Gone Fishing

2019 update: More stories emerge, another witness recants and Gail Maney finds new allies in her fight to prove she’s innocent.

​A key witness comes forward with new information that could vindicate Gail Maney, and the lead detective reflects on where his investigation might have gone wrong.

​As Gail Maney and three others go on trial for murder, flaws in the prosecution case come to light.

​The media called him a “stone cold killer”, but the truth about Stephen Stone is a bit more complicated than that.

​Two historic murder investigations merge into one. But how can police figure out what actually happened, when their key witnesses keep changing their stories?

​A terrified witness contacts police. Revelations about a young woman’s murder force detectives to reconsider everything they thought they knew about the Deane Fuller-Sandys case.

​Gail Maney had a tough West Auckland upbringing, but she wasn’t a bad kid. Then in the 1990s she slid into a life of hard drugs, petty crime and prostitution. But does that really mean she’s a killer?

For years, Deane Fuller-Sandys was thought to have drowned while fishing at Whatipu. But did police get it right when they later decided Deane was the Larnoch Road “body in the boot”?

Gail Maney has served 15 years in jail for ordering the 1989 murder of young Auckland tyre-fitter Deane Fuller-Sandys. But she says she never knew him. In fact, she thinks he wasn’t even murdered.

Gail Maney was sent to prison on her son’s birthday.The police said she’d put a hit on a man who stole drugs from her. She went to jail for 15 years.She’s consistently denied having anything to do with the disappearance of Deane Fuller-Sandys. In fact, she says, she never even met him. She doesn’t think he was murdered at all. She thinks he’d just … gone fishing.In this series, Amy Maas and Adam Dudding investigate the case against Maney. They unravel the conflicting and shifting accounts of key witnesses. They expose major flaws in the police timeline. And they raise disturbing questions about police conduct in the case.