He loved helping Dad on his courier run. Paul Jones often wondered how much help he was, but still, he loved having Lachie around. He was full of wonder and Jones enjoyed introducing his son to everyone and pointing out Gore’s landmarks: the big brown trout; the giant guitar statue proclaiming the town, population 13,000, as “New Zealand’s capital of country music”.

At the Hokonui Drive roundabout, the 51-year-old would point out Gore Police Station, which always got cop-mad Lachie bouncing in his seat.

But on Tuesday, January 29, 2019, Jones rode solo on his normal courier run.

Job done, Jones left Gore about 5.30pm for a hair appointment in Invercargill where he’d been living since he split with Lachie’s mum, Michelle Officer, five months earlier.

It hadn’t been a tidy break-up. Jones was accused of being verbally abusive, and he admits, he was no angel in the past. However, he had visitation rights and stayed the odd nights at her Salford St house, usually on a mattress in the lounge.

In fact, he spent the previous two evenings at her place. Lachie had been out of sorts, a runny nose. Jones would later say the boy had been “uneasy” and so they shared a bed together on Monday night.

Lachie fell asleep briefly then woke wanting to sing their song, You Are My Sunshine, before putting a tiny arm around his dad and drifting off again.

In the morning, he begged to tag along on the courier run. But as much as Jones loved having the wee guy riding shotgun, he had a busy day and said no. Jones sweetened the deal by offering to get away together at the weekend.

Jones packed off to work.

The next time he would see Lachie, he would be lying in the back of a police car, stone cold and lifeless.

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

Sitting in his central Christchurch chambers, Grant Fletcher is troubled.

The criminal defence lawyer disentangles himself from his desk’s paper mountains and stares at a creased, muddied map of a World War I battlefield on the wall.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he sighs, sitting down heavily, returning to the Lachie Jones’ file once again.

He’s only been on the case since January this year.

A frustrated Paul Jones called him after a meeting with Detective Inspector Stu Harvey before Christmas.

The initial police investigation concluded death by accidental drowning, and no suspicious circumstances. But pressure from Jones and concerns from Gore District Council had led Southland Police to take a fresh look. Local Mayor Tracy Hicks and council chief executive Steve Parry declined to comment for this article, citing the active court case.

The police reinvestigation opened in November 2020 with the scope to determine if there was any criminal liability around Lachie’s death.

Out of town officers would conduct inquiries “to a homicide level”, Jones was told.

He came away thinking, finally, they would get to the truth.

Jones always rejected the accidental drowning theory. Nothing seemed to stack up.

For starters, he could never imagine Lachie scarpering on his own, especially to a strange place, and at night, well past his bedtime.

He was a clingy, well-behaved boy, Jones says. He disputes claims that he had a tendency to run off — something that Lachie’s kindergarten teacher also told police. She described Lachie as a model young boy who even thanked her when changing his nappy and was never far from sight.

And then there’s the three-page autopsy report. Dated March 4, 2019, it concluded the cause of death was drowning. It found no signs of traumatic injuries.

The funeral home that prepared Lachie’s body for burial found him in “perfect condition”, according to a letter sent to Jones. They double-checked and found “no visible marks on his feet or legs”.

This fact is a major red flag for Jones and his legal team.

The road to the ponds — which has since been fenced off by the council which is defending the WorkSafe charges at a trial which has no hearing date yet — is loose gravel. Lachie is said to have climbed over a locked cyclone gate or adjacent wooden fence and walked or run along the grassy banks beside the two ponds. The vegetation at the time was overgrown, dense with thistles, prickles, along with widespread geese, duck, and sheep defecation. Midges were rife.

A thin strip of rough concrete borders the ponds, which police involved in the reinvestigation told Jones his son could have followed.

He’s gone past the first pond, police believe, and continued several hundred more metres to the far end of the second pond. That’s where he was found later that night.

“There’s no logic to it all,” Jones says.

“If [Lachie] wanted to jump in, he would’ve jumped in at the first pond. To walk through all that rough terrain, prickles, thistles, stones, sheep s*** everywhere ... It would’ve been all over his feet.”

The day after Lachie’s death, Jones and his friends retraced the supposed route and suffered multiple cuts, scrapes, and bites.

“And yet he arrived at the funeral home in perfect condition, not one mark on him. As the undertaker said to me, he was perfect. How does that add up?” Jones says.

A police dog handler located Lachie about 11.15pm. He was motionless, face up, not face down, like many child drowning victims, with both knees exposed, breaking the surface of the water.

The officer immediately pulled him out of the water. Lachie had white foam around his mouth and was cold to touch. He started CPR while radioing for help.

After doing CPR for some time, the policeman considered Lachie’s best chance of recovery was with paramedics, so he picked him up and ran towards the gate on Grasslands Rd where he believed ambulance staff would be waiting.

Running with Lachie in his arms, he met police colleagues on the way and then paramedics near the top of the second pond.

Despite the best efforts of the constable, and then the ambulance staff, Lachie was pronounced dead at the scene about 11.50pm.

What happened next really concerns Fletcher and his fellow lawyer Hamish Evans.

It appears that the scene where Lachie was found — in total darkness — was not cordoned off and secured overnight for scene examinations at first light.

No fingerprints or fibre samples were ever taken from the fence or gate that Lachie was supposed to have clambered over. No footprints were sought, or car tyre tracks. No specialist scene of crime officer (SOCO) attended.

There seems to have been no consideration given to “back-tracking” from the location the police officer first saw Lachie in the water, to retrace his steps and find the exact route he was supposed to have gone since last being seen. The police dog only picked up a scent for some 40m from where Lachie was found — and no other alternative routes, including across surrounding farm paddocks, were examined.

And who was the shirtless guy who had reportedly been seen by a Salford St local running around the oxidation ponds that night? He was never tracked down and those claims were never verified with the witness.

Jones also wonders how Lachie felt so cold in the back of the cop car, when it had been such a warm, summer’s evening.

“The quality of the initial police investigation was disappointing,” Evans says.

“How likely is it that a 3-year-old boy is able to walk a kilometre through thistles and long grass, with a full nappy, miles away from home, all by himself without getting a scratch? It just seems implausible.

“For reasons that we don’t understand, the police don’t seem to have considered other possible scenarios.”

Police appear to have relied heavily on the credibility of witness accounts.

And yet, not all of them stack up.

The result is a confused timeline and questions over exactly when Lachie went missing.

What could have helped was telecommunications polling data. Telcos record their user’s access to cell towers when a connection is first created — usually either when the phone comes into a cell tower’s broadcast area and when calls and text messages are made. The securing of this data might have corroborated stories and clarified timings over that fateful evening.

Some telcos only keep their data for a month or two. For some of the key witnesses in Lachie’s case, police either never requested cellphone data or were too late and the data was already lost. It was “basic police work”, Jones’ lawyers say.

“Having read the [police] file very carefully, having considered the police investigation, and having considered significant concerns in relation to the way the police investigated this matter, I’d describe this case as unsettling and deeply disturbing,” Fletcher says.

“The police have just taken the lightest look at it and considered a factual series that is just implausible.”

The police reinvestigation concluded late last year.

At a meeting with Jones on December 16, Harvey said there was “insufficient evidence on the facts that we have at this time in regards to any criminal culpability of any person in regards to Lachie’s death”.Fletcher and Evans are calling for a full coronial inquiry into Lachie’s death and are working to get experts to review the case.

Jones has never seen the final police file but Harvey confirmed to the Herald that it has now been handed over to the coroner.

“As such, police are not in a position to make any further comment,” Harvey says.

In response to an interview request, Michelle Officer’s employer said on behalf of her and her family: “As the matter is before the courts they would prefer not to comment at this time. Given the traumatic nature of this situation they request privacy.”