It was only afterwards that Edwards claimed that he had nothing to do with the Epsom carjacking. <\/p>\n
His denial fell on deaf ears.<\/p>\n
Edwards was sentenced to 16 years in prison, which was replaced by preventive detention (essentially an indefinite term of imprisonment) when the Solicitor-General appealed for a harsher penalty the following year.<\/p>\n
Ever since then, Edwards has remained behind bars but maintained his innocence over the Epsom kidnapping.<\/p>\n
In September 2022, he wrote to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the authority established to review potential wrongful convictions, which agreed to open an investigation.<\/p>\n
Court documents released to the Herald reveal the CCRC\u2019s six-month inquiry uncovered five problems in the original police investigation.<\/p>\n
The most glaring was the \u201cclear discrepancies\u201d between the victim\u2019s description of her attacker and Edwards\u2019 physical appearance. <\/p>\n
The kidnapper was Caucasian with dark skin and \u201cdense\u201d hair on his arms. Edwards is Maori and has no body hair.<\/p>\n
The victim also said her attacker had no distinguishing marks on his arms, where Edwards has obvious tattoos on his hands.<\/p>\n
Most obviously, the kidnapper also had a large tattoo written across his stomach, about 12cm high, in black and green lettering. <\/p>\n
Edwards did not have a large tattoo on his stomach, or any sign of laser removal.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere does not appear to have been any attempt by police to establish whether Mr Edwards had any of the identifying marks described by the victim,\u201d according to the report of Colin Carruthers, KC, the former chairman of the CCRC.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn particular, had police undertaken this relatively simple inquiry, they would have found that Mr Edwards does not have a horizontal tattoo across his stomach.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frankie Edwards in the Waitakere District Court when he was first arrested in June 2006 for five attacks on women across Auckland. He soon pleaded guilty to 34 charges and was sentenced to preventive detention. Photo \/ Kenny Roger<\/p>\n
Despite interviewing Edwards about the other four attacks, in which he admitted his involvement, the police also failed to ask Edwards any questions about the Epsom incident.<\/p>\n
The CCRC also said that the police failed to follow several \u201cobvious\u201d lines of inquiry in relation to an injury suffered by Edwards when he smashed the car window in Henderson, the day before the Epsom kidnapping.<\/p>\n
He badly cut a finger which later required surgery, but the Epsom victim did not describe any injuries to the hands of her kidnapper.<\/p>\n
The only information on the police file that could have connected Edwards to the offending was that the Epsom victim\u2019s car was found near his sister\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
However, the CCRC investigation discovered the address belonged to a woman with the same name, not the sister that Edwards was living with at the time.<\/p>\n
The CCRC concluded that Edwards did not commit the Epsom kidnapping and that a miscarriage of justice had taken place, so referred the case back to the Court of Appeal.<\/p>\n
In a judgment released this month, the Court of Appeal said Edwards pleaded guilty \u201cfor reasons which will never be fully understood\u201d, although it was clear that neither he nor his original defence lawyer appreciated the lack of evidence for the Epsom attack.<\/p>\n
The Crown also conceded that the police, after conducting an internal investigation following the CCRC inquiry, could offer no evidence to link him to the crimes. <\/p>\n