Jury acquits four teens of American PhD student's machete murder

Four teens have been acquitted of participating in the murder of a University of Auckland PhD student who was found at a bus stop last year with a deep, unsurvivable machete wound to his head.

The same defendants, however, were convicted of aggravated robbery and manslaughter.

Jurors returned the verdicts this evening after the High Court at Auckland had otherwise closed for business.

Justice Simon Mount ordered that name suppression continue for the defendants, who are now 18 and 19 years old but were youths when the offending occurred. A sentencing date has not yet been set.

The verdicts followed three days of closing addresses in which defence lawyers unanimously placed blame for the killing on a fifth defendant who earlier pleaded guilty to murder.

Crown prosecutors Henry Steele and Taniela-Afu Veikune argued, however, that all of the defendants would have been aware that a robbery with a machete was about to take place and that grievous bodily harm was likely to result.

“Nobody’s harvesting bananas,” Steele said of the weapon in the car.

Victim Kyle Whorrall, an American entomology student close to obtaining his PhD, had walked to the grocery store for snacks on the night of the April 2025 attack. He was targeted while sitting at a bus stop, apparently for a rest.

Prosecutors described the fatal attack as “violent and entirely unprovoked”.

“They took his wallet and they left him with a catastrophic and ultimately fatal wound to his head,” Steele said. “They left him with that wound dying and very much alone.”

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Kyle Whorrall, the 33-year-old US student killed at an Auckland bus stop in Meadowbank in April 2025, was studying entomology.

Lawyers for each of the teens argued no one except the person who wielded the machete could have anticipated Whorrall’s death.

Of the five teens, three had documented histories of robbing people using knives. In the month before the homicide, two of them had been involved in four incidents involving machetes. During a dairy robbery in Manurewa, one defendant hit a passerby with a machete, “cutting him almost to the bone”, prosecutors pointed out.

The teen who pleaded guilty to murder might have been the one who hit Whorrall, but it’s impossible to tell with so many defendants having “twin propensities” for property crimes and machetes, Steele argued.

He suggested the group had been jointly on the prowl that night, having worked together in a failed attempt to steal a motorbike shortly before the killing.

“What is it that binds them?” he asked jurors. “What brings them together? What do they have in common?

“It cannot be a coincidence. It simply cannot be that three people, all sharing the same propensities, are in the same car that night with a machete ... It’s no accident. It’s by design.

“There’s no other plausible explanation. Their propensities are why they are together that night.”

Prosecutors noted one witness recalled the driver of the vehicle telling him, “We done it”. The same witness was also described by his own mother as the biggest liar in New Zealand.

A friend of another defendant said the teen told him the plan had been to rob the stranger at the bus stop. They saw his bag, not realising they were only groceries, the reluctant witness recalled being told.

Defence lawyers each urged jurors not to convict the defendants based on a distaste for their lifestyle. If police and prosecutors couldn’t even say who allegedly played what role, jurors certainly shouldn’t make that assumption, Paul Borich, KC, suggested.

Of all the teens, the one who pleaded guilty appeared the most unpredictable and had the longest history of violence, he said.

“He is way out there ... prone to unstoppable violent rages,” Borich argued, describing him as someone who had “evil in his heart that night”, albeit unknown to the others. “You have your murderer, I suggest. I could not be clearer... It’s an inescapable truth.”

Police investigate the scene at a Meadowbank bus stop where Kyle Whorrall was killed. Photo / Alex Burton

Fellow defence lawyers Annabel Maxwell-Scott, KC, and Marie Taylor-Cyphers, whose clients did not have a history of violent property crime, described the situation their clients were in as every parent’s nightmare.

“We worry about who they hang out with – the wrong crowd,” Maxwell-Scott said, describing her client as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time with a group he didn’t know that well.

Teenage boys often go driving around without a plan in place and with little discussion of what the night will entail, she said.

“What you cannot do is find them guilty by association,” she said.

The defence emphasised that teenage boys have undeveloped brains. Jurors had to put themselves in the defendant’s shoes when considering whether they would have anticipated serious violence to result.

Whorrall’s mother, who travelled from the United States for the trial, silently wept as the verdicts were read. Families of the defendants also cried.

In most cases, murder carries a mandatory life sentence with a minimum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years, although lesser sentences are usually handed down for cases involving youths.

All options are on the table in cases of manslaughter, from home detention to life imprisonment.

Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.