Kirsa Jensen disappearance: Police confirm ‘the file is, certainly, still open’

A mum reads of her lost daughter: Kirsa Jensen's mum, Robyn, at Friday morning's memorial gathering, marking the 40th anniversary of the disappearance, at Awatoto. Photo / Paul Taylor

Family of still-missing Kirsa Jensen have been reassured that the file on the 40-year-old mystery is still open, and that if police get any leads they’ll be following up.

The assurance came from retired police Assistant Commission Ian Holyoake as he spoke on Friday at a gathering to mark the anniversary at the spot where then-14-year-old Colenso High School (now William Colenso College) pupil Kirsa Mary Jensen was last seen alive, with horse Commodore near a gun emplacement north of what is now the Waitangi Reserve at Awatoto on the afternoon of September 1, 1983.

Kirsa Jensen, who was 14 when she disappeared from the foreshore at Awatoto during an afternoon horse ride on September 1, 1983. Photo / Supplied

Commodore was found waiting at the scene for the girl who never came back, and Holyoake would remark that there seemed to be always a case in a police life that was never solved, and worried: “This could be that one.”

But, even this week, Detective Sergeant Daryl Moore, a long-serving Napier officer who now holds the file, has added a reference and a name, in what is now a digital form of the hefty tome that for many years held all the evidence just waiting for the day when something might land to resolve the case.

A niece, Genevieve Jensen, places flowers at the Kirsa Jensen memorial near the Awatoto gun emplacement. Photo / Paul Taylor

Among that evidence would be how the day she disappeared was a cloudless first day of spring, just as it has been every time police and family have gathered to mark the anniversary, each time police officers like Holyoake, retired Inspector Ross Pinkham, and Moore highlighting she’s far from forgotten.

The small memorial put in place at the site, fortunately, went largely unscathed in February’s cyclone, but all-around are still signs of the damage, including the bridge over which traffic passed in sight of where Kirsa was last seen.

While initial witness William Russell, claiming to have seen Kirsa as he drove over the bridge later became a suspect but has since died, , police retain an open mind as to what happened.

At the memorial mother Robyn, who lives in the same retirement village as Holyoake, read a passage from her 1994 book, Kirsa: A mother’s Story, with others present including Kirsa’s father, Rev Dan Jensen, who stepped into the role of police chaplain in Napier some years after their daughter’s disappearance.

He later lived in Australia for 14 years and is now in Tauranga, and had remained in Napier after a gathering last weekend. Also at the memorial was their son, Kirsa’s brother Michael.

The Kirsa mystery is one of several unsolved disappearances in Hawke’s Bay, but as the hunt for the killer of 6-year-old Teresa Cormack in Napier in 1987 showed, there was always hope.

Her killer, Jules Mikus, was arrested 15 years later, based on DNA profiling processes almost unheard of at the time she’d been killed.

On Friday, after Kirsa’s mother read the passage from the book, Holyoake reassured again: “The file is, certainly, still open.”