KEY POINTS:
It was the blue of the car battery that caught Keith Davis' eye. The Tirau labourer clambered up the loamy gully through the thick undergrowth to take a closer look and made out the car wreck, wedged nose-first against a towering tree some 70m below State Highway 5,
about 15km out of Tirau.
It would have been easy to miss, even from 20 paces. The forest had begun to absorb it, encasing metal, rubber and bone in its viney, inexorable embrace, like a modern Sleeping Beauty.
A bumper sticker read "I love my waterbed". Davis saw a piece of checkered blue shirt - the same fabric as his own shirt - and then some bones. At first he thought someone had planted animal bones in an old car as a practical joke and dumped it there.
It was around 8.30am, on the last Wednesday of September. The sun hadn't yet burned through the morning haze. Davis, who'd come to this spot in the Kaimai-Mamuku Forest Park to scout for piglets, went to fetch his friend, David Burns, who lived nearby. With Burns' torch, they could see more bones and a brown shoe in the driver's foot well. Burns called the police from his mobile.
Davis says: "Because I knew it was a funeral place, I stayed there for 20 minutes in silence. I had a cigarette, thought he was talking to me in my head. 'Who are you, mate?' I thought. I reckon he needed to be found, for me to notice it like that."
After Davis' discovery, police publicised a description of the wreck - a bronze Mark III Ford Cortina Ghia with old-fashioned number plates. One of the first calls Tokoroa detective sergeant Kevan Verry received the following morning was from Bryan Slater, whose younger brother George Henry Slater - known as Jim or Jimmy - had inexplicably disappeared in the area 22 years ago, driving the same kind of car. There were other calls: from Jim's former apiarist boss and friend Geoff Ernest, and from two retired police involved in the original case. Even without forensic validation - which only arrived a week later - Verry was satisfied the remains belonged to Jim Slater, formerly of Tirau.
It was a shock for the family, he says. "It's the third time they've had to address the grief. He went missing, then they had to cross the bridge of him being declared dead, and now this time. But at least it's finished... It's like the programme Cold Case. We can provide closure - the file can now be closed."
Until 11 days ago, Jim Slater's family and friends had to live with a blank, a cruel riddle. "Put it this way," says Ernest, "Motor accident; somebody's killed, that's it, people go through their grieving, mourning, and they get on with life. But this has been going on for years - the guesswork, the conjecture... It was like a book with the last chapter missing."
The vanishing of Jim Slater became local lore. Rumours bred: he'd done a runner to Australia to escape financial and personal woes (he'd spent a few months working on the West Australian wheat belt in his early 20s); he had suffered amnesia in a motor vehicle accident and was living with another identity.
Daughter Linda Slater couldn't help imagining her missing father was still alive somewhere, his past life erased by amnesia. "I've always been in two minds whether he was dead or living next door as someone totally different," she says.
Linda is now 28, the same age her father was when last seen alive. She's married with three sons aged between two and seven years, and works part time at a photo lab. Her parents had separated when she was a toddler, and although Jim visited regularly, she has no memories of him. "I do have a vague memory of his car."
Jim had another daughter two years after Linda with a de-facto partner, from whom he later separated. She too now has children.
Linda kept in touch with Jim's three older brothers Bryan, John and Tom, and their families; Bryan gave her away at her wedding. They told her about Jim.
"He was a real, typical Kiwi bloke: she'll be right Jake; gumboots into hospital when I was born. A lovely, kind, soft-at-heart man."
The new certainty of his death is still filtering in. "Because I didn't know him that well, it's hard to grieve for him... It's really sad to think that your father had been sitting there for 22 years without anyone seeing him," she says.
"I truly believe he's only just become ready to be found."
The brothers, now in their late 50s and older, and still living in the central North Island, were unwilling to comment for this story. "The past is the past," said Tom.
"It's sore for them," Linda says. "It's taken away the hope they had that he was alive."
It has also raised the ghosts of old painful speculations, of questions that can never be fully answered.
Jim seemed to be in good spirits when he left work early Friday evening on February 15, 1985, recalls his former boss. Jim had worked for Ernest for about three years, and they were good mates. It was just the two of them tending Ernest's 1400 beehives, scattered across 100km. Jim was "a workaholic" recalls Ernest. "[With] paying the bills and probably child maintenance, it was a hell of a job getting him to go at knock off time." Once he drove through the night shifting hives. "He loved his work, loved his bees, loved driving." Ernest had discussed making him hive manager.
After work, it seems Jim drove 50km to the small Rotorua flat where his ex-girlfriend and her sister lived.
He may have stopped off at his Tirau house where he lived alone, or gone directly from work. Newspaper reports from the time say he'd proposed to the ex-girlfriend several months earlier and been turned down. At some point, the ex's boyfriend joined the group, who were having quiet drinks. Jim left early, around 9.30pm.
Max Rigg, the now-retired Putaruru sergeant who oversaw the original case, recalls Jim may have argued with his ex-girlfriend before his departure. "We wondered whether he'd driven home in a hurry, or been a bit pissed off and hadn't paid enough attention."
The summer evening was stormy and wild. Te Aroha, 54km from Tirau, flooded that weekend, and there were slips and washouts on the road between Tirau and Rotorua.
Ernest went to police when Jim Slater failed to come to work the following Monday. He and Slater's brothers began scouring on foot the route he was likely to have taken home; turning right from York St on to SH5 on Rotorua's fringes, now populated by car yards and boating suppliers, driving past the bush of Tarukenga Reserve, past more rolling pasture and dense bush, before opening out into pasture around Tirau.
"The first week or two was the hardest, because if the car had run off the road and he was trapped in it, he'd be thinking, 'come on you buggers, I need something to eat and drink'. It was a horrible feeling."
Other family and friends searched other places he knew, such as his favourite trout fishing spots. Ernest chartered a plane and flew across the Mamuku ranges twice. "We flew right over that spot but we couldn't see. As time went on we still searched but the hope of finding him alive had gone."
Bryan told the New Zealand Herald last week: "I spent a couple of months searching and walking that road [SH5] and the bush surrounding there. I just can't believe that we were so close... and I missed it."
Years passed. When Ernest and Bryan bumped into each other, they never mentioned Jim, but "it was just under the surface," says Ernest. "We both knew that I was thinking of Jim and he was thinking of Jim."
Every so often, someone would ask if there was any news. "He was always at the back of minds."
The day Davis stumbled on his remains Ernest was telling a friend about the time Jim broke his toe, not realising a fire engine was on its way to retrieve Jim's remains.
A coroner's investigation is now under way to determine the cause of death. Verry says the position and state of the wreck was "consistent with a high-speed accident", adding that the police had "no concern anything untoward happened".
When the Herald on Sunday visited the wreck's site last week with Davis and Burns, a bunch of bright yellow flowers had been placed beside the twisted undercarriage; a blazing contrast to the surrounding brown and green. Vines that criss-crossed the undergrowth had been cleared, and yellow paint spots on tree trunks marked the route from a metal road below. A lighter green streak of regenerated punga drew a line from the wreck, up the precipitously steep gully to a sharp bend on SH5. The wreck has been taken apart by police and fireworkers, but the front seats are still wedged where Davis first saw them. There's a sense of peace.
"This was his grave for 20 years," says Davis.
The remains were returned to the family on Friday, and a service is being arranged.
Max Rigg says: "I'm very pleased he's been found. Now the family can be at rest, and he can too."
Missing People
About 770 people are officially listed as missing in New Zealand, with around 18 men and women added to the list every day.
But a little over half, such as Hastings man Cameron Dormer and Hokitika man John Machejefski, are found within three days, and 90 per cent within three weeks.
Only about 1 per cent - 60 to 70 people a year - are still missing after a year.
Missing Persons Unit head detective sergeant Liam Clinton says it's not as rare as many people expect to find someone, or their remains, as long after they disappeared as in Jim Slater's case.
Coincidentally, the unit already had Slater's police file to hand, after a friend of one of his brothers reported seeing a "dead ringer" for him in Australia last December.
Scott Bainbridge's book Without Trace: On the Trail of New Zealand Missing Persons details 16 of the most bizarre, unsolved cases, including those of Tauranga father and tax inspector Pat Fisk in 1956, Sandra Weightman from Avondale (1974), and Coromandel girl Alexa Cullen (1996).
Clinton says the unit is developing its database to speed up identification of remains in cases such as Slater's.
"As soon as something like that goes on TV everyone who's got someone missing thinks it's them."
