charges being laid in respect of some allegations. The police even wrote letters to ACC supporting compensation claims." Jury A number of irregularities in the trial were publicised in a 20/20 episode which aired on TV3 on 16 November 1997. The programme alleged that the jury foreman had been the celebrant at the wedding of the Crown Prosecutor Brent Stanaway 15 years earlier. It was also alleged that a female juror had had a sexual relationship with a co-worker of the mother of one of the children involved. The programme also put forward statements that most of the children who made allegations of sexual abuse withdrew their accusations at various times during proceedings but that social workers conducting the interviews treated this as a symptom of 'denial'. Detective Colin Eade The 20/20 programme also claimed the main investigating detective, Colin Eade, had a history of mental health problems. Eade told interviewer Melanie Reid he was "burnt out" before the case started and 'beyond repair' by the time it was over. He left the police force in 1994 suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. In an interview with Sean Plunkett on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report on 20 November 1997, Eade admitted that after the trial he had sexual relationships with two of the mothers involved in the case and that he had propositioned another mother during the course of the investigation when he was drunk. New Zealand First MP Rana Waitai, who was a former police commander with 31 years' experience, said "If half of what was on the (20/20) programme is true, Peter Ellis must immediately be released and hugely compensated for the devastation that has been done to his life." Appeals First Court of Appeal hearing in 1994 The case entered the Court of Appeal in July 1994 led by Graham Panckhurst QC. A key aspect of the appeal was that the seven children, whose evidence the jury accepted, had named 21 other victims – either as observers or participants. None of those 21 children confirmed any of the allegations. On the fourth day of the hearing (28 July), the oldest child on whose testimony Ellis was convicted, and probably the most credible of the child witnesses, told her parents that her story was not true, that she had said only what she thought her parents and the interviewer wanted to hear. The Court of Appeal considered that it