‘Someone has to pay’: The unsolved apple orchard murder
Two years after her brother was found covered in blood in a tent, Anne Hely still cries often, and sends him daily text messages, even though she knows it’s futile. Blair Ensor reports.
Anne Hely can’t reconcile why anyone would want to kill her brother. Neither can her 12-year-old son, who was so traumatised after his uncle was stabbed to death, that he moved his bed into her room and stayed there for months, because he didn’t feel safe.
Two years after Simon Bevers was found covered in blood in a tent at a Nelson apple orchard, Hely, 53, still cries most days, and has post traumatic stress disorder.
Every day she texts her brother, even though she knows it’s futile.
“xxx,” she taps, because it’s how he used to end all his messages to her. Then she does the same for their older sister, Alex, who died suddenly from a heart attack in London just eight months after the murder.
“Mum lost two of her children in a year and it’s impossible to explain what that is like for a family.”
Hely’s grief is compounded by the fact her brother’s killer remains at large, despite police previously offering a reward of up to $100,000 for information.
“It’s just horrific. Initially, I was completely crushed, and I still am, but now I’m getting angry. The main thing that is propelling my anger is my [91-year-old] mum. She doesn’t want to die before knowing who did this. Someone has to pay - they can’t get away with it.”
Bevers was last seen alive about 8pm on Monday, March 7, 2022, as he walked towards the campsite he’d set up in an implement shed at Eden’s Road Fruit in Hope. He’d arrived at the orchard a fortnight earlier, after a stint fruit picking in Central Otago.
The following day, Bevers failed to show up for work, but that didn’t raise any alarm bells. Often people would take the day off if they were tired or sore.
But when he didn’t emerge the next morning, a colleague went to check he was OK. As they peered into his tent at about 7am they were confronted by a grisly scene.
Bevers’ lifeless body was partly covered by a duvet, and his t-shirt was soaked in blood.
The following morning, Hely was working when she got a text from her mother asking if she could call. It was urgent.
“I knew something bad had happened, but I didn’t know what. The rest is kind of a blur. She said he’d been killed and I think she was just very vague about how he’d died. I just went into pure adrenaline shock.”
Then Hely had to work out how to tell her son, Billy, that the uncle he looked up to, would no longer be able to teach him to drive, film him skateboarding or go on long bike rides with him.
“They were very, very close.” Bevers lived with Hely and his nephew in Auckland for a year during the Covid-19 pandemic and was their main support.
“My big brother always looked after us,” she says. “He would always give whatever he had to anybody.”
At the time of his death, Hely believes Simon was frustrated that he was still working in orchards because his true love was scriptwriting for films. The pair had wanted to make a film together but that had been delayed by the pandemic because he couldn’t save as much money as he needed.
But by March 2022, he was close to realising his dream. “It’s such a shame that all of that is gone,” Hely says.
Detectives investigating the murder quickly established that on the night Bevers was last seen alive, four people had been drinking and listening to music in a caravan not far from his tent. Drinking was against orchard policy. No-one from the group reported seeing Bevers. They said they went to bed variously between 9.30pm and midnight.
Police carried out a massive search of the orchard. In one of the four rooms in a nearby accommodation block, they found a blood-stained green puffer jacket.
It belonged to a 48-year-old Samoan RSE worker - identified last year by Stuff as Filipo Mapusaga - who was among those who’d been drinking in the caravan.
It turned out Mapusaga had failed a random drug test on March 1, after someone had quietly alerted management that he’d been smoking cannabis.
The result jeopardised his employment. The informant wasn’t Bevers, but there were whispers it might have been.
When questioned by detectives, Mapusaga denied any involvement in the murder.
He said he thought it was someone other than Bevers who’d dobbed him in for using drugs. Police had reason to suspect the man was the killer - the blood on the jacket was compelling evidence. But it wasn't a smoking gun.
Someone else, like one of his two roommates, could have worn the jacket to kill Bevers. Or the blood could have got there some other way. (It had been hot in Nelson, and no-one reported seeing anyone wearing the jacket in the fortnight Bevers worked at the orchard. The autopsy didn’t reveal any relevant historic injuries that might have caused him to bleed in the days before the murder.)
The roommates, also Samoan RSE workers, told detectives they’d played no part in the crime, and didn’t know who was responsible. Neither of the men had been drinking in the caravan. One said he’d watched a movie before going to sleep. The other had apparently played pool in a shared kitchen/common room area before heading to bed.
Frustratingly for police, there was little other evidence that pointed to the identity of the killer. Bevers appeared to have been sleeping when he was attacked.
There was no sign of a struggle and no-one reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious on the Monday night, when it’s thought he was killed. Nothing obvious was missing from Bevers’ tent. Crucially, the murder weapon has not been found.
In announcing the $100,000 reward on the first anniversary of Bevers’ death, Detective Inspector Mark Chenery, the then officer in charge of the investigation, said police had not established a firm motive for the murder and had hit a “brick wall to a certain extent”.
Mapusaga, a father-of-10, had been interviewed four times by detectives, Chenery said at the time, and knew he was “central to the inquiry”.
In May 2022, he was allowed to return to live with his family in a village on the western tip of Samoa’s largest island, Savai’i, and hasn’t returned to New Zealand since.
His roommates picked apples in Nelson again last year, but it’s unclear where they are now.
Chenery has since taken up an overseas posting, but this week Detective Sergeant Micaela Rolton said the reward did not result in any new information about the murder.
Rolton said because the investigation was ongoing she was limited in what she could say. However, she confirmed samples gathered during the scene examination continued to be tested for DNA.
But Hely has begun to lose hope her brother’s murder will be solved. “It just seems like there’s so much evidence, but so little at the same time. We all thought the reward would shake someone loose.”
Last year Mapusaga told Stuffhe didn’t know how the blood got on his jacket.
“I didn’t kill him. I don’t know who killed him.”
Stuff doesn’t know the identities of his roommates.
As the homicide investigation enters its third year, Hely’s frustration grows.
“Where’s your conscience?,” she asks of the killer. “I’m angry… very angry at whoever is responsible, because [my brother and I] were very close. I miss him so much.”