Tracy Neal talks to her about what it took to recover from the deceit that “knocked the life” out of her.
Alexandra Purucker’s relief that the woman who took all her life savings was behind bars was short-lived.
Just over a year into a four-year prison term Iris Huebler was released from a cold, hard prison cell to the warmth and comfort of her Golden Bay home.
A couple of months later, a decision arrived that bolstered Purucker’s belief in justice.
Huebler now owes Purucker $868,954 plus $50,000 for exemplary damages, while Huebler’s husband, Rainer Huebler was found jointly and separately responsible for $155,127 of the $868,954.
“The judgment is fantastic and exactly as it should have been. I’m very grateful,” Purucker told NZME soon after she learned of the decision.
“It’s an extraordinary decision but it’s the truth, and the truth doesn’t keel over like a lie.
“It would have been disastrous if it had been anything different,” said Purucker, who remains guarded against the possibility of an appeal within the statutory timeframe.
She is also aware that it’s a step - albeit a big step in the process towards recovering the money that was siphoned from her former cafe business in Tākaka, the proceeds of its sale and an inheritance from her family in Germany.
Purucker, now almost 70, was born in Munich but grew up in Berlin. She moved to New Zealand with her British husband in 1996 and sought solace and peace in the verdant valleys of Golden Bay.
The self-confessed city dweller says the smell of cow dung was always the epitome of paradise for her when she was a child.
Golden Bay wasn’t the first choice, but it was where Purucker and her now former husband found themselves during their search for Eden.
“My ex was a bit of a doomsday follower and thought we’d need a place with our own water and food, but at the time we couldn’t find it so ended up in Wairoa Gorge.”
The valley near Brightwater, south of Nelson turned out to be “sandfly hell”, and they moved to Golden Bay in 2000.
The comfortable home in Tākaka that Purucker’s still glad to have (at one point she had considered giving Huebler power of attorney and putting the home in a trust) is a self-refurbished bungalow with roses clinging to the exterior and birds singing in the trees of the park-size garden.
Rescue dogs Tilly and Buddy enjoy romping across the lawn and through the rambling garden’s undergrowth.
“They give me a lot of joy; they get me out of the house and talking to other people.”
Huebler had been hired to help manage the books at the landmark Tākaka cafe, The Dangerous Kitchen, which Purucker owned from 2003 to 2010 and to take charge of Purucker’s affairs when she returned to Germany to care for ailing family.
“She held a highly trusted position with signature rights for the various bank accounts,” Purucker recalls.
Purucker later found that over the course of six years from April 2012, Huebler had taken several hundred thousand dollars from Purucker’s accounts and credit cards, on the pretence she was investing on her behalf.
The transactions led to five charges on which Huebler was convicted of being a person in a special relationship, and receiving money she had an obligation to manage.
Purucker was left not only penniless, and a beneficiary reliant for the first time on Winz payments, but with a credit card debt of $14,500 as a result of Huebler’s dishonesty.
“Iris had been in my life for 16 years; my most trusted friend who had been there with me when my older son died, when my parents died, when my dog died.”
Huebler continued the pretence of being Purucker’s closest friend after having taken the money.
“When she had cleared me out and claimed she got hacked, she cried … she came here and she cried.”
Purucker said discovering the truth almost knocked the life out of her.
While she was overseas Huebler sent her a message to say she had been hacked and a couple of bank accounts had been frozen.
Purucker wasn’t concerned as they were accounts she didn’t need access to.
“Then when I came back she said, ‘I’ve got bad news – I got hacked and all your money is gone – it’s the Internet fraud of the century’.”
Purucker believed her, even trusted her, until she went into the local bank and inquired as to why her accounts had been frozen that she learned the truth.
“The bank told me, ‘You haven’t been hacked, you’ve been robbed’.”
Purucker said she was stunned and had no idea where to turn until a friend advised her to lay a complaint with the police.
In October 2018, “matters blew up”. “Some days I didn’t know what to do or where to start.”
Purucker says she sank into a deep depression, combined with the onset of serious trust issues. She lost friendships while others were strengthened.
“A lot of people dropped away when it wasn’t ‘fun and yeeha’ anymore, but a few friendships deepened. One phoned every day to see if I was still around because, yes, I was that low.”
She also grieved the loss of what was shaping up to be a comfortable retirement in “the winter of her life”.
She said not only had her money been stolen, but also her time, energy and lifestyle in what she said was a precious last chapter of her life.
“I have been really dark, really sad and really lost, but for me, it was really important to feel all this properly and not just sweep it under the carpet, and not pretend it didn’t happen.
“You have to do that before you can let it go - you have to feel in order to understand the scale of what has happened.”
She said it was some comfort that justice had in a small part been served when Huebler was sentenced in the Nelson District Court last October to prison, but Purucker was yet to see a cent of the $80,000 reparation order.
That, and efforts to get at least some of her money back were the drivers in the subsequent High Court action, which Justice Isac concluded she had established on “the balance of probabilities that Ms Huebler has unlawfully obtained $868,954.24 of her funds, and these funds have not been repaid.”
The summary of facts linked to the criminal case heard in the district court originally recorded that the amount stolen was $768,651 to which Huebler initially entered not guilty pleas. It was reduced to $700,000 following plea negotiations.
Crown prosecutor Jackson Webber told the district court last October that Purucker had been the victim of “lie after lie, after a complete lie” about investments which were anything but.
He said the money had simply been taken from Purucker and then transferred to accounts held by Huebler and people who knew her.
The subsequent High Court fraud case centred on a dispute over the amount Purucker sought to have returned as part of a plea arrangement in the criminal matter, and a second sum of $102,416 around Purucker’s claim that she was tricked into providing a sham loan to Iris Huebler.
Huebler was authorised to withdraw $100,000 of Purucker’s money as a loan but used her authority to direct the funds to a third-party account to acquire services for her own benefit, which amounted to deceit.
“There is no doubt she was enriched,” Justice Andru Isac said.
He found that Huebler’s convictions for the theft were conclusive evidence that she was guilty of defrauding Purucker of $700,000 and that Purucker had also established to the requisite standard, that theft had occurred of the remaining $168,959.24 - the amount reduced by the plea bargain process plus the amount of the loan.
Lawyer Joshua Pietras said Justice Isac’s decision, which also noted the unusual step taken to award damages in recognition of the poor conduct, was a complete vindication of Purucker.
Pietras said a central feature of the case was the effort made by Iris Huebler in particular to prevent Purucker from ever seeing a cent.
The Hueblers’ attempts to show they were no longer married by dividing their assets when Iris Huebler sensed the walls were closing in, were seen as an attempt to future-proof themselves and their joint assets.
Purucker called it an “elaborate sham”.
Soon after she reported the suspected fraud to the police in October 2018, she filed civil proceedings and obtained an interim charging order against Iris Huebler’s share in the family home in Golden Bay.
The Hueblers then drove to a bank, closed their two joint accounts and opened two accounts in Rainer Huebler’s name.
On the same day, they prepared a handwritten agreement at a lawyer’s office confirming that they had agreed to separate.
A typed document, “Living Arrangement between Iris and Rainer Huebler after separation on 16 November 2018″, said they agreed to live in different areas of the marital property in Golden Bay.
Justice Isac said there was no evidence that the defendants had taken steps to dissolve their marriage and that their period of cohabitation in the family home only ended when Iris Huebler was remanded in custody in December 2021.
He said the separation agreement was intended by the defendants to protect them against Purucker’s claim.
Justice Isac was in the end satisfied that Rainer Huebler was jointly and severally liable to Purucker for funds deposited into the defendants’ joint bank account and was also liable to Purucker for the proceeds of cheques he cashed.
Huebler maintained that none of Purucker’s funds had been stolen, rather, the money had all been returned and the reason it was “missing” was because of Purucker’s “lavish spending on overseas travel and improvements to her home”.
Justice Isac said Huebler’s claim she had repaid all of Purucker’s money was “breathtakingly incredible” and also inconsistent with her original claims captured in an audio recording played in evidence at trial, that internet hackers were responsible for stealing Purucker’s funds.
Neither was there any credible evidence to support this.
The loss of the money was made more bearable by the fact Purucker has had worse losses in the past.
A legacy of loss
Purucker grew up in the years Germany was still picking itself up from the end of World War 2. Her mother, an actress and her father, a writer and director, divorced a year after she was born.
“It was quite something growing up in the 1950s with a divorced actress for a mother. My mother was quite emancipated but at that time women were still waiting with the newspaper and the house shoes for the husband to come home from work.”
Then, in 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, separating East from West Germany and members of Purucker’s extended family were instantly stranded on opposite sides.
“I remember my grandmother standing in the hallway crying because her siblings were all on the other side.
“It was the start of a long time of oppression and separation.”
Purucker says the legacy of loss goes back further to the time her grandparents were born in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“They went through World War I, which was the cruellest war, and then they slid into famine and poverty.
“My parents were born in the 1920s and they then went through the Great Depression and then World War II.
“It was a generation highly traumatised and so badly damaged. I imagine a lot of German people born in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, they can relate, as being born to traumatised parents.”
When Purucker moved to New Zealand, it was a country not unfamiliar to her. Her great uncle Conrad Gailer, a German baker started Gailer’s Cake Kitchen in Hamilton.
Purucker says he “married a Kiwi lady with a Scandinavian background and had a tribe of children”, and often returned to visit family in Germany.
“Uncle Conrad would return to Germany often to visit his sister – my grandmother, so I knew him from a young age.
“I always really liked him and I guess that set the course in motion.”
Then came the devastating, sudden loss of Purucker’s eldest son.
“He would have been 51 now, but he died 17 years ago of heart failure. He left me a beautiful grandson.”
Purucker still calls Berlin home. When she was last there close to six years ago she had considered packing up and returning.
That was before she realised all her money had gone.
Her arrival at court last year, dressed finely in beige and pearls with her thick dreadlocked hair bundled artfully for the occasion, concealed the years of hurt, grief and disbelief at the “evil deceit” committed by Iris Huebler, the friend she once trusted with almost everything she had.
“It was a great relief that the truth was finally out as I’d been waiting for that for four years,” Purucker told NZME in the weeks that followed.
Purucker says in recent years she’s had time to reflect on what it means to be resilient, which like most things takes time to build.
“It’s a bit like weightlifting - it needs practise and with that, it gets better and easier.”
The experience has also changed her.
“I think I’ve grown a lot and become humbler, and I’m much more appreciative and yeah, there are probably things I no longer take for granted, so it has changed me, absolutely.”
She realises she’s not alone in experiencing what happened.
“My heart goes out to all those who’ve been through the same. My motto is it could always be worse, so I’d better be grateful for all the good stuff.”
- By Tracy Neal
Open Justice multimedia journalist, Nelson-Marlborough
