In fond remembrance of Marice

Marice McGregor, 45, wasn't one for photographs, let alone publicity, yet her picture was beamed into households across the country when she became the centre of a three-week search and subsequently a murder trial.
What followed were 10 difficult days for the McGregor family, who had to sit quietly in the public gallery while the accused, Dean Richard Mulligan, maligned their sister, sister-in-law and friend.
At the end of the trial, a jury took a matter of hours to come back with a guilty verdict, which saw Mulligan sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of 15 years.
Kathryn King sat down with Marice's brothers: Rowan McGregor and his wife Rosemary, and Garth McGregor and his partner Sarah McLachlan; to share their memories of Marice and the trial they all went through.
The girl so shy she would deliver Avon cosmetics pamphlets in the dead of night to avoid face-to-face confrontation with her clients - despite which, she nevertheless entered herself into a beauty pageant and went on a two-month Contiki-style tour of the United States alone.
This is the real Marice McGregor, as her family remember her. It's a picture very different from that painted by Dean Mulligan, the man found guilty of murdering her.
It's been a long road for the McGregor family, who say they are really only just grieving properly now, more than a year after Marice was found dead in a ravine known as Whiskey Bend off State Highway 4 on May 12, 2010.
Her disappearance sparked a three-week police search, and threw the McGregors into the spotlight with numerous public appeals for information through national media, countless sleepless nights and an unshakeable, sick feeling.
"We found dealing with the press really horrifying, we're really private people, but we got the feeling that there was a lot of support there as well," Rowan said.
Able to get aerial pictures from Rowan's work, and with the support of police, the family embarked on their own round of searches up and down the Parapara and helped hand out flyers about Marice at a roadblock in Upokongaro.
"We got this feeling that we couldn't just sit there, we had to get out and help," Rowan said.
They climbed down behind a lot of rest stops, and were shocked and disgusted by the amount of rubbish, appliances and car bodies they found, but they didn't find Marice.
"You've got to do something, you just need to. When you love someone you don't just leave it for others to go and do," Rosemary said.
As they waited, they got hundreds of text messages, phone calls, and weeks worth of baking."The support from the community has been fantastic," Rowan said.
On the day Marice was found, Garth had planned to search that very ravine the coming weekend.
Sarah for one, was very pleased it wasn't him who found her.
In the days following, local iwi invited them to a blessing of the site, followed by a huge lunch at a nearby property, which they found some comfort in. And through all of that, it was the man who had killed her, who first alerted them to her disappearance under the guise of concern.
Rowan and Rosemary met with Mulligan a week after Marice disappeared, to retrieve the spare keys for her car and house off him.
Rosemary recalls thinking at the time that Marice would have been comfortable with Mulligan, since they shared similar problems speaking, and found him otherwise charming.
It wasn't until later that she realised he was being critical towards Marice, albeit in a polite way, when he was supposed to be her friend.
"I didn't notice until later that he didn't seem worried, when we were so frantic. You expect everyone to be like that, we weren't looking for anything else."
Rowan said they knew Marice was in a relationship with Mulligan, but they did not know a lot of detail.
Marice had told them he was "the one" and had been very upset that he did not come to Christmas lunch with them, despite being invited. It was revealed during Mulligan's trial that he had met Marice through an online dating website, and begun a relationship with her while still married and living with his wife.
"She was a very private person and had a difficulty in reading people, which is an important skill in life. She found that part of it pretty difficult, and that's probably why she learned to use the computer, it was her way of communicating with the world," Rowan said.
Shortly before she was killed, Marice had discovered Mulligan was married, after she called his pastor out of concern for his welfare. To hear that Mulligan was already married "would have been absolutely devastating", Sarah said.
"She trusted him, she thought he was the bee's knees, loved him and thought he loved her. She didn't understand that people could be conned like that. She genuinely thought she was in love," Rosemary said.
MARICE'S funeral was attended by more than 300 people, including some of the police officers who worked to find her.
In their eulogy, her brothers remembered the sister their parents adopted as a baby as a quiet and shy girl growing up on a farm in Okoia, who loved animals, fishing and did her share of farm chores despite rheumatic fever, a leaking valve to the heart and tonsillitis ruling out strenuous activity.
Painfully shy, Marice found it difficult to talk to people, but once she set her mind to something, there was no stopping her.
They recall being "gobsmacked" when she came home, aged about 20, and announced she had entered herself into a Wanganui beauty pageant.
Her OE to the United States was much the same.
"She was very strong-minded when she decided to do something, but it wasn't ever a fool-hardy thing," Rosemary said.
People she didn't know made her nervous, which made her job as an Avon salesperson curious, Rowan said.
"She didn't know how to read people and would get nervous with people that she didn't know."
She overcame the problem by delivering her pamphlets to clients in the middle of the night to avoid having to confront them, preferring to contact them later by computer, a tool she was particularly savvy with.
A doting aunt of four, she never missed a birthday party or Christmas gathering, and had long conversations with her nieces and nephews about computer games.
Later hit by medical problems which required three serious hospitalisations, her legs in plaster and painful rehabilitation, Marice was unable to hold down a regular job, but kept herself busy with light or volunteer work.
One of her great joys in life was attending and competing in cat shows all around the North Island, winning countless ribbons, rosettes and certificates, which decorated her home.
Marice made contact with her biological family about 10 years ago and had met an uncle.
When they saw her picture in the news, they made contact with Garth and attended her funeral.
The circumstances they met in were a shame, Rowan said, because they got along really well.
They were particularly touched that Marice's uncle chose to speak at her funeral, saying how nice it was to hear that she was loved and cared for and had a happy childhood with a caring, loving family.
IN the year's wait before Mulligan went on trial for Marice's murder, it was all the family could do to keep busy.
The wait ended up delaying the grieving process for all of them.
"I put my emotions on hold. You've lost them and they're not there anymore, but it's still not the end of it, you've got more heartache to go through," Rosemary said.
They didn't all attended the 10-day trial every day, sometimes due to work commitments and sometimes because they didn't want to hear it.
Sarah said she didn't attend during Mulligan's police interviews because she "couldn't stand the bull****", while Rosemary said she was there - except for the period the pathologist took the stand to describe Marice's injuries.
"It was hard sitting there listening to it and you can't say anything ... You can't stand up and say 'You're a liar' - you just have to try and not take it in."
For Garth, the worst part of the trial was that only 12 months or so of Marice's 45 years of life had been taken as the be-all and end-all..
It just added insult to injury that Mulligan was able to say the things he did about Marice, he said.
It still rankled that Mulligan continued to deny killing her, and had met with Rowan and Rosemary while she was missing, knowing where she was.
"How could he sleep for those three weeks when we were up all night and pleading with national media?" Sarah asked.
But at the end of the day, it was made clear that he was a liar who betrayed and hurt Marice.
Garth said he thought the judge did a "brilliant" job of explaining why Mulligan had been given 15 years' non-parole, and they accepted his reasoning.
The police had explained to them before the sentencing that he would never be free, even if he did make parole, which they found reassuring.
Now, even with the trial over, there is still Marice's estate to deal with and the process of grieving.
Part of that process was to conduct this interview, their last, in the hope that people will think of the Marice they knew; a quiet, reserved person, who was loved by her family and always looked for the best in people.