KEY POINTS:
Indie Corbett picked up the morning paper, saw a photograph of her dad and began to read.
Grant Adams had been missing for 16 months and this was the first sign she'd seen of him for two Christmases and two birthdays.
What Indie read made her scream. There was nothing written that the 10-year-old understood of her father, especially the paragraphs which said he would never come home again.
"A criminal with strong links to notorious gangs," she read. "Suspected P dealer", "criminal underworld" and "believed to be dead as the result of a drug rip-off".
She cried and picked up the phone, dialling the police hotline 0800 SPEAKUP listed at the bottom of the article, demanding to speak with the senior police detective in charge.
"Why did you say these things about my dad?" she wanted to know. "Where is he?"
And that's how Grant's mum, Sam Corbett, found Indie last week. Angry and crying, on the phone, demanding answers the police don't have.
And what do you tell her, this little girl who dances ballet, jazz and hiphop? That her dad was no angel, but also that he wasn't a bad man. That instead, there was an ugliness inside that he couldn't fight, that came twice a year and went as quickly as it arrived. That his father, Trevor, was nothing but bad all the time and sometimes, even though he was dead, Grant would talk to him.
"What was portrayed in the news is not the son I know," says Sam. "He was the light of my life. He was a musician, he was an artist, he was a chef. He's dead. I know he's dead. Indie is refusing to believe it."
And no wonder. "How are you princess," wrote Grant Adams, who would now be 29, in beautiful, careful script. His letters to his daughter are kept between plastic sheets in a special folder. "I love you heaps, my honey, and I know you love your dad heaps too. You are a very special girl, Indaka. You have a very important part in the world. Whenever I am sad I look at your smile and that brings happiness to me once more."
It's hard for Indie to understand, to connect those words with the police call for help to find her dad.
It was 1982 and Grant Adams was four when Sam ran back to New Zealand from Australia, fleeing years of violent abuse at the hands of Trevor Adams. Neighbours in the small Australian farming town gave her and her children the money to escape. For years he had beaten her every way he could think, eaten steak while Sam and the kids ate mince, crushed Christmas presents and thrown fearfully prepared dinners to the kitchen ceiling.
There was something wrong with his mind, Sam recognises now. Something that drove him to heroin and, for a while, made him "the biggest drug dealer in Adelaide".
Sam had been a Sunday school teacher and she would pray for change, which never came.
They couldn't escape. Trevor would ring New Zealand, timing the calls for when Grant was alone to accept the collect call charges. Sam would find $1000 owing to Telecom; the cost of having Trevor tell her son how evil she was.
Later, Sam would tell the kids their dad Trevor died in a car accident. "I think that was a mistake," she says now, because perhaps the truth would have made a difference.
Trevor Adams actually died north of Adelaide one night in the late 1980s after stabbing Joy Matthews, 39, more than 20 times. He left her to be found by her ex-husband Mike Matthews. He took Joy's 1970 Holden Kingswood and raced north, driving it into a semi-trailer near Port Wakefield.
"Grant was a clever, smiling little boy, a really loving kid," says Sam. "He was quite a delight, he used to make me laugh." Grant found school easy; he had obvious artistic abilities and would read years beyond his level.
Growing up in West Auckland, he was free to roam as Westie kids did and, with three brothers and two sisters, always had a large pack of friends. Life was what it was then, with waterslides in the back garden and large family birthdays. They were happy.
"Then he hit puberty. He just turned from being an okay kid to being a child with a huge chip on his shoulder."
Grant was first brought home by police after he worked out a scam with money machines. The officers said the scheme was years in advance of his age; the sort of achievement that wasn't a moment of pride in a mother's life. As he grew into teenage years, he struggled with convention, resisting rules and regulations. He started telling Sam he was talking to his dad. It brought the horrors back; the bastard just wouldn't die.
There were psychologists, counsellors and "tough love" programmes. She sent him to Metro College in Mt Eden, which taught using alternative education methods. There were silly burglaries and other juvenile crimes which made no sense for a boy with "so many talents".
His mates called him "Granit", because they all had nicknames. When the police used the nickname last week, spelling it "Granite", Sam says it lost the sweetness it carried from those troubled teenage years.
Grant left school and moved in with mates. He'd smoke dope and have a few drinks, although spirits sent him crazy in a way that made Sam remember the boy's father. He went on the dole and attended Government-run courses until a food management course helped him turn a corner. He became a chef but those late teens were still littered with patches of deep depression. "He was still talking to his father then, too." He'd cut his arms, even try to kill himself, winding up in hospital. Those attempts ended when one of his mates tried and succeeded.
Grant fell in love and Indie was born. The relationship didn't last and Indie has lived with Sam since she was two.
Indie grew older and Grant struggled with himself. He did a short stretch inside, but came out determined to go straight. He moved to Rotorua, fell in love again and fathered another daughter.
It was the best of years; the six-month cycle was kept at bay as he worked hard, cooked well, bought furniture and created a garden. One of his recipes was printed in Cuisine, and he won an award as a chef.
When that relationship fell apart, it broke him. One night he snapped, no one knows why. Sam and Indie were asleep when a rage came over Grant. He hit his mother - "I couldn't go outside for two weeks," she says - and cried out 'I love you Mum' as the police took him away.
She pleaded in court for a community sentence, to keep him from jail, with counselling and anger management plans. The judge gave Grant the chance.
He moved to Royal Oak, near where he was working, then Tauranga and finally Napier. When they last spoke, in October 2005, she was angry with him, demanding to know if he was attending the courses laid out by the court. He hadn't.
He emptied his bank account on November 16, 2005 and made his last call on his mobile phone a month later on December 13. When he missed Indie's February birthday, the family grew worried and a month later, Sam told police he was missing.
One year later, as the police asked the public for help to find Grant, it was the press conference that cut Indie to the core.
"'It wasn't the dad we knew, honey'," Sam says she told Indie. "Indie needs to know her dad wasn't a bad man. She can't carry around what Grant carried his whole life."
