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so that beautiful women will love them. When detectives asked Clark about photographsof his beautiful lawyer girlfriend Karen Soich rolling naked in money he replied: ‘Women like money, don’t they?’ Money was a means to an end, and for Clark a potent attraction was the power it gave him over women. It meant he could buy them, use them and discard them, often brutally.
    After the author Richard Hall investigated Clark’s background in New Zealand, he painted a picture of a small town loner – a skinny kid with a chip on his shoulder, without the physical or mental gifts to put him above his peers. There was nothing about him that marked him as special, except for the most important thing of all: an ego that drove him to do whatever it took to feel superior to the common herd. He wanted to be number one. To do that, he turned to crime the way some turn to sport and others to study or music. Unlike most people raised in relatively normal family circumstances, he showed no inhibitions about breaking the legal and moral rules.
    Terrence John Clark was born in Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island – the first city in the world to see the rising sun each day. When Clark was born on 13 November 1944, the biggest business in town was the abattoirs and freezing works, where his father, Leo, worked when Terry was young. ‘Good old Leo’, as locals called him, was from a farming family and was a sportsman, a surfer and a founder of a local surf lifesaving club.
    But while the father was a public-spirited sportsman in a sports-mad community, Terry wasn’t. Not big or strong, he soon developed into a loner at school. He affected being a rebel without a cause. In that time and place, that meant being a ‘bodgie’, with a Cornell Wilde haircut and a roll-your-own cigarette hanging from his lip. Whereas his younger brother Paddy was good at school and at sport, Terry went the other way: he played tough guy.
    But there was ambition and a shrewd streak of business sense in the family. In the early 1950s, while Terry was inprimary school, Leo bought the local pie-cart – a caravan that sold pies, sausages and bacon at night. Soon after, he bought a better house. And by 1957 he set up the first driving-school in the town. Leo the farmer’s son was not content to be an abattoir worker all his life. But while his family was bettering itself, Terry Clark was going the other way: he was unusually aggressive in schoolyard fights and so determined to be seen as tough he talked about carrying a knife and being prepared to use it.
    Like a lot of kids from provincial towns, Terry Clark got out as soon as he could. By 1962, he was in Auckland working as a welder’s assistant. He fancied something that paid better than handing welding rods to a tradesman but he wasn’t going to follow his father into a life of hard work. He wanted short cuts.
    It didn’t take him long to collide with the law. The police picked him up for interfering with a car. He was given probation. Other youngsters in the same boat might have ‘pulled up’ but Clark wasn’t other youngsters. He was drawn to the dark and dirty side. In Auckland in the 1960s, that meant thieving. Illicit drugs were still almost unknown, armed robberies were rare. Burglary, theft and receiving were what Kiwi crooks did. Top of the pecking order were the safecrackers.
    In 1963, Clark had begun what would become a habit: acquiring women. That year, while still on probation, he married a girl called Sally R. They moved into a flat. Meanwhile, Clark combined panel beating with minor rackets: stolen cars and shop breaking. But, already, he was receiving stolen goods from other thieves, which meant they did the dirty work and took the bigger risk. This set a pattern.
    After a farcical foray into safe blowing – he left the gelignite on top of the safe, instead of drilling it, and blew up half the service