2001 Panmure RSA killings

On the morning of 8 December 2001, William Dwane Bell entered the Panmure RSA (Returned and Services' Association) club in Auckland, New Zealand, carrying a shotgun concealed in a guitar case and wearing a police shirt. He had been dismissed from a work-experience job as a barman at the club two weeks earlier after other employees found him abusive, rude, and untrustworthy. Bell's getaway driver, Darnell Kere Tupe, accompanied him to the club but remained outside during the attack.

Bell shot three people in the chest and then bludgeoned them to death with the butt of the shotgun: the club president, a club member, and an employee. A fourth person, employee Susan Couch, was seriously injured and left with brain damage and other permanent injuries. Bell spent approximately 45 minutes inside the RSA, roughly 15 minutes robbing the premises of about $13,000 and 30 minutes assaulting the victims, before fleeing with cigarettes, the previous night's takings, and cash taken from the victims' wallets. He was arrested five days later at his mother's home.

At the time of the murders, Bell was on parole for a 1997 aggravated robbery in which he had severely beaten a service station attendant with a stolen police baton. He had been automatically released in July 2001 after serving two-thirds of a five-year-nine-month sentence, as required by law at the time, and had accumulated more than 100 prior criminal convictions. A subsequent internal inquiry by the Corrections Department found that none of the five release conditions imposed on Bell had been met, and attributed failures to understaffing, low morale, and poor management within the Māngere probation service, as well as police inaction after Bell committed offences shortly before the murders.

Bell was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period, initially set at 33 years and later reduced to 30 years on appeal—at the time the longest minimum non-parole period ever imposed by a New Zealand court. He also received concurrent sentences for attempted murder and aggravated robbery. Tupe was convicted of three charges of manslaughter and aggravated robbery and sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment; he was released on parole in 2012.

Surviving victim Susan Couch later sought damages from the Department of Corrections over its handling of Bell's parole, and in 2012 the department agreed to pay her $300,000 in punitive damages. While in prison, Bell was seriously injured in a 2007 attack by a fellow inmate and has been subject to further disciplinary and legal proceedings related to his imprisonment.