Sat 3 Sep 2011 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Glenn Mills The scope of the police investigation into Auckland train driver Glenn Mills has been revealed by the officer who led the case, who has detailed the mountain of information they had to wade through for evidence. Detective Sergeant Andy King says as they began gathering evidence about allegations Mills was knowingly infecting sexual partners with HIV, the police team grew to include his entire squad of ten staff and a full-time analyst. Police executed a search warrant on Vodafone, as Mills had two 021 numbers. "We dumped all his text messages from Vodafone for the previous six months," Detective Sergeant King says. "That was in the vicinity of 60,000 text messages received and sent over six months. So you're looking at 10,000 text messages per month, which is a huge amount of data. In hard copy it was five thousand A4 pages of spreadsheet data." An analyst worked fulltime on the phone data for three months. "From that text data it was patently obvious that Glenn was extremely sexually active. He was obviously working a great deal on internet dating sites. And we then went from there to NZ Dating, he was very active on NZ Dating ... he had three or four profiles on there, portraying himself as a homosexual male looking for other males," Detective Sergeant King recalls. Police were granted a search warrant and asked for downloads of all of his conversations on the dating site. "NZ Dating were extremely receptive to helping us," the detective recalls. "They took the search warrant and went away and came back somewhat sheepishly probably about three or four days later and said 'look, we do really want to help you, but we can't, because the amount of data we have on this person is just too much. He's been active on this site for three years and he's been in contact with literally thousands of people nationwide, and there's literally millions of messages on our system between him and other people, and it's so large we can't download it'." NZ Dating told police they were welcome to send officers to look at the information. "At this time we were starting to realise it was getting bigger than Ben Hur," Detective Sergeant King recalls. "And we started to change our game plan somewhat, changing around to having victims come to us rather than us trying to seek them." As the analyst went through the text data they came across a message where a woman claimed Mills had made her pregnant, which was the first time police became aware that he had not only had sex with men. "And it was obviously of concern to us insofar as that he had quite possibly infected a woman with HIV – and we had concern for the unborn baby as well. So we contacted her very quickly and it transpired that she had met Glenn off a phone dating site called Hot Gossip and they had hooked up by means of Hot Gossip ... he'd gone around to her place and they'd had sex that night, then he'd gone next door and had sex with her girlfriend as well, both times unprotected. “So we had her and her friend tested, and obviously we had to check in regards to her unborn baby as well. Both were negative, fortunately, which was great." Police realised they needed to further expand the investigation and found Mills was also very active on Find Someone, another dating website which is run through Trade Me, where he was portraying himself as a man looking for a woman to start a relationship with. As they had with NZ Dating, police executed a search warrant with Trade Me and found he had been in contact around 300 women in around 18 months. "Trade Me did their own analysis for us, they were very helpful, and they broke that down to approximately 100 women who he'd exchanged contact details with," Detective Sergeant King says. "And so we sat a detective down with every single one of those women and advised them what the situation was, and advised them to get tested and take all the precautions necessary." Detective Sergeant King says this portrays the huge amount of labour-intensive detective work that went into the investigation. Mills died in prison on November 13 2009. "It was very sad, not also for him, but also for his victims," Detective Sergeant King says of the death, which he can’t comment further on as an inquiry by the Coroner continues. You can read the full feature here
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Saturday, 3rd September 2011 - 10:41am