'He was everything to us': The New Zealanders who never came home

Friday, 24 March 2023

Every year in New Zealand, more than 11,000 people are reported as missing. While most are found within 72 hours, others simply vanish. Virginia Fallon reports on some of the country’s current and most enduring cases, and the limbo left in their wake.

In the photograph, Fiva Pita is smiling.

Beaming out from the fliers plastered all over Lower Hutt, the 74-year-old’s image is accompanied by blunt descriptors: skinny build, fluent in Samoan and English, last seen at the mall around Christmas.

But what Lena Pasene would have us know of her uncle is his kindness and love for his family; that he’s a vegan, a cancer survivor, a member of a Samoan golfing team that travelled internationally.

“We love him so much, we just need to know where he is.”

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More than three months since Fiva Pita was last seen there are still no answers as to how or why he vanished seemingly into thin air.

At the boarding house where he lived, his room is untouched, as are his bank accounts. The leads from the public have so far come to nothing.

Still, at any reported sighting, Pasene jumps in the car and goes looking; hands out more fliers; talks to everyone she can. “I’m mentally and physically drained,” she says. “We all are, all the family.”

Pita’s missing persons report is one of the more than 11,000 annually received by police and though most turn up within 72 hours, many others remain unfound.

Right now, there are 593 missing people on police books, while over on their website the list stretches back decades.

Included are some of the country’s most high-profile cases and enduring mysteries. There’s Kirsa Jensen, the 14-year-old last seen in 1983 riding her horse on a Napier beach, and toddler Amber-Lee Cruickshank, who disappeared in 1992. Breanna Muriwai, the 22-year-old last seen in August 2022 at Kāpiti Coast’s Te Horo beach is one of the more recent.

'I'll keep searching and asking questions,” her mother Jasmin Gray told Stuff in December.

The oldest case is that of Dunedin man Michael John Dudley, now missing for 44 years. After joining his colleagues for after-work drinks one night in 1978, the 20-year-old headed for home in his sign-written van. Neither he nor the van have been seen since.

The website only includes people police have permission to display; currently they number 35 and although Pita’s picture isn’t there, his case is echoed in that of another man who disappeared from the same place Pita lived.

In the early hours of July 13, 2014 Tupulaga Talalelei was seen in the kitchenette of the Bay St hostel but later that morning both he, and the walking stick he relied on, had gone.

Nearby security cameras didn’t show him leaving and a search around his home and sweep of Wellington Harbour found nothing. This week, police said that investigation is still in progress.

Much like in Talalelei’s case, Pita’s family say there’s no known reason as to why the 70-year-old vanished; there’s no suggestion of depression or ill-feeling towards him; he was just there one moment, missing the next.

Pasene says police are now considering three scenarios in her uncle’s disappearance: misadventure, foul play or suicide. Whatever’s behind it though, she just wants to know.

“The thought of him just out there somewhere in the cold, it’s just closure…” and then her voice breaks: “I’m sorry, I’m just so tired.”

Unlike in the movies, there’s no 24-hour stand down before reporting someone missing in NZ, nor are they automatically declared dead after seven years.

According to police, missing person files are never closed but reviewed regularly, and further investigations may take place if new information comes to light.

When it doesn’t, the power to declare someone dead lies with either the High Court or Coroner and can come after a disaster or accident when a body can’t be found – like with the Pike River disaster– or when there’s strong evidence the person is dead due, in part, to the inability to find them.

Of course, sometimes the missing don’t want to be found. For nearly 18 months, Tom Phillips and his three children have avoided detection from frustrated police and searchers in the second time they’ve disappeared from Marokopa.

Those children, Maverick, Jayda Jin and Ember, were last seen in December 2021 and police have said the family could be anywhere in the country, and might be using fake names.

And just as police believe Phillips is being helped to remain off-grid, private investigator Ron McQuilter believes it’s only a matter of time before the family is found.

McQuilter has been finding people for the past 40 years and, having worked on some of the country’s highest-profile mysteries, knows the answer is usually hiding in plain sight.

When Lee Shepard disappeared in during a 2003 nightshift at a London recycling plant, the 26-year-old left behind his belongings, pregnant wife and no apparent trace.

As investigations by local detectives only brought theories of foul play or Shepard leaving to start a new life, the case grew cold. Six years later McQuilter solved it, proving Shepard never left his workplace but had been rendered unconscious and died before being caught up in machinery. Police had never tested for DNA.

Today, McQuilter says the finding was cold consolation for the man’s family but some closure nonetheless.

“The family were in a state of suspended animation - they didn’t know what to do next - just helpless.”

While McQuilter says it's generally people who owe money that don’t want to be found, he’s recently been involved in a case of the opposite: David Glue, a man who inherited $300,000 yet can’t be tracked down to receive it.

Although the London-based recluse may well manage to remain undiscovered, it’s a scenario unlikely to happen in NZ. The country’s too small and everyone knows someone who knows someone else.

“Police will know where he is,” McQuilter says of Phillips. “They’ve got fluro technology for heat sources, number-plate recognition, bag and phone traces as well as looking at facial recognition systems. It’ll be any day now.”

But just as he’s sure about that case, he’s almost as certain about one aspect of another much more mysterious disappearance.

In May 2015, John Beckenridge's car was pulled from the sea near Curio Bay, nearly two months after he and his 11-year-old stepson Mike Zhao-Beckenridge were last seen in Invercargill.

The pairs’ bodies were never found; something McQuilter says just doesn’t add up.

“To have a car driven over a cliff but contain no trace of two people? In a violent crash like that there’d be DNA somewhere; a body part caught somewhere. Beckenridge had seven passports, you know.”

The Swedish-born 65-year-old also had at least four known aliases, international connections and a background of helicopter flying, all details leading to McQuilter’s long-held theory this was no accident.

“They’ll turn up somewhere.”

Aaron O’Neill says he knows it’s ridiculous, but he can’t help hoping the same thing will happen with his cousin Jessica Boyce.

Last seen in 2019, the Marlborough woman’s disappearance was eventually upgraded to a homicide investigation with police saying her red ute was left at Mount Richmond Forest Park to misled them. They also say they know who was involved and are waiting on forensic electronic evidence.

Also waiting are her family who O’Neill says have spent the past four years living in limbo; a constant existence of what-ifs.

“We're 99% sure she's gone but without there being a body there's always that chance - someone looks like her and your heart skips a beat. I'm driving along thinking ‘she could be buried anywhere, I could have passed her 20 minutes ago’.”

O’Neill says that when someone is missing life goes on, sort of. Jess has missed myriad occasions – the birth of a niece the latest.

This week he took aim at the rewards for information occasionally offered by police, questioning why there's been nothing in Jess’ case. He doesn't resent anyone else who gets one but is determined that not only is she remembered but that her killer can’t rest easy.

“I just want to make sure she still gets attention; that nobody forgets her name.”

Unfortunately, says media expert Dr Catherine Strong, when it comes to getting or maintaining that attention, not all missing person’s cases are created equally.

“You just have to look at the media to see what’s missing there - and that’s the non-white missing people.”

Strong says global research shows much more coverage is given to white, conventionally attractive females from wealthier backgrounds than anyone else; a practice widely described as Missing White Woman Syndrome.

“Look at Madeleine McCann, years after she disappeared there’s still so much coverage, yet every day a Nigerian child goes missing and the global media say ‘so what?’”

But while journalists have an undeniable role to play in the disparity, so do audiences who click on stories about people that look like them: “They think ‘it could have been my child, my mother or me’ and that becomes the mirror effect.”

Also, affluent families tend to have more photos of the missing to be used for publicity and are more comfortable talking to media.

“ This all feeds into Missing White Woman Syndrome which is very much alive and true.”

Huia Mackley says her brother’s disappearance both highlights an imbalance in missing persons’ cases, and the importance of publicity.

”He was ignored until we approached the media; even the Coroner said that because of the publicity an enquiry was in order.”

Jason Butler was the antithesis of a missing, attractive white woman when he disappeared nearly 16 months ago.

“Because he was Māori, had been mentally unwell for most of his adult life and just wandered around the countryside, not a lot of importance was placed on my brother.”

In October 2021, the 50-year-old Ōpōtiki man was taken into the Raukumara ranges on unapproved work experience by a DOC contractor, and seemingly left behind to fend for himself.

Mackley says there was a litany of failures behind the case, now before the coroner. She’s angry the family and iwi had to organise their own search parties, paying for helicopters and canvassing the dense bush on foot.

While she believes justice will ultimately be served in coming enquiries, there’ll be no real rest until her brother’s body is found.

“That’s all we have to hope for now, to know where he is. We loved him very much; he meant everything to us.”

And families can always hold onto hope, if not happy endings.

Jane Furlong’s skeleton was found two decades after she went missing and in 2017, the mystery of a missing Nelson teenager was solved.

When Leo Lipp-Neighbours vanished in 2010, exhaustive searches failed to find either him or the car he was driving. Seven years later, in an incredible coincidence, the car was discovered at the bottom of Port Nelson; the teenager was inside.

While the return of a body might not bring all the answers behind a disappearance, Detective Sergeant Fiona Cox says it can bring some closure.

Cox is the missing persons national coordinator so knows all too well the hell experienced by families of the missing.

“There are so many questions and until a body is located the family is in limbo, its awful, they’re assuming all the time.”

It’s also awful for police who invariably become deeply invested in cases, often becoming close to families throughout long investigations. More than anything, those cops want to bring closure for the people left behind.

“We’re human, I've been in the job 17 years now … every case you feel for the families… They’re in turmoil.”

Melissa Mills has been in that turmoil since June 2022 when her brother John Mills was last seen.

While the Mt Roskill man has undoubtedly become the victim of foul play after getting involved with a bad crowd, his sister says he was a good guy who’d help anyone.

”He was lovely, just a bit lost, but he’d give you the shirt off his back. He was a real comforting guy; we were so close.”

In December police swooped on a Hamilton house in the search for the Auckland man; the week prior they’d blocked off Hamilton business Riverlea Motor Wreckers.

And just like Huia Mackley who believes that justice will soon be served on those responsible for her brothers' death, Melissa Mills says it's the coming home that really matters.

“My parents and I don't really even give a shit about the person out there who did it. We just want his body back.”