It has been 25 years since 2-year-old Amber-Lee Cruickshank disappeared from Kingston on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. Initially she was presumed drown but quickly police and her mother Nicola suspected something far more sinister happened to the little blonde girl. Video / Mike Scott
South Island toddler Amber-Lee Cruickshank disappeared 25 years ago from a small town on the shore of Lake Wakatipu.
Despite exhaustive and repeated searches, there has never been any sign of the little girl.
The Herald senior crime and justice reporter Anna Leask investigated the famous cold case in a bid to generate some answers for the toddler's family.
In October, to mark the 25th anniversary of Amber-Lee's disappearance, the Herald released Chasing Ghosts, a six-part podcast series, news feature and mini-documentary about the case - one of New Zealand's most baffling mysteries.
It's something I've lived through for the last 25 years, day in, day out always wondering what went wrong that day and what happened and was there anything I could have done to change that.
I'm Anna Leask.
I've been a crime reporter for more than a decade and have always been fascinated by cold cases.
I was only nine when Amber-Lee went missing, but I remember clearly seeing her little face in the news.
I have often wondered how, in a place as tiny as Kingston, she could vanish without a trace.
The last time Nicola saw her daughter, the blonde-haired blue-eyed girl was on the front porch of a mate's place.
To lose a child and not know what or how or where that child is, it's just pain that you can't explain. It's the emptiness....
But to be able to visit that child's grave site and know how that child died and to be able to visit - it's closure.
It's not closure coming here, every time I come here and I turn down this straight… wow…. 17th of October 1992, it's the same road I travelled.
Only, disaster.... it's just horrible.
You look at the mountains and it's such a beautiful place to have something ripped away from you so... yeah, it is, it's raw, it hurts, my guts is churning.
You look around and you see how much has changed in the 25 years.
I mean, my first port of call every time I get here is the plaque that we planted a couple of months after she had disappeared after going out every day searching for hours and hours on end - to no avail.
I mean, this is all I've got to come and visit, and that's why we planted an Amber Liquid tree in her name.
Yeah [CRIES SOFTLY]... be nice to have an end to this, not to relive it all the time - because that's what you're doing, you're reliving it, every time you come to Kingston...
In mid-1992 they decided they had to ditch that lifestyle.
They sold their home at Otautau - about 50km north-west of Invercargill - and bought a house bus.
They planned to leave everything behind and start fresh with their three kids on the West Coast.
They spent their last night together as a family parked by a local river.
Nicola's eldest son Harley was with them that night.
He was going to stay with a family friend, so he could complete the school year before joining Nicola, James, Amber-Lee and Danny, who was 7 months old, on the Coast.
Kingston is known for its steam train history. Amber-Lee Cruickshank, 2, disappeared from the township in 1992. New Zealand Herald photograph by Mike Scott
But when she woke up Nicola changed her and took her down to the water for a paddle.
The little girl hated water – she was well known for that – and there was no way she was going in.
But when Dette got his boat out Nicola convinced the toddler to go for a ride.
NICOLA CRUICKSHANK:
My fondest memory is being on the boat and her sitting on my knee just laughing.
She was just so happy to have the water just splashing up and that is the last memory that I really have with Amber-Lee is on the boat that day.
No one could have imagined what would happen next.
They'd finished eating and the adults dispersed to tidy up.
NICOLA CRUICKSHANK:
My 7-month-old was in one of those jolly jumpers in the doorstep. Amber-Lee was at the front of the house, she had a glass of Coke, I remember that thinking she shouldn't have that because she won't be going to sleep any time soon with the sugar.
And, that's the last time I remember seeing Amber-Lee...
James and Dette headed to the house bus and started to clean up the glass.
Eventually, James came out the back to see how Nicola was going.
Then all hell broke loose.
NICOLA CRUICKSHANK:
It was probably about half an hour, 45 minutes later James came to see how I was getting on and I said it was a waste of bloody time and I was sick of it and 'what's Amber doing'.
He said 'I think she's inside watching TV' and I said 'well here, you can do it' and off I went to have a look and that's when I discovered that Amber wasn't inside watching TV.....
So I started to panic, running around yelling out her name, saying 'Amber's gone'.
Everybody starting looking, started door knocking and then the alarm was raised that night.
I was just frantic. I was running all round this place. I ran down to the park thinking she may have gone there.
I thought maybe she's gone down to the boat yard because we'd been out in the boat and she was so happy about that, she was ecstatic about it.
I can't say Amber wasn't a runner because she had done a runner on me a couple of times to the park - a lot of people know with their own children, it's the same.
Kids can just vanish, bang, like that. I've watched it.
I was to stay at the property, sitting in anguish waiting and waiting for word.
The next day a search was coordinated at 8 o'clock in the morning and that was on the Sunday. That was coordinated from the pub down the road.
Everybody was deployed out a certain radius and then the search was called off at 5pm that day and then Monday, the same again and at 5pm the search was called off, presumed drowned in the lake - and that was it.
There was no more searching cos they all presumed she was in the lake.
Dette was known to police, so when the 111 call came in officers flagged it with Warwick Walker, a detective sergeant based in Queenstown.
It's pretty standard for detectives or senior officers to be briefed on an incident if people known to police are involved in any way.
Walker headed to Kingston the next day to find the search for Amber-Lee in full swing.
RETIRED DETECTIVE WARWICK WALKER:
They were doing extensive ground searches, they'd been out on the lake in boats and canoes, I believe some local divers had been called in - local scuba divers called in to go and have a look around various parts of the lake.
I believed right at that stage that yeah, she had probably just gone missing.
So other than we had some interest in the people who were in and around, there was nothign of a crimnal nature at that stage, in that first 48 hours.
How did you find Nicky and James that day when you spoke with them?
RETIRED DETECTIVE WARWICK WALKER:
It was strange.
It was a mixture of very, very - particularly from Nicky - very, very emotional as you would expect the mother of a young child who's gone missing, very, very upset, very wound up.
But also there was some guardedness going on in the background.
I didn't know Nicky and James but I knew the people where they were staying and I figured hey, look, if that's the association there there's probably been some past history with the police and that may just be standoffish because they didn't like the police - albeit that we became a necessary part of their lives at that stage looking for Amber-Lee.
However, you've got a big body of water surrounded by very dense bush and I believe that there are some old mining holes around that area, albeit that I'd been told that they'd been searched.
So I then started reading through the file in detail in terms of what had been done because I was fairly determined that we needed to find Amber-Lee.
Probably after that amount of time she was going to be dead but you know, we had to find Amber-Lee and we had to find her for the family.
Retired detective Warwick Walker worked on Amber-Lee's case in 1992/3. New Zealand Herald photograph by Mike Scott
Walker took me through the two searches, step by step.
RETIRED DETECTIVE WARWICK WALKER:
So, the initial search on the day she went missing was, you let residents know there's a little girl missing, can you go and look in your house, can you look under the bed.
The following day I believe the search and rescue people actually went in and looked under and in houses themselves.
There were some houses that were shut up so we had to get access to those places.
Now obviously a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl's not going to break into a house or it would be fairly obvious.
But after I came back from being away for a month there was another search done where we went into every house and looked in every cupboard and looked in the ceilings and went underneath every house in Kingston again, just to make sure nothing had been missed, that she hadn't just crawled off and been missed, or that in fact she'd been hidden in one of the houses that perhaps had been locked up.
So anything that was locked up at the time, well quite naturally you didn't search that because if the residents are away and a house is locked then a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl is not going to go in.
But they were searched that second time to make sure she wasn't in there and we made sure we went and visited absolutely every single one in case somebody had somehow surreptitiously opened a house and put her in there.
A lot of those little baches down there, people don't go to them for months and months and months so we had to be satisfied that hadn't occurred.
But Nicola and James carried on searching, day in and day out, for another two months.
I can't begin to imagine what that must have been like - the despair of not knowing where your child is, being haunted by thoughts of her being alone, scared, hurt.
Or worse.
During our visit to Kingston Nicola showed me where she and James searched.
There are a heap of tracks up into the bush that the couple walked countless times.
They clambered through overgrowth and pools of water, turned over rocks – looking anywhere a little girl could have stumbled.
The memorial plaque to Amber-Lee in Kingston. It reads 'presumed drowned'. New Zealand Herald photograph by Mike Scott
NICOLA CRUICKSHANK:
We went out searching by boat, all along the reserves, along the sides, up to Half Moon Bay and back again.
We've been searching all out the back here, we walked the railway lines, we looked in little cavity holes, under rocks, things like that.
We've been all up the back of the bush, along the tracks and I've done that a few times, every time we've come to Kingston.
You know, I've followed a lot of false leads, false hopes, maps that have been sent to me dotting out where she is. I've searched all those, to nothing.
You come across bones up in the track and you think 'oh is this animal or is this human/' and you wonder about those things.
It's like a few years back when bones were actually found down the road there and turned out to be sheep bones.
I'll never forget that day that actually happened because that tore me to bits.
I got a sense of how it would feel if she was found - the loss, the pain, the anger that I felt that day… and then to be told they were animal bones was um, that was painful.
I screamed, I cried, I was so angry, I was angry with the media because it was all over the radio before I was even told.
It's just hard, I mean, I don't know what to say - I've learned to live with it and I've learned to deal with it and hope that one day someone somewhere might remember something or seeing something and we get some answers.
I remember on the night she went missing I thought I heard a little girl yelling out from up here and always wondered if maybe she'd been brought up here.
MIKE SCOTT:
You thought you heard a girl?
NICOLA CRUICKSHANK?
Yeah, yelling from up above when I was down at the house and I thought I heard a little girl from the distance, which seemed to be coming from up the boat ramp way.
It gives you hope that you see maintenance happening around the place and you kinda think that if she was around here that someone may stumble across her.
If Amber-Lee was at Kingston, surely in 25 years someone would have found her - a hunter, a local - even a dog.
But there has been no sign of the little girl, at all.
Which begs the question - did someone take her?
UP NEXT:
Amber-Lee's memorial at Kingston reads "missing, presumed drowned".
In episode two of Chasing Ghosts, I'll tell you why that's simply not the case, and what likely happened to the todder 25 years ago.
