Drowning in sorrows

Te Rae-kai-hau Point, where the mother and daughter took their lives, had earlier been the scene of happy family outings. Picture / Fotopress

At the edge of the rugged South Wellington coast a pair of green spray-painted lines leads down the rocky shore to the water's edge and stops. This is where a family ended, destroyed by a disease.

In the cold Cook Strait waters the bodies of a mother and daughter floated just past these lines last weekend. Then they lay side by side at the water's edge, covered in white sheets, as police searched for the reason why.

They found the answers not in the lupins or the boiling surf at Te Rae-kai-hau Point but in a police file opened four months ago when the women killed their husband and father, a man lost to Alzheimer's disease.

The 51-year-old daughter had survived her first court appearance in March, charged with murdering the man who gave her life. Her 75-year-old mother was charged on June 16, accused of killing the man she vowed to have and to hold until death did them part.

Once a family of five, who immigrated to New Zealand from Holland in 1953, all the tragedy has left is a brother and sister trying to find answers. Court suppression orders prevent their names being published.

With the sun shining in the window of his Johnsonville home, John looks brave, his glistening eyes never spilling over. "I don't know what they thought about being charged. We never talked about it, to my knowledge they never told anyone."

For John, the death of his family is made harder by the fact that he had been estranged from his parents and sister for the past few years because of disagreements with his mother, whom he describes as the matriarch of the family.

She did not agree with how he chose to live his life is all he will say. As a result he never saw how far his father had deteriorated, never knew they were intending to kill him, had no idea they would take their own lives.

Just as he remembers the curt phonecall from his sister four months ago on February 6 saying, "poppa has died in mysterious circumstances", before she hung up, he remembers sitting at work and listening to the radio last Sunday.

Two bodies were found at Te Rae-kai-hau Point, and then "knock, knock" the police arrived to tell him his sister and mother were dead.

"I would never wish this on anyone else, three members of a family gone in a few months, a family of five knocked down to two in four months."

There will be no emotional ending for John or his sister from Christchurch, because the rift was not mended before death, but he looks and smiles, "It is a sad ending, but not a bad history."

He grew up in Island Bay, where his parents settled and married, in a house filled with love, children everywhere, part of the kindergarten his mother ran from their home.

John remembers the woman who he says made him much of what he is today, a sister he loved and a kind, patient gentle father - a man with a talent for painting houses, a machine operator at a hosiery factory and later a man who worked sewing teatowels and sheets.

His legacy lies in a box in John's house - a chest full of teatowels and sheets, which, he says, "he deliberately stuffed up so we could have them".

The Dutch man who loved to garden had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease 18 months before his death. Although euthanasia is legal in Holland, John believes his father would not have wanted to die.

"Whether my sister did it, my momma did it or poppa asked for them to do it, we will just never know."

Police found his father on February 5, lying dead in his bed, after his sister called them.

John had not seen his father for six months before he died but he had already seen the signs he was slowly leaving.

His father would launch into conversation in English and, without warning, halfway through a sentence revert to Dutch.

"I don't think I was mentally ready yet for my parents to deteriorate," John says.

As John was removed from his father's life in Levin just 50 minutes up the road, his mother was dealing with the slow death of her husband, replaced by a man who would become violent, frustrated at being unable to communicate, at forgetting. His father slept in a separate room in the home he shared with his wife and daughter, with locks fitted to the bedroom doors to control him.

His mother would sit with next-door neighbour Audrey Cameron and, over their knitting, describe how her husband was deteriorating.

The disease was stealing the once articulate man. Neighbours who stopped to talk to him as he pruned his camellias now crossed the road when they saw him in the front garden, trying to avoid incoherent conversation that went in circles.

Talking of his father hurts but the stories of him flow more readily for John than those of his sister and mother.

"He always used to joke 'I'm not 50 any more, I've only got a few more years left,' but that was his joke, nothing serious about it. I always said to him 'you'll be around until you're 100'.

"I remember him lying in the garden snoring his head off having a sleep on a summer afternoon."

He also remembers taking him to a building site where they tied steel. Later John found his father untying all the pieces he had tied.

After the war living in Holland his father had been the family breadwinner. He would walk miles to find food for his siblings, in bad shoes, which eventually saw him lose three toes on one foot and two on another.

Other members of his family emigrated to Canada but John says his father was forced to come to New Zealand.

"Canada wouldn't take him, Australia wouldn't take him because of his feet, so they ended up in New Zealand."

For years his father wore orthotic shoes, and John always wished he could have kicked a soccer ball with him.

Then, 10 years ago, he had surgery to fix his feet. "I remember him walking down the driveway wearing a proper pair of sneakers - at 65 he could finally kick a soccer ball."

A few years later his memory started going.

"It was really quite bad," says neighbour Graham Hawley, almost looking ashamed.

"He would just be out sitting out the front of the house or pottering in the garden."

Every Friday John's father would be taken to the Gardenview Dementia Care facility in Levin to give his sister and mother a break. The tragedy, John says, is that his father was set to become a permanent resident this week.

He looked forward to finally spending time with his father before he slipped away.

John says the family had agreed it was best for his father.

He does not want to believe his father's illness had become that bad, he likes to think his parents were preparing to grow old together playing backgammon and bridge, his father pottering in the garden pulling out the good plants and leaving the weeds because he liked the flowers.

Before he was diagnosed, John's father and mother had moved from Wellington to live in Otaki. Their daughter, who moved between Wellington and Auckland, eventually settled in Levin, where she ran a dairy with her son.

John says the dairy was a nice focus for his parents in their retirement. Daily they made the journey from Otaki to help out in the shop, until they decided to move to Levin in 1999. After they bought their home, his sister moved in upstairs.

They never talked of assisted death, euthanasia, but something happened on February 5 this year - the house in Levin was on the market, his mother and sister had bought a house in Wellington where his sister a new job to go to.

His father was set to go into the dementia home as a permanent resident but somehow, four months later, they are all dead and John does not understand why.

"In a way the deaths of my mother and sister has closed a chapter. It was a big mess and I think in their own way they have fixed the mess."

Thames pensioner Rex Law who killed his wife Olga who had Alzheimer's calls it a happy release.

"I suppose they were a bit like me. They couldn't stand it any longer."

Law's gentle wife had been replaced by a woman who defecated in wardrobes, swore at him, was often violent and told anyone who would listen that he beat her.

"It's a terrible thing, you can't stand seeing them go downhill."

After killing his wife, w tried to end his own life as well, he says. "It's not an easy decision to make, it's very hard but I don't feel myself a criminal. I suppose they did not either."

John cannot say what being charged with murder did to his sister but he suspects when his mother was also charged, it sparked the pact to end it.

He says he and his surviving sister were waiting for the court case to find out why and how things had happened. Now they must wait for a coroner's hearing. But the only people who can really answer their questions are dead.

John remembers Te Rae-kai-hau Point where they died - he played near there as a child.

His mother would bundle him and his sisters up to play and laugh in the waters of nearby Princess Bay on warm Wellington days.

Late last Saturday night his sister and mother decided to end their lives in the place where they had happy memories of a once close family.

At the rest area a green arrow points to the sea. John's mother and sister walked the rocky shore here, stones crunching beneath their feet, heavy with the weight of a pending court case and the knowledge of what they had done.

With the nearest houses 500m away they slipped into darkness.

"The mess has ended. Let's make peace as best we can with the facts as we know them and give all three a peaceful send-off and see if we can move on ourselves," says John.

He wonders if he had been in contact whether things would have been different. "There will be no emotional conclusion, we'll always just have to live with that." He looks away.

"I think your role in life is to stand straight, strong and true, kia kaha is the Maori term for that," he says. "Go in peace, stay in peace."