A pair charged with “offering an indignity” to the remains of an unidentified woman whose body was found wrapped in bags floating off Gulf Harbour in North Auckland earlier this year can now be named.
They are Kaixiao Liu, a 36-year-old man, and Lanyue Xiao, a woman of the same age.
The pair deny the unusual charge and are heading to trial.
They were arrested and charged a month ago and granted interim name suppression at their first appearance in the North Shore District Court.
That suppression lapsed at a subsequent appearance and their lawyer indicated they would file an appeal. However, their lawyer Michael Kan today confirmed they were no longer pursuing suppression.
Liu and Xiao have not been charged with killing the woman. There has been no word of any further charges.
Police have confirmed their inquiry into the death is a homicide investigation.
The charge they jointly face, covering misconduct in respect of human remains, carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Their next appearance in the North Shore District Court is set down for September 17 for a case review.
Mystery still shrouds much of the case, including the identity of the small East Asian woman whose body was recovered by a fisherman on March 12 in Gulf Harbour.
In a press release on July 1, police announced they had arrested a man and a woman in connection with the Gulf Harbour case after they were flagged attempting to leave the country on Sunday evening.
The saga then took a strange twist, when police managed to gain a court order suppressing their own announcement of breakthroughs in the homicide investigation.
It appeared the announcement had been made in error after a breakdown in communication within police, who days later abandoned the bid for a sweeping suppression of the fact of the charges.
Court documents say they interfered with the body on March 8 in Ōrewa, four days before the woman was found in Gulf Harbour, a 20-minute drive away. The documents list Liu and Xiao as living at the same Royal Oak property.
Police say they are not ruling out further arrests or charges. No one has been charged with killing the woman as yet.
As they made their first appearance in court on Monday, July 1, police and forensic staff were searching a home in Ōrewa’s Harvest Ave. They remained there for several days, conducting extensive inquiries in the garden.
But as July rolled into August there have been no more updates on the case from police.
Since she was found and recovered from the water, the woman’s remains have been held at the Auckland city mortuary in Grafton, in the care of the coroner.
On the morning of March 12, fisherman Paul Middleton was angling at Gulf Harbour and snagged a large plastic bag floating just offshore.
After ripping through several layers of plastic, he initially thought the bag contained meat before he saw a human hand sticking out and called police, he told media on the shore.
Despite dozens of calls to a dedicated phone line set up by the investigation team, police say the woman is unclaimed and unidentified.
Police are treating the case as a homicide.
Acting Detective Inspector Tim Williams, of Waitematā CIB, earlier said police were liaising with overseas counterparts along with Interpol and his investigation team is continuing with extensive inquiries.
Williams did not name the overseas counterparts but thanked everyone who had come forward with information so far.
In April, the Herald revealed police have completed and issued an Interpol “black notice”, a special appeal seeking information on unidentified bodies, to their international partners.
Following an autopsy, Williams said police had established the remains came from a woman who was small and of Asian descent, possibly Chinese.
Police would not say whether the post-mortem results showed signs of foul play suggesting how she died.
Despite her stature, the autopsy results showed she was neither a child nor a teenager and was likely to have been middle-aged.
Investigators have not given the woman a name and are understood to be referring to her as simply “the victim”.
She was found wearing blue pyjama pants with a distinct love heart pattern and a singlet branded with a logo in Chinese lettering.
Google translate image detection software said the lettering reads “80cm Juanyan Knitted Garment Factory”.
A couple of weeks after the autopsy, police announced they had obtained a DNA profile of the victim.
But the profile did not match anyone in police records.
While the Gulf Harbour case is unusual, it is not the first time human remains discovered in Auckland have remained unidentified for an extended period.
In February 2008, pig hunters found a badly decomposed body in the Waitakere Ranges.
The remains spent more than a year in the same mortuary as the Gulf Harbour victim before they were identified as former Mt Roskill man Lino Leger, who went missing in 1987.
Police do not believe his disappearance and death were suspicious.
When the remains were identified in October 2009, Detective Sergeant Roger Small said the identification was the result of a facial reconstruction by Auckland cardiologist Dr Jonathan Christiansen, extensive media attention, the work of a forensic dentist and pathologist, DNA evidence and a “process of elimination and patience”.
