Alan Hall spent 19 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Now, nearly 40 years after the crime, he has received almost $5 million compensation. Cushla Norman charts his decades-long fight for justice. 

Geoff Hall unfolds the blue sweatshirt his older brother, Alan Hall, supposedly wore that Sunday night in 1985 when Arthur Easton was stabbed to death at his home in south Auckland. The sweatshirt, now a relic of ‘80s athleisure, is virtually box-fresh.  

“I never got a chance to bloody wear it,” Alan says, prompting a chuckle from Geoff.  

Alan bought the sweatshirt two months after the murder “on a Friday” – he still remembers those details – and had the receipt to prove it.  

At trial in 1986, the jury heard this was the sweatshirt a witness saw the offender wearing. But it later transpired the witness was never shown Alan’s sweatshirt.  

The brothers continue sifting through the piles of evidence – gloves, a woolen hat, a bag of ash. It’s stored in boxes at the Auckland office of Tim McKinnel, an investigator on the Hall’s legal team. McKinnel pulls out an identikit sketch of a man police said was Alan.  

Geoff is facetious in his commentary: “Oh yeah that was Alan, but somehow he’d grown a moustache when he never had one and shaved it off again.” 

“It never really looked like Alan at all, did it?” McKinnel says.  

Postal worker Arthur Easton was at home with two of his children, Brendon and Kim, when an intruder burst into their home at about 8pm on October 13, 1985. 

The man was wearing a woolen hat and holding a military-style bayonet. 

The boys struggled with the intruder, before he fatally stabbed their dad, a father of five. 

The man escaped through the back of the property, leaving behind his hat and the bayonet. 

Brendon and Kim initially told officers the killer was a six-foot-tall Māori. 

Alan Hall was an unlikely suspect. A 23-year-old who enjoyed riding his bike around Papakura, he had failed to get school certificate and was bullied a lot “right from childhood,” Geoff says. 

He worked in a pill-making factory and saved assiduously to buy his mum one of the first microwaves in New Zealand. 

He had a “massive heart,” Geoff says. 

The family couldn’t comprehend how Alan could be suspected of committing a murder. 

“He’s just not violent at all. He’d walk away rather than argue with you,” his mother Shirley Hall told TV show Frontline in 1989. 

She also described him as “a little slow mentally, a little immature” – a hint of the un-named challenges he was facing. Three decades later, Alan was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. 

So why did police zero in on him? 

After Easton's death, police began canvassing the area and stopped in at the flat of Alan’s older brother, Greg. Officers showed him the woolen hat found at the scene. Greg said he had one like it. 

The next day the Hall family was taken down to the station. 

Alan admitted he had owned a bayonet, like the one left at the scene, and had been in possession of Greg’s hat, but gave inconsistent reasons as to why he had neither the night Easton was killed.  

The family believe the items were stolen, but never filed a report with police.  

Alan also happened to be in the vicinity of Easton’s house that fateful night, having taken himself out for a long walk.  

The bayonet, the hat and that walk would end up forming the planks of the prosecution’s case. 

At the 1986 trial, another key piece of evidence helped convict Alan: the statement of a witness, Ronald Turner.  

Turner told police the man he saw fleeing the scene was Māori, “definitely dark skinned, he was not white”.  In a follow up interview, he said he was “100% sure” the man was Māori.  

But the jury and Alan’s defence team never heard this.  

Before the trial, police took a final statement to Turner, not to review, but to sign. Turner signed it, not noticing the word Māori had been removed. This was read out in court, but Turner was never called to give evidence. 

The absence of ethnicity in Turner’s statement served another purpose too. It explained away the Easton boys’ initial description of the intruder being Māori, something they had become uncertain of. 

This gave the prosecution a pathway to prove Alan, a 5’7” Pākehā, was the killer. The jury accepted this, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

In prison, Alan maintained his innocence, while outside his mother, Shirley, tried to prove it.  

She was Alan’s biggest champion, selling the family home to pay lawyers' bills and pursuing every legal avenue available up until her death in 2012. 

“We have the truth and that’s the only way to live,” she would remind the family. 

In 1987, Alan’s appeal failed, but in 1988, there was a breakthrough.  

Shirley obtained some documents under the Official Information Act and slipped inside was an anonymous note from a police officer. The subject line read “some police are honest”.  

The note said Brendon Easton endured “2 to 3 hours brainwashing” to believe the intruder held the murder weapon in their left hand – not their right as he originally thought. The note also said the Criminal Investigation Branch tried to pressure the pathologist to say the intruder was left-handed – the same as Alan. 

It was a “goldmine” Geoff remembers. 

Tim McKinnel says the document was important to the family but actually made little difference to the case. 

“Something like that evidentially doesn’t carry much weight - it’s anonymous. You can’t attach it to any particular source, but it means a lot.” 

Still, in that same bundle of papers, was the real smoking gun: evidence that Turner’s statement had been altered. Unfortunately, it came too late for an application to the Court of Appeal and for a first attempt at a royal prerogative of mercy. 

Royal prerogatives of mercy are typically the last port of call in the appeals process and are a chance to bring new evidence to light. The Governor General can decide whether to pardon, dismiss or send someone back for a retrial based on advice from the Justice Ministry. The Halls made three such attempts, but failed each time, even though for two they had proof Turner’s statement was doctored. 

Geoff says the 1992 appeal was particularly strong. 

“Legally, they should have given Alan a retrial.” 

After the 1992 appeal, the family was running out of options. 

“We were drained” Geoff says, both emotionally and financially. 

Alan was released from prison in 1994. For the next 18 years he lived in the Auckland area on parole but was sent back to prison after breaching conditions in 2012. 

Alan’s battle has drawn much interest over the years. Documentaries probed his conviction and the Innocence Project, an attorney-run programme that seeks to free innocent people, picked up his case. But things really reignited in 2018 when Newshub journalist Mike Wesley-Smith investigated the case for a true crime podcast, Grove Road. 

To Wesley-Smith's surprise, the officer in charge of the murder investigation, Kelvin McMinn, was willing to talk and provided startling new information about who removed the word Māori from the witness statement.  

Wesley-Smith found a second source who corroborated McMinn’s account and he informed Crown Law of this significant development twice – in 2018 and 2020 – providing detailed correspondence about what he had uncovered. But Crown Law sat on the information for years, while Alan remained in jail. 

Then in January 2022, the family appealed to the Supreme Court. Alan was released from jail the following month and in June of that year he finally got justice. 

The Crown admitted key evidence was “unjustifiably altered in a material way”, leading to a substantial miscarriage of justice. The Supreme Court agreed and quashed Alan’s conviction.  

At the age of 60, he was free at last. 

But questions remain: how and why did this miscarriage of justice endure for so long? 

Of particular concern was that the evidence which freed Alan in 2022, was obtained by the family in 1988. But for some reason, the fact Turner’s statement was altered made no difference to earlier appeals. 

It’s a source of deep frustration for the family and one of their lawyers from that time, Bruce Stainton. He says there was a “bias” in the ministry’s advice to the Governor General and he’s demanding answers.  

“If the Ministry of Justice can’t get it right, who the hell can?” 

The travesty has sparked investigations from the police, Crown Law and the Independent Police Conduct Authority, but, as yet, no one has been held to account for what happened to Alan, or to Arthur Easton. 

Independent KC Nicolette Levy examined Crown Law’s role and a report was released in May. She cleared Crown Law of wrongdoing for how it handled Mike Wesley-Smith's inquiries, saying there was no obligation on lawyers to “fully absorb” materials sent to them or to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice.  

But Crown Law hasn’t been completely excused. Its earlier role in the case and the 1986 trial has been referred by the Solicitor General (as the head of Crown Law) to the police for investigation.  

Alan’s battle hasn’t achieved the profile of other famous miscarriages of justice, like the Arthur Allan Thomas case, yet it is as serious.  

Although rare in New Zealand, it’s the type of case that can shake confidence in public institutions. The Hall family, Mike Wesley-Smith and some legal commentators say a royal commission of inquiry is needed. 

Yesterday, the Crown apologised to Alan and he received $4,933,725.75 compensation. It works out at about $260,000 for each year he spent in jail.

The amount eclipses the $950,000 paid to Arthur Alan Thomas, the $3.5m paid to Teina Pora and the $925,000 ex-gratia payment to David Bain after acquittal. 

The Halls say they feel the truth about Alan has finally won out, but they want more answers for Arthur Easton's family.

"We know for them justice is still to be delivered for Arthur, and we sincerely hope that ongoing investigations can find those responsible for Arthur's death and hold them accountable."

For Alan, they say, it's time to move on.

"Alan was 24 when he was arrested. He is now 61... Alan can now focus on what was denied to him for decades, building his life as a free man."

They just wish Shirley Hall was alive to see him do it.

"Before she died, Shirley was asked what her hopes for Alan were. She said she wanted his name cleared so that he could again hold his head up high. We can now tell her, 'Mum, we did it. Your wish has come true'."