At only 24, oaioha Tokotaua’s young life reads like a crime thriller filled with shocking twists. He’s escaped a notorious serial killer, survived a vicious rape and been suspected of murdering his best mate who later turned up alive.
Haunted by these terrible events, oaioha, who is originally from Taranaki, has lived a nightmare for the past 10 years, and it’s only now that he’s able to talk about it.
oaioha’s best friend was young Australian Natasha Ryan, who made world headlines when she disappeared in 1998, only to turn up alive and well while serial killer Leonard Fraser was on trial for her murder. Natasha later revealed she had been hiding in a boyfriend’s cupboard for four years.
But until Fraser was charged with Natasha’s death, it was oaioha, the last person to see her alive, who was under suspicion. At one point he was even arrested for her murder. “I cried every single night because I believed Natasha was dead,” says oaioha, who visited Natasha’s mother with flowers every Mother’s Day for the four years her daughter was missing.
But the ordeal for oaioha and his close-knit family went well beyond the strange saga of Natasha’s years in the cupboard. As he reveals for the first time to the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, oaioha himself was a victim of Fraser.
When he was 14, Fraser drugged him so another man could rape him, a horrific attack that oaioha has never recovered from. Natasha was there that night and witnessed oaioha being raped, an experience he believes contributed to her going into hiding.
“I felt guilty because Natasha was there when I was raped,” says oaioha. “When she went missing a week later, I blamed myself, feeling that Natasha had run away after she saw what happened to me.”
But since she reappeared in 2003, Natasha has refused to tell oaioha why she ran away and won’t respond to his appeals for contact. It’s a far cry from the close friendship the two once had, which began just after oaioha and his family moved from Taranaki to Rockhampton, a small city in Queensland, Australia.
He was immediately drawn to Natasha, who was his fellow classmate at the local primary school. The Tokotaua family moved to Australia for a better life but the move was resented by oaioha, who didn’t want to leave his mates or school. An outstanding pupil, he’d passed School Certificate Maori at age 11.
“I was rebelling against my parents because I didn’t want to be in Australia,” says oaioha. “I had been doing really well at school, I was getting my name in the local papers, and then I had to pack up, leave it all behind and move countries. It seemed that everything I knew had been taken away from me.”
When oaioha was 14, he, Natasha and three other friends began experimenting with drugs. one night they went to a popular spot to get some drugs from two older men they knew. one of them was serial killer Leonard Fraser. But soon after the young friends arrived, they were attacked by the two men and oaioha, who couldn’t get away, was drugged by Fraser and then raped by his companion.
Powerless to rescue him from two aggressive grown men, all Natasha could do was look on in shock. “I remember lying there and feeling a needle go into my arm. I started feeling heavy,” says oaioha. “From that point on, everything was a blur.”
The rape left oaioha in deep shock, and life became even more traumatic when Natasha went missing a week after the incident, just after she and oaioha had caught up for a chat. Despite having no body, police believed Natasha was dead and her family even held a memorial service in her memory.
Police suspected oaioha because he was the last person to see her alive. Plain-clothes detectives watched the family home for 24 hours a day, trying to find evidence against oaioha. Then, two years after Natasha disappeared, when oaioha was just 16, the police finally decided they had enough evidence to arrest him.
“They arrested me during my English class, in front of my classmates. My teacher was crying and my school counsellor came running in, telling the cops that they couldn’t do this,” he says.
The shocking arrest was enough for the small community to label him a murderer. “It was horrible,” says oaioha. “I couldn’t face walking down the street and I didn’t go to school for months because people were looking at me and thinking that I had murdered my best friend.”
oaioha’s father Alister, who coached rugby league at the school, moved his family to another state to get away from the accusations and small-town gossip. oaioha told the police about being raped during their investigation into Natasha’s disappearance, but was too afraid to formally report it.
Suspicion was finally lifted from oaioha when Fraser, by then in jail for three other murders, was secretly taped by police in prison saying he had killed Natasha. It seemed like the ultimate piece of evidence, but there was a twist ahead that nobody could have predicted: Natasha’s reappearance during the trial.
