The story of Rena Maloney
Rena Maloney and her partner of five years, Martin Berry, had a volatile and abusive relationship. Yesterday, a jury convicted Maloney of stabbing Berry to death and hiding his body in the compost heap.
Days after Martin Berry had once again been bashed by his partner, Rena Maloney, he received a phone call from her ex-husband.
The call had been arranged by Berry’s friends who were worried about his safety after he was on the end of a string of violent attacks by Maloney. They were hoping Maloney’s exhusband Jim (The Press has agreed to not reveal his real name) would be able to help.
Jim called Berry and said he told him: ‘‘I walked away and . . . he should as well.’’
Sixteen months later, the exhusband received a call. Berry was dead.
The warning signs
Life was looking up for Rena Maloney when, in 2007, she and her husband moved from Britain to start a new life in New Zealand, settling in Horowhenua.
The couple met in the 1990s while Jim was working in the air force and she was working in the military camp’s bar. She would eventually receive military training.
Jim says their start in New Zealand was positive. But he puzzled over why Maloney had difficulty maintaining friendships and holding down jobs.
He spent a lot of time away from home for work and Maloney started drinking heavily. Then the assaults began. In one, he suffered a broken rib. ‘‘It was absolutely petrifying.’’
The final straw was on April 13, 2014, when a police officer arrived at the couple’s home to say Maloney had used a plank of wood to smash an old car parked at a neighbouring property and poured petrol on a boat, parked on a trailer. Before she could set it alight, the rural fire brigade’s alarm went off for an unrelated call, and she left.
The Palmerston North District Court was told Maloney had drunk a large volume of alcohol. Then 49, she was jailed for attempted arson and wilful damage.
Jim packed his bags and left. ‘‘I started my life again and a few months later I found somebody who is now my beautiful wife.’’
A violent relationship
On release, Maloney also started a new life by taking up a cooking course and one night she met Martin Berry at a party.
Berry, the eldest of three children, grew up in Whanganui passionate about chess, gardening, cricket and football.
After leaving school, Berry got a job with the National Bank as ‘‘numbers were his thing’’, his sister, Joanna Staham says.
Berry, who had trouble making friends, also started drinking heavily. Staham puts the drinking down to him being ‘‘a little socially awkward’’, and alcohol giving him the confidence to be more social.
His heavy drinking eventually led to him losing his job. He would later tell his mother that he needed help and that he wanted to move to Christchurch to attend controversial alcohol rehabilitation centre The Deanery.
Not long after, his mother sold her home in Whanganui and also moved to Christchurch. Together, they put a deposit on a house on Main North Rd.
Maloney came to Christchurch and moved into Berry’s three-bedroom home.
‘‘Then it reasonably quickly deteriorated into drunken violence.’’
Berry would often secretly call his brother. One of the violent incidents included biting his nose off, smashing a chair over him, beating him, and smashing a telephone so he couldn’t ring.
David Berry said he was told Maloney chased his brother several times with a knife.
Martin Berry was so fearful he would leave his home and walk the streets at night not wanting to risk more violence.
‘‘She wouldn’t leave, and he didn’t know what to do. We implored him to get away. Many times I would say, ‘I will come down, pick you up and take you away’,’’ David said.
‘‘I feared for his life.’’
Extent of violence
Court documents released to Stuff reveal in detail the abuse Berry suffered at Maloney’s hands.
The 56-year-old had three convictions for assaulting him. Police visited the address 20 times. On 16 of those occasions, Maloney was the primary aggressor, three of them were neutral. Berry was regarded as the aggressor only once.
In two horror days in September 2019 – 21⁄2 years into the relationship – a drunken Maloney attacked Berry, biting and scratching his face for about 30 minutes.
She threw a wooden stool so forcefully, it broke when it hit his legs, leaving him with large cuts and bruises.
Two days later, drunk again, Maloney entered Berry’s bedroom and dragged him out of bed and into the lounge. Over the next two hours, she scratched and bit him, punched him in the ribs, and tried to rip his mouth open.
Maloney was convicted of assaulting Berry three times in 2018 and 2019.
On the third sentencing, the judge said Berry was ‘‘terrified’’ of Maloney but still wanted her to come home. ‘‘The fear that he has of you is when you are drunk.’’
He sentenced Maloney to 18 months’ intensive supervision, so she could take part in an alcohol course, and imposed conditions banning her from possessing or consuming any alcohol or non-prescription drugs.
The murder
Maloney moved back into Berry’s home on Main North Rd. On December 29, 2020, the couple went out for lunch with Berry’s brother and his partner at an Indian restaurant. Berry looked ‘‘healthy and tanned’’, was welldressed and clean-shaven. The lunch went well.
But hours later, an argument erupted and Maloney stabbed Berry multiple times in the back of his neck and back, then cut his throat. She only stopped stabbing him when the handle broke away from the blade. It was later found lodged in Berry’s upper neck.
Maloney dragged the 55-yearold into the garden’s compost heap and covered him with dirt and leaves. It will never be known whether Berry was dead at the time.
Over the next two weeks, Maloney visited the supermarket buying wine and a number of cleaning products including bleach, disinfectant and rubbish bags.
Maloney was also getting rid of Berry’s possessions and clothing, robbing his family of precious memories.
She disposed of his clothes in council rubbish bins and other items were thrown over the fence to be found badly damaged. She would later claim she had given some of his clothes to the homeless and the Salvation Army.
The ‘‘confession’’
Maloney walked into the Christchurch central police station on January 13, 2021, and told police she had ‘‘accidentally man-slaughtered’’ Berry.
Maloney told police that when Berry and her returned home from a lunch with his brother, they got into an argument over marijuana.
‘‘That’s when it just hit me. It was like, he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t care about me, he cares about drugs and that’s what he wants to do for the rest of his life.’’
During the argument, she said, Berry was making her mad and pushing her around.
‘‘He was dragging me down . . . I was getting wild, I just felt exhausted with it all. I just felt I couldn’t do it anymore.’’
She told police that she stabbed him ‘‘constantly’’. ‘‘Once I started, I couldn’t stop.’’
When she stopped, Berry was on the floor, with blood everywhere. She recalled a ‘‘smell of death’’ but not what happened to the knife.
After the interview, she was charged with murdering Berry.
Jim was on his way to work when a friend told him Berry had been murdered.
‘‘I just sat in the car, probably for about 10 minutes, just frozen.
‘‘It was a whole spectrum of different emotions and obviously grief was the biggest one.
‘‘I don’t know how a human being can do that. It’s beyond comprehension.’’
He went to Christchurch for Maloney’s trial expecting to give evidence but Justice Jonathan Eaton ruled his claims of a violent relationship with Maloney were inadmissible.
Instead, reading articles about the trial, Jim was struck by the similarities to his relationship with Maloney.
‘‘Apart from the stabbing, a lot of the build-up was deja vu – this is what happened [to me].’’
It took the jury 41⁄2 hours to find her guilty of murdering Berry.
Jim feels guilty about whether he could have done more to help Berry.
‘‘I’ve been in the same situation . . . She makes a lot of promises. She will say how she will change and stuff like that – and she will change for a little while – and then it will slowly start going back around.’’
Asked how he would describe Maloney, he said there was one word that summed her up: ‘‘Evil.’’