Described as one of the greatest true crime stories about a crime that never happened, eight-part podcast Peter Ellis, the Creche Case & Me has won two silvers at this year’s New Zealand Podcast Awards, for best documentary podcast and best true crime podcast.
It was the first podcast produced by Newsroom’s investigations editor, Melanie Reid, and comes the day after another of Reid’s series, The Boy in the Water, was hand-picked by Apple Podcasts as one of its exclusive Shows We Love for 2023.
Peter Ellis, the Creche Case & Me was a 30 year labour of love for Reid, a story of prejudice, paranoia and a conservative political climate in early 1990s Christchurch when a witch-hunt against young, gay childcare worker Peter Ellis was in full swing.
The podcast helps listeners comprehend just how a homophobic establishment coalesced around an irrational fear that Satanic child sex rings were operating under everyone’s noses.
As a young reporter, Reid gained exclusive access to Ellis and secretly interviewed him while the case unfolded in the courts, then continued to do major investigations spanning three decades.
Reid and her team then brought this astonishing story to life through archival taped interviews she had rescued from a bin at the TV station where she used to work.
The series won the award for best crime reporting at this year’s Voyager Media Awards, and was a finalist in two categories of the prestigious international New York Festivals Radio Awards.
“The cascade of failures by our institutions and systems that allowed this absolute injustice to occur is still hard to stomach. The collective delusion by the state and its subsequent determination and investment in his guilt is a shameful episode in New Zealand’s history that still troubles me immensely to this day,” says Reid.
“This is an extraordinary podcast because of Peter. To quote his sister, Tania Ellis, ‘Peter took all the arrows but very rarely fired them’, even at the height of his vilification.
“I am also particularly proud of the then crèche girl and her mother who were brave enough to break their silence and put some reality and perspective into a period of time that would later become known as Satanic panic.”
Newsroom’s popular weekday podcast The Detail, produced for RNZ, took out gold for best spotlight award, which recognises shows with sizeable audiences bringing the medium into the mainstream, while the listeners’ choice category was won by music podcast The Morning Shift.
This is the third year the awards have been held, set up to recognise the growth in independent and established podcast creators both locally and internationally. Judging was conducted by a panel of more than 30 judges from across New Zealand and abroad.
“The quality, creativity and diversity displayed by podcasters this year was fantastic to see, and it is a testament to the thriving podcasting community in New Zealand,” says awards co-founder, Richard North.
Fantastic. Congratulations Newsroom.