Richard Woods disappeared from Napier Hill 30 years ago this week.
It’s a mystery that has haunted a Napier family and their community for three decades.
Richard Woods had recently turned 50 when he was last seen leaving his lodgings in the narrow lanes of the Napier hills on a Saturday afternoon walk on March 23, 1996.
The abiding question for his family, including sister Dianne Turner and her husband Ross, is that, having exhausted seemingly all other scenarios, is there someone still with something to tell them about what happened?
“We would just like to know what happened. It is just such a mystery,” Dianne said.
Richard’s disappearance was something his family thought about every day.
“Every time we hear of a body being found, we wonder if it could be...
“He was so friendly, he would walk up to anyone, say hello and have a chat.”
The simple known facts are that Richard John Woods lived at Lincoln Grange, a historic home in Lincoln Rd, on Middle Hill, between Shakespeare and Milton roads.
It was run at the time by Hawke’s Bay District Health Board as a mental-health service residence, which he left mid-afternoon, possibly intending to walk into town.
Dianne and Ross were in Christchurch on a Ulysses Club motorcycle rally when they learnt a couple of days later that Woods had gone missing. They rushed back to Napier to join a search with precious few leads on where to look.
Woods, who had three brothers and a sister, and three sons and a daughter, was a visible identity in Napier, an inveterate walker around the streets and known as an Elvis Presley impersonator around the entertainment venues.
But, while the public responded to calls for any information that could be relevant, none was of any positive sighting.
The money in his bank account was untouched, and nothing was missing from his room, indicating he meant to return. Among his belongings was his daily medication.
He had visited his daughter Leonie in the morning, and in the early afternoon rang his brother Phil, who arrived at Lincoln Grange shortly afterwards to pick him up. But Woods had already left.
He had also called a fellow church member, saying he might call in, but he never arrived.
In the ensuing days and weeks, residents would search the gardens, bush-clad slopes and gullies of the hills, and police and family would search varying areas following reports of possible sightings, or on hunches as to where he might have gone.
They would also search their own thoughts and memories, recalling, for example, that he once walked from Porirua to Hawke’s Bay, and got to Waipukurau before feeling the need to call family to pick him up.
Publicity was widespread, including his ex-wife’s appeal through Australian magazine That’s Life almost a year after the disappearance. Clairvoyants also offered to help.
“Everyone has tried,” Dianne Turner said this week. “But there’s been nothing.”
A coroner considered the matter in 2010 and reached a finding of missing, presumed dead. Three decades after the first story in Napier’s Daily Telegraph, headed “Fear for missing Napier man”, a file is still held by Hawke’s Bay police.
Detective Sergeant Hamish Urquhart said it was marked “inactive”, among numerous missing person files, meaning there had been no recent information to revive the inquiry.
Doug Laing is a Hawke’s Bay Today reporter based in Napier, with more than 50 years in the newspaper industry. He was a reporter on the Daily Telegraph in 1996 and covered Richard Woods’ disappearance.