The man who murdered and raped Blessie Gotingco is also a child sex offender who had recently been released from prison under the strictest possible conditions - including 10 years of GPS surveillance.
Tony Douglas Robertson yesterday lost name suppression, two months after being found guilty by a jury at the High Court at Auckland. Robertson can be named after the Supreme Court rejected his application to appeal against an earlier decision to lift suppression.
The decision means the 27-year-old's criminal history can finally be revealed.
He was 18 when he kidnapped and molested a 5-year-old girl in Tauranga in 2005. Police believe a local officer who acted on instinct and hunted Robertson down, finding him and the girl with her pants removed, saved her from a worse fate.
Robertson was jailed in October 2006 for eight years after being found guilty of seven charges, including indecently assaulting the girl and attempting to abduct two other children.
On his release from prison in December 2013, he breached his conditions twice in a few weeks and was deemed such a lasting danger that he was to be monitored strictly for a decade.
Robertson raped and murdered Mrs Gotingco three months after the supervision order was imposed but yet to be enforced.
The Crown said he ran down Mrs Gotingco and broke her leg as she walked home.
He threw her into his car and drove her to his nearby home where he raped her then stabbed her to death.
Two days later, police found her body after a detective checked location data associated with the GPS anklet Robertson was wearing. NZME.