Napier - the town that lost its innocence

For 15 years the shadow of Teresa Cormack's murder has hung over Napier. JO-MARIE BROWN reports how it changed the life of a community.

Those who look carefully at the letterboxes along Napier's quiet, tree-lined streets are sure to spot the bright orange stickers of flowers giving a friendly wave.

For up to a dozen children each year, those stickers are an immense relief.

In their moment of panic and terror they run to a "safe house" knowing they can escape from a potential attacker, their school bully or an intimidating dog.

That sticker scheme is now as much a part of Napier as the horrific murder case which first inspired it.

Fifteen years ago, a vulnerable Teresa Cormack did not have any such escape route when she was approached by a man while she was walking to Richmond School.

Her disappearance and the discovery of her little body nine days later at Whirinaki Beach left the district reeling.

It was not the first scar on the city's collective consciousness. Just four years earlier, another Napier schoolgirl, Kirsa Jensen, vanished while exercising her horse along Awatoto Beach. Her body has never been found.

And, incredibly, on the same day Teresa went missing police had found the naked and bloodied body of 16-year-old Colleen Burrows on the banks of the city's Tutaekuri River.

Despite those violent incidents, Napier, by and large, regarded itself as a friendly and safe community in 1987.

The loss of 6-year-old Teresa forced people to accept that horrific crimes could indeed happen on their doorstep.

That uncomfortable realisation changed Napier forever and continues to affect the psyche of those who live there today.

Bay City Radio's talkback host Dave Pipe clearly remembers the emotional roller-coaster ride that locals endured when Teresa went missing.

"At first it was more like a stunned reaction. An unbelieving reaction that a child could go missing at such a time when there were so many people around.

"Each day there was greater tension, guessing, speculation and fear that was expressed through the calls," Pipe recalls.

"Then of course when her body was found there was the tremendous anger.

"The sense of disbelief that this could really happen in a good city like Napier when that's the sort of thing that happens elsewhere.

"It was like an atom bomb was dropped here and the shock waves went right out around the country."

Pipe, now in his second term as a Napier city councillor, believes Teresa Cormack's murder stood apart from other tragedies in the public mind because of her young, sweet face.

"When you look at that photo you see innocence and vulnerability. And that could have been anyone's little child.

"There was a revulsion in society that anyone could do such a thing."

Pipe says Teresa's murder was a great shock to Napier. Big city crimes were now happening in the provinces.

"It was a naivety that we had. We were naive that we thought we could send our children off to school and that they would be safe.

"You just looked at the world through different eyes after that."

The sickening fate of that 6-year-old girl did indeed change the attitudes and behaviour of Napier residents.

Parents no longer let their children walk to school alone.

"As a parent, when they hadn't convicted anyone, you did wonder if the bastard was living near you," says Pipe.

A trust set up in Teresa's memory on July 21, 1987 raised funds to buy an answerphone for every school in the Napier-Hastings area to improve communication between parents and teachers about where individual children were at any given time.

At Richmond School in 1987 it hadn't occurred to staff that a child could be kidnapped off the street. Teresa's absence on June 19 did not set off any instant alarm bells.

Now, principal Harry Findlay says, parents are expected to phone the school and leave a message on the answerphone if their child is going to be away.

At 9.10 am every day a teacher checks the attendance boards and phones parents immediately if a pupil is unaccounted for.

The Teresa Cormack Charitable Trust also funded the "Pete and Penny keeping ourselves safe" video which was sent to hundreds of junior schools and kindergartens throughout the country.

The trust has now wound down but in 1987 New Zealanders rushed to their local banks to make donations in the hope that such safety initiatives would spare the life of another innocent child.

Napier was not alone in wanting to voice their feelings over Teresa's death.

Rallies and marches were held across the country where people screamed for the death penalty, frantically waved placards and in some instances, burned effigies.

Napier, too, had a rally in the weeks after Teresa's body was found but the mood was very different.

Organiser Denyse Watkins was worried that the hysteria sweeping across the nation would lead to violence. This was something she didn't want despite feeling immense anger herself.

"If anybody had gotten hold of the guy at the time I don't think anybody could have been responsible for their actions," she says.

"[But] hate breeds hate and somebody was going to be hurt, there was no two ways about it.

"I think we knew that a peaceful and loving march would help the grieving of a family far more than any anger would."

Watkins, who was a community worker and mother of three at the time, asked people to bring a flower and march through the city's streets.

An estimated 20,000 people came, almost half Napier's population, for a march that people still remember today.

"The whole city just came to a standstill. No one served in shops or anything," Watkins recalls. "You could hear the silence. It was eerie. It was as though everyone was holding their breath.

"You could hear pushchairs and prams and footsteps. That was it. No talking."

The thousands of flowers left at the foot of the city's cenotaph after the march were later taken to Whirinaki Beach and thrown into the sea and over the shallow grave where Teresa's body was discovered.

To this day Watkins, who has also become a city councillor, is surprised at how much of an impact Teresa's death has had on Napier residents.

"She became a symbol, I think, of everything that was abhorrent."

Dave Prebensen was Napier's mayor in 1987 and agrees Teresa's death was a turning point in the city's history.

"I guess we lived in a cocoon in those days ... I think people were getting more and more isolated in their own worlds."

Prebensen says the community's perception that Napier was a safe place to live was simply borne of ignorance of what was happening in the big wide world.

Teresa Cormack's murder was a wake-up call.

"A loss of innocence is probably a good description of it because you never go back to where you were before and time doesn't fix it."

Kirsa Jensen's disappearance in 1983 had started to make people think more about their own personal safety, Prebensen says.

"But when the Teresa Cormack thing happened it reinforced that so in a way, unfortunately, people almost developed a siege mentality of wanting to protect their children.

"We still have the legacy of that today where a lot of people walk their children to school and don't let them out of their sight."

The desire among parents to drive children right to the school gate after Teresa's murder caused mundane, practical problems.

Traffic congestion forced some schools to redesign their entrance-ways to provide extra parking while the dangers associated with children crossing busy roads also had to be addressed.

"There was a major change in people's behaviour in how they handled their kids and what they let their kids do," Prebensen says.

Aside from changes that affected Napier's children, adults themselves altered the way they conducted themselves.

As mayor, Prebensen visited hundreds of homes and meeting halls urging people to get to know their neighbours and form Neighbourhood Support groups.

"The community feels pretty powerless in those circumstances so any initiative like that was well received because it was something people could actively do."

The Neighbourhood Support scheme took off with groups forming in almost every street in Napier.

The idea was broader than the police-run Neighbourhood Watch initiatives in that people were encouraged to hold street parties and regularly interact with each other as well as keeping an eye out for trouble.

"There was a sense of coming together as a community and getting comfort and support. It was a matter of [re-building] confidence really."

Attitudes towards Napier's police force also changed. "Before people thought it was the police's job to catch the criminals. Now it's a very different attitude from the community in that we need to help ourselves and not just not notice or turn a blind eye," Prebensen says.

The idea of having "safe houses" marked with orange stickers is one way in which Napier continues to help itself.

Similar schemes have at times run in places such as Bluff and on Auckland's North Shore but Napier's Child Watch Safety Houses programme has actively been promoted for the past 15 years.

Spokeswoman Zita Miller, whose own letterbox bears the brightly coloured sticker, said around a dozen children make use of the 160 designated safe houses in Napier each year.

Children were taught at school to recognise the stickers and knock on the door if they were approached by strangers, bullied, hurt, lost or simply frightened.

"Older people use it too if they run out of petrol for example and need a safe door to knock on," Miller says.

"In one case there was a young Australian woman hitchhiker who felt she was being followed by the man who had given her a lift. She saw one of the stickers and ran inside."

Safe houses are particularly prominent in suburbs with schools and children and the occupants of potential homes were all vetted by the Napier police, Miller says.

"I think myself it's been successful to the point that we're not a hands-on operation with children. We're there like a safety net.

"Being there is more important in some ways than being used."

The arrest of a 43-year-old sickness beneficiary last Tuesday for Teresa's murder has marked a new turning point for the town, bringing a resurgence of emotion. For Teresa's best friend, Maria Taukamo, now a mother herself, the pain of remembering what happened is still too much.

The 21-year-old's eyes well up with tears, rendering her speechless when trying to express how the murder has affected her life.

"I still remember her," she whispers as she keeps a watchful eye on her 3-year-old son, Elijah.

Teresa's parents, Kelly Pigott and Ross Cormack, say they too have fond memories despite 1987 events having shattered their lives.

"The sorrow of losing Teresa will never go away. She was a beautiful child," Pigott says.

The unsolved murders of Kirsa Jensen and Teresa Cormack have always cast a shadow over Napier and many locals now feel a sense of relief that there might be a conclusion to one.

For those who helped to search, those who feel under suspicion or those who merely watched events unfold, the prospect of putting Teresa's death behind them is something Dave Pipe believes would be most welcome.

"Those two cases have hung over us for years now so I'd liken it to a wound that just hasn't healed. It's there all the time," he says.

"I get the feeling that a lot of people want to move on. They want some resolution ... that would be tremendous."