Police find couple dead in remote valley

Press, 8 January 1980, Page 1

Police find couple dead in remote valley

PA Whangarei The police yesterday found the bodies of a man and a woman in the remote Tangowahine Valley near where the car of last Thursday’s Hikurangi murder victim, Raymond Boon, w as found abandoned on Friday.

The bodies, believed to be those of William Te Huia Flavell, aged 29, and Adele Marshall-Smith, aged 19, were lying side by side about 65 metres from the road.

Both had gunshot wounds to the head.

The police had been seeking the couple in connection with their investigation of the killing of Mr Boon and Stephen Erceg, aged 27, whose bodies were found in a lay-by of the Marua Road north-east of Hikurangi on Thursday morning.

Subject to a pathologist’s report, the police consider the deaths to have been caused by gunshot wounds to the head.

The police were reasonably satisfied nobody else was involved, but this possibility has not been discounted.

While no named person was being sought, the reason for the four deaths was still unexplained. According to a reporter of the “New Zealand Herald,” the hunt ended early yesterday afternoon when the bodies of a man and a young woman were found by a small police team in steep bush. They were about 65m off the Tangowahine Valley Road, which runs north off the main highway between Whangarei and Dargaville. Three days earlier the police had found one of the murdered men’s cars, a Mitsubishi Galant, on the other side of the road just a few hundred metres away. The bodies were found by an Auckland policeman, Detective D., J. Wood, who was one of‘a small group of police systematically searching dense native bush near where the . Galant had been abandoned. It appeared that both had died from gunshot wounds and had been dead for some time. A shotgun and two rifles missing from the Whangarei home

of Miss Marshall-Smith's mother were lying near the dead couple.

The bodies were sprawled on the ground and bathed in blood. There was no sign that the couple had built a camp intending to stay in the bush. “It looks as if they had gone there to die,” said a policeman. The police had been searching for the couple since the discovery on Friday of the bodies of the two Whangarei men.

During the week-end, after discovering notes at the homes of Mr Flavell and Miss Marshall-Smith, the police announced that they feared for the safety of the couple. Detectives have been working on a theory that drugs may have been involved in the Hikurangi murders. Messrs Erceg, Boon and Flavell and Miss Marshall-Smith mixed in the same circles, and according to police, all used drugs. Early theories were that the two men were killed

during a confrontation over a drugs deal which went sour. But after the latest discovery no clear motive had emerged for either of. ..they double deaths. Detective Senior-Ser-geant E. M. Jones said detectives now had to interview friends and acquaintances of the dead people to “fathom out the motives.”

When kissed goodbye by * her boyfriend, Steve Erceg, ’ on Thursday afternoon, Erica Mortimer had no '■ doubt she would see him again.

The next day, his body and that of Raymond Boon were found

She said she had not known where the two men were going when he left her.

The pair had gone to Mr Boon’s Hikurangi house where they had lunch with Mr Boon’s girlfriend, Vicky Smith. After lunch, they were joined by Mr. Flavell and Miss Marshall-Smith, the police believe.