Lonely John Tam said sorry then disappeared

Before he disappeared from the face of the Earth, John Tam called in at Wah Lee's, the Chinese goods store on Auckland's Hobson St. Unusually for a man who never accepted offers of help, he asked a favour. Could Barry Wah Lee write a letter for him? It had to be in English and it had to apologise to someone, someone he thought had misunderstood him.

Wah Lee wishes he had taken more notice of that letter written eight years ago because soon after, Tam vanished, and the coroner is likely to rule next week that he is presumed dead.

The market gardener was a loner but apparently had no enemies. Police found no sign of a struggle at his house and no sign of a break-in. There was no indication he had been in an accident or become ill, and for him to wander off or pack up and leave was totally out of character. He was simply gone.

The letter written by Wah Lee might have been the glimmer of a clue but he never knew who the letter was for and there was no real trail to follow.

Tam lived quietly next door to the family market garden in Tidal Rd, Mangere, and had retired from the hard labour of growing 14ha of vegetables. He kept to himself, seeing his family and going to the local shops but hardly communicating with anyone else. He had little money. Wah Lee only knows the last time he saw the 63-year-old he had seemed "concerned".

Wah Lee runs his shop with his brother. Their grandparents began the business 100 years ago and it has been catering for Chinese immigrants since.

It's the kind of place you can pick up tai chi shoes for $15 a pair, a new wok, or some Chinese medicine. Tam used to feel at ease there. The affable Wah Lee looks at his watch and says, "Actually, he should be in about now".

Before he went missing, Tam would catch the bus from the old family homestead every month or so and call in. He would sit down and rest or go out the back to chat in Chinese to Wah Lee's mum, Linda, now in her 80s.

Tam was described as a "slow thinker" and Barry found his Chinese hard to understand. He admits he did not take a lot of notice of him.

"I used to talk to him about things he wanted. Sometimes he asked us to bring things in. He got [Chinese] music tapes. He'd buy dried fish and shrimp paste and sauces, and sometimes he would discuss how to fix his tape recorder because he would play his music on it."

This time of the year was special and Tam would arrive with freshly harvested vegetables, a yearly tradition of appreciation to the Wah Lees for the help and kindness they had shown the Tams, who had fled chaotic and communist post-war China in the early 1950s.

Tam was about 12 when he arrived with his mother, two brothers and a sister, reuniting with their father, who had scouted out New Zealand a year or so earlier. The family initially needed a bit of help, recalls Wah Lee.

"I think Dad was quite helpful. In those days it was desperate times. It was far more necessary to get out of China. My parents and my grandfather were quite helpful and I think a lot of Chinese remembered us because I don't think they took their pound of flesh. I shouldn't say, but you know some people would take advantage ... but dad never did. They used to even stay here."

He reaches to a crammed shelf behind the counter and brings out a Chinese cassette Cantonese for Foreigners, which Tam once bought to try to improve his English.

But he talked more to Mrs Wah Lee, who sits in a family room at the back of the shop reading Chinese newspapers.

Her English is broken but her son translates as she tells how Tam once told her someone had tried to pry open his windows and that once something had been stolen. Later, Barry Wah Lee remembers her saying that at some stage, windows at Tam's house were smashed.

Mrs Wah Lee warned John against carrying much money in his pocket. She drank tea with him, and adds, "He gone long time," nodding in sadness.

Barry Wah Lee recalls that the last time he saw Tam he was not his usual self. "He was a bit concerned, actually, because he asked me to write a letter to say sorry to somebody, and in English. Obviously, they were English-speaking people and I don't know what was going on or why he wanted me to write that one.

"So I guess probably as I didn't understand him very well. I just nodded my head usually, and obviously I should have taken far more notice ... There might have been something going on there."

Tam's brother David has no idea why he should have wanted the letter written. If he had been hassled by anyone he had not told him. He could not think why he would need to apologise to anyone."Why? He did nothing wrong to anybody."

His brother did turn to him for help once when he was burgled and the police were called but that was some years before he disappeared. He did not think any of the locals were mean to him. Tam did not know any of them, living his self-contained life.

Tidal Rd consists of brick and tile and wooden homes on one side, with the Tams' market garden on the other, and some factories. David Tam still lives and works there. He climbs down from his tractor, smiling gently and shaking hands. It has been a sad eight years he says. "It's in the mind all the time."

He is not sure there is much new he can say. He has been saying the same things to police and reporters for years. As he walks towards the dilapidated house where his brother lived, past rows of cabbages, he comments the cabbages are "not quite ready. They have just started to close".

He has all sorts of vegetables planted but not potatoes because they are expensive to grow. Market gardening is an expensive business, with fertilisers and sprays and back-breaking work.

Tam is in his 60s now. As the only one of the siblings still working the gardens, and with his children following careers in computing and accountancy, he has to think about what to do with the business. His family have to move on from John's disappearance.

The land was a dairy farm before the Tams took it over in 1958, and the old, four-bedroom house, standing isolated towards the perimeter, was the farmhouse.

Once all the family lived there but David moved down the road when he married and, in the end, only John remained.

On the creaky front deck David seems hesitant to open the locked door. Peering in through broken windows, a pair of gumboots can be seen on the dusty floor. "Yes, they are probably John's," says David, turning away.

On the last day he saw his brother, David was working and noticed John going off in the morning. He assumed he was going to the shops.

He did not see him return but noticed the next day his door had not been opened, which was John's usual habit. After a few days it was still closed and he went to check. He knocked on the door but there was no answer. The back door was closed but not locked. He went to Otahuhu police station and reported John missing.

Asked if they were a close family, David says if anything happened they always helped each other. Asked if his brother seemed happy, he is a little puzzled. "Well, hard for me to say. In my view I say, well, it's part of the work isn't it, happy or not, it's part of, like, living." He shakes hands again, walks slowly away and gets back on the tractor.

Earlier, Wah Lee talked about John Tam's beliefs. He worked the land, and work for Chinese people like him was something almost holy. "He worked hard and then he would feel fulfilled through it."

For Detective Inspector Bernie Hollewand, then a detective sergeant in Mangere, the Tam case remains a frustration. Initially, police were not overly concerned. Independently living adults sometimes just go off, and usually they return.

But as time went by and the police found out more about Tam, they realised he was not the type to go off anywhere. Hollewand wondered if perhaps he had become ill, maybe had a stroke somewhere, or become disoriented and someone had taken him in. Despite plenty of publicity, he was not traced to any hospital and no one came forward.

A few cranks telephoned suggesting he was buried in the cabbage patch. But Hollewand says they conducted a search of the gardens and beyond, 20 police officers and recruits standing side by side, searching every centimetre.

"We did sweeps through the gullies and through the tributaries leading to the Waokauri Creek. We were quite confident he wasn't in the market garden. We used a cadaver dog, just as a check on ourselves in case there was something dead there. Nah."

They door-knocked the houses opposite. Some of the properties had a view of the house, but no one had seen anything.

When Wah Lee told Hollewand about the letter he went to the shop several times. The police would have explored further if they could but the details were vague.

Hollewand had been told about a broken window and a burglary but with the juvenile population in Mangere and the incidence of burglary, it would be expected someone would try it at some stage. There was nothing to suggest anything was related to the disappearance.

When they searched the house they found few possessions. Tam did not seem to have anything worth stealing. Now, with the passage of time, Hollewand thinks accidental death is a remote possibility and he was probably murdered. But why? "Don't know. Robbed for a few dollars in his pocket? I don't know."

Usually, when someone is attacked for a few dollars, the victim is left injured or to die. Usually, with a missing person, there are whispers to start the investigation. "But there's nothing in this case. Absolutely nothing. To my mind this is not a case of a staged disappearance. This man had no other place to go and no other place that he appeared to want to go.

"He wasn't fleeing a domestic situation. He wasn't fleeing business pressures, he wasn't fleeing any sort of situation. He had no criminal associations, no drug-dealing gangs, he had no reason to disappear voluntarily."

John had $105 in the bank. He refused to apply for a pension or a benefit so his brother used to give him money to live on. That $105 is still there but of John Tam there is not a trace.

14,000 missing names a year

Each year the police work on 14,000 missing persons incidents and 7000 of those are entered into a database.

More than 80 per cent are cleared within two weeks. At any one time the database has 1200 names on it.

About 600 are likely to have been reported missing for more than a year. A significant number of these are people who are thought to have fallen down a crevasse or been drowned, for example, and are presumed dead.

Just one per cent of the people are still missing after one year, but again this includes people for whom there is an unrealistic expectation they will be found alive.

A number of missing persons reports relate to "recidivists" who go missing several times.

Females aged between 10 and 19 make up the largest group, followed by males in the same age group.

* source New Zealand Police