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A New Zealand chef who committed the first murder on Norfolk Island in more than a century will be released from prison in just weeks.
The body of Janelle Patton, a 29-year-old Sydney woman, was found wrapped in a sheet of black plastic in the island’s Cockpit Waterfall Reserve on Easter Sunday 2002.
Ms Patton had suffered 64 injuries, including stab wounds, a fractured skull and a broken pelvis, and her death sparked a police investigation that made headlines around the world.
More than two decades later, despite Glenn Peter Charles McNeil’s conviction for Patton’s murder, his murder remains a topic of debate on true crime podcasts and among amateur detectives.
The body of Janelle Patton, a 29-year-old Sydney woman, was found wrapped in a sheet of black plastic in the island’s Cockpit Waterfall Reserve on Easter Sunday 2002. New Zealand chef Glenn McNeill, convicted of murder of the Mrs. Patton, you will be released. from prison in February
McNeill’s story about what happened the day Ms Patton was killed changed repeatedly after her arrest and no motive for her murder was ever established.
Ms Patton, who worked in hospitality, had moved to Norfolk Island to escape a bad relationship in Sydney more than two years before McNeill took her life.
Relationship problems continued to plague her, with several failed affairs and occasional angry encounters with local men and women.
Ms Patton was last seen alive on the morning of March 31 while on her daily walk around the island, where her parents had spent their honeymoon.
Detectives sent from the Australian mainland had to be sworn in as Norfolk Island agents before they could speak to the island’s 2,771 residents and visitors at the time.
Mrs Patton’s parents, Ron and Carol, were visiting Norfolk over Easter when their daughter was murdered and had every reason to believe the crime would be solved quickly.
Police knew the names of all the people present on the island, which covers just 35 square kilometers and is located about 1,400 kilometers east of Evans Head on the New South Wales north coast.
Despite Glenn McNeil’s conviction for Patton’s murder, his murder remains the subject of conjecture on true crime podcasts and among amateur sleuths. McNeill is pictured being led to the Norfolk Island courthouse in Kingston after his arrest in February 2006.
Instead, the search for Ms Patton’s killer dragged on for years as islanders insisted it could not be one of them, despite a 2004 coronial inquest hearing listing 16 local “persons of interest”.
Among those named was a man accused of pulling Ms Patton’s hair at the pick-up club and another with whom she described sex as “not rape, but it wasn’t what I wanted”.
The investigation found that Ms Patton had struggled mightily for perhaps 15 minutes while being beaten, cut and stabbed to death with sharp, blunt instruments.
Ms Patton’s diary entries included references to a former Island boyfriend who spat at her and later described himself as her “first enemy in Norfolk”.
About half of the territory’s population descends from British sailors who mutinied against naval officer William Bligh on the HMS Bounty in 1789.
The mutineers, led by Fletcher Christian, hid on Pitcairn Island with their Tahitian wives and their descendants were resettled in 1856 in the former penal colony of Norfolk.
Those “real” islanders make up about a third of the permanent population: the Buffet, Quintal, Nobbs, Evans, McCoy, Adams, Young and Christian families.
They speak a mix of archaic English and Tahitian, but only to each other, and the Norfolk telephone directory includes their nicknames in its listings.
Persons of interest cleared of any involvement in Ms Patton’s murder include ‘Bucket’, ‘Spindles’, ‘Jap’, ‘Tugger’, ‘Moose’ and ‘Frenzy’.
The search for Ms Patton’s killer dragged on for years as islanders insisted it could not be one of them, despite a 2004 coronial inquest hearing listing 16 local “persons of interest”. A police vehicle is shown leaving the Norfolk Island courthouse carrying Glenn McNeill.
Early in the homicide investigation, the Australian Federal Police took the fingerprints of most of the adults on the island, but found no match to evidence found at the crime scene.
In February 2006, four years after Ms Patton’s body was discovered, McNeill, a 28-year-old father of two, was arrested in New Zealand.
McNeill had been questioned over a robbery shortly after Ms Patton’s murder and his fingerprints were taken, along with a DNA sample, which were re-examined in 2004.
Two of the prints found on the plastic sheet used to wrap Ms Patton’s body belonged to McNeill and hairs matching her DNA were located in the boot of her Honda Civic.
Broken pieces of green glass removed from Ms. Patton’s hair were also similar to particles recovered from that vehicle.
The only foreign DNA detected on Ms Patton’s body was that of an unidentified woman.
McNeill arrived in Norfolk in 2000 with his girlfriend and worked in several restaurants on the island before returning to his homeland after Patton’s death.
He initially claimed that on the day Ms Patton disappeared he had been smoking cannabis and accidentally hit her while driving his Civic.
“I was driving down the road and I dropped my cigarettes,” McNeill told detectives.
‘I bent down to pick them up and hit her. At first I thought she had hit a cow or a dog. I came out and saw she was under the car and I panicked.’
Detectives sent from the Australian mainland had to be sworn in as Norfolk Island officers before they could speak to the island’s 2,771 residents and visitors at the time of Ms Patton’s murder.
McNeill said he put Ms Patton’s body in the boot of his car which he drove to Cockpit Waterfall Reserve and stabbed her just to make sure she was dead.
He later retracted that statement and in February 2007 faced trial before a jury of fewer than 2,000 of the island’s eligible voters.
McNeill gave evidence that he did not kill Ms Patton or see her on the day she was murdered and claimed that if he had made a confession it was due to mental illness.
Lawyer Peter Garling, now a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, put forward the proposition that a woman had killed Ms Patton in a fit of jealousy.
The jury found McNeill guilty and he was sentenced to 24 years in prison with a minimum sentence expiring on February 1.
McNeill, who served his sentence in New South Wales prisons, unsuccessfully appealed his conviction to the Federal Court and was refused leave to appeal by the High Court.
Three years after his conviction, NBC aired an episode of Dateline in which McNeill’s girlfriend, Shelley Hooper, offered a new theory about the murder.
McNeill gave evidence that he did not kill Ms Patton or see her on the day she was murdered and claimed that if he had made a confession it was due to mental illness. She is pictured in front of the Norfolk Island Courthouse.
Hooper said Patton had been murdered by a couple of drug dealers who forced McNeil to dispose of her body.
McNeil later made the same claim from prison, adding that he had been wearing surgical gloves that he buried in his garden. Police searched McNeil’s former property but found no gloves.
Norfolk Island lawyer John Brown, who represented McNeill, told the ABC there were “quite a few” inconsistencies in the case against his former client.
“One was that the only DNA found on the deceased person was female,” Mr Brown said.
“And there’s no way he could have put female DNA on the deceased, that was one of the things, but there were several.”
The ABC reported that McNeill was expected to serve his parole in New Zealand after the government confirmed his likely release. Supreme Court of Norfolk Island.
Janelle Patton murder on Norfolk Island: killer Glenn McNeill free from prison