Murder inquiry dogged by bad luck

Press, 29 December 1988, Page 1

Murder inquiry dogged by bad luck

By NEIL CLARKSON Fortune was not on the side of Detective Inspector Emmett Mitten when he packed his bags in Christchurch 18 years ago and set off for South Westland to investigate the disappearance of Jennifer Mary Beard. Miss Beard, aged 25, had been dead about two weeks when Mr Mitten, now Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Canterbury-Westland police region, crossed the Main Divide. It was the beginning of a murder inquiry which was to occupy much of his working life for nine months. Even

today all fresh information on the unsolved murder goes to him. The murder occurred near the Haast Bridge just after midday on December 31, 1969. Eleven days later her fiance, Mr Reg Williams, of Tasmania, went to the Milford police station to report her six days overdue in meeting him. Her body was found by ponce on January 15. It lay under the last span on the north side of the bridge. . The heat of the past fortnight had taken its toll and a Christchurch pathologist, Dr Patrick Kelleher, was unable to identify

with any certainty the cause of death. It was clear, however, that Jennifer Beard had been murdered and he considered strangulation was most likely. Dr Kelleher noted that the three pairs of pants worn by her had been neatly rolled to her knees. On the other hand her blouse had clearly been torn open and pushed up round her head and neck. Her fastened brassiere had been pushed up. The police considered that she had gone beneath the bridge to relieve herself and had then been attacked.

It became clear to the police that Miss Beard, who had been hitch-hiking to Milford to join ner fiance, had been murdered by the driver of a mid-1950s Vauxhall car. She is believed to have accepted a ride from the driver at the car park near Fox Glacier. At times the police were frustratingly close to the break-, through needed to positively identify her killer. Fortune, it seemed, was not on their side: © Her pack, which contained her camera, was never found. The police believed she had taken a photograph at Fox

Glacier which included the murderer and his car. ® A photograph taken of the Haast Bridge on the day of Miss Beard’s death showed the murderer’s car crossing the bridge. The picture was taken about two seconds too late. The bridge obscured its number plate. ® A child who walked beneath the bridge soon after the murder returned to tell her parents a woman was sleeping there. Had they checked the police would have been just three days behind the murderer, not a fortnight.

Information is still being given to the police 18 years after the death of the Welsh-born schoolteacher, who was the daughter of a Methodist minister.

This month, Mr Mitten has been called twice by people offering information.

“I have had a lengthy letter from a resident in the top of the South Island with various information concerning a particular person,” he said. A Christchurch person has been in touch with information about another man.

“I suppose this year I have had people come forward with information on about eight separate occasions. On some occasions you can say straight off ‘that is quite incorrect,’ but sometimes you have to look at it to see if you can work anything round it.

“But I have got past the stage of getting excited. “The most recent occasion when we really got geared up was about four years ago. It was quite direct information concerning a person’s whereabouts at the time of the murder.

“We secretly carried out quite a considerable investigation, but came up with nothing. “When you consider the length of time, it is quite surprising how it keeps in the eyes of the public.” The murder investigation got huge publicity. The police worked in an isolated area with only one telephone at their disposal.

“My attitude right at the outset was that we had a murder,” he said. “There was the fact that she had last been seen getting into a car. “From all accounts, she was a girl of very high moral integrity. She was engaged to this Tasmanian man. “Her whole history was one of consistency. When she didn’t turn up and had last been seen getting into a car, it didn’t look too good,” said Mr Mitten.

"The biggest difficulty I foresaw at first was finding her body. She was last seen on the road south of Fox Glacier, going to Wanaka. That is a long distance.” Within four or five days, the police had searched both sides of the road between Franz Josef and Wanaka. “That was a mighty task.” The break came when a couple reported to the Dunedin police on January 15 that they had stopped in the rest area beside the Haast Bridge on December 31 to help a man having trouble with gear linkages in a Vauxhall car. A woman was in the car.

Two policemen were sent to check the Haast Bridge area and found her body. Mr Mitten, now accustomed to calls about Christmas from the news media checking on the inquiry, would not be drawn on long-standing rumours of a prime suspect in Timaru. “The only answer I have ever given is that we never said that we had a suspect for the murder. We never confirmed that there was a man in Timaru that we spent a lot of time on. “But if you were to ask if it was true we spent a lot of time in Timaru, I would have to say yes.” It is, however, widely known that

the police had a Timaru suspect who drove a Vauxhall car. The man eventually publicly said he was the suspect and claimed the police had been hounding him. The man was hit by a car and seriously injured within two years of Jennifer Beard’s murder. He spent about two years at Cherry Farm, near liunedin, before being discharged. He is still thought to be living in the Timaru area.

Mr Mitten does not believe recent forensic advances would have brought the police closer to the killer. “There is no advance I know of,

given the same circumstances, that would have helped.” The delay of more than two weeks in finding the body he described as a tremendous handicap. “But that is something you are confronted with. “I think history shows that once you get a long delay in the police being notified, you are immediately on the back foot.” Even after spending the best part of nine months on the inquiry, there was still much work to do, Mr Mitten said. “After two years we had cut out everything we could do. Then, in subsequent years, we have followed up any new leads.” Mr Mitten said difficulties arose because of the isolation of the murder scene. “Probably, to have the time over again, I would have approached it in a slightly different manner.” The huge public response to media appeals swamped the police. Mr Mitten said that, in hindsight, less publicity might have kept the response to “more manageable proportions.” “We had to use the media to get people. We lost control of the number of people who were coming forward. It would probably be one of the greatest examples of public co-opera-tion. “Early in February, 1970, cars were three deep round the Christchurch Central Station. They were Vauxhalls being brought in to be checked.” The police, he said, regretted that they never found Jennifer Beard’s pack. “That was one thing we always

hoped we would find. That would have given us a tremendous amount. “She was seen at the car-park by Fox Glacier with the offender and the car. At the time she was taking a photograph and the people who saw her said that the car and the offender would have been in the photograph.” A photograph of the murderer’s car driving across the bridge also proved a frustration. It had been taken by one of the party who stopped to help the suspected killer fix his car. “We got a very blurred picture of part of the car and the bridge.” A recently-developed American technique to. clarify pictures was offered to the police, who hoped it would bring up enough detail to identify the car. The bridge obscured the number plate. “We were able to get the negative sufficiently clear to see the hood. It confirmed that we were looking for a Vauxhall motor car. It was the same shape.” Another example of police misfortune was the failure of a couple to check one of their children’s report of a woman sleeping beneath the Haast Bridge. They did not report the incident until after the body of Jennifer Beard was found. “Had they investigated and found the body we probably would have had a totally different result, because instead of being 20 days behind the eight-ball, we would have been much closer.” The investigation was a huge and long undertaking. About 50,000 people were interviewed and more than half of the country’s 33,000 Vauxhall cars were checked.