Desperate to solve cold case

The wife of a Tauranga man who disappeared more than 50 years ago is hopeful that new information might finally lead to a breakthrough in the baffling case so she can know the truth before she dies.
Inland Revenue inquiry officer Pat Fisk was 37 when he disappeared in 1956 while on a routine assignment to the Murupara area.
The mystery of his disappearance has never been solved, and his body has never been found - baffling Bay people for more than five decades.
Pat's wife Maureen Thomas hopes that newly found aerial photographs will provide new evidence, and inspire someone to come forward.
The images, sourced from New Zealand Aerial Mapping, show a shot of the Pekepeke Quarry, where Pat was last seen. The pictures were taken just four months after his disappearance.
Daughter Caroline Fisk said the photos would allow police to check the validity of witness statements, even after all this time.
The images show buildings in the area, and Caroline believes they will help reveal the visibility of landmarks from certain points in the area. This could prove if a witness was lying or telling the truth about what they saw from a certain spot.
If new information comes to light, the family are prepared to pay for ground penetrating radar to search areas of the quarry to look for Pat's body. An aerial shot of the Te Whaiti area shows areas where Pat's body could have been hidden - but also shows what a huge task it would be to find it.
Mrs Thomas said she hoped that someone with knowledge of Pat's disappearance might want to clear their conscience before they died, or might have made a deathbed confession.
"Somebody must have known what did happen. After all this time, maybe they think it's safe to come forward."
But the 86-year-old knows that the odds of finding the truth, 54 years later, are slim.
"I think it's not very likely that we will find what happened, but we want to keep on trying. I'd like to try and put the record straight. We are all very keen to find an answer."
The Whangaparaoa woman said she would never give up on finding the truth about what happened to Pat.
"It's something I've never been able to stop thinking about.
"Life goes on, but always in your mind is 'what did happen to Pat?'"
Mrs Thomas, who remarried many years after her first husband's disappearance, has always believed that Pat was murdered.
"I know that he didn't leave us, which initially was the police assumption.
"The whole family and I feel sure that he met with foul play because of the work he was doing.
"I feel [the truth] would validate Pat. At the time, the speculation of what happened was so awful. We know he didn't leave us. Pat was a lovely man, and a good father and husband."
The case was the subject of TVNZ documentary The Missing last year. Search and Rescue revisited the case for that programme, and came to the conclusion that Pat was killed.
Although Caroline said the show brought "one or two people out of the woodwork," there was still no answer.
Pat's youngest daughter Trisha Fisk never met her father - her mother was three months pregnant with her when he disappeared.
Trisha, one of Pat's five children, hopes the truth comes out before it is too late.
"They are all getting older. [We want to find out] before any hope of finding him is totally lost."
The family was not looking for blame, she said, but would like to find Pat's body.
"Before mum dies, we would like to find him and get closure for her.
"Everyone has got on with their lives, but it's always been there. It's come up more and more as she's got older."