Heavy Metal investigation: Justice a phone call away
Scrap-metal dealer John Reynolds was bashed to death 22 years ago. Martin Van Beynen and Blair Ensor find that plenty of people still hold out hope Reynolds’ killer will be found.
John Thomas Reynolds was killed at a time when police still filled in forms and typed up reports in hard copy. The resulting pile of documents mean he has a continuing presence at the police’s Christchurch headquarters where filing cabinets, crammed with material from the investigation into his murder 22 years ago, fill up half an office.
The files are testament to a thorough police investigation that left no stone unturned. However, in the end, investigators were unable to unearth enough evidence to charge anyone and the case entered the annals of New Zealand cold cases.
Cold does not mean forgotten and periodically the police have mounted publicity drives to drum up information. New leads were followed but wound up at dead-ends.
The man who headed the initial investigation, Detective Inspector John Doyle – now retired from the police – counts the case as his only unsolved murder and he believes a resolution is only a phone call away.
‘‘To me, someone had to know. Someone else had to know about it. I still believe that someone or some people hold the key to this,’’ he says.
Reynolds’ family have mixed feelings about the prospect of the murderer suddenly being found.
All want a resolution so they can put the matter to rest and get justice for him but an arrest will bring its own pressures.
Michael Reynolds, a Christchurch electrical contractor, who found his brother’s body in 1996, is worried about having to go through a trial so long after the event.
Reynolds’ widow, who does not want her real name used, says an arrest won’t stop bitter feelings about her husband’s killing because they dissipated long ago.
‘‘I can’t really see anyone coming forward. It would mean a lot but all the ugly feelings have gone. I still care but all that inner hate, I haven’t thought like that for a long time.
‘‘I’d still like to know who it was and just let them know they took my husband, a father, a grandfather.’’
The scrap-metal dealer’s daughter Lara says she doesn’t want to hope the killer can be found because that would open her up to more frustration.
But she will keep co-operating with any attempt to find the killer.
‘‘I will have done something for my dad because he deserves nothing less.’’
The hardest thing for her is the fact he missed so many great moments with his grandchildren. ‘‘He would have been a great granddad,’’ she says.
Her parents had a strong, committed marriage and the loss of her father was devastating for the whole family, she adds.
Detective Sergeant Dorothy McPhail, who oversees the extensive Reynolds file and was involved in the investigation in 1996, says police are not giving up, even 22 years later.
‘‘But we can’t do it all ourselves. Somebody out there holds that crucial bit of information.’’
Anyone with information about Reynolds’ murder can phone 0800 564 673 – a dedicated number police have set up for the case.
SOMEONE MURDERED HERE
Nothing much remains of the factory unit at 220 Hazeldean Rd where John Thomas Reynolds, 55, met his end.
On April 28, 1996, Reynolds was bashed to death with a heavy instrument in his scrap-metal yard called Garden City Scrap Co.
Only the concrete floor on which his body was found can still be seen through the high gates of the caryard that now occupies the space.
Car dealer Friday Ogbah has been selling cars from the spot for three years and had no idea a murder had happened there.
Some things remain the same. Locomotives pulling coal trains and the TranzAlpine scenic train still ply the railway tracks just across the road.
The building, in which Reynolds housed his piles of scrap metal and guillotine was demolished after the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.
Reynolds bought the building with the help of his brother Michael not long after he was made redundant from the railways in 1990.
Michael owned the building next door and used it for his electrical contracting business.
The front entrance of Reynolds’ building was a large roller door, in which a smaller door provided easy access when the roller door was closed.
Reynolds was found lying face down about 5 metres in from the roller door. He lay in a pool of blood near the scales he used for weighing scrap brought in by suppliers. He was surrounded by drums and a jumble of scrap metal and other items typical of the trade.
Because the roller door was down, police deduced that Reynolds had gone inside through the small door with someone who may have been a supplier and whom he knew. He was then disabled by a blow to the head and struck repeatedly while on the floor.
His office, where he paid most of his suppliers, was just inside the building. It was also the smoko room and a place where he would have a yarn over coffee with his mates. A tray in a drawer of the desk contained cash for paying suppliers.
His daughter Lara, who used to love going to work with her dad, says Reynolds was happy in his yard.
‘‘My last image of him is being face down in his own blood and his head being ... and that’s not pretty, but my overwhelming image is of him being happy down there doing his thing.’’
Reynolds ran a tight ship and got rid of scrap quickly but the weekend’s haul should still have been on the premises.
Police thought they might be able to track the killer by pairing scrap with identified suppliers and seeing what was left over.
They compiled a list of customers and appealed for suppliers of certain bits of scrap to come forward. One witness recognised a piece of scrap as coming from the Lincoln dump.
The strategy did not reap the dividends that police hoped.
Officers also searched the building for the weapon used to bash Reynolds to death. Although the yard contained plenty of blunt instruments, the weapon used in the murder was never found.
HEAVY METAL CAST
An opportunist, a junkie, an angry scrap-metal supplier, a gang member, someone from his murky past.
The potential culprits for the murder of John Thomas Reynolds, 55, on April 28, 1996 were many and varied,
Head of the inquiry, Detective Inspector John Doyle, now retired, says the police had to carefully work through a list of candidates, ruling some out and marking others for further inquiry.
He says the most promising early lead turned out to be a dead-end.
Two delinquent boys, Toa Waihape, 15, and Corey Stephenson, 11, who both lived in a boys home, went out on the town for a day of fun on the day Reynolds was killed.
Waihape came from a highly dysfunctional family.
His brother Peter would murder a prostitute in Christchurch in 2005.
Corey Stephenson did not go on to better things and is in jail on unrelated offences.
About 1.15pm, the boys noticed Reynolds’ small truck in Hazeldean Rd with the keys in the ignition. By then, Reynolds had probably already been killed.
They drove off in the truck leaving it in Hoon Hay about 5.30pm the same day.
They were the most obvious suspects but were eventually eliminated.
Police devoted most of their energy to two possible culprits. One was an unemployed man called Ben Johnson.
Johnson, now deceased, was at the time of the Reynolds murder, a 41-yearold father-of-five who was struggling to make ends meet.
He scrounged scrap for extra income, had connections to Black Power and had been in jail for a bank robbery. He apparently told police that he was at home smoking cannabis when Reynolds was killed.
The main person of interest was Kent Gorrie, who had been in trouble with the police since he was 13, and had, by the time Reynolds was killed, a long criminal record.
He was an intravenous drug user and supplied scrap to Reynolds, whom he regarded as a ‘‘mate’’. Violent incidents in his life have cost Gorrie part of an ear and an eye.
‘‘My last image of him is being face down in his own blood . . . and that’s not pretty, but my overwhelming image is of him being happy down there doing his thing.’’
John Reynolds’ daughter Lara