Teresa Cormack

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Teresa Maida Cormack
Born	June 18, 1981 Napier, New Zealand
Died	June 19, 1987 Napier, New Zealand

Teresa Maida Cormack (June 18, 1981 – June 19, 1987) was a six-year-old murder victim from Napier, New Zealand.

1 Teresa's death
2 Investigation
3 Breakthrough
4 Aftermath
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Teresa's death

Teresa lived in Napier, New Zealand, with her mother, Kelly Piggot, and a younger sister named Sara.^[1] Although reluctant to go to school on the day after her birthday, Cormack departed home on her normal walking route to Richmond Primary School, which was a short distance from where she lived. However, she did not go to school and instead wandered the streets in the suburb of Maraenui for around an hour.

Eight days later, Cormack's body was discovered in a shallow grave on Whirinaki Beach by a woman walking her dog. An autopsy revealed that she had been raped and suffocated.

[edit] Investigation

Three male pubic hairs and semen were found on Cormack's body. However, genetic fingerprinting at the time was not advanced enough to find her killer.

Jules Mikus was questioned by police and provided samples of his saliva and blood. Mikus provided an alibi for the time the abduction was believed to have occurred. Afterwards, he was excluded as a suspect.

[edit] Breakthrough

In 1998, her case was re-opened. Due to advances in genetic fingerprinting, police were now able to use the samples of found at the crime scene. The pubic hairs that were found on Cormack's body were taken to a lab in the United States to undergo new mitochondrial analysis, which linked them to the samples given by Mikus.

On February 26, 2002, fifteen years after Cormack's death, police arrested Jules Pierre Nicholas Mikus for Cormack's murder. Although Mikus pleaded not guilty, a jury found him guilty for kidnapping, rape, sexual assault and murder.

[edit] Aftermath

The case attracted widespread interest in New Zealand.

In 2004, Rowene Marsh-Potaka (who had campaigned to stop her brother from being paroled for murder) collaborated with Cormack's mother Kelly Piggot to write an anti-parole song. They wanted the song to let people know that offenders such as Mikus should serve their full sentences. Piggot also has a daughter named Hannah. ^[2]

Paul Rothwell's play Golden Boys, which ran at Circa Theatre in early 2006, was inspired by the Cormack case.