Wartime murder or tall tale?

Police considered digging up the Brown St reserve to search for the victim of Jack Ball. Photo / Janna Dixon

In 2005 the Herald on Sunday revealed a wartime murder mystery. Now the intrigue is deepening.

As cold cases go, it was a good one. Walking in off the street, a man told police that his grandfather had shot and killed an American sailor in Auckland 60 years earlier in a fight over a woman.

The 2005 tip sparked a two-year investigation here and a missing persons search in the United States, even though the alleged killer - who can now be revealed as Jack Ball - had long since died.

At one stage, it even brought three US military investigators and an anthropologist to Auckland, eager to dig up a Ponsonby park and solve the mystery.

Now, four years on, it appears the case is as solved as it ever will be. A body has never been found, even though the search for answers to the war-time mystery took our police and American investigators on a trawl through history.

The search went back to the great American invasion of the 1940s, when Kiwi men streamed out of the country to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The Americans arrived to find the biggest man-drought the country had ever known.

Like many families, the Balls had their own set of legends that were passed down the generations. When Phillip Ball jnr - Jack Ball's grandson - heard one such story, he felt he had to tell police.

Appearing at the public counter of Dunedin police station, he told officers about Jack Ball, a "ladies' man" who had sold a West Auckland farm for £3000 and stashed the proceeds under his bed. He bought a pistol to protect his savings - a fortune at the time.

Apparently, Jack Ball was seeing a woman called Jennifer, who was also engaged to a United States sailor. When the sailor found out about the affair he confronted Ball with a knife. Ball drew the pistol, fired and killed the sailor.

Ball then covered up his crime, or so he would tell his son Phillip Ball snr in later years, as he began to drink more regularly. The family was living on Brown St in Ponsonby at the time, and behind the rented home was a small garden with a tamarillo tree, beneath which he said his victim was secretly buried.

Jack Ball died in 1969, drowning when his boat sank in the Tamaki Estuary.

World War II was, says historian Harry Bioletti, a time of great tension. "[Kiwi men] envied [American servicemen] because they had so much money and looked so smartly turned out. There were stoushes and fights."

At first glance, it appeared one of those fights ended in murder. A police file was forwarded to the Auckland policing district, where Detective Inspector Bruce Shadbolt oversaw the investigation.

Other family members were interviewed, including Phillip Ball snr, who confirmed to the Herald on Sunday he had heard the story from his father in the final years of his life, and had in turn passed it on to his children.

Shadbolt established the home in Bruce St no longer existed, and the property had been turned into Auckland City Council's Brown Reserve.

Meanwhile, the United States Embassy was informed - and the response showed the passion the nation has for repatriating its servicemen from anywhere in the world, wherever they have fallen.

Shadbolt admits to being surprised that shortly after the Americans were informed, three US Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigators and an anthropologist arrived in Auckland.

"They jumped on a plane and came out here all ready to dig up a park."

Officers worked through documents from the 1940s, tracing the Ball family from a house in central Auckland - now a parking lot off Cook St - to Wanganui and back to Ponsonby.

Records from schools helped police pin down the date the family lived on Brown St to 1949-1950 - well outside the timeframe of Jack Ball's story of a war-time altercation.

"When Brown St came into [the story], the war was over. As things went on, there were little things that didn't quite gel," said Shadbolt.

Inquiries with the United States also answered questions. There were initially three missing servicemen, then just one as the others were traced.

Finally, about 2007, police were told that the final missing person had been identified after recently dying. "They hadn't been able to pinpoint anyone who was unaccounted for," Shadbolt said.

With no one missing, and a timeline that didn't match, police contemplated searching for the grave.

Shadbolt said officers investigated using ground-penetrating radar, which peers beneath the ground to reveal variations in soil density. It can reveal areas of disturbed ground, or more solid objects - like a body.

However, it also provides misleading results. Clumps of roots or other buried material could have had officers turning over the entire reserve.

"It's not as sharp as you see on CSI," said Shadbolt. Officers had sourced original property plans, so were at least able to work out where the house was and roughly where the garden would have been.

Against this, though, was the change time had wrought on Brown St. Much of the street's exposed areas had been shifted, and the reserve would have been extensively dug up for planting and landscaping when it was created.

If there was anything to find, it was likely it had been shifted years before. "To take it any further would have been speculative," said Shadbolt. "We exhausted all the inquiries we could to ascertain if it was true."

Historian Bioletti, who wrote The Yanks Are Coming: The American Invasion of New Zealand 1942-1944, was not surprised to hear the result. "By 1945, there were very few [US servicemen] remaining, wrapping up their depots."

By 1949-1950, a missing sailor would have been well-documented.

For Phillip Ball snr, the outcome was no surprise. His father told the story after a few drinks, which became more common in his last years. "It was," he said, "just drinking talk - I think."