This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2024. Today we take a look at some compelling true crime cases.
No body: How do police decide a missing person might have been murdered?
No body to examine, no murder weapon, no DNA, and no confessions.
Crown prosecutor Barnaby Hawes acknowledged those were the circumstances the jury had to return a decision on, when he gave his closing address at the High Court at Christchurch in October, 2023.
Despite that, David Benbow was found guilty of murdering his childhood friend Michael McGrath seven years ago, in the suburb of Halswell in 2017.
McGrath’s brother, Simon, said the family was “elated” with the verdict, but one thing was missing. Michael’s body.
“This is the right verdict,” he said, but he wanted to ask Benbow where his brother was.
Preliminary research by justice officials found there had been only about five cases with a murder conviction without a body in New Zealand. Benbow brought that number to six.
One of the cases, the murder of Leah Stephens and Dean Fuller-Sandys, hit the headlines again last year as two people found guilty of the killings hoped to appeal their decades-old convictions.
Meanwhile, police seem to be increasingly comfortable considering homicide charges without a victim’s body.
The high-profile missing person case of Yanfei Bao – which turned into a homicide case – is evidence of this.
So how do police decide when a missing person search turns into a homicide investigation?
The extraordinary life of a Kiwi accused of killing his wife
Have you seen Alex Lang? Or Donald McPherson, as he was known when he stood trial in an English courtroom for the murder of his wife, Paula Leeson.
Paula’s brother Neville Leeson wants to know if the man he knew as McPherson really is in New Zealand.
They last heard of McPherson was just before Christmas 2021 at a hearing leading up to the inquest into Paula’s death. McPherson didn’t turn up to court. Instead, he said through his lawyer he had returned to New Zealand and would testify at the inquest hearings by video link.
For Neville, it’s a promise from a man who has lied so often.
The Kiwi with multiple identities has now lost a civil trial where he was accused of murdering his wife so he could cash in on multiple insurance policies.
Born Alex Lang of Takapuna, the former Westlake Boys student was known as Donald McPherson to Paula’s family, who say it’s a “huge relief” to know her sister’s suspected killer would not benefit from any of her 14 insurance policies.
Journalist David Fisher studied the evidence and interviewed witnesses for this extraordinary case of the Kiwi accused in an English court of killing his wife for a $7 million insurance windfall.
Two slain tourists, lies, and jailhouse snitches: David Tamihere’s 34-year legal saga
David Tamihere spent almost 20 years in prison for the murder of two Swedish backpackers in 1989. He has always maintained his innocence.
In 2020, he was granted the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a witness was found guilty of lying at Tamihere’s trial. The case returned to the Court of Appeal last year, 33 years after the first trial.
In July, the court released its decision upholding the convictions, saying the evidence still proved his guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Tamihere is serving a life sentence and was released on parole in 2010. On the eve of the court hearing his appeal, he was a cleaner and lawnmower at a West Auckland marae.
Tamihere owes his case being reviewed again, decades later, to the ‘jailhouse lawyer’.
Killer confession: A prison yard bombshell and the jailbirds’ crusade to find a body
The shrill foreign voice bounced around the concrete tomb-like walls. Tingjun Cao was making a scene. Prison guards rushed to the one-man cell.
Like most things behind bars, nothing escaped the attention of the other inmates. And, as ever, it was them against the screws. They came to the defence of Cao who seemed to simply want a change of clothes. They started braying, yelling for the Corrections officers to back off.
“We were shouting, ‘Leave him alone’. We were all behind him,” recalls former Christchurch Men’s Prison inmate Steve*.
It was December 2023 and Cao had been arrested and charged with the murder of Christchurch real estate agent Yanfei Bao.
The mother of one had disappeared in July last year and never been seen since.
Police alleged that Cao – who had pleaded not guilty and would fight his case in court, and ultimately fail – had met her at a house she was selling in the suburb of Hornby, attacked her with a knife, and dumped her body in a shallow grave on a farm outside of the city.
Until the ruckus at the cell, Steve didn’t know who Cao was. But after that incident, he slowly got to know him.
The former inmate says Cao coughed up how he killed Yanfei Bao one day in the prison yard. It was a graphic, cold-blooded confession that prompted other inmates to try to get the shy, retiring Chinese national to reveal where he had dumped her body.
Infamous conman on his life of crime and faking his own death
There was the super-yacht-owning Harvard graduate and multimillionaire, the confidant to Saudi princes, a World Bank tax analyst and a long-standing member of the New York State Bar Association.
This is no elite-of-elite round table dinner - it’s just a few of the stories contrived by Wayne Eaglesome to go with the many aliases such as George Von Rothschild, Father Antony Garibaldi, Dr Angus Harrow, Alex Newman, Bernhardt Bentinck, Alex Bergen, Bernhardt Augustus Longwater, Barnaby Gordon, Richard Mountjoy, Alex Bauer and Ari Ben Yitzhak.
With more than 250 convictions to his name and dozens of aliases, Eaglesome is one of the country’s most infamous conmen. A man accustomed to blurring the line between fact and fiction, he spoke to the Herald about his life of crime. But after the interview, things took an unexpectedly personal turn.
