COVER-UP How police got to the truth about Dale Watene's disappearance
Sandy Graham shot dead her partner, Dale Watene, then enlisted her best friend to bury the body in a shallow grave, deep in a forest. Then she told lie after lie to hide what she’d done. Blair Ensor reports.
On the morning of April 17, 2020, Sandy Graham and her best friend, George Hyde, loaded a couple of shovels into a four-wheel drive, packed Graham’s kids, aged 6 and 7, into the back seat, and headed for a rugged forest in western Southland.
They were looking for a place to bury a body.
Their journey deep into Longwood Forest – a 23,000-hectare chunk of conservation land – took them along the backstreets of the small town of Otautau, past paddocks of grazing sheep and through a maze of dirt and gravel roads.
On the fringe of a clearing, at the end of an overgrown, deadend logging track, Graham and Hyde chose the spot for a grave they hoped no-one would find.
The pair took turns digging a hole in the clay soil while the children played nearby. When they were finished it was nearly a metre deep and more than a metre wide.
Later that day, Hyde returned to the forest with the body of Dale Watene, Graham’s boyfriend, a father to a then 5-year-old boy.
He was wrapped in a tarpaulin and had a bullet lodged in his upper spine.
Watene, the son of a truck driver, grew up in the Waikato town of Huntly. He moved to Otautau, 40 kilometres northwest of Invercargill, in 2001 to work on a dairy farm. Over the next 20 years, Watene had a range of jobs at the farm, most recently driving trucks and tractors. He was regarded as reliable and a good stock handler.
Watene met Sandy Graham in September 2019 after exchanging messages on social media.
Graham was on home detention at the time, following her fourth drink-driving conviction. (This time, her children had been in the car.)
She and Watene both had children from previous partners, and, initially, were smitten. Watene met Graham’s family and seemed to get on well with them.
They even talked about getting married.
But the relationship was volatile. Graham once threw a beer bottle at Watene’s head after she crashed his car. Twice in 2020, Watene was thrown, drunk, from Graham’s home and barred from returning for five days by police.
Watene also began to suspect
Graham was cheating on him. He knew she used the dating app Tinder. Whenever he confronted her, she denied any infidelity and the pair would argue.
Despite the turmoil, they continued to see each other on and off. Watene rented a red-brick bungalow about 20km out of Otautau on Waikouro-Wairio Rd, but often stayed at Graham’s home.
On April 15, 2020, Watene celebrated his 40th birthday.
The next day, he, Graham and her two children drove into Longwood Forest in his fourwheel driveSUV to collect pine cones – a breach of Covid-19 lockdown rules. The truck got stuck in a stream, and they had to phone for help.
The two men who towed them out were invited back to Graham’s house for dinner and a couple of beers. Watene cooked.
He and Graham were kissing and seemed happy. As the men left, just after 6pm, Watene was talking about heading out to buy some more beers.
It was the last time anyone from outside the house saw him alive.
Five days later, on April 21, Detective Sergeant Chris Lucy got a call from one of Otautau’s two police officers. Dale Watene was missing. Nothing was immediately suspicious. Otautau was a small service town, population nearly 3000, but people disappeared from time to time.
However, the case wasn’t without intrigue, and Lucy, the head of criminal investigations in western Southland, listened carefully as Senior Constable Dave Cowie briefed him.
Watene’s SUV, an Isuzu Mu, had been found in a gravel lay-by at Holt Park, about 500 metres from Graham’s Sorn St home, on April 17. Cowie thought it was an odd spot.
It wasn’t on the route Watene would have taken home from Graham’s house.
Bank records showed Watene had last used his Eftpos card on April 15 when he spent about $190 at the supermarket on groceries.
His property looked like it hadn’t been lived in for a while. The lawns were long, the fridge was empty and a loaf of bread in the pantry was mouldy. Photos of Watene and Graham were in a pile next to the microwave.
Graham had hosted people at her house for drinks over the weekend, but Watene wasn’t one of them. She’d told Cowie she hadn’t seen Watene since he left to get some beers on April 16, but had missed a series of calls from him later that night.
She gave several dubious explanations for where Watene might be. He could be ‘‘on a bender’’, hiding out with his ‘‘meth dealer’’ in Invercargill, or on the run with a one-eyed man called Rick from Riverton.
Two days later, when there was still no sign of Watene, Lucy and a colleague, Detective Regan Fahey, travelled to Otautau to investigate.
By then, talk was spreading through the town about the disappearance. Some people thought Watene might have gone bush to escape a drug debt.
Others feared he’d been murdered. Suicide couldn’t be ruled out either, as he’d struggled with depression since breaking up with the mother of his son in 2019.
On April 24, Graham told Fahey that Watene was in good spirits when she last saw him. As he was leaving her home, she’d rushed inside to get his birthday present. She said she ignored his later calls because he likely would have been drunk and in a bad mood. Now, she was worried something bad had happened.
‘‘This is totally out of character for him,’’ she told Fahey. ‘‘I would describe him as being clingy and a person who messages non-stop.’’
Graham told police she’d heard Watene owed money to gang members. She said she doubted he had committed suicide. He would have left behind items that were important to him, such as his pounamu (greenstone), for his son. She also believed he would have left a note. ‘‘I just don’t know where he is.’’
Lucy was perplexed by the Holt Park scene where Watene’s Isuzu was discovered. There were no keys in the ignition, the fuel lines were disconnected and diesel had pooled on the ground. And, most unusually, the battery had been removed.
Friends told police Watene had only one battery, which he switched between the Isuzu and another vehicle he owned – a black BMW. A battery was found under the bonnet of the BMW in the car port at his WaikouroWairio Rd home.
Lucy couldn’t think how it could have got there. Otautau didn’t have a taxi, there were few cars on the road because of strict Covid-19 restrictions, and it would have been a long walk to Watene’s home for anyone lugging a battery, let alone for Watene, who’d lost half a foot years earlier in a work accident.
(Police inquiries later revealed the Isuzu would continue running when the battery and keys were removed. Disconnecting the fuel lines was one of the ways to get the engine to shut off.)
There was no evidence to suggest Watene had committed suicide and the idea he’d gone bush and was in hiding didn’t hold much weight with Lucy either. The groceries Watene bought were nowhere to be found, but they weren’t the type someone would buy if they were planning to live off the grid for an extended period.
The most likely scenario, Lucy thought, was that Watene had been killed.
After Anzac weekend, he briefed his boss, Detective Senior Sergeant Stu Harvey, on the case. Watene was still officially a missing person, but on hearing the details Harvey ordered that it be run like a homicide investigation.
Detectives made an urgent request for Watene’s cellphone data. It showed that about 9.30pm on April 16, his phone was used to make nine calls to Graham’s phone in the space of five minutes, all in the vicinity of her Sorn St property. In the 15 minutes before that it had been used to make a series of social media searches and Facebook calls to two of Watene’s friends, neither of whom answered. At 9.37pm, it was turned off.
Police suspected a murder and a cover-up. The Holt Park scene appeared staged to make it look like Watene’s Isuzu had broken down, and the repeated phone calls looked like a misbegotten alibi attempt. Investigators zeroed in on Graham, the last person who’d seen him alive.
About a week after Watene’s disappearance, she’d contacted his mother, Christine, via Facebook and asked if she’d heard from him: ‘‘This is so messed up. Do you have any idea . . . where he could be? Nothing’s adding up, and it’s honestly not like Dale to do this . . . I will let you know if I hear anything and if you need anything just let me know. Be safe and take care.’’
Graham had also posted several news stories about Watene’s disappearance to her Facebook page. ‘‘We all hope he comes back safe and well,’’ she wrote on May 1, ‘‘One very missed human.’’
But Graham was known to be deceptive. In 2008, when she was sentenced for driving drunk and dangerously, and injuring a police officer, a court heard that her mother (who declined to comment for this story) described her as ‘‘the world’s best liar who always had a plan’’.
Police obtained warrants to search Graham’s home, access her phone records and bug her phone, house and a motel they put her up in. They found that on April 16 she’d twice called her friend, George Hyde, in the 15 minutes after she’d received the barrage of calls from Watene’s phone.
Hyde, a 23-year-old farming contractor and four-wheel-driving enthusiast, lived about 20km away, near Tuatapere.
The next morning, when police arrived to talk to Graham and search her home, Hyde was there. He’d stayed the night. Given his newfound connection to the case, police questioned him too.
Graham maintained she hadn’t seen Watene since he left her home on April 16. She couldn’t explain why his cellphone was polling near her house when the calls were made to her phone later that night.
‘‘He was never at my house, I can assure you of that. Why wouldn’t he just come in? That’s just f...ing weird . . . I just wished I’d picked up my phone,’’ she told police in a videotaped interview at Invercargill police station.
She said she phoned Hyde to ask him how to download movies.
Asked what she thought had happened to Watene, Graham said: ‘‘I think he’s run away from his problems.’’
Harvey, a police officer of nearly three decades, watched the latter part of the video interview live.
‘‘I came away thinking we don’t have the right person,’’ he told Stuff. ‘‘She was very pleasant, very relaxed – laughing and joking – there was never any indication she was . . . making things up.’’ Hyde wasn’t so convincing. He initially said he was at home all night on April 16, but changed his story when confronted with cellphone data showing he’d left there and driven towards Otautau not long after Graham phoned him at 9.36pm.
In that case, he told police, it might have been the night she’d invited him over for drinks. He said he returned home when Graham got drunk and fell asleep.
‘‘I don’t know where [Watene’s] gone or what’s happened to him. I’d like to think he’s just hiding. I hope he turns up soon.’’
At this point, detectives had only circumstantial evidence to back up their suspicions. That began to change when they learned some of the results of the search warrant at Graham’s home.
While there was no visible blood in the house, testing with Luminol, a chemical that reacts with minute amounts of blood, revealed a 4m trail between the hallway and the lounge. Police ripped up sections of carpet to test if the blood was Watene’s. They also found some of the groceries Watene had bought on April 15.
The case against Graham was mounting, but police were missing a key piece of the puzzle – Watene’s body. Graham knew it.
‘‘They can try . . . and make a scenario out of something, but they need hard f…ing evidence,’’ she told Hyde and another man in a conversation intercepted by police, ‘‘And with no body there’s no f… ing evidence.’’
Police hoped to find Watene’s body during a search of Longwood Forest on May 16 and 17. A fortnight earlier, two investigators, Detective Dougall Henderson and Detective Sergeant Dave Kennelly, had walked an overgrown track deep in the forest looking for the spot where Graham and Watene got stuck in his Isuzu on the day Watene disappeared. It was about 12km from Graham’s home.
The officers had noted an area at the end of the track, where it looked like a load of rubbish had been dumped. There were bricks and mortar, a car tyre, a drum and roofing iron. If Watene didn’t turn up elsewhere, they thought the area warranted a closer look.
On May 16, volunteers searching the site flagged that the ground was soft and appeared to have been disturbed, but a police dog trained to sniff out human remains did not find anything.
At a briefing a couple of days later, Henderson mentioned the site as one of several places of interest. When he talked about the bricks, another officer recalled a pile of bricks from a demolished chimney had been found during a search of Hyde’s home, which he was renovating.
A third detective, who’d been analysing phone data, mentioned a text Graham had sent to Hyde on April 27: ‘‘Bring [a] load of bricks?’’. ‘‘That instantly set alarm bells going,’’ Harvey says.
Henderson and two colleagues went straight back to the forest with spades and trowels.
After carefully removing the debris, they started digging. The bricks were a decent link to Hyde and, right from his first visit, Henderson thought the site seemed as good as any to bury a body. After a few minutes, one of his colleague’s spades unearthed a foot.
‘‘It was nothing short of a miracle,’’ Harvey says.
An autopsy revealed that Watene had been shot through the mouth with a single, low-velocity .22 calibre round. The bullet was lodged in his spine.
During their investigation, police had learned that Graham, who did not have a gun licence, had borrowed a 10-shot semi-automatic
.22 rifle from a friend for hunting. She returned it after Watene disappeared.
Forensic testing of the rifle revealed Watene’s blood s on the stock and sight. His DNA was also found inside the barrel. Harvey was confident it was the weapon that had killed him.
On May 27, police again searched Graham’s and Hyde’s homes simultaneously. They were suddenly very interested in Hyde’s renovations, particularly the stack of chimney bricks.
That same day, Graham called a Stuff reporter and said that she had nothing to do with Watene’s death and was doing everything she could to help police catch his killer.
‘‘I’ve got nothing to hide. We all want to know who’s done this. He was a dearly beloved man to all of us. He treated my children like a dad.’’
‘‘It was nothing short of a miracle.’’ Detective Inspector Stu Harvey on the discovery of Dale Watene’s buried body.
In the months that followed, investigators matched wallpaper and roofing iron found at the Longwood Forest grave site to items at Hyde’s home.
(Watene’s DNA was later found on a bloodstained piece of underlay removed from the hallway of Graham’s home.)
On August 4, Graham and Hyde were arrested.
During a lengthy interview, police put all the incriminating evidence to Graham. But she denied any involvement, and always seemed to have an answer to their questions.
How, for instance, did she know Watene had been shot in the throat, as per a phone call they’d intercepted, when that information hadn’t been made public?
Someone she knew was friends with detectives working on the inquiry, Graham said, and she’d heard it from them. ‘‘I swear on my kids’ life I did not have that gun. I didn’t shoot Dale.’’
Hyde initially declined to comment. But about a month later, his lawyer arranged a meeting with detectives at an Invercargill police station. Hyde had something to confess.
‘‘It’s been 153 days now since Dale’s death,’’ a detective said to him, ‘‘I’d really like to know what happened.’’
Hyde said that on the night of April 16, Graham, whom he considered his best friend, had called him in tears. She wanted him to drive to her home urgently, and said something like, ‘‘Come here with a strong stomach’’. When Hyde arrived, Graham met him on the front lawn. He said she told him she and Watene had fought, Watene had hit her and then the pair had wrestled with a gun.
‘‘I can’t remember the actual details of what she told me,’’ Hyde said, ‘‘All I know is that she told me he shot himself.’’
Inside Graham’s home, Watene was lying on his back in the hallway, not far from a toy box. He was bleeding from his head.
Hyde said he helped Graham, who was recovering from a broken collar bone, drag Watene’s body to the lounge. They rolled it up in a tarpaulin then carried it out to the garage, where Watene’s black BMW was parked, and put it in the back seat.
Then, Graham burnt Watene’s boots, hat, phone and wallet in her fire.
The next day, Hyde disposed of the body in Longwood Forest. That night, while Graham’s children were asleep in bed, he helped her return the black BMW to Watene’s home in Waikouro-Wairio Rd. Ten days later, at Graham’s request, he said he took a load of bricks and other rubbish from his home and dumped it on the grave site to conceal it.
Asked why he helped Graham cover up what had happened, Hyde said: ‘‘I didn’t want her to get into trouble for having a firearm. I didn’t want her kids to get taken off her. I believed everything she said. I didn’t question it. I never thought she’d lie to me about something as serious as that. ‘‘I thought he’d killed himself because I was told that and that’s what it looked like.’’
Hyde said he was ashamed by what he’d done.
When the case came to trial in Invercargill last month, it had one more twist. Sandy Graham took the stand and admitted she was involved in Dale Watene’s death.
‘‘His family deserve to know the truth, and I’ve got to be accountable for my lies otherwise I can’t change.’’
Graham said that on that fateful night, as the two visitors left, Watene never went to get beers. Instead, the children went to bed in her room and she and Watene fell asleep watching TV.
When they woke, about 8pm, Watene saw Graham had received a ‘‘dick pic’’ from a man, who earlier that day she’d admitted sleeping with when Watene was barred from her home.
Watene wasn’t happy. The pair argued. Watene called her a ‘‘slut’’. He punched Graham in the chest, winding her, then kicked her.
Graham’s daughter emerged from bed and tried to ring 111. Watene snatched the phone from her and ended the call before it was answered (Graham’s phone records confirm this call).
Then, Graham grabbed Watene’s cellphone, hid it in her underwear drawer, and, after consoling her children, went to get her phone from him. The pair yelled abuse, and pushed and shoved each other.
At 8.48pm, Graham went outside to hide and sent a text message to a local police officer: ‘‘Are you on duty?’’ She said Watene found her, saw the text, and accused her of sleeping with the officer.
Graham then drove away in Watene’s Isuzu Mu, in the hope he’d follow her. She parked the vehicle at Holt Park, where it was found later.
As she ran back to her house, she could hear her kids screaming and Watene swearing. Graham ran into her bedroom and grabbed the .22 rifle from behind a mirror. She pointed the gun at Watene’s stomach. He grabbed it and put the barrel in his mouth.
In the hallway, the pair wrestled with the gun. When Graham reached to close the bedroom door, so her children wouldn’t see them arguing, the gun went off.
Graham froze. She didn’t know if she’d pulled the trigger. She put the gun away, checked Watene’s pulse, then used his phone to try to find hers (this explains the nine calls). She found it on the roof (she couldn’t explain the social media activity in the 15 minutes prior).
In tears, Graham called Hyde. ‘‘I didn’t really know what to do. I just wanted somebody there who would support me and my kids because if I was going to ring the police I was going to be taken away.’’
While she waited for him to arrive, she lay next to Watene. She didn’t want to believe what had happened. At some point, her son needed to go to the toilet, so she had to lift him over the body. ‘‘I think I told the kids that I’d punched him and that he was playing dead.’’
At 9.46pm, she said she saw the police officer had replied to her text from an hour ago, apologising, because he was busy. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ Graham replied, ‘‘We [are] all in bed all tucked up. Was someone pissed looking for [my neighbour]. They’ve gone now, sorry to waste your time.’’
When Hyde arrived, she told him there had been a fight and Watene had shot himself. She didn’t call the police, she said, because she was scared they wouldn’t believe her, and she’d lose her kids.
Instead, the following day they drove into Longwood Forest and dug a grave. Graham said she didn’t tell Hyde to conceal the grave. She said her text to him on April 27 that mentioned bricks was about improvements at her home.
She said she did not remove the battery from Watene’s Isuzu when she left it at Holt Park.
By then Watene had two batteries, so she didn’t need it for the BMW when she drove it to Watene’s home. (Graham previously told police Watene had only one battery that he switched between the two.)
‘‘I wish I’d rung the police,’’ Graham said through tears. ‘‘The hate they [Dale’s family] must feel towards me must be beyond words.’’
Under cross-examination, Graham admitted telling a litany of lies, but insisted what happened was a tragic accident, not murder.
The prosecution homed in on the likelihood of Watene being shot by accident. Forensic firearms expert Angus Newton said a lack of gunshot residue on Watene’s face meant he was shot from at least 80 centimetres away and probably more than a metre.
Watene’s armpit to fingertip measure was only 69cm. Graham said she was sure the last time she saw Watene’s hands, they were both on the barrel.
Then there was the rifle itself. Graham testified there was no magazine in the gun, it was in the garage, so she thought it wasn’t loaded. The last time it was fired, she said, was during a possum hunting trip about a month earlier.
Another witness, Brendon McRae, who was on that trip, said he made sure the gun wasn’t loaded before he handed it back to Graham. Graham said she did not load the gun or touch it after the trip.
Geoffrey Miller, who owned the gun, said that when it was returned to him after Watene’s disappearance, he pointed it at the ground and pulled the trigger to make sure it wasn’t loaded. He was surprised when it went off. This suggested a magazine was fitted, as the weapon would automatically reload when fired.
Graham insisted there was no magazine in the gun when she had the altercation with Watene. She believed Miller was lying.
In her closing address, Crown prosecutor Mary-Jane Thomas said Graham was ‘‘cunning’’, ‘‘clever’’ and ‘‘manipulative’’.
‘‘To call Sandy Graham a liar does her a disservice. She’s not simply a liar, she’s a storyteller. She weaves together fact and fiction to create stories with a hint of truth, peppered with untruths that support her narrative.’’
Before her arrest, Graham had made up stories about what had happened to Watene, and cast suspicion on others. Then, when she gave evidence during the trial, she continued to lie, Thomas said. Why, for example, did Graham not yell and scream and tell one of her neighbours to call 111 as she ran back from Holt Park? ‘‘Moving the car was all part of the cover-up.’’
But that alone, Thomas said, did not make Graham a murderer.
She urged the jury to focus on the facts, particularly around the rifle. ‘‘You can be sure that on the night [Watene was killed] someone put at least two bullets in the magazine, attached the magazine, pulled the lever to load the bullet into the chamber, and shot the rifle.’’
Based on the forensic firearms expert’s evidence, Watene and Graham couldn’t have been locked in a struggle over the gun when it was fired, Thomas said.
Graham’s counsel, Phil Shamy, disputed this. Determining the distance Watene was shot from wasn’t an exact science, he said. And Watene’s fingertip to mouth measure was about 87cm, which meant he could have reached the barrel.
Evidence around the handling of the rifle before and after the shooting was also dubious, Shamy said. When Brendon McRae, the possum hunting partner, checked it to make sure it wasn’t loaded, it was dark, and he’d been drinking. He also didn’t have a gun licence.
Miller had also been drinking when he later fired the shot into the ground. And the only bullet casing police could find in the area hadn’t come from the gun.
The Crown had also not advanced a motive for why Graham might have killed Watene deliberately, and, in his submission, there was no evidence she had.
Together, Shamy said, it amounted to too much doubt: ‘‘You must be sure before you convict Miss Graham of murder. It’s not enough if you think that she is likely guilty, or probably guilty, you must be sure, because that is what beyond reasonable doubt means. Nothing short of that is sufficient. If you are not sure, you must acquit.’’
On Thursday, Graham was found guilty of murder. Hyde was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact to manslaughter.
The verdict, in Hyde’s case, meant the jury was unable to establish beyond reasonable doubt that he knew Graham had murdered Watene when he helped conceal his body.
Today, the remote spot in Longwood Forest where Dale Watene was buried is marked by a white cross. It’s surrounded by new ferns, empty beer bottles and cans of pre-mixed alcohol.
Harvey, now a detective inspector, is still surprised that police ever found the makeshift grave. If they hadn’t, he believes investigators would not have had the evidence to charge Graham and would still be investigating Watene’s disappearance.
‘‘When we set this operation up, it wasn’t to get a murder conviction, it was to find Dale Watene.
‘‘We’re just incredibly happy we were able to give some sort of closure for his family.’’