Joseph Thompson has been called a serial rapist, but in view of the number of rapes he committed, a new word should be invented to describe him. This 45+ minute documentary reports on the hunt for him. He is said to be the first serial rapist in New Zealand’s South Island. Whether or not that is true, the hunt for him devoured more resources than the hunt for probably any other violent criminal in the country. He was said to have been caught by a combination of criminal profiling and DNA testing, but frankly it is a mystery why it took so long to bring him to book.

At that time, South Island had a population of only around a million people. As the serial rapist was either a Maori or a Polynesian, male (obviously), of a certain age and a certain build, how much time and effort would it have taken to trawl through the entire population manually?

This documentary has a slightly unusual format in that parts of it are recited by young girls because many of his victims were young.

 Thompson was eventually sentenced to thirty years with a mininum recommendation of twenty-five years without parole. Ordinarily, that would be considered a severe sentence but in this case it was extraodinarily lenient. His youngest victim was just ten years old. She was dragged from her bed on a rainy night, raped in a park, then dragged a kilometre along the railway line and raped again. She resisted, and was beaten for her troubles. Surely that act of depravity alone warrants at least a twenty-five year sentence.