A judge has ordered home detention for a former private investigator who failed to convince jurors that she was tricked into buying stolen designer clothing after it was brought to her home soon after the high-profile burglary of Dame Trelise Cooper’s Auckland head office.

Kathy Yu-Jen Stephens, 46, returned to Auckland District Court today for the sentencing hearing, just over nine months after she was found guilty of receiving more than $1000 of stolen property.

“I am not in the least convinced you were an innocent party who was taken advantage of,” Judge Nevin Dawson said today, adding that she would have been aware both of the value of the clothing and that it would have been obtained illegally.

The fashion aficionado, who once had a cake business called Vanilla Coco, which she acknowledged “could” have been inspired by Coco Chanel, told jurors that acquaintance Nicholas James Bush showed up at her doorstep late one night with two suitcases full of high-end fashion.

Stephens said she paid Bush $600 cash for some of the items that night, but over the course of five weeks she gave him between $3000-4000 worth of free rent and her own clothing that he then resold.

Kathy Yu-Jen Stephens (in pink) hides behind her lawyer Christina Hallaway after a hearing at the High Court at Auckland. Photo / NZME

She said she felt sorry for Bush after he said he got in a fight with his girlfriend and was kicked out, grabbing the two suitcases as he left. But prosecutors suggested that the story, even if taken at face value, also should have been a red flag - indicating that the clothing was at least stolen from Bush’s girlfriend.

Police executed a search warrant at Stephens’ Onehunga home in November 2020, one month after the heist, recovering 18 items of stolen clothing that they valued at about $12,200. Stephens declined to talk to police after her arrest.

At her trial, however, she said she had no idea the Trelise Cooper office had been burgled and she didn’t know the items at her house were stolen until her arrest. She described herself as “quite a gullible person” despite her job as a private investigator.

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“Yeah, maybe,” she later responded under cross-examination as prosecutor Frances Gourlay asked her if the situation seemed too good to be true. “I guess. I can’t remember.”

Bush, a former television industry worker, was sentenced in February to two years and five months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to the October 2020 burglary, in which an estimated 2000 high-fashion clothing items were pilfered - including the fashion designer’s entire 2021 spring and summer samples. The heist resulted in an estimated loss to Cooper of roughly $750,000.

Many of the items, authorities have repeatedly noted, were never recovered.

“One lonely hanger is all that’s left,” Cooper posted on social media at the time.

A third co-defendant, florist Andrea Edwards, was sentenced in June to 300 hours of community service after pleading guilty to possessing nearly $137,000 worth of the looted clothing. Edwards was arrested alongside Bush after police searched their shared hotel room and a storage facility in her name which they both had visited.

Today’s sentencing hearing for Stephens had been postponed from an earlier date at the request of defence lawyer Jacqueline Rempe so that the judge could review notes from Edwards’ sentencing for the sake of parity.

Prosecutors said the situation was different for Edwards, who was described during her sentencing hearing as a domestic violence victim now living in WINZ housing after a series of temporary accommodations including a women’s refuge. Home detention was not an option for her because of her living situation and prison time also did not fit her unique circumstances, the judge who sentenced her said.

“It’s submitted you, too, had been in a toxic relationship prior to the offence,” Judge Dawson said to Stephens today, adding that the relationship she described seemed to have ended five years before the offence. “In my view, there is no causal connection.”

But, like Edwards, Stephens deserved credit for previous good character and her risk of reoffending has been assessed as low, he noted.

He ordered that Stephens serve her home detention for seven months.

- Qiuyi Tan and Craig Kapitan, NZH