The secrets, shame, and stories that led to unmarked graves
The Post - 19 May 2025
Late one Saturday in 1911, an “insane man killed a fellow lunatic at the Porirua Mental Hospital”.
It happened in a day-room where, due to over-crowding, eight men were sleeping, reported The New Zealand Times.
That night, when attendant James Brown responded to the sounds of a scuffle, he found one of the men kneeling on another.
“I ran over to him and said, ‘what are you doing, Frank?’” Brown told the inquest, held only two days after the murder.
“Renall jumped back into bed and said, ‘Please, dad ... he struck me on the face.”
More than a century after Frank Renall reportedly beat John Henderson to death with his fists and a chair, both men lie in unmarked graves near the asylum where it happened.
More than 1700 other patients lie there in the same way: unacknowledged, unclaimed, and publicly unnamed.
Now though, that’s set to change. Read more....