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Offender Database Pauline Brown

Pauline Iris Brown

Alias

.

Offences

Shot her ex-husband with a shotgun, then a rifle in Queenstown in September 1993

Victims

William Rainsford

Offender Affiliations

.

Gang affiliations

none known

Age

Born 1960

Current Location

At large

Parole/Release Dates

Sentenced to "life imprisonment" in March 1994
Paroled September 2003

Background
The Dominion, 12 April 1995,
A Woman convicted of murdering her husband after shooting him with both a shotgun and a .303 rifle has had her appeal rejected. Pauline Brown is serving a life sentence for murdering William Arthur Rainsford at Arrowtown on September 10. Brown appealed on the basis her lawyer failed to call all available evidence and carry out her instructions.

Giving the Court of Appeal's decision, Justice Heron said the defence's difficulty was in pointing to any evidence that Brown was deprived of the power of self-control or lost self-control. Drinking a bottle of wine, smoking cannabis and taking prescription drugs may have affected her judgment but that would not have advanced the defence of provocation.

The case was an overwhelming one of planned and deliberate killing in circumstances where Brown had only the slightest evidence of anything improper on her husband's part toward her children. It was not surprising the jury took only 95 minutes to reach a verdict the Appeal Court regarded as inevitable.

The Southland Times, 11 Dec 2002
A Queenstown woman has had her bid for an early prison release rejected, nine years after she murdered her estranged husband in Arrowtown.

Pauline Brown shot and killed William Rainsford at point-blank range after she suspected him of sexually abusing their two-year-old son. On Monday, a parole board hearing panel, in Christchurch, rejected Brown's bid for early release. The memory of Mr Rainsford lives on as he is honoured by his motorcycle mates at an annual rally.

Best mate of Mr Rainsford and motorcycle rally organiser Grant Ramsay wouldnot comment on the parole board's decision. He would only say he had been friends of both Brown and Mr Rainsford. Each year a motorcycle rally was held in honour of "Wobbly" (Rainsford) to raise money for his son.

"We do a run and we get the odd raffle going and a few dollars go to their child's fund," Mr Ramsay said. On September 10, 1993, Brown made an early morning drive to the Arrowtown home of her estranged husband. She roused him from sleep, called him a "child molesting bastard" and shot him four times.

The first shot blew part of an arm off. Another was fired from point-blank range at the back of his head as he tried to phone for help. At her trial, Brown claimed she was provoked into shooting Mr Rainsford because she believed he had abused their two-year-old son. Brown also said she had been bashed and sexually assaulted by Mr Rainsford.

Three days before the murder, a distressed Brown approached Queenstown police about the abuse allegations. After a lengthy discussion, the police officer dealing with Brown thought she had been persuaded to leave the allegations with investigators.

Both a High Court jury and the Court of Appeal rejected her provocation claim, the latter saying "Brown was possessed of only the slightest evidence suggesting anything improper on Bill Rainsford's part towards her children." Brown believes she has worn the backlash of an earlier parole board decision to free controversial killer Gay Oakes. "It's extreme double standards," Brown, 42, said from Christchurch Women's Prison.

"If I'd done what Gay did, and given him a whole lot of pills and buried him in the garden, maybe it would have been different." Oakes walked free last October after serving just eight years for drugging her violent de facto partner and burying his body in the backyard of their Sydenham home. She argued that she had suffered from battered women's syndrome.

In releasing Oakes two years early, the parole board said the mandatory 10-year life sentence for murder was "unduly inflexible in the particular circumstances of battered women." Similar grounds of provocation were raised when Brown appeared before the parole board last week. Brown said she was angry and upset by the decision. She is next eligible to apply for parole next September.

From the January 1995 COSA newsletter
Woman's appeal on murder conviction fails

A Queenstown woman jailed for life for killing her estranged husband, lost her appeal to have her murder conviction overturned on the grounds that she thought he had abused her children.

Pauline Brown shot her ex-husband William Rainsford with a shotgun and then a rifle. The Court of Appeal decided this was overwhelmingly a planned and deliberate killing in circumstances where Brown was possessed of only the slightest evidence of anything on Bill Rainsford's part towards the children.

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Corrections and Additional Information
We endeavour to make this database as accurate as possible, but we are at the mercy of whatever information we can find in various online and offline archives. We rely on the public - that is, people like you - to fill in the gaps that we cannot. If you wish to submit additional information or a correction to this file CLICK HERE . Privacy: Trust policy is that all sources are treated as strictly confidential unless we are explicitly told otherwise. If you wish to see a file removed from this database certain conditions must be met by the offender set out HERE Note that this does NOT apply for those that are the primary offender in a murder, rape, or any sexual offending involving minors. We do not enter into correspondence regarding the guilt/innocence of offenders. Such correspondence is not responded to, especially if the offender concerned has a number of prior convictions

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