of rape and abduction and he began a seven year nine month jail sentence. 

Dougherty’s defence team sought more DNA testing with new, more sophisticated techniques available at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR), the state forensic agency. Dougherty and his lawyers expected the results would rule him out and provide grounds for an appeal. 

ESR scientist Peta Stringer conducted the tests and identified DNA material on the girl’s underwear that couldn’t have come from Dougherty, but she claimed other, faint DNA traces still could not exclude him. In November 1994, the Appeal Court threw out Dougherty’s appeal saying the DNA evidence was equivocal. Dr Arie Geursen, a molecular biologist and geneticist and then director of Auckland biotechnology company Genesis Research and Development, and lawyer Murray Gibson happened to be downstairs at the Auckland High Court on unrelated business, on the day the Court of Appeal was hearing Dougherty’s appeal. Their interest was stirred. 

Both had a special interest in trials involving DNA: their professional relationship had begun in 1990 when Gibson was representing murder accused Michael James Pengelly in New Zealand’s first major DNA trial. A newspaper report of the Dougherty judgement the following day rang alarm bells for Geursen. 

In the Penrose offices of Virionyx, a biotech company where Geursen is now a senior manager, he’s still vehement as he recalls how events unfolded. “I had this knot in my stomach, an intuition that told me what the judges were saying was just nonsense: they said the forensic evidence not only pointed away from Mr Dougherty but also towards him — that just can’t happen. After mulling it over I rang Murray Gibson and said, ‘there’s something not right about this. I think you need to go and find out what the hell is going on with this case.'” 

Gibson got a copy of the Appeal Court judgement and the ESR file and posted both to Geursen. “When I got the [ESR] file I nearly dropped out of my bloody chair. There was nothing clearer than that this wasn’t David’s DNA.” The DNA traces Peta Stringer had said could possibly have come from Dougherty fell below the level of significance recommended by the test kit’s manufacturers. Persuaded by Geursen, Gibson took over as Dougherty’s counsel and the pair started preparing a petition to the Governor-General, whose intervention was needed to lodge a second appeal. 

Chisholm got involved after a tip-off by a lawyer friend in early 1995. She contacted Dougherty in prison and phoned Gibson who by his own admission gave her a “rather frosty reception” and warned her off writing anything at that point. At that time he and Geursen were seeking overseas experts to corroborate Geursen’s opinion. 

Progress was slow over the next few months. Gibson’s application for legal aid had been turned down so both men were working unpaid. Gibson paid for Californian scientist Dr Rebecca Reynolds and Australian scientist Dr Stephen Gutowski to analyse the ESR test results. Both reports, received late in 1995, supported Geursen’s interpretation that the DNA test unequivocally excluded Dougherty and implicated another, unknown person. 

In November 1995 Chisholm finally met Geursen. He was also reluctant about media involvement, but explained to her the scientific data. Says Chisholm, “It was revelatory.” She remembers going to lunch straight after with editor Jenny Wheeler and being wildly excited about the story. “But, if you’d told me that day that [the story] would still be going on in 2002, I’d have thought you were mad.” 

Guersen was impressed by Chisholm’s quick comprehension and persuaded Gibson to talk to her about the case. Gibson asked her not to break the story until the petition was in the post, to the Governor-General. Slowly she wheedled her way into the defence cause and a close bond formed between journalist, scientist and lawyer. 

Dougherty, speaking from his Palmerston North home, says at first he was “sceptical” about her motivations. He “expected her to grab five minutes of limelight” by breaking the story immediately and was surprised she agreed to hold off until his defence team was ready to go public. 

Chisholm was forced to publish the story a week earlier than planned when she discovered someone from competitor the Sunday News had requested the Dougherty news file from their joint clippings library. She fast tracked the story in a few hours and it led the paper on March 31 1996, headlined “Child Rape Jury ‘Misled’ On DNA“. 

Alongside the experts’ findings, Chisholm reported a breakthrough concession from the ESR. Lionel Sharman, then ESR acting general manager in forensics, had admitted Stringer had made an honest misjudgement and that if he were a member of the jury he’d be very worried. Dougherty, he told Chisholm, may not be responsible for the stains on the victim’s underwear. Sharman even congratulated Gibson and Geursen for raising concerns over the evidence. Chisholm recalls, “As soon as he said that I thought we were home free.” 

Just days later she promised Dougherty she’d write a story a week until he was freed, thinking that wouldn’t be long. She, Gibson and Geursen all expected that once the authorities realised the evidence had been misinterpreted the process that would clear Dougherty would begin. 

Instead the police refused to reopen the investigation, the Crown Law Office refused to look at the new evidence and the ESR restricted access to their files and retracted Sharman’s concession. 

Vindication came in June, when the petition to the Governor-General succeeded and Dougherty was granted another appeal. Two months later, the Appeal Court finally quashed Dougherty’s convictions and he was released from jail on August 20, 1996. 

Chisholm’s involvement went way beyond writing articles. She spent hours with Gibson and Geursen preparing for the second appeal. The “three musketeers”, as Chisholm dubs them, would plot strategy in lunch hours and evenings at cafes or workplaces. They buoyed each other whenever spirits flagged. Chisholm remembers madly tweaking their submission in a Wellington motel room the night before the second appeal hearing. Geursen had to wake the porter at 4am to print the revised version. Chisholm: “It shouldn’t have been fun but it was — such a bonding experience.” 

The campaign consumed Chisholm. “It meant everything to me at the time. It could profoundly influence whether I was happy or not depending on whether things were going well or badly. If things were bad I’d have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach the whole time and when things went right I’d be leaping around the room.” 

She didn’t feel the least compromised by shifting from observer to active participant: “I had already taken a position, and I was certain I was right. Early on Mike Forbes [editor at the time] said to me ‘are you sure about this?’ and I said, I’d never been surer of anything in my life. He was satisfied and let me go my own sweet way. I realised a long way further down the track that if this hadn’t worked, if something had gone wrong, I think I would have resigned — I would have put the paper’s credibility at risk.” 

A delicate relationship grew between Chisholm and Dougherty, and after his release they became friends. While he was in prison, they spoke by phone sometimes daily until the prison started monitoring Dougherty’s calls (he was breaking prison regulations by speaking to the media). Dougherty says he was mentally tortured by his wrongful imprisonment but wasn’t allowed psychiatric treatment because he wouldn’t confess. Chisholm, he says, supported him emotionally. “She became not only my friend, but a vetting point… She became a part of my life that I couldn’t do without. It became apparent to me this wasn’t a job, but more of a personal crusade. She wanted to see a wrong set right.” 

Chisholm’s son, Jay, was born on December 10 1996. A few weeks later Arie Geursen received more results from overseas experts to bolster the defence case at the retrial, ordered by the Court of Appeal because of the rape victim’s unwavering insistence she’d identified the right man. Chisholm returned from maternity leave early to cover the retrial in April 1997. Partner Lichter ferried Jay to the court at break times for Chisholm to breast-feed. 

For Chisholm, the retrial was a “horror show”. She was exasperated by far-stretched scenarios posited by the Crown in its attempts to reconcile the new DNA evidence with the prosecution’s case, and the court’s refusal to let Geursen use visual material to explain the DNA tests. At one point, the judge Justice Robertson requested Gibson to ask Chisholm to stop making faces in view of the jury. She rolls her eyes. 

The jury deliberated for 10 hours — “10 hours of please God, please God, please God” for the non-religious Chisholm — before returning a “not guilty” verdict. At last, Dougherty’s name was cleared. The story, says Chisholm, should have ended there. But it was to drag on a further four and a half years, and the hardest part was yet to come. 

In November 1997, then-Justice minister Doug Graham rejected Dougherty’s bid for compensation. Graham said a “not guilty” verdict wasn’t enough: Dougherty had to prove he was innocent “on the balance of probabilities”. Chisholm and her co-crusaders were devastated. “It was awful,” she recalls, covering her face in her hands. 

The battle lines redrawn, Gibson filed for a judicial review of the minister’s decision and Chisholm wrote and wrote. She reported a 1998 police re-investigation that ruled out Dougherty; pilloried Graham’s flippant dismissal of it; and monitored the inquiry he eventually ordered in November 1998. The inquiry, conducted by Auckland QC Stuart Grieve, stretched to two years. Finally, in November 2000, Grieve concluded that Dougherty had proved his innocence and recommended compensation. Chisholm: “When I read Grieve’s report I just cried and cried. People thought I was mad in the office. And I probably was a bit.” 

At the other extreme, she counts Graham’s refusal to pay out as one of her lowest points. “He’d make me want to throw things.” Her anger showed in swipes at him in her stories. “For the first time I produced pieces which were ‘journalism with attitude’. I let the readers know what I thought. I’d always been trained not to do that.” 

Another low point still causes Chisholm’s face to furrow. Just two weeks before his $868,728 compensation payout in July 2001, Dougherty crept into a pub after hours and stole two bottles of liquor and an axe. He abandoned them 500m from the pub and was arrested as he tried to hitchhike to Auckland to see Gibson. 

When Dougherty rang her from the police station, Chisholm knew she would have to report the burglary — “I wanted to protect him, but I had to protect myself as well”. Dougherty obtained a suppression order but Chisholm persuaded him it would be better for him to “front up to the media… It was heart-breaking”. 

To her, the burglary was a sign she’d failed him. “He wasn’t in his right mind and I knew that. It was my job to look after him and I didn’t do it well enough, obviously.” 

Throughout the campaign, it was this sense of responsibility for Dougherty that she wrestled with the most. She was acutely aware of the strain placed on him by the constant publicity and his ongoing mental problems from his imprisonment, including an obsessive-compulsive disorder. “His was the story that I’m proudest of but in order to do it I had to take away his anonymity. Arguably, his mental health might have been better if he’d just done his time and come out the other end.” 

She also felt conflict at her need to protect the Star-Time’s exclusivity, which meant asking an “exceedingly loyal” Dougherty to avoid coverage by other media when it might have helped his cause. 

With his compensation money, Dougherty bought a Palmerston North house, got a new car and gave money to his extended family. 

After the payout he stopped returning Chisholm’s calls. “I thought he was angry at me for going out in the open about the pub thing, even though he’d never said that,” she says. “But then I realised maybe he just wanted to forget all about us because we represented a part of his life that’s too painful to keep revisiting. He needed to get his life back without these three guardian angels flapping around his head.” 

The next time they spoke was more than a year later when Nicholas Paul Alfred Reekie appeared in court charged with the offence for which Dougherty was jailed. (Reekie faces 22 other charges involving sexual assaults on three other women. His depositions hearing was held in November.) 

Chisholm called Dougherty to get his reaction to the court appearance for a story, and was “relieved to hear in his voice that he was in a good place emotionally, because I’d seen him in very bad places”. Dougherty says his affection for Chisholm has never lessened, but “now I’ve moved on, I’m getting on with my life”. 

“The campaign meant everything to me. It could profoundly influence whether I was happy or not depending on whether things were going well or badly. If things were bad I’d have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.” 

Inevitably, the Dougherty campaign spilled into Chisholm’s home life. For partner Barry Lichter, it meant taking chunks of time off work to look after Jay while she covered the retrial, seeing little of her as she worked into the evenings and watching her cope with “frustration from beginning to end… She was always on top of it but it permeated her whole life.” 

There’s no hint of resentment in his words. Being a journalist helped him understand how important the story was and he speaks admiringly of her “tremendous dedication”. 

Chisholm also had to deal with hate-mail — a letter from the victim’s family asking if she was “sick” — and a defamatory 19-page statement mailed to newspapers by a group calling itself “Friends of the Rape Survivor’s Family”. She still doesn’t know why the victim remained adamant about Dougherty’s guilt even after the exhaustive process that cleared him. At one stage she believed police speculation the girl must have been covering up for someone she knew, but has now changed her mind. “Initially I couldn’t believe she could have got it innocently wrong, but the fact someone else has been arrested indicates it was a case of mistaken identity.” 

Perhaps, she wonders, it has something to do with the “siege mentality” towards Dougherty that police say developed in the victim’s family about two weeks after he moved in next door. Or with the victim’s mother declaring on television in 1998 that she would kill her daughter and bury her in the backyard if she found out she had lied. 

Chisholm is humble about her role in Dougherty’s exoneration: “I was just doing the right thing.” And, she stresses, “It was very much a team thing.” 

Her fellow crusaders are less stinting in their praise. Says Geursen, “You mustn’t underestimate the very important role she played. People are often sceptical of the press, but if Murray hadn’t involved Donna this thing would have got swept under the carpet.” And Gibson: “Without Arie’s expertise and Donna’s ability to articulate it the potency of DNA would have been very much reduced… It was almost Donna’s pen matching the ESR’s opinion they were infallible that evened the playing field. Her reporting kept hope alive for us.” 

But none is more emphatic than Dougherty. “If you asked me [to talk] about any other subject to do with me I’d politely turn you down. But if you’re interested in my opinions, thoughts and feelings about Donna I could never express to you enough the impact she’s had on my life.” 

Outside of work, Chisholm does the average motherly things: backyard soccer, trips to the beach, bike riding around her beacon, One Tree Hill. And then there’s the on-going genetic passion for horses. There are three currently, two retired trotters, and Landora’s Image, in training at Kumeu. The family turn out to every race and trial: Landora’s Image has won two races and had 10 places, earning $26,000. But the mare’s champion parentage, says Chisholm, means her real value is as a broodmare. 

Chisholm used to drive her own horse, Elixir, but stopped when he had to be retired about seven years ago. “I was never very good or very experienced, I hasten to add — I did all the slow work.” Right now, Lichter is chasing his amateur driver’s licence, and looking to buy another horse to drive. 

Back at work Chisholm is excited at the chance to do more writing. In October, she drove a new campaign against the Accident Compensation Corporation (and subsidiary Catalyst) and their “heartless and hardline” treatment of claimants. 

Interestingly, this story has triggered the biggest reaction of her career. “The phone hasn’t stopped ringing, emails and letters continue to pour in — it’s struck a nerve.” 

She’s still “hungry” for another Dougherty story — “if you’re not you should get out of the game”. After his compensation payout, she was approached to take up other causes, but none was compelling enough, and “I was just tired, tired, tired”. 

So what has all this meant for journalism in this country? Just another story to sell just another paper? Not according to her mentor. Says Pat Booth: “I think there’s a tendency [these days] to pick up issues, beat the tripe out of them and simply put them away and move onto something else. It’s a lot more difficult to sustain something over months or years. It’s important the media has people like Donna Chisholm, people who’ve got the vision to see an issue, the moral integrity to take it up, and the physical and mental energy to pursue it.” 

For Chisholm, Dougherty was a personal six-year odyssey and the best kind of story a journalist could hope for. “One of the nice things about Dougherty and the comb cases is they righted some wrong; they did some good for people — whereas so many stories now are about exposing scandal. That’s got its place, but it’s just not as rewarding.” 

 

This story was first published in N&S in January 2003 and Nicola Shepheard would go on to win the best junior feature award, Crime and Justice, at the Qantas Awards 2004.