Investigative journalist and TV presenter David Lomas spends his days solving family mysteries for his series David Lomas Investigates. Photo / Dean Purcell
Greg Bruce talks to investigative journalist and TV presenter David Lomas about what led him to a career that involves solving family mysteries and tracking down birth parents.
I arrived five minutes early for our interview, signed in on an iPad and sat down to wait. Ten minutes later, my phone rang.
“Are we still meeting?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, with the smugness of someone who has been inconvenienced by someone else’s lateness, but isn’t going to make a big deal of it. “I’m in reception.”
“In reception,” he repeated. There was a long pause. “I can’t see you here.”
I stood and looked around. I also could not see anyone. I was puzzled. Where was New Zealand television’s most popular and successful finder of missing people? He must be lost. How ironic! How cute!
And that was when it hit me with great and acute embarrassment. There was a very good chance the person who was lost was… me.
“Oh no,” I said. “Am I in the wrong place?”
I didn’t hear him sighing but I knew he must be. Of course I was in the wrong place. Finding people was literally his job. He knew exactly where I was, and exactly how to get from there to where he was, where I was supposed to be. And he gave me clear and precise instructions on how to do so.
I began following them and had been walking for a couple of minutes when my phone rang again.
“You need to turn around,” he said
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you wearing a green jacket?”
I looked down to check. I told him I was.
“I’m watching you,” he said.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I looked around. The street was empty. I began to feel like I was in a horror movie. I laughed uncomfortably.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Keep walking,” he said. “Turn left,” he said. He didn’t hang up until I was in reception.
He took me to a boardroom on the fourth floor of what was then the Warner Brothers building. It was sterile and empty. I didn’t see another person. It felt like the perfect allegory for the current state of New Zealand media: all that’s left is David Lomas and those of us who feed off his success.
Although he is best known now for his shows on which he locates missing family members, he first achieved fame as one of the country’s finest newspaper journalists, reporting for The Dominion, Auckland Star and the short-lived Auckland Sun in the 1970s and 80s.
He covered the biggest crime stories of the day: Mona Blades, Mr Asia, the Cohen trial. He was deeply connected and knew how to get a scoop and was highly respected throughout the industry.
When the Sun lured him with the offer of a fat pay cheque, before he’d even set foot in the office, he was on a plane to Malaysia, where he spent a month reporting on the trial of Lorraine and Aaron Cohen, the mother and son arrested for drug trafficking. He was sitting immediately behind the Cohens for the duration of the trial.
“It’s an extraordinary thing to sit and watch somebody on trial for their life,” he says of that time. “The death sentence was an option. You’re sitting there thinking, ‘If it goes wrong, they’re going to be killed’.”
Lorraine Cohen was sentenced to death but had that sentence commuted to life imprisonment on appeal and she and Aaron were eventually pardoned and released in 1996.
Nine months after he returned from Malaysia, the Sun was unexpectedly shut down and Lomas was suddenly a middle-aged ex-hack.
He’d only ever worked in newspapers and didn’t know what to do next (“Print was everything to me”) – but then someone he knew at TVNZ called him up and said they were looking for “story breakers” for a late-night news and long-form current affairs programme. He had no experience in TV and no particular interest in it, but he didn’t need to appear on screen and a job was a job.
He had the right skills for it and did well enough that he quickly moved on to become a producer on Paul Holmes’ then-new current affairs show, and then into jobs with long-form current affairs shows 60 Minutes and Sunday, eventually working his way up to become chief of staff for TVNZ news.
While his current show, David Lomas Investigates (which followed his previous series Missing Pieces, Lost and Found), can be high stress at times, requiring many moving parts to come together at the right time, he says the 6 o’clock news bulletin on TVNZ was comfortably the most stressful experience of his working life.
“When I used to run the newsroom there, we’d have stories on which you were literally running down the corridor with the tape. The editor had finished, you’d grab the tape and you’d sprint round to play out – and you’re running – and you’d get there with 15 seconds to go. Nothing quite beats the stress of that.”
Eventually, he says, he was promised a job that was subsequently given to someone else, and he felt like he was being squeezed out, so he quit and went freelance. He made several documentaries, including one on Mr Asia and another on the 40th anniversary of the Wahine disaster, then he got a phone call from Dame Julie Christie, who’d had an idea for a show in which he helped people reconnect with missing loved ones.
That was 17 years ago.
Lomas has been part of dozens of reunions over the past two decades, but even now it’s not uncommon for him to cry on camera.
He has often travelled overseas with the people on his show, staying with them, eating with them, living their stories. He has retained connections with many of them over the years. Sometimes, he’ll hear from people who featured on his show years ago. They’ll send photos of their new and growing families. They’ll send life updates.
“I often get little messages. You know: ‘My dad died, but thank you so much for connecting us’.
“They’re not total strangers. They’re people that I’ve actually had a very intimate involvement with and an involvement where it’s one of the biggest moments of their lives. So they’re not easily forgotten.”
The impact of a reunion is typically much bigger than the show can represent. The lives being changed are not just those of the people being reunited, he says. There are brothers, sisters, spouses, children, entire extended families.
“You can’t do a journey like we do with those people and not be attached. But you can be attached and detached, which is sort of what I have to be. You’re really with them on a journey. But it’s not my journey. I’m there doing a job to help them find people. And when it happens…
“I’ve probably cried more rewatching the programme. On the day of the event, you’re really busy and you’re doing stuff and you get the shakes and you think, ‘This is amazing’ when you see it happening. But you’re so busy working, you’re not engrossed in the moment: you’re trying to make sure it all works.
“But when I watch programmes later – even five years later – I’ll watch a programme and the stories, the emotions, they’re pretty amazing.”
He says there are similarities between the way he approached his crime reporting and how he approaches his work on David Lomas Investigates. In both cases, he sees his job as not just accounting for what has happened, but trying to understand why. He has the journalist’s curiosity to find what leads people to do what they do.
He recalls one story he covered for the Auckland Star, in which five children had horrifically abused another child. He wrote a three-part article about the case, looking into the back stories of the five who committed the act.
“Who were these people?” he says. “Why did they do that? Looking at their background, it’s a horrible story of neglect and abuse which they had suffered.
“It’s looking into people’s lives, trying to tell stories about them. There’s no doubt what those kids were doing was absolutely horrific, but they weren’t inherently bad. They just totally lost it. And that brings you to: ‘What is the society doing wrong?’ All sorts of things.”
The morality of the acts that have led to the estrangements on David Lomas Investigates might be at a different level, but the factors driving them are often similar.
“And the more you see of that,” he says, “the more you realise that everything’s not black and white.”