Search for missing mum restarts 20 years after she disappeared
A search to find the body of missing Waikato mum of three Sara Niethe has relaunched 20 years after she died at the hands of her partner.
Yesterday, about 50 NZ Land Search and Rescue (LandSAR) personnel and volunteers from across the Waikato region gathered at the Kaihere community hall, in Ngā tea.
There was optimism among the search crew, but also a shadow of grief given that two decades on, Niethe’s family were still seeking closure.
On March 30, 2003, Sara Niethe died after being injected with methamphetamine by her then-partner Mark Pakenham at his rural property in the Hauraki Plains.
It took years for Pakenham to admit what he had done. He was eventually charged with manslaughter and sentenced to six years and seven months in prison. But Niethe’s body has never been recovered.
The person behind the new search yesterday was private investigator and ex-police officer Bruce Currie, who throughout his lengthy career had come across ‘‘a lot of homicides’’. But the disappearance of Niethe had stayed with him for years.
The aim of the search was to cover the vast bush and gullies of the Hauraki Plains, which were near where Pakenham lived.
Niethe had gone to see Pakenham at his house but was expected to return to her mother’s home later that evening. She was neither seen nor heard from again.
Leading up to 2009, Pakenham lied to investigators, stating he had nothing to do with Niethe’s disappearance and instead said he ‘‘loved her’’.
Currie, over the years since her death, would drive past Pakenham’s house asking the same unanswered questions that remain hanging over the search.
‘‘I always wondered what happened to Sara,’’ he said.
Currie had wanted to revisit the case since the search for Niethe went cold, and during the pandemic he offered to look into her disappearance again.
It became his absolute focus, and he spent three years combing through information and evidence, with even his partner saying he’d ‘‘lost a lot of sleep over this’’. But for Currie, this was something he felt he needed to do ‘‘to give the families some closure’’.
During the initial searches for Niethe in 2003, investigators based parts of their search on what Pakenham told police.
He initially claimed she had left his Ngā tea property suddenly and not returned. But in 2009, a friend of Pakenham’s, fitted with a wire, caught Pakenham’s confession that he had drugged her.
Pakenham was charged with Niethe’s murder in 2011, but his sentence was reduced when he opted to plead guilty to manslaughter instead.
Following Niethe’s death, her three children were left without a mother. Eldest son Dion Chamberlain, who was 12 at the time, had been a natural protector of his sisters since.
But the years following had also wiped much of the memories of what happened.
‘‘My mum was a bit of a free spirit I guess, pretty social, pretty loving, and very much a barefoot-in-the-grass kind of lady. She loved us kids and [was] super proud.’’
Coming to yesterday’s search was not easy for him and his siblings because every renewed effort to find their mum also meant reliving the past. It was still hurtful given Pakenham was now free but his mother’s whereabouts was still a mystery.
‘‘It just highlights that the judicial system we have here is not perfect, it’s flawed in lots of ways . . . I try not to let him take up any more of my time.’’
Pakenham was released in 2016 and those at the search believe he now lives somewhere discrete in the far north.