Tāngarākau campground murder trial: Youth worker recalls finding Adrian Humphreys’ body

The body of Adrian Humphreys was found at a remote Taranaki campsite on May 7, 2022.

A youth worker staying at a remote campground with three at-risk teens left his tent at dawn and headed to the communal kitchen for a coffee. Only moments later, he came across his “worst nightmare”.

Hayden Tunnicliffe could see ahead of him a man lying face down on the ground.

“We start jogging towards him,” he recalled.

“I got to him and you could tell straight away that something wasn’t right.”

The colleague with him began to roll the man over, but he was “stiff”, Tunnicliffe said.

“That’s when we figured he was gone.”

The body was Adrian Humphreys, a fellow camper at Bushlands Campground in Tāngarākau, eastern Taranaki.

Tunnicliffe saw blood on Humphreys’ torso and recognised he had been stabbed. He immediately rushed for help.

“I was really shaken up. I felt sick,” he said while giving evidence on Thursday in the High Court at New Plymouth.

“It’s my worst nightmare finding something like that.”

Now, one of the teens Tunnicliffe was caring for while at the camp, as part of the youth programme Start Taranaki, is facing charges of murder and burglary.

The Crown alleges Justice Williamson-Atkinson, 17, took a knife from the camp’s kitchen and during the night he snuck out of his tent and killed Humphreys.

The teen wanted to leave the campground but needed a car so he broke into the 57-year-old’s camper to steal his keys and, during the burglary, stabbed Humphreys five times, it is alleged.

Williamson-Atkinson’s defence team, however, claim it was another teen from the youth programme who committed the act.

The jury in the trial, which began on Monday before Justice Francis Cooke, has heard Humphreys arrived at the campground, located along the Forgotten World Highway, on May 6, 2022.

The outdoor enthusiast was a former Royal Air Force serviceman from Britain.

At the time of his death, he was living in Rotorua where he worked at Southern Cross Healthcare as an anaesthetic technician.

He had stayed at Bushlands Campground only weeks before and was excited to be returning with the camper trailer he had just bought.

Within hours of his arrival, three Start Taranaki mentors, including Tunnicliffe, arrived with Williamson-Atkinson and two other teens.

The Kaponga-based organisation provides an eight-week programme to troubled youth involving time spent in the wilderness, the beach, a marae, and in a residential space learning skills such as barbering.

Adrian Humphreys was allegedly killed for his car, pictured at a petrol station the day before he died.

In evidence, given via audio-visual link from Australia, Tunnicliffe, who no longer works for Start Taranaki, said it was the programme’s policy to have “24-hour surveillance” over the boys, except while they were in the bathroom.

While Williamson-Atkinson had washed the dinner dishes that night, including a knife used to cut meat and tomatoes, Tunnicliffe said he was supervised.

Before bed, they sat around a firepit where there was “lots of talking and lots of jokes” among the group.

There was nothing concerning about the youngsters’ behaviour that evening, Tunnicliffe said, except when Williamson-Atkinson was caught “slipping” another teen a pen which had been used to graffiti the campground’s bathroom.

The mentors slept in a shared tent with its main door open, facing the teens’ pup tents.

Despite the campground managers’ earlier evidence stating mentors would usually sleep in the same tent as the teens when the programme visited the site, Tunnicliffe said he did not have any concerns about the trio being in individual tents.

However, Williamson-Atkinson had tried to keep the door to his tent open that night but was told to close it.

Tunnicliffe was the last of the mentors to go to bed and said that when he did he was “100 per cent convinced the boys were asleep”.

When he woke the following morning, on May 7, 2022, he noticed the door to Williamson-Atkinson’s tent was open and the teen was awake and peering outside.

“It was kind of weird.”

After the discovery of Humphreys’ body, the campground was secured and the mentors and teens were confined to one tent.

Tunnicliffe said the boys had questions about the stabbing, but they were “all pretty good” about it.

The group was later driven to a police station by an officer and during the trip, Williamson-Atkinson fell asleep.

Under cross-examination by defence lawyer Nicola Graham, Tunnicliffe said it appeared another teen in the police car, the one whom the defence claims killed Humphreys, had “tears in his eyes”.

That same teen, who has name suppression, became more withdrawn in the days after the death, while Williamson-Atkinson “went about like nothing had happened”, Tunnicliffe said.

He also said under cross-examination that knives were usually removed from kitchens when the programme visited a site but said no mentor was tasked with that job this time.

Tara Shaskey joined NZME in 2022 as a news director and Open Justice reporter. She has been a reporter since 2014 and previously worked at Stuff where she covered crime and justice, arts and entertainment, and Māori issues.