Detective remains focused on task

By CLAIRE TREVETT

Wisdom would counsel against betting a big wager in a game of poker with Detective Inspector Rod Drew.

The man in charge of unravelling the mysteries of Coral-Ellen Burrows' disappearance has a face of granite.

At the onslaught of questions thrust at him in daily media updates, Mr Drew remains impassive.

"We've had a huge amount of information provided to us. And more than 430 phone calls to our free phone number."

Uncanny coincidences remain just that.

"I wouldn't like to speculate on that," is one of his favourite expressions, followed closely by, "I am not making any assumptions that those two matters are related."

The inquiry, in all but name, is a murder inquiry.

Mr Drew, a master of deflection, will not say that, endlessly repeating his brief: "A little girl is missing and we have to find her. It is not a question of upgrading the case to a homicide."

But as time wears on, an ominous feeling has grown in the town. The investigation team will soon number 70.

Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Oxnam has come in to be Mr Drew's right-hand man. A veteran of 24 years, Mr Oxnam cracked the Kate Alkama murder case and was instrumental in the interviewing of Wairarapa child killer Bruce Howse, convicted for the murder of his two stepdaughters.

A police source described the role of the likes of Mr Drew and Mr Oxnam as critical. "In any operation the officer in charge is the catalyst. If he isn't up to it then no one else will be."

Mr Drew admits he is somewhat old school when it came to setting up an investigation. While he did not know where Coral was, he would not be thrown off his stride by the conjecture of armchair detectives.

Investigation procedures were there because they worked. At the very least they provided a starting point.

There was no point throwing the dart at a map and deciding to start there.

The investigation team would include detectives drafted from all over the country.

Their job was to find little bits of information and it was Mr Drew's job to gather it into one big answer.

And that was exactly how he liked it.

"I just have a passion for major investigations and the challenges that they pose. I like the thought processes that you have to go through, the message you have to use to resolve major investigations."

Detective work was the goal he had worked towards since he became a policeman in January 1974. It did not take him long. Just five years later he became a detective. He likes the methodical nature of it, the processes of elimination, the juggling of jigsaw pieces until they become a whole.

It was Mr Drew who shaped the list of suspects in the murder inquiry after the disappearance of Teresa Cormack in 1987.

He was also on the teams that dealt with the drowning of Masterton woman Maureen Hammond in her bath in 2000, and the killing of baby Lillybing the same year.

Now he is in charge of another high-profile case just three weeks after he gave up the patch of territory that had been his for the past six years to become Wellington's field detective inspector.

He still lives in Masterton but he did not expect to be working back on his home turf quite so quickly.

He is a reticent man, happier speaking of facts than opinions or feelings.

But the cases still affect him. He has his own children, and when Coral's mother, Jeanna Cremen, plunged her head into her hands, shaking with sobs at the family press conference, Mr Drew was the one to offer comfort, rubbing her shoulder.

It is dispiriting work, dealing with the grittier side of humanity, with usually more knockbacks than leads.

But there are always highlights. In Coral's case the biggest so far, or at least the biggest he will admit to, was the finding of her school bag.

"It's natural if something comes in that is a significant find it lifts your spirits in one sense.

"It gives you impetus to go on and other things to consider."

A photographer observed he was a "blinker" - a person whose reflexes are so rapid that he blinks in that split second between the flash and the lens clicking.

Those reflexes come in handy when he's publicly fronting cases.

Every question goes through a rapid-fire filtering process in his head as to whether an answer would give away something that needed to be kept secret.

He would be too polite to say the part of his job he probably hated the most was dealing with the media.