Murder probe follows body find

‘Let’s go!’’ Dust curls down the clay and rock road. Sneakers patting away under the canopy of kowhai and whiteywood trees while the bellbirds and magpies shout Anzac rivalries.

My two boys in blue tops, and with bags bobbing, cannon down the hill through the bush road. We stop at the ford below to stretch and look for ‘Finn’, our resident brown trout. Shouts of triumph as we see him lurking in the rocky pools.

We jog, me at the back keeping pace, up and over the dusty rise to descend between tussock hillside and bushstream paddock down a rutted and channelled dirt road.

Over the one-lane bridge between the first houses and we flop to the ground with the dog. Something catches the eye; in a break in the kanuka, a tawny creature stares down at me. Deer? Stag. It watches us carefully, antlers steady. I point out the stag, well within earshot of us, but not moving. A grey warbler announces the school bus. Turning, sneakers, bags, waving hands in the back seat and gone.

– Bernard Shapiro, Pigeon Bay A small bouquet of flowers with the words ‘‘To our darling baby girl, we’ll love you forever’’ was placed outside the police cordon of the Upper Hutt house where a woman was found dead early yesterday.

Police have not identified the victim but said the 30-year-old had been assaulted with a weapon. A post-mortem examination would be carried out today.

Police were seeking three or four men believed to be at the address at the time the victim was assaulted.

Family standing outside the red brick flat on Ward St, Wallaceville, were in shock and comforting each other.

They described the dead woman as ‘‘outgoing’’ and ‘‘free-spirited’’ with a talent for cooking.

She did not have children, but two much-loved cats, they said.

Police were called to the house after neighbours heard a ‘‘commotion’’ and saw men running from the property just after midnight.

Detective Senior Sergeant Warwick McKee said he did not believe the murder was a random incident.

‘‘The people were at the address for a reason and we’re determined to find out what that was,’’ he said.

A neighbour said an electric-blue Subaru Impreza sedan came down a long driveway on Wilford St, which runs off Ward St.

She claimed that 20 minutes later ‘‘cops and their dogs’’ turned up and were focussing on the driveway and looking for weapons.

Police had told local people the woman had been stabbed in the stomach and the suspects were believed to be Caucasian.

Police asked the residents to be on the lookout for knives and even guns and ‘‘cartridges’’.

A neighbour of the dead woman, who did not want to be named, said she thought she heard a woman’s scream, then men’s voices.

She described her neighbour as a friendly, talented chef who had lived in the flat for about five years and would use lemons and limes from her garden, and chat with her grandchildren.

A man who said he lived in the same group of flats as the woman said he heard yelling around midnight and went outside to see what was happening.

‘‘I seen them breaking through the door and heard the screaming,’’ the man, who would not give his name, said.

‘‘I seen them going in, smashed a door down, that was it.’’

The people he saw were wearing hoodies.