Dad’s hunt for killer
Twenty-three years ago, two police investigations and still no one has been brought to justice for Donny Reidy’s death. Dad Merv Reidy will not give up. Florence Kerr reports.
As Merv Reidy held his son’s broken body at Seddon Park Funeral Home in Hamilton, he made a vow.
‘‘I will find your killer,’’ he whispered in his son Donny Reidy’s ear.
But 22 years after Donny’s death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver on a Waikato road, Merv’s promise has looked unlikely to be fulfilled, with the Waikato Times able to reveal the man both police and family believed responsible was never charged due to a botched investigation.
Donny, 23, was killed after being by hit by a vehicle on State Highway 1, just north of Ngaruawāhia, in the early hours of October 7, 1995.
Police investigated the death twice. In 1995 police found it was an accidental hit and run, but after dozens of letters and heavy lobbying by Merv, police reopened the case and eventually found what he already suspected the case was a homicide.
A Waikato Times investigation uncovered that police had a main suspect, but due to the first bungled police investigation, evidence was lost and DNA samples were not tested, which meant a prosecution never went ahead.
Donny was a bit of a scallywag, a ‘‘likeable rogue really’’, his dad says.
The family moved to Australia when Donny was eight.
Merv had a car detailing business at the time and when Donny was at high school and he would often skip school to help his dad out.
‘‘He wanted to come back to New Zealand to meet his cousins when he was about 18 or 19, but he intended to come back for a couple of years.’’
The year Donny was killed, he planned to return to Australia for Christmas.
His mum had a place for him to stay and a job at the trucking yard. Donny had been at a party the night he was killed.
Merv says all he was told was that Donny had wandered off on State Highway 1, laid down on the road and got hit.
The main suspect, who cannot be named because of legal reasons, was last seen with Donny in his Holden HQ outside a Ngāruawāhia petrol station an hour before the 23-year-old was killed.
Police released a photo of a person sitting in the passenger seat of a HQ Holden at the BP service station.
‘‘As soon as I saw the photo I knew it was Donny in the car and whoever was driving the car was in the service station. I found out who was driving the car and I said to police that he was the last person to see Donny alive.
‘‘I found out where a mob of them (partygoers) were staying on the Sunday, so I went around and knocked on the door and they all admitted that Donny had wandered away from the party and had run out on to SH1.’’
But none of the partygoers would say that Donny was taken out there in a car.
‘‘I asked a lot of questions but no one wanted to give me too many answers,’’ Merv said.
Merv suspects his son may have been bashed at the party and run over to make it look like a hit and run.
Today police still consider the case active and welcome any new information.
Detective Inspector Graham Pitkethley said the file remains an active investigation.
‘‘Over the years information concerning Mr Reidy’s death is assessed and investigated as it comes to light, and has been subject to a number of inquiries,’’ he said.
‘‘Although suspects have been nominated and investigated, the offender remains unknown.
Twenty-three years on and sitting at his brother Peter Reidy’s Ngaruawahia home, Merv clasps his hands together to stop his involuntary shakes.
Years have wearied Merv, but his desire to bring Donny’s killer to justice is as strong as the day he whispered his promise into his dead son’s ear.
‘‘It was a promise made in revenge,’’ Merv said.
‘‘But now it’s one for justice. To honour my promise to my son. It might not happen while I’m still on this earth. But it should happen, for justice’s sake.’’
Donovan Reidy was 23 when he was killed. He was on State Highway 1, north of Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia, when he was hit by a vehicle early on October 7, 1995.
This is where Donny’s life ends, but it’s where the story of the unwavering perseverance of a loving father looking for justice begins.
Twenty-three years ago Donny’s dad, Merv Reidy, was watching television in his Perth home when the phone rang.
It was 9.20pm. That’s the time Merv remembers. It’s the time his life came crashing down.
‘‘It was Joyce, my sister. She never called me.
‘‘What do you want? I asked. ‘It’s Donny, Merv. He’s dead.’
‘‘I thought she was lying. and then I lost it.’’
Merv went to his former wife’s home a few streets over. She lost it too.
Merv and his ex-wife had moved to Australia when their children, Natalie and Donny, were kids.
Donny wanted to get to know his New Zealand family so he returned to his birth country in early 1995, planning to head back to Australia in December. That never happened.
‘‘We came home,’’ says Merv Reidy. ‘‘We got the earliest flight and came straight to him.’’
Merv went to Seddon Park Funeral Home in Hamilton where his son lay. He held him and whispered a solemn vow in his ear: ‘‘I will find your killer.’’
It was promise first made in revenge, Merv says. It’s now one he holds for justice.
No-one has been charged with Donny’s death. What began as a hit and run probe riddled with mistakes became a likely homicide in the minds of police. It was already murder in Merv’s mind long before, and remains so today.
Police did have one main suspect. He was the last person seen with Donny in the early hours of that morning.
CCTV footage from
Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia BP revealed the last image of Donny alive, sitting in a silver Holden Kingswood less than an hour before his broken body was discovered by motorists.
The car belonged to a
Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia man, who broke the news of Donny’s death to Peter Reidy, Donny’s uncle.
On October 7, 1995, Peter was at home on his only day off from his job at Placemakers.
He read the headlines on his TV’s Teletext and saw someone had been killed in a hit and run near his Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia home.
Minutes later there was a knock at his door.
‘‘And there he was, a boy I recognised but I didn’t know him. He said, ‘I think it’s Donny that was killed,’’’ Peter says.
‘‘We went in his car down to the police station and he knew more of what Donovan was wearing than I knew. The police put us in their car and took us to the hospital.
‘‘I went in first and straight away I knew. Then he went in and came out and goes – yeah, that’s him. I will never forget those lips, he made that strange statement that stuck in my mind.
‘‘A few days later it struck me that it was strange that he had come to my house, because when he knocked on my door no-one at that point knew whether the dead person was a man or a woman. Not only did he know it was a man – he knew it was Donny.’’
In the early hours of October
7, 1995, Auckland resident Beryl Pokai was woken by a phone call from wha¯ nau in Whanganui.
A family member had died. She needed to gather her siblings and head back to their marae as soon as possible.
‘‘We are travelling down Hopuhopu straight, it was about
4am and I just happen to see something out of the corner of my eye. So I back-back and as I’m backing back I look at my rear view mirror and I see a car has just turned into one of the driveways and I thought – oh, this car is coming to help and I see [Donny Reidy] on the side of the road."
Pokai, who was in her early 20s at the time, says Donny was lying on his stomach. He was off the road. He was alive, she says.
‘‘He had a brown jacket on like a Swanndri – he was lying head towards Auckland, feet towards Nga¯ rua¯ wahia.
‘‘I open the door, put my foot down on the ground and then everyone in the car starts yelling – ‘Don’t get out, it’s a trick, you’re going to get out and somebody’s going to jump you.’
‘‘It was happening because there were a few cases at that time and I sat there for five minutes just looking at him. So I said, ‘OK, he’s off the road, the only way something bad would happen to him is if somebody goes off the main road and collects him.’
‘‘So I leave and go to call the police.’’
Pokai stopped at the same BP station Donny had been just 20 minutes before. Her attempts to call police were fruitless, and on the attendant’s advice she went to the Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia police station.
While there another motorist arrived. He, too, had concerns about a man on State Highway 1.
‘‘At that stage, unbeknownst to me it had already happened. Donny was dead. I talk to police and then I go back. Then I see him. He wasn’t where I last saw him.
‘‘He was a long way from where I first saw him and he was covered with a blanket. I didn’t even register that it was the same person I’d seen earlier.
‘‘When they lifted the blanket, I saw his jacket and I knew.
‘‘We decided we needed to get him off the road so we all took a part of him. It was awful. I knew as soon as I lifted him that he was not gonna come back. He was gone.
‘‘We laid him on the side of the road and waited for police.’’
The first police investigation into Donny’s death, in 1995, was fatally flawed – investigators
missed key evidence and didn’t test key DNA, a later police review of the case found. They failed, Merv says. A series of interviews with the main suspect showed how his story changed. The man did not reveal in his first interviews that he had been with Donny less than an hour before he was killed.
When shown CCTV footage from the service station that showed Donny slumped in his passenger seat, the suspect claimed he couldn’t remember. Light-coloured hair found on the underside of his vehicle was never tested and the evidence was destroyed.
The CCTV footage from the service station also later disappeared from the police evidence room.
Police closed the case as an accidental hit and run. Their findings would be supported by a coroner nine months later.
Still hunting for justice
Twenty three years later Merv is back in New Zealand visiting family. Age has wearied him. He suffers involuntary shakes because of a stroke.
He sips a can of Coke between tremors. He is staying at Pete’s Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia home.
Tears spring to his eyes as he describes the fight for justice. It has left him battered – he wears his scars on the inside.
Merv describes the first investigation as utter ‘‘bullshit’’.
‘‘We arrived on a Tuesday and by Thursday I knew it wasn’t a hit and run. I knew he’d been murdered, but I had no way to prove it,’’ he says.
‘‘Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia coppers kept saying it was an accidental hit and run, but I kept saying to them, it’s not hit and run, it’s a murder.
‘‘All I was told was that Donny had been at the party and he had wandered off on SH1 and laid down on the road and had got run over by a car.
‘‘I started asking questions about the ones who were at the party with Donny. No answers.
‘‘But by then police already had a photo of someone sitting in a Holden at the BP service station in Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia. As soon as I had seen the photo I knew it was Donny in the car and whoever was driving the car was in the service station. I found out who was driving the car and I said to the police he was the last person to see Donny alive.’’
The family were horrified when police closed the case.
‘‘With what detail we knew from the police investigation – we were asking ourselves why didn’t they pursue the suspect. I wasn’t going to let this lie.’’
For three years Merv and his brother Pete started a letterwriting campaign to local MPs and conducted their own questioning of locals.
Merv came to New Zealand to meet police and the coroner who presided over Donny’s inquest. ‘‘Peter kept pushing and I started writing letters from Australia,’’ Merv says.
Every time the Aussie truckie got time off he would get on a plane and head back to his campaign.
He achieved a breakthrough with the coroner. ‘‘After spending an hour with him he agreed that I had a chance of getting the case reopened as long as I kept pushing.’’
In his third year of the fight to have the case reopened Merv was on the verge of giving up when he received a call from police, to say they were reopening the case.
He finished work early, went home and slept for four days.
With an offer from his employer of as much time off as he needed, Merv headed back to Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia.
The new investigators had the task of sifting through the work of their colleagues. What they found were failures that would stop them from prosecuting anyone despite the new investigators also coming to believe Merv’s suspect was responsible for Donny’s death.
In files obtained by Stuff ,a police report written by investigators in 1998 detailed the mistakes made in the first investigation.
‘‘There have been a number of major flaws in this investigation, not the least being the standard of the scene investigation, the interviews of the suspect [name withheld] and the examination of his motor vehicle.
‘‘The fact that the videotape from the BP service station has gone missing and that the hairs from the suspect vehicle have been destroyed are other difficulties with this particular inquiry,’’ the report states.
‘‘There does not appear to be any reason why [the main suspect] would want to run the deceased over but, without any other explanation being available, it appears to me that he is responsible and this is why he is claiming not to know who his passenger at the service station was.’’
Police visited Merv when they ended the second investigation. Without the key evidence or a witness, the investigators could not pursue any charges.
The news was another blow for Merv and brother Pete. Still, they continued to write letters.
Today, the file remains an active investigation, Detective Inspector Graham Pitkethley says.
‘‘Over the years information concerning Mr Reidy’s death is assessed and investigated as it comes to light, and has been subject to a number of inquiries,’’ he says.
‘‘Although suspects have been nominated and investigated, the offender remains unknown.
‘‘Police continue to encourage anyone who has any information to speak to police.’’
On the deck of his brother’s Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia home, Merv wipes tears from his eyes. His voice is hoarse – he can feel his years are coming to an end but he made a promise.
‘‘It’s still pretty raw, even today,’’ Merv says. ‘‘I promised Donny, when I went to see him in the funeral parlour, that till the day I died I would push to get the evidence to prove he was not in a hit and run, he was murdered.
‘‘In the beginning I wanted revenge; now, in the end, I want justice. I don’t think I’ll ever get it in my lifetime. But I still have to keep pushing.’’
‘I’ll prove Donny was murdered’