Case took police to Australian outback
A pursuit for answers to the baffling disappearance of toddler Amber-Lee Cruickshank took police officers to the Australian outback.
October 17 will mark 25 years since the 2-year-old vanished from the small town of Kingston, on the southern shore of Lake Wakatipu, south of Queenstown.
Her body has never been found and police are no closer to solving the case, which is full of unanswered questions, speculation and innuendo.
One theory was she went into the lake. Another that someone ran her over, then panicked and buried her body.
Investigation head Detective Sergeant John Kean said police suspect AmberLee was the victim of foul play or an accident.
They had interviewed ‘‘one or two’’ potential suspects, he said, who were in Kingston the day the girl disappeared.
One man who found himself at the centre of the case in the early years of the inquiry said the police were ‘‘hell bent’’ on convicting him for the murder of the toddler.
‘‘[The police] had my one foot in jail, and the other foot on a banana skin.’’
The man, now in his 50s, who spoke to Stuff on condition of anonymity, accused police of ‘‘squandering’’ money and fabricating a case about him to frame him, including sending two Invercargill police officers to the outback of Australia to interview his friend.
‘‘It was horrible ... I was angry for 10 years. I’m still an angry man about it. It’s been 25 years and I’m still f..... off.’’
The man had been with a friend, his wife and their two sons boating at Kelvin Heights, near Queenstown, on the day Amber-Lee vanished.
Two more of his friends had travelled up from Invercargill and the passed through Kingston, without stopping, later that evening. Not according to police, he said. ‘‘Their theory was three of us [himself and two male friends] were in a ute, travelling from Invercargill to Queenstown that day and we ran over Amber-Lee Cruickshank ... who had wandered off onto the main highway from that house away down the bottom of Kingston – God knows how.
‘‘We killed her, panicked, put her in the ute and took her out to the ultimate games site and buried her there or buried her somewhere else. That was the case they were building.’’
The man said the first he knew he was a suspect was when a friend called him out of the blue from the desert in Western Australia.
Two police officers from Invercargill had just turned up to a campsite to ‘‘grill him’’.
The man’s movements were backed up by his friends.
Kean confirmed the man was a suspect but had been ruled out as a person of interest.
‘‘[Name withheld] became a person of interest after information was received that he had knowledge or involvement in the disappearance of Amber-Lee.
‘‘This phase of the inquiry commenced in 1994 and ran for some 12 to 18 months. [He] was interviewed and as a result of that and other inquiries completed into his whereabouts on that and subsequent days he was ruled out as a person of interest.’’
He confirmed police were sent Australia as part of the investigation.
Kean also confirmed that a child’s clothes were found in a Queenstown toilet in the days after Amber-Lee went missing.
‘‘[The couple who found the clothes] said they took [them] to the Queenstown Police on or around 26 October, 1992.
‘‘After showing the clothes to a member of the police they took them home and discarded them and initially did not connect these clothes to Amber-Lee.’’
The pair were later shown clothes similar to what Amber-Lee was wearing the day she went missing and they believed they were similar to what they had found, Kean said.
‘‘The police have no record of these clothes being brought to the Queenstown station, nor could the couple who found the clothes identify the police officer they had shown them to. The clothes were never found.’’
Police were comfortable the case had been handled ‘‘as best it could with the information available’’, he said.
Kean said he would not rule out offering a reward for information in the future. to