[7] In July 2024, the Crown prosecutor conceded that a miscarriage had occurred,[8] and in October 2024, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of all four defendants, and ordered a retrial for Stone.
His body was never found and authorities initially believed he probably drowned after being swept out to sea at West Auckland's Whatipu Beach, where his car was discovered shortly afterwards.
[14] Eight years after the disappearances, a person being interviewed by detective Mark Franklin linked the deaths of Fuller-Sandys and Stephens after previously denying there was any connection.
[2][15] Police also received new information about a burglary that had allegedly occurred at Gail Maney's rental home at 22 Larnoch Road in the Auckland suburb of Henderson, two weeks before Fuller-Sandys disappeared.
[16][18][19] In 2024, Julie-Anne Kincade KC, acting for Gail Maney, described evidence from the people whose initial contacts with police sparked the entire investigation as the "rumour and gossip witnesses.
[27] The prosecution case relied heavily on the testimony of the four alleged eyewitnesses: two men and two women who were interviewed eight or more years after Fuller-Sandys and Stephens disappeared.
[18] During the trial, Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Franklin was strongly challenged by defence lawyers over whether he had bullied these alleged witnesses, or pressured them to change their stories to match a predetermined police narrative, but he denied doing so.
Gail Maney and Henriksen gained a retrial[30] on the grounds that the original trial judge had not adequately summed up the case for their defence to the jury.
At this time, the judges were unaware that key documents had not been disclosed to the defence, which proved that police had amalgamated differing witness statements into one incriminating narrative – and both appeals were dismissed.
[9] It led to the involvement of private investigator Tim McKinnel, who had worked to overturn the wrongful conviction of Teina Pora,[38] and then three prominent lawyers, Julie-Anne Kincade, Nicholas Chisnall, and Aieyah Shendi, agreed to represent Maney as she continued trying to clear her name.
[27] In December 2023, a recall application was filed on Maney's behalf asking the court to retract their 2005 decision dismissing her original appeal against her murder conviction.
[45] Then in July 2024, the Crown agreed that the convictions constituted a miscarriage of justice because two crucial documents, which should have been provided to the defence team at the trials in 1999 and 2000, were not turned over.
Stone's lawyers said the fax was a "smoking gun" because it showed how two so-called witnesses ended up with near-identical accounts of the murders when their previous statements had been wildly divergent.
At the start of the hearing in August 2024, Stone's lawyer Paul Wicks KC, said "any retrial would be 36 years after the murders, two of the four so-called witnesses in the case had now recanted their original statements to the police and the evidence of the two remaining individuals was both contaminated and unreliable."
One of Maney's lawyers, Jack Oliver-Hood pointed out at least nine instances where police informed a so-called witness that it was Fuller-Sandys who had been murdered, before the individual ever mentioned his name.
"[20] The lawyers for Stone and Maney argued a new trial was not feasible because the police had "bullied" people into what to say, and failed to disclose documents describing their procedures, leading to a miscarriage of justice.
The Crown conceded it had no case against Maney for the alleged murder of Fuller-Sandys, as the only person who implicated her at the original trial had subsequently disavowed the statements she made to the police and died in 2023.
[9][10] The Auckland Crown Solicitor will determine whether there is sufficient evidence for Stone to face a jury again; this decision is scheduled to be announced in December 2024.
They said they helped bury Fuller-Sandys' body in dense bush somewhere in West Auckland, and that they were present when Leah Stephens was raped and murdered.
However, at one point during the investigation, he spent half an hour alone with Franklin and immediately revised his statements to say he remembered both killings – which helped the police tie the two cases together.
[15][7] Tim McKinnel wondered whether the Solicitor General was aware that Neil and Martin had given between 15 and 20 different versions of events before granting them immunity for rape and murder.
Law professor Kris Gledhill said that Neil and Martin appeared to have "participated in more criminality than was alleged against [Gail] Maney" and questioned whether immunity should be granted to those who could be a greater risk to public safety than the person they are giving evidence against.
[20][53] In July 2019, a second woman, who has name suppression and gave evidence in the trial that convicted Gail Maney, said she lied that she was present at the shooting of Fuller-Sandys after being "threatened and harassed" by police.
They would search my house, [and] told me that they were going to make my life a misery if I didn't start playing ball, which meant admitting to my so-called role in his murder."
She said she gave a false statement after police threatened to take away her young child but added: "My view was that he wasn't murdered and he was washed off the rocks fishing.
Gail Maney's lawyers made similar observations, stating that Franklin "coerced and threatened" all four key witnesses to get the evidence he wanted from them.
In overturning the convictions, the Court of Appeal noted there were "significant questions about the veracity of Detective [Mark] Franklin’s assurances in the 1999 trial", and that it harboured "deep misgivings" about his conduct.
Under his command, in December 2024, the Crown are seeking an extension of time until March 2025, so police can carry out further investigations before deciding whether to put Stone back on trial.