Detective promoted

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 6

Detective promoted

The Christchurch police force will soon lose one of its most experienced, and unflappable, detectives. Detective Senior-Sergeant Bob Meikle, a man who has been involved in many major crime investigations, will at the end of the month transfer to New Plymouth where he will head the city’s C. 1.8. Detective Senior-Sergeant Meikle, a former truck driver, joined the police in 1959, and has worked in Christchurch for a total of 17 years. He has also been based in Invercargill, Timaru, and Ashburton. Among the investigations he recalled this week were those into a death in a river near Greymouth, the importing of heroin at Karamea, and “the case of the yellow headlamp” murder inquiry at Waimate in the late 19605. In the Waimate case, a witness told the police of a suspicious car which was seen on the night of the murder and had one yellow headlamp, said Detective Senior-Sergeant Meikle. Soon after, a policeman driving on a side road spotted the car and its driver was subsequently questioned. “He did not give satisfactory answers and a search of his farm revealed a body,” he said. A drug investigation which started at Karamea, on the West Coast, in 1979, resulted in the discovery of the largest amount of heroin ever imported into New Zealand. Consequently, a self-em-ployed Auckland property developer was convicted in the High Court of importing heroin, and received a long prison sentence. The unsolved Alfred Anderson murder is one of Detective Senior-Sergeant Meikle’s disappointments. Alfred Anderson was found dead, with gruesome neck

and head wounds, in his Waltham flat in June, 1982. The murder file was still open and the case could yet be solved, said Detective Senior-Sergeant Meikle. He said that he preferred working on “heavy inquiries, something you can get your teeth into.” “I like to walk away from a case knowing that the rules of fair play have been followed and that justice has been done,” he said. Crime had become more violent over the years, he said. In Christchurch, the

police had noticed that over ; the last year more people were carrying knives. Christchurch was also known as a city which had a large number of burglaries. Detective Senior-Sergeant Meikle has a reputation among his fellow policemen as being unflappable, fair, and extremely competent. His successor in Christchurch has not yet been appointed.