Teresa case lingers

Press, 17 December 1988, Page 8

Teresa case lingers

By NEIL CLARKSON Eighteen months after the death of Teresa Cormack in Napier, the police are still tantalisingly short of the evidence needed to take her suspected murderer to court. The thousands of statements, reports and documents relating to the death of Teresa, aged six, lie in about 200 large folders stored in a room at the Napier police station. Teresa disappeared in the Napier suburb of Maraenui on June 19 last year between her school and her home. Her disappearance sparked a huge search which ended days later with the discovery of her body partly buried on the beach at Whirinaki Bluff, beside the busy Napier-Wairoa highway. “Inquiries have basically concluded,” said Detective Senior-Ser-geant Alan Aitken, second in charge of the murder investigation. “We still get odd bits of information coming in from members of the public which we look at, but a lot of it is already known and doubles-up or confirms what we already know.” Detective Senior-Sergeant Aitken, who is head of the Hastings Combined Investigation Unit, said the file will probably be reviewed with the investigation’s head, Detective Inspector Ron Cooper, early next year. This would include a full review of suspects in a bid to eliminate them or find something that may point to one as being the killer. “A majority of the persons in the

suspect category have" been eliminated,” he said. Detective Senior-Sergeant Aitken said there were only a handful of strong suspects. “From my point of view, as second in charge of the file, I believe there is a person who is clearly out in front — who clearly stands ahead as the person most likely to have committed the offence. “But having said that, a lot of people want to know why we haven’t done anything. “We really haven’t got sufficient evidence to bring a charge against him.” There was not enough evidence that would be admissible in court, he said. Detective Senior-Sergeant Aitken said the suspect he considers most likely to have committed the murder lives in the Napier suburb of Maraenui, where Teresa lived. The police initially hoped that DNA testing would lead to the murderer. Body fluids and hair found on Teresa’s body were sent to an English laboratory for analysis. “The DNA let us down. It didn’t work. There was insufficient DNA extracted from the samples taken from Teresa.” Detective Senior-Sergeant Aitken said both he and Detective Inspector Cooper had been touched emotionally by the murder. “We are both committed to ultimately getting there in the end.”