Steven Stone spent 26 years in a New Zealand prison for two murders. In 2024, the crown itself stood up in court and admitted something had gone wrong with his case.
A year later, they decided not to try him again at all. That’s not usually how a story like this ends.
Usually when a conviction gets overturned, the state either retries the person or formally accepts they were innocent all along.
What happened to Stone sits somewhere in between. And that gap is what this video is actually about.
Back in 1989, a 21-year-old man named Dean Fuller Sandes went fishing off Oakland’s West Coast and never came home.
A decade later, a cold case investigation produced a very different story. Police alleged Fuller Sandies hadn’t drowned at all, but had been shot dead in a garage in front of witnesses on the orders of a woman named Gail Manny.
And that Stone was the one who pulled the trigger. Stone was also convicted of raping and murdering a second person, a woman named Leah Stevens, who police said had witnessed the first killing.
He was sentenced to two life terms. The entire case rested on four eyewitnesses who were granted immunity from prosecution and had their identities protected by the court.
Two of them later took back what they’d said. In 2024, New Zealand’s Court of Appeal quashed every conviction connected to this case.
Not just Stones, but three other people’s as well. After the crown admitted police had failed to hand over documents that could have changed how jurors saw those witnesses, Stone walked out on bail after 26 years inside.
But he wasn’t fully cleared yet because at some point during his sentence, he’d apparently confessed to the killings.
A confession even New Zealand’s own parole board suspected wasn’t genuine. Made, they believed, purely to improve his chances of release.
The court said that was something only a jury could properly weigh. So instead of freedom, Stone was handed a retrial date.
Before we go further, a note on how this video is put together. This isn’t a story about a criminal getting away with something.
Everything here is drawn from court judgments, official crown statements, and reporting from outlets including RNZ, the New Zealand Herald, and One News.
Where the justice system itself is the subject. We’re going to treat it with the same scrutiny we’d apply to anyone else.
In this video, we’ll go through exactly how this case was built in the 1990s, what actually happened at trial, how it came apart three decades later, and what’s happened to Steven Stone since the Crown finally decided this time not to put him through it again.
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We’ll start on a boat off the coast of Oakland in August 1989. On the evening of the 21st of August 1989, a 21-year-old Oakland tire fitter named Dean Fuller Sandies told his family he was going fishing.
He headed for Watipoo, a wild rocky stretch of coastline on Oakland’s west coast, known even then for dangerous surf and a history of people being swept off the rocks.
He never came home. Some of his belongings later washed ashore, consistent with exactly the kind of accident the coastline was known for.
For close to a decade, that’s what everyone, including police, believed had happened. A young man lost to a rogue wave.
His body never recovered because the ocean off that particular stretch of coast rarely gave anything back.
Steven Ralstone at the time was 19 years old. Available reporting describes him during this period as already connected to gang life and with an existing pattern of offending.
Language used across multiple sources ranges from career criminal to gang enforcer. Though this account isn’t in a position to independently verify the specific nature or extent of his record prior to 1989.
What can be said with more confidence, because it recurs consistently across independent reporting, is that Stone was a known figure within Oakland’s criminal underworld before his name became connected to Fuller Sandy’s disappearance at all.
Gail Manny, the woman police would eventually allege had directed Stone to kill Fuller Sandies, was 22 in 1989.
According to background compiled for the RNZ’s and Stuff podcast that would later become central to unraveling this entire case, Manny’s own path to that point had been shaped by a difficult childhood and an education cut short, followed by a drift into a world of sex work, drug dealing, and gang associations.
The same broad millu stone himself was already embedded in. She worked briefly as a sex worker around this period and had accumulated what’s been described as a lengthy record of relatively low-level offending rather than anything approaching the seriousness of what she’d eventually be accused of directing.
For close to 8 years, none of this connected to Fuller Sandies at all. His case remained, as far as the public record was concerned, a presumed drowning.
Tragic, but not suspicious. That changed in February 1997 when police began following up on a set of tips that had nothing directly to do with Fuller Sandies on the surface.
According to reporting on how the case was reopened, a man named Arnot told police that two separate people.
His former partner, Tania Wilson, and an employee of his named Colin Manny, who happened to be Gail Manny’s own brother, had each independently told him stories at different points about a historical murder involving a body found in the boot of a car.
Investigators worked to figure out who that story might actually be describing. After considering several possibilities involving other people who disappeared around the same general period, they concluded the body in the story was full of sandes, not lost to the sea at all, but killed, and that the person responsible was Steven Stone, acting, according to the theory police developed at Gail Manny’s request.
The motive police settled on centered on a burglary. According to the case they built, Man’s rental home on Lano Road in the West Oakland suburb of Henderson had been broken into at some point around August 1989 with drugs and clothing taken.
Based on interviews with people who knew her at the time, including former flatmates and a neighbor, police concluded Many had become convinced Fuller Sandies was responsible for that burglary, and that her anger over it was what led her to ask Stone to kill him.
It took a further 2 years of investigation, working from these initial tips through to a fully constructed case before Gail Manny was formally charged with commissioning Fuller Sandy’s murder.
What police alleged had actually happened that August evening in 1989. Not a fishing trip gone wrong, but a killing carried out in front of multiple witnesses inside a suburban garage would become the foundation of a criminal case that took until 1999 to finally reach a jury.
A full decade after Fuller Sandies himself had first been reported missing. The theory police eventually put before a jury was specific and genuinely disturbing in its detail.
According to the Crown’s case, Dean Fuller Sandies wasn’t simply attacked at random on his way to go fishing.
He was, prosecutors alleged, enticed to Gail Man’s rental home on Lanok Road in Henderson.
Drawn there under some pretext connected to the trip he was already planning to take that day.
Once he arrived, the Crown’s case held, he was confronted by Steven Stone inside the property’s garage in front of Manny and seven other people who happened to be present.
Stone, according to the evidence later given at trial, shot Fuller Sandies and then, in an act prosecutors argued was specifically designed to implicate everyone else in the room and ensure their silence going forward, passed the gun to four other men in turn, each of whom fired shots into the body as well.
What happened afterward, according to the same case, was calculated to make the killing look exactly like the accident everyone had assumed it was for the following 8 years.
Fuller Sandi’s body was disposed of somewhere in coastal forest, never to be recovered. His car was driven to the car park at Waterpu Beach and left there, creating precisely the impression that had, in fact, taken hold for the better part of a decade, a young man who’d gone fishing and simply never come back.
The second half of the Crown’s case centered on Leah Stevens, a 20-year-old woman who’d been living with her grandmother, Isa Fischer, at the time.
Her grandmother believed she was working as a waitress. In reality, Stevens was working in Oakland’s red light district around Kuranga Road and occasionally performing at a strip club.
According to the Crown’s case, Stevens had been among the people present in that Lanok Road garage.
And in the days following Fuller Sandy’s death, Stone became convinced she was on the verge of breaking her silence and going to police.
Prosecutors alleged he killed her to prevent that from happening. Stevens disappeared from the Coranga road area 5 days after Fuller Sandes on the 26th of August 1989.
Unlike Fuller Sandies, her remains were eventually found. Discovered by two walkers in Woodhill Forest, northwest of Oakland in June 1992, 3 years after she’d gone missing.
It’s worth pausing on the broader social world. All of this was alleged to have taken place inside because it shaped how police approached the entire investigation once it finally reopened.
Both Fuller Sandies and Stone had been part of a loosely connected West Oakland scene that included drug dealers, strip club bouncers, sex workers, and gang members.
The kind of overlapping semi criminal social network where reliable, consistent testimony is often genuinely hard to come by.
Mark Franklin, the detective who led the investigation once it reopened in 1997, later described the challenge in blunt terms during an interview connected to the podcast that would eventually help unravel his own case.
The job, as he put it, was essentially trying to work out who was who in the zoo.
Franklin resigned from the police roughly 5 years after taking on the investigation. Fuller Sandi’s case was formally reopened in February 1997, followed by Steven’s case the following year in 1998 when police separately charged Stone with her rape and murder.
Gail Manny was charged with commissioning Fuller Sandy’s killing. The matter first reached a jury in 1999.
Many and Stone were convicted. May successfully appealed and won a new trial and was convicted again the following year in 2000.
Stone’s convictions for both killings and the associated rape charge connected to Stevens stood from that same period onward.
The case that produced those convictions rested almost entirely on the accounts of a small number of witnesses interviewed eight or more years after the events they were describing.
Four people gave the evidence that formed the backbone of the crown’s case. All four were granted immunity from prosecution.
Two of them referred to in later reporting and the podcast that examined the case as Neil and Martin had themselves admitted involvement in the rape and murder of Leah Stevens.
In exchange for testifying against Stone and supporting the broader case against Manny, both men received full immunity from prosecution for their own conduct along with witness protection and new identities under New Zealand’s witness protection scheme.
It’s worth being direct about what this arrangement actually meant in practice because it sits at the center of everything that would eventually go wrong with this case.
Two men who had by their own admission participated in a rape and a killing walked away from any consequence for either specifically because their testimony was needed to convict someone else.
That’s not on its own evidence the testimony they gave was false. This channel has covered similar indemnity and immunity arrangements in other organized crime cases where genuinely truthful cooperation from someone with their own culpability has proven essential to securing a conviction against a more senior or more directly responsible figure.
What made this particular arrangement different was what happened once journalists and investigators began actually testing the specific content of what Neil and Martin had said.
That testing came years later through the 2018 RNZ and Stuff podcast Gone Fishing produced by journalists Amy Mars and Adam Duing.
What they found, working back through the original police statements and interview transcripts, was a body of testimony that didn’t hold together under close examination.
According to the podcast’s own reporting on its findings, Neil in particular appeared to take genuine pleasure in constructing small dramatic scenes complete with invented dialogue and stage directions, describing events that on the available evidence quite clearly never happened.
In one account, he described watching Stone shoot a man he referred to as Steve number two, a killing that appears nowhere else in the case, connected to no identified victim, and that investigators were never able to connect to any actual person who’d gone missing or been killed.
It’s a genuinely striking detail because it illustrates something considerably more serious than simple inconsistency between different tellings of the same true story.
It suggests a witness capable of fabricating an entire specific detailed criminal event that appears to have had no basis in reality whatsoever.
Private investigator Tim McKinnel, a former police officer who became involved in examining the case, put the broader problem in similarly stark terms.
Comparing the various statements Neil and Martin had given across the life of the investigation, McKinnel identified somewhere between 15 and 20 meaningfully different versions of what had supposedly happened spread across the two men’s combined testimony.
That’s not the kind of variation you’d typically expect from two genuine witnesses independently recalling the same distant traumatic event with imperfect memory.
It’s the kind of variation that raises serious questions about whether the underlying accounts were being actively constructed and revised rather than simply remembered.
A further complication emerged around how at least one other witness came to give evidence in the first place.
According to an account later given to journalists, one witness described being subjected to sustained intense pressure from police over an extended period before eventually providing a statement.
Describing officers visiting repeatedly, sometimes in groups, searching through personal belongings, and making a presence felt consistently enough that the witness experienced it as close to harassment.
The clear message conveyed, according to this account, was that the pressure would continue until a statement matching what investigators were looking for was finally given.
None of this necessarily means every element of the crown’s case was fabricated or that Stone and Manny’s convictions were automatically wrong simply because some of the underlying testimony was unreliable.
Juries in both the 1999 and 2000 trials heard this evidence along with whatever cross-examination and context was presented at the time and reached guilty verdicts on both occasions.
What it does establish is the specific structural vulnerability at the heart of this case from the very beginning.
A conviction built almost entirely on the word of witnesses who had powerful incentives to tell police whatever story would secure their own immunity, whose accounts diverged wildly across multiple retellings, and whose reliability had never been meaningfully tested by an independent investigation until journalists working decades after the fact began asking the questions that should arguably have been asked before either trial ever took place.
That gap between what a jury was told and what a subsequent independent examination of the same evidence eventually found is where this account turns next.
Because it’s the thread that would over the following six years unravel every single conviction connected to Dean Fuller Sandy’s death and very nearly cost Steven Stone the freedom that finally eventually came his way.
In June 2018, RN Zayn staff released the first episode of an eight-part podcast series called Gone Fishing, produced by journalists Amy Mars and Adam Dudding.
What started as an examination of a case most New Zealanders had likely forgotten about within a few years of the original convictions became over the following six years the single most significant force behind unraveling almost everything the crown had built against Steven Stone, Gail Many and two other men convicted alongside them.
The podcast’s reporting worked back through the original police statements and interview transcripts belonging to the two immunized witnesses this account has already introduced, known publicly only as Neil and Martin.
What that examination found went well beyond the kind of memory inconsistency you might reasonably expect from two witnesses recalling traumatic events years after they happened.
As covered in the previous part of this account, Neil’s testimony included a detailed, dramatist account of watching stone shoot a man he called Steve number two.
A killing with no identified victim, no supporting evidence, and no connection to any actual missing or deceased person investigators were ever able to establish.
It was on the evidence the podcast uncovered, simply invented. That specific fabrication mattered for reasons well beyond the individual incident itself.
If a key crown witness was capable of constructing an entire detailed criminal scene involving a person who apparently never existed, it raised serious unavoidable questions about how much confidence could reasonably be placed in the rest of what that same witness had told police about Fuller Sandies and Stevens.
Private investigator Tim McKinnel, who became directly involved in examining the case following the podcast’s release, described the scale of the inconsistency across Neil and Martin’s combined statements as running to somewhere between 15 and 20 meaningfully different versions of events.
Eminnel wasn’t a firsttime critic of a New Zealand wrongful conviction case either. He’d previously played a central role in overturning the conviction of Tain Pora, a case that remains one of the country’s most widely recognized examples of a serious criminal justice failure involving the rape and murder of Susan Berdett.
His involvement lent the growing case against Stone and Manny’s convictions a level of credibility that was difficult for authorities to dismiss out of hand.
The podcast’s findings didn’t stop with Neil and Martin, two additional witnesses. Women, who had also given evidence supporting the Crown’s case, later retracted their evidence entirely, telling journalists they’d felt pressured by police during the original investigation and had shaped their statements to match what they believed detectives wanted to hear rather than what they actually remembered or knew to be true.
It’s worth pausing here to introduce a detail that complicates any purely simple version of this story because presenting Stone’s case honestly requires holding it alongside everything else already established.
According to a 2017 parole board report, Stone had by that point accumulated a history of 70 separate convictions beginning when he was 14 years old.
The same report noted that Stone had at various points initially acknowledged some level of involvement in the offending connected to Fuller Sandes and Stevens before later moving to deny all elements of both murders and the rape entirely.
None of this establishes that Stone was guilty of the specific killings at the center of this case.
A lengthy record of unrelated prior offending isn’t evidence of a particular crime. And this account has already detailed the serious, independently documented problems with the witness testimony that originally convicted him.
But it’s a detail worth including plainly because an honest account of this case can’t simply present Stone as an obviously blameless figure swept up entirely by accident.
He was by his own extensive record a man with serious documented criminal history independent of anything connected to Fuller Sandies or Stevens, which is precisely why the specific provable reliability of the witnesses used to convict him on these particular charges mattered as much as it did.
By August 2020, Stone’s own legal team, led by lawyer Annal Maxwell Scott, had formally lodged an appeal with the Court of Appeal, joining an effort already underway on Gail Man’s behalf.
The legal team assembled around the case grew to include prominent figures well beyond the original investigators.
Among them, Meg Donde, executive director of Amnesty International in New Zealand, who publicly described the case as one of the country’s most bizarre and egregious miscarriages of justice.
The specific legal breakthrough that finally moved the case from a media controversy to a formal court reversal centered on evidence disclosure.
A legal requirement that police and prosecutors turn over material relevant to a defendant’s case, including anything that might affect a witness’s credibility before trial.
According to the crown’s own eventual admission, two vital documents affecting the credibility of two key witnesses had never been disclosed to Stone Manny or their original defense teams at either the 1999 trial or the 2000 retrial.
One of those disclosure failures carries a specific weight worth dwelling on because of who it involved.
Mark Franklin, the detective who’d led the original investigation and who described his own approach to the case as trying to work out who was who in the zoo, had failed to disclose his own communications with a lawyer representing one of the key witnesses.
Contact that could have provided the defense with a genuine basis to challenge that witness’s reliability at trial had it been known about at the time.
It’s worth noting what became of Franklin himself in the years since. After leaving the police force and relocating to Reratonga, he was later sentenced to 9 months imprisonment for selling cannabis.
It’s a detail this account includes not to suggest any direct connection between Franklin’s later personal offending and the specific conduct of his original investigation, but because it’s difficult to leave out of an honest account of a case that hinged in significant part on exactly the kind of institutional trust and integrity Franklin’s own subsequent record calls into question.
In July 2024, the Crown formally admitted to the Court of Appeal that these disclosure failures had produced a genuine miscarriage of justice in the original trials.
The court delivered its full decision that October following a hearing held earlier in August for three of the four people originally convicted.
The outcome was unambiguous. Gail May’s convictions were quashed and a formal verdict of a quiddle entered.
Full exoneration more than two decades after she was first found guilty. Her brother, Colin Manny, and the fourth defendant, Mark Henrikson, both convicted as accessories after the fact, received the same outcome.
Convictions quashed, verdicts of a quiddle entered. The Court of Appeals specifically noting that given how much time had passed since Fuller Sandy’s disappearance, and since both men had already served their original sentences, a quiddle was the appropriate result rather than any further legal process.
Stone’s outcome was different, and it’s worth being precise about why, because it wasn’t simply a court deciding on its own initiative that his case deserved separate treatment.
Crown lawyer Mark Lillico specifically argued at the Court of Appeal, hearing that a case still existed against Stone, independent of the disclosure failures that had undone the case against the others, and that it deserved to be properly tested in front of a jury rather than resolved through a quiddle.
The specific evidentiary basis for that argument centered on Stone’s own prison confession, an admission that, according to the parole board’s own separate assessment, appeared to have been made primarily as a strategic move aimed at improving his prospects for release rather than as a genuine acknowledgement of guilt.
The Court of Appeals own detailed reasoning on this specific point was formally suppressed, meaning the full explanation for why Stone alone was treated differently from his three co-acused was never made fully public.
What was made public was the practical result. Stone’s convictions for both murders and the rape were quashed alongside everyone else’s.
But rather than walking free immediately, he was ordered to face a retrial with a court date eventually set for 2026.
Stone was granted bail in October 2024 after what most reporting describes as roughly 25 to 26 years in custody.
Precise figures vary slightly across different sources, reflecting the specific combination of remand time, sentencing, and parole periods involved.
He remained free on bail conditions, formerly still facing the prospect of a third trial over the same two deaths, while the Crown spent the following 6 months deciding whether to actually put him through it.
On the 30th of April 2025, Steven Stone appeared before Justice Timothy Brewer at the High Court in Oakland 6 months after being released on bail.
Still formally facing the possibility of a third trial over the deaths of Dean Fuller Sandies and Leia Stevens.
Oakland Crown Solicitor Alicia Mcccleintok stood up and told the court the crown would not be proceeding.
Her reasoning given directly to the court centered on a basic evidentiary principle rather than any broader statement about Stone’s guilt or innocence.
A criminal trial can only proceed where there’s sufficient admissible evidence to prove a charge beyond reasonable doubt, and the passage of time, she explained, sometimes brings about substantial changes to what evidence actually remains available to support a case.
In Stone’s specific circumstances, key witnesses were no longer available through a combination of factors connected to the consequences of the Court of Appeals own decision the previous year.
Whatever case had once existed against Stone, built on the testimony examined and substantially discredited across the previous 6 years of investigation and appeal was no longer one the Crown believed it could actually prove.
Justice Brewer formally discharged Stone on both murder charges and the rape charge. In doing so, he made a point of characterizing what that discharge actually meant in practical terms.
Stone, in the judge’s own words, was to be treated as effectively acquitted. It’s a meaningful distinction worth understanding precisely because New Zealand’s legal system draws a genuine line between a formal not-guilty verdict delivered by a jury and a prosecutorial decision not to proceed with a case at all.
Stone never had the opportunity to be tried a third time and found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
What he received instead was a decision by the crown that it no longer had a viable case to bring a different legal pathway to the same practical outcome.
Justice Brewer’s specific choice of language, describing that outcome as an effective acquitt was a deliberate effort to make clear that this distinction shouldn’t be read as leaving any lingering doubt about Stone’s guilt hanging over him going forward.
Stone’s own reaction to finally formally walking free after decades in the system captures something of what that specific legal journey.
Quashed convictions, then a retrial order, then six more months of uncertainty before the crown’s final decision had cost him emotionally by this point.
According to reporting from outside the courthouse that day, he responded with visible frustration and an expletive as he left rather than any obvious sense of relief or celebration.
It’s worth reading that reaction alongside everything this account has already traced. A man who’d spent a quarter of a century in prison for crimes the justice system had ultimately determined it could no longer prove against him who nonetheless had to wait a further six months after his convictions were formally quashed before learning whether he’d faced the entire ordeal a third time Gail Manny who by this point had already been fully acquitted the previous October spoke to media about her own confusion over why her co-acused had been treated so differently from the outset she maintained as she had for years that none of what the original case alleged had actually happened, that everyone convicted was innocent, and said plainly that Stone didn’t deserve to have remained in the system any longer than she had.
It’s a notable statement of solidarity from someone whose own path through this exact legal process had been considerably shorter and cleaner than his, arriving at full acquitt in a single court of appeal decision rather than the additional six-month weight stone was made to endure.
The formal resolution of the criminal case didn’t bring this story to a close on its own.
Separate from the courtroom proceedings, New Zealand police launched their own internal investigation into how the original case had been handled, led by a detective inspector, running alongside a parallel independent investigation by the Independent Police Conduct Authority, the body responsible for examining alleged police misconduct in New Zealand.
A police spokesperson responding to the final outcome for Stone acknowledged directly that the result, no one ever being tried again for either death, was disappointing for the families involved, while stressing the importance of allowing both investigations to run their proper course before any further steps were considered.
It’s worth pausing on what that specific acknowledgement actually represents because it points to a genuinely difficult unresolved reality sitting underneath the entire legal resolution of this case.
Dean Fuller Sandies and Leah Stevens are both still dead. Whatever actually happened to them in August 1989, whether Fuller Sandies really did drown in dangerous surf as everyone believed for the first eight years, or whether he was killed in the way police eventually alleged by someone, even if the specific case built against Stone and Manny has now been comprehensively discredited, remains formally unresolved.
The Court of Appeals decision and the Crown’s subsequent choice not to retry Stone don’t establish that no crime occurred.
They establish at most that the specific case built against these four people using this specific set of witnesses doesn’t hold up to proper scrutiny.
For Fuller Sandies and Steven’s own families. That leaves a genuinely unsettled question that this entire decadesl long legal process has now closed off any realistic prospect of ever answering through a courtroom.
A further more personal dispute emerged the following month, illustrating that the fallout from this case hadn’t fully settled even once the criminal proceedings themselves had ended.
In May 2025, Stone’s 32-year-old son, Daniel, filed a formal complaint over public comments Crown Solicitor Alicia Mccclintok had made following the April hearing.
According to Daniel Stone’s complaint, a mcclinintok’s public statement had caused significant harm to his father and their broader family by in his characterization, perpetuating a misleading impression, specifically that the case against his father had simply been dropped because witnesses happened to no longer be available rather than because it had been comprehensively established as a serious miscarriage of justice from the outset.
The comparison Daniel Stone’s complaint drew was a pointed one. He pointed to how New Zealand’s justice system had handled another prominent recent wrongful conviction case involving a man named Alan Hall, declared innocent in 2023 after 19 years of wrongful imprisonment and awarded close to $5 million in compensation.
In that case, both the crown and the court had gone out of their way to explicitly acknowledge on the record that the justice system itself had failed not only Hall, but the victim’s own family as well.
Daniel Stone’s complaint argued his father’s case deserved the same kind of direct unambiguous acknowledgement rather than a public characterization that in his view left room for the impression that the case against Stone might simply have gone cold through unfortunate circumstance rather than through documented admitted institutional failure.
This account isn’t in a position to adjudicate that specific dispute over how Mcccleintok’s comments should properly be understood or whether her characterization of the decision not to retry Stone was intended or reasonably could be read the way Daniel Stone’s complaint suggests.
What the dispute itself illustrates is worth noting plainly. Even after 25 years in custody, a quashed conviction, and a crown decision explicitly characterized by a judge as an effective acquitt, questions about how definitively and publicly the justice system was prepared to own its own failure in this specific case remained genuinely contested right up to the point this account was put together.
What can be stated with confidence, drawing together everything covered across this account, is the basic shape of what actually happened to Steven Stone.
A 21-year-old man disappeared in 1989, presumed drowned. A cold case investigation opened nearly a decade later built a case against Stone and three others using witnesses who were later shown through independent journalism and subsequent legal proceedings to have given testimony riddled with fabrication inconsistency and according to at least some of those witnesses own later accounts direct police pressure.
Stone spent approximately 25 years in prison as a result. When the case finally fully unraveled, three of his four co-acquused were immediately and fully acquitted.
Stone himself was made to wait a further 6 months, formerly still facing the prospect of a third trial before the crown finally concluded there simply wasn’t enough left of its own case to put in front of a jury again dot the specific failures that unraveled the case against Steven Stone, Gail Manny, and their co-acused.
Fabricated testimony from immunized witnesses, undisclosed material affecting witness credibility and a police investigation built substantially around informants with their own reasons to cooperate don’t sit in isolation.
They fit into a considerably longer and for New Zealand’s criminal justice system considerably more uncomfortable pattern.
A recurring reliance on unreliable informant and in custody testimony that has across several of the country’s most serious criminal cases produced convictions that didn’t survive sustained scrutiny.
It’s worth setting out that broader pattern plainly because the Stone and Manny case isn’t an isolated failure of one investigation or one detective.
It’s the latest entry in a list of New Zealand wrongful conviction cases stretching back decades, each involving its own specific facts, but sharing a recognizable structural weakness.
Cases built substantially on the word of witnesses who had a direct personal incentive, reduced charges, immunity from prosecution, or simply police goodwill to tell investigators what they believed detectives wanted to hear.
The clearest historical parallel and one of the most widely known miscarriages of justice in New Zealand’s history is the case of Arthur Allan Thomas convicted twice.
First in 1971 and again in a retrial in 1973 for the murders of Harvey and Ganette Crew, a married couple killed on their Wicato farm in 1970.
Thomas spent close to a decade in prison before a royal commission of inquiry established specifically to examine his case found that police had fabricated physical evidence used against him ultimately leading to a formal pardon and a substantial compensation payment.
The Thomas case remains more than 50 years later, the case most frequently cited in New Zealand as the definitive example of police misconduct producing a wrongful conviction.
And it established well before Stone and Manny’s case that New Zealand’s criminal justice system was capable of getting a serious violent crime conviction badly, provably wrong.
The Tayapora case, already referenced earlier in this account through private investigator Tim McKinnel’s direct involvement in both matters adds a more recent and in some ways more directly comparable example.
Pora was convicted twice in 1994 and again at a 2000 retrial for the rape and murder of Susan Berdett based substantially on a confession he gave to police as a teenager with a diagnosed intellectual impairment.
A confession that later scrutiny found to be unreliable and inconsistent with the physical evidence.
Pora spent more than 20 years in prison before the Privy Council quashed his convictions in 2015, and he was later awarded compensation exceeding $3 million.
The parallel to Stone’s case is direct. A lengthy prison sentence, a formal legal process that took decades to unwind, and a conviction that rested on testimony from a source whose reliability should have been treated with far greater caution at the original trial than it was.
A third case worth including here because it illustrates the same underlying problem playing out through a different kind of unreliable evidence is that of David Doaty convicted in 1993 of the sexual assault of a young girl in Oakland based substantially on identification evidence and testimony that DNA analysis later definitively contradicted.
Doati served 3 years before Dire testing, not available or not properly applied at the time of his original trial, established that he could not have been the perpetrator.
His case became one of the driving forces behind establishing New Zealand’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, a body created specifically to provide a formal independent avenue for examining potential wrongful convictions after standard appeal processes have been exhausted.
The same kind of institutional gap that in Stone and Manny’s case was ultimately filled not by any formal review body, but by investigative journalism.
That last point is worth dwelling on directly because it’s arguably the most significant common thread running through several of these cases.
New Zealand’s Criminal Cases Review Commission wasn’t established until 2020, meaning it existed for less than a decade by the time Stone’s case reached its final resolution.
And it played no role in either the Poor case or the Stone and Manny case, both of which were substantially driven toward reconsideration by outside journalism rather than any formal state review mechanism.
In Pora’s case specifically, sustained legal advocacy work by figures including Tim McKinnel did the work a formal review body might otherwise have done.
In Stone and Manny’s case, that role was filled by the Gone Fishing podcast team, working through original police transcripts years after the trials had concluded, and public attention had long since moved elsewhere.
This raises a specific uncomfortable question that sits underneath all of these cases considered together.
How many similarly unsafe convictions currently stand in New Zealand’s justice system unexamined simply because no journalist, private investigator, or advocacy group happened to take a sustained interest in reopening a case most of the public and the legal system itself had already treated as settled.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission exists specifically to try to answer that question through a formal process rather than depending on individual journalists getting interested in old files.
But its relatively recent establishment means its full record and its capacity to catch cases like Stone and Manny’s before decades pass remains, as of the most recent reporting available, still being tested.
It’s also worth being precise about what these cases do and don’t establish about immunized witness testimony as an investigative tool more broadly.
Witness immunity deals offering a person involved in criminal conduct protection from prosecution or a reduced charge in exchange for testimony against someone else are a legitimate and in many genuine organized crime and gang related cases a necessary investigative tool.
Without them, prosecutors would lose access to testimony from people genuinely positioned inside criminal networks who would otherwise have no incentive to cooperate at all.
The problem the Stone and Manny case illustrates isn’t that immunity deals are inherently illegitimate.
It’s that testimony obtained this way carries a specific well doumented reliability risk. The witness has a direct personal stake in the outcome and a corresponding incentive to shape their account toward whatever result benefits them most.
And that risk requires a level of independent corroboration and scrutiny that according to the findings that ultimately undid Stone and Manny’s convictions simply wasn’t applied with sufficient rigor in this specific case.
Detective Mark Franklin’s own description of his investigative approach, referenced in the previous part of this account, trying to work out who was who in a chaotic web of overlapping contradictory accounts, captures something of how that specific investigation actually unfolded on the ground.
Building a homicide case, particularly a cold case reopened years after a body was never found, often does require piecing together fragments of unreliable, self-interested testimony from people connected to the criminal underworld the victims moved through.
What the eventual court of appeal finding establishes is that in this instance, the process of piecing those fragments together crossed a line from careful investigative work into something that produced, whether through deliberate misconduct, genuine investigative overreach, or some combination of both.
Testimony detailed enough to convict, but unreliable enough to eventually collapse entirely once independently examined.
It’s worth being fair to the specific institutional pressures operating on police in cases like this one without treating that context as an excuse for the specific disclosure failures already covered in this account.
Cold case homicide investigations, particularly ones without a recovered body, operate under genuine and difficult evidentiary constraints that more straightforward cases don’t face.
Investigators in Fuller Sandy’s case were working by the time the case was reopened in the late 1990s with a disappearance already nearly a decade old.
No body and a victim whose own lifestyle and associations already documented earlier in this account made piecing together his final movements considerably harder than a more conventional missing person’s case might have been.
None of that excuses the specific failure to disclose material affecting witness credibility which the crown itself has now formally admitted amounted to a genuine miscarriage of justice.
But it helps explain without justifying how an investigation built on this kind of fragile self-interested testimony came to be constructed in the first place.
Taken together, the Thomas, Pora, Doaty, and now Stone and Manny cases describe something more significant than four isolated failures spread across half a century of New Zealand criminal justice history.
They describe a recurring institutional vulnerability, a system that has on multiple welldocumented occasions allowed convictions to rest on testimony or evidence that shouldn’t have been trusted as far as it was.
And that has then required in almost every instance sustained outside pressure over many years before that vulnerability was formally acknowledged and corrected.
Whether the more recent creation of a dedicated criminal cases review commission meaningfully closes that gap going forward or whether cases like Stone and Manny’s continue to depend on the coincidence of a journalist deciding to dig back through old files years after the fact is a question this account can’t resolve.
But it’s one the pattern traced here makes difficult to avoid asking directly. An effective acquitt in Steven Stone’s specific legal circumstances resolves the criminal case against him.
It does not on its own resolve the question of compensation. A separate, considerably more complicated legal process that New Zealand’s system treats as entirely distinct from the criminal proceedings themselves and one that as of the most recent reporting available, Stone had not yet formally completed.
New Zealand’s approach to compensating people for wrongful conviction operates through a specific cabinet guideline framework rather than any automatic legal entitlement.
A person seeking compensation after a quashed conviction must apply to the Ministry of Justice, which then typically appoints an independent Queen’s Council or King’s Council to assess the claim against a specific legal standard.
Not simply whether a conviction was quashed on procedural or evidentiary grounds, but whether the applicant can establish their innocence on the balance of probabilities, a genuinely higher bar than simply having a conviction overturned.
This distinction matters enormously for understanding where Stone’s situation actually sits. Gail Many, Colin Manny, and Mark Henrikson were formally acquitted by the Court of Appeal itself, a court making its own determination on the existing evidence.
Stone’s case followed a different legal path entirely. His convictions were quashed. A retrial was ordered, and the crown subsequently decided not to proceed with that retrial.
Whether that specific sequence positions him more or less favorably for a compensation claim than his co-acused who received unambiguous acquitt directly from an appellet court is a genuinely separate legal question from anything determined in the criminal proceedings covered earlier in this account.
It’s worth grounding this process in a direct comparable example already referenced in the previous part of this account.
Alan Hall, wrongfully convicted of a 1985 murder and declared innocent by the Court of Appeal in 2023 after 19 years in prison, was subsequently awarded compensation of close to $5 million following a formal assessment under this same framework.
One of the largest such payments in New Zealand’s history. Tapora’s compensation awarded after his convictions were quashed by the Privy Council in 2015 exceeded $3 million, reflecting a broadly similar calculation based on years of lost liberty, lost earning capacity, and the documented impact of wrongful imprisonment on his life.
Both cases give a rough sense of the scale of compensation New Zealand’s system has been willing to award in comparable circumstances, but neither guarantees any particular outcome for Stone, whose own claim, as of this account, had not yet been formally resolved or its outcome made public.
There’s a specific tension worth naming here. One that connects directly back to the dispute already covered in the previous part of this account between Stone’s son Daniel and Crown Solicitor Alicia Emlintok over how the decision not to retry his father should be characterized publicly.
The language used to describe why a case didn’t proceed. A straightforward unqualified acknowledgement of wrongful conviction versus a more measured explanation citing unavailable witnesses and the practical effects of time passing can carry real practical consequences beyond how a case is reported in the media.
A compensation assessment conducted under the balance of probabilities standard is likely to examine closely how and on what specific legal basis a case actually concluded.
Whether Stone’s case is ultimately treated in that formal assessment process as functionally equivalent to Manny’s clean acquitt or as a materially different outcome reflecting genuine unresolved uncertainty about the underlying facts is not a question this account is in a position to answer.
But it’s precisely the kind of question Daniel Stone’s complaint appears to have been anticipating.
Separate from any compensation claim, the two ongoing investigations already introduced in the previous part of this account, the internal police review led by a detective inspector and the parallel independent examination by the independent police conduct authority represent New Zealand’s formal mechanism for establishing individual and institutional accountability for what went wrong in the original investigation.
It’s worth being precise about what each of these bodies can and can’t actually do.
An internal police review can result in findings about individual officer conduct, potential disciplinary action, and recommendations for changes to investigative practice.
But it’s conducted by the same organization whose conduct is under examination, which is part of why the IPA’s parallel independent role matters.
The IPAR has the power to conduct its own separate investigation, reach independent findings, and make public recommendations, though it doesn’t have the power to reopen the criminal case itself, or impose criminal liability on individual officers directly.
Any potential criminal referral arising from its findings would need to go through a separate prosecutorial decision made independently of the IPAR process itself.
As of the most recent reporting available, neither investigation had produced a public finding. That means one of the central remaining questions in this entire account, whether the disclosure failures already admitted by the crown and the fabricated or coerced testimony already established through the Gone Fishing Podcast’s reporting reflected deliberate misconduct by specific individuals or a more diffuse combination of investigative overreach, institutional pressure to solve too high-profile deaths, and inadequate oversight remains formally unresolved.
Detective Mark Franklin’s own specific role in the undisclosed communications already covered in the previous part of this account puts him at the center of that unresolved question.
Though it’s worth being careful here. An undisclosed communication being identified as a legal failure sufficient to support a miscarriage of justice finding is a different and lower threshold than establishing individual criminal or disciplinary culpability for that same conduct, which would require a separate, more specific finding from whichever body ultimately examines it.
This is also the point in the story where it’s worth returning directly to Dean Fuller Sandes and Leah Stevens own families whose position in this entire account has up to now largely sat in the background of the legal proceedings themselves.
A police spokesperson’s acknowledgement already referenced in the previous part of this account that the final outcome was disappointing for the families involved under states in a fairly significant way.
What that outcome actually represents for them specifically. Both victims are dead. Whatever happened to Fuller Sandies in August 1989, presumed for eight years to be a drowning, then treated by police as a homicide, then the subject of a case that took a further 2 and 1 half decades to collapse entirely, remains formally unresolved with no realistic further prospect following the crown’s decision not to pursue a third trial of ever being tested again in a courtroom.
The same is true for Stevens. For families in this position, a legal system working exactly as it should, refusing to convict someone on evidence that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, can still produce an outcome that leaves the underlying question of what actually happened to their family member permanently unanswered with no clear alternative avenue left to pursue it.
It’s worth being honest about the genuine tension this creates rather than presenting it as a simple story of wrongful convictions corrected and justice ultimately served.
Justice in the narrow legal sense of ensuring no one is punished on the basis of evidence that doesn’t meet the required standard appears to have functioned as intended by the time this account reaches its current point.
However long that process took and however much documented institutional failure it required getting there.
But justice in the broader sense many people would recognize genuine accountability for two deaths and some form of resolution for the families left behind remains entirely unmet and there’s no indication as of the most recent reporting available that it ever will be.
Both of those realities exist simultaneously and neither should be allowed to obscure the other.
There’s a further practical consequence worth noting distinct from compensation and formal accountability connected to New Zealand’s broader capacity to actually solve cases like this one going forward.
A homicide investigation that took this particular path collapsing decades after its original convictions following the exposure of fabricated and coerced witness testimony doesn’t just affect the four people whose convictions were ultimately quashed.
It represents a substantial multi-deade diversion of police and judicial resources toward a case that according to the crown’s own eventual admission should never have been built the way it was in the first place.
Whatever finite investigative capacity New Zealand police had available for cold case work during the years, this case was under active reconsideration and appeal was capacity not available for other unresolved cases.
An indirect cost that doesn’t appear in any compensation calculation, but that represents a genuine consequence of the original investigative failure.
Nonetheless, where this leaves things, as of the point this account was put together, is a case with several major questions still genuinely open.
Stone’s compensation claim, if and when it proceeds, has not been publicly resolved. The internal police review and the IPA’s parallel investigation have not produced public findings regarding individual accountability and the underlying question of what actually happened to Dean Fuller Sandies and Leah Stevens in 1989 remains in the fullest sense unanswered.
Not because anyone has been cleared of wrongdoing through a jury’s considered verdict, but because the specific case built against four people over more than two decades has now been comprehensively shown not to hold up, leaving nothing else in its place.
Strip away the individual names, the specific dates, and the particular details of this case, and what’s left is a genuinely uncomfortable question about how a justice system built to protect against exactly this kind of failure still allowed it to happen.
And then allowed it to stand for the better part of 25 years. Here’s what the record actually establishes laid out plainly one final time.
A young man, Dean Fuller Sandies, disappeared off a beach in August 1989. For close to a decade, everyone involved, his family, police, the coroner’s office, treated that disappearance as a tragic accident, a presumed drowning in dangerous surf.
Then in the late 1990s, a cold case review reopened the file, built substantially on the word of two immunized witnesses whose accounts, when finally subjected to sustained independent scrutiny nearly two decades later, turned out to include entirely fabricated events, describing a killing with no victim anyone could ever identify.
On the strength of that testimony and testimony connected to the separate disappearance of Leah Stevens, four people were convicted.
Two trials, multiple appeals that at the time went nowhere. A private investigator with genuine standing in this exact kind of case getting directly involved.
An eight-part investigative podcast working back through the original transcripts. A formal crown admission of a miscarriage of justice.
Three people fully acquitted in a single court of appeal decision. And Steven Stone himself made to wait a further 6 months beyond that, formerly still facing a third trial before the crown finally acknowledged there simply wasn’t a case left to bring.
25 years. That’s the specific human cost sitting underneath every one of the legal and procedural details this account has worked through.
Whatever Steven Stone actually did or didn’t do in August 1989. And this account has been careful throughout not to claim more certainty about that underlying question than the public record actually supports.
A quarter of a century in custody is not a small thing to have happened to a person on the strength of testimony that has since been shown to include material that was by the clearest possible standard simply invented.
It’s worth asking directly rather than leaving it as an implied conclusion. How does a justice system allow this to happen?
The honest answer drawn from everything already covered across this account isn’t a single failure at a single moment.
It’s a chain of smaller failures, each individually explicable, that compounded into something much larger.
A cold case investigation working with limited physical evidence and a body never recovered leaned heavily on witnesses who had a direct personal incentive to tell detectives what they wanted to hear.
Material that could have let the original defense teams challenge those witnesses credibility at trial went undisclosed.
Whether through deliberate suppression or investigative carelessness remains as the previous part of this account made clear formally unresolved.
Appeals process after appeals process, operating at the time with the information available to them, didn’t catch what had gone wrong.
And ultimately, it took a team of journalists working through old transcripts on a podcast with no formal legal authority at all to do what the system’s own internal safeguards had failed to do across two trials and multiple earlier appeals.
That last point is worth sitting with directly because it’s arguably the single most important lesson this case actually offers and it’s a lesson this channel has now encountered in some form across almost every wrongful conviction case covered in this broader pattern.
New Zealand’s criminal cases review commission. The body specifically created to catch cases like this one didn’t exist for most of the years Stone spent in custody and played no role at all in either Tanapora’s case or this one.
Both depended instead on the specific coincidence of the right investigator or the right journalists deciding years after public attention had moved on to look again at files most people had already treated as settled.
That’s not a system working as designed. That’s a system getting lucky, which raises the harder, genuinely uncomfortable question this account has to leave open because there’s no honest way to answer it with confidence.
How many convictions currently sitting in New Zealand’s prison system rest on exactly this same kind of fragile, self-interested testimony simply because no one has yet had the reason, the resources, or the specific interest to go back and look.
This isn’t a rhetorical flourish. It’s the direct logical extension of everything this account has traced across Thomas, Doaty, Pora, and now Stone and Manny.
Four cases spanning five decades, each caught not through the ordinary functioning of appeals and review processes, but through some combination of extraordinary individual persistence and in the most recent case, old-fashioned journalism.
A justice system that has now demonstrated this specific vulnerability four separate times across 50 years has a considerably harder case to make that this represents a handful of unfortunate exceptions rather than a real structural weak point in how difficult evidence thin cases get built and tested.
None of this is offered as a conclusion that police, prosecutors, and courts are fundamentally untrustworthy, or that the specific individuals involved in Stone and Manny’s original investigation acted with deliberate malice rather than genuine, if flawed, investigative judgment under real pressure to solve two unexplained deaths.
The honest position, consistent with how this account has approached every difficult question along the way, is to hold two things together rather than collapsing into either extreme.
Cold case investigations built on incomplete physical evidence are genuinely difficult work. And the specific pressures facing detectives trying to build a case nearly a decade after a disappearance, working through a chaotic web of unreliable witnesses connected to the criminal underworld the victim moved through.
Are real pressures that deserve some good faith acknowledgement. At the same time, whatever pressure existed doesn’t excuse, and the crown’s own formal admission confirms it doesn’t excuse.
Building a case to the point of conviction on testimony this unreliable or failing to disclose material that could have let a defense team test that testimony properly at trial.
There’s a final question worth asking directly because it’s the one this case leaves genuinely open rather than resolved.
What do we as an audience following stories like this one actually owe the people caught inside them?
Both the wrongfully convicted and the families of victims whose deaths remain in the fullest sense permanently unresolved.
Steven Stone walked out of custody after 25 years to a crown solicitor’s careful legal language rather than an unambiguous public acknowledgement his own son believed the case actually deserved.
Gail Manny spent over two decades maintaining that nothing the original case alleged had ever happened and was ultimately proven right by the court of appeal itself.
And somewhere in all of this, Dean Fuller Sandies and Leah Stevens own families are left with a case that will now almost certainly never be tested in a courtroom again.
Not because anyone was found not guilty by a jury weighing the true facts, but because the specific case built against four people over 25 years simply didn’t survive being looked at properly.
We don’t think there’s a clean, satisfying answer to what any of us owe the people inside a story like this.
What can be said with confidence is this. A justice system that took 25 years, an eight-part podcast, and a private investigator’s direct personal history with an almost identical earlier case to finally correct what it had gotten wrong is a system that worked in the end.
But far too slowly, and only because a specific, fortunate set of outside circumstances happened to align.
That’s not a comforting lesson. It’s the honest one this case actually supports. If you found value in this kind of case-byase account, one that takes the time to separate what’s actually been proven from what was simply alleged, convicted, or later discredited, and that doesn’t flinch from sitting with the genuinely uncomfortable questions a case like this raises about the system itself.
That’s exactly the standard this channel holds itself to across every case we cover. We don’t dramatize unproven allegations.
We don’t pretend legal outcomes are simpler than they actually are, and we go back to the original record rather than relying on any single account.
If that’s the kind of coverage you’re looking for, subscribing and turning on notifications is the best way to make sure you’re here for the next one.
We’ll see you then.
