‘OH MY GOD WHAT HAS HE DONE?’
Top cop reveals all about Millane investigation
The day after Grace Millane was reported missing and Detective Inspector Scott Beard was called in to oversee the investigation, he had one order for his team.
“One thing you want is a photo of Grace up there,” he told them. “Because that’s who we’re working for. We’re working to find Grace.
“She’s not just a name — she’s a person. So I want as many photos of her up on the wall as possible, so we know why we’re here.”
Beard has fronted some of the most high-profile cases in Auckland.
In early December 2018, he took on one of the biggest: The Millane investigation — known as Operation Gourami.
Beard delivered updates to the media when Grace disappeared. He was at her father’s side when he made an emotional appeal for information. He announced the worst possible news — that she was dead, murdered.
Rewind 443 days ago to December 5, 2018.
Just after lunchtime that day, Beard was alerted to Grace’s disappearance.
“We get missing-person complaints every day, and multiple times some days.
“But it’s when you look at the circumstances here, you know, a young English girl on an OE in New Zealand on her birthday . . . the family hadn’t been able to contact her.
“This is someone who’s been contacting her family daily, if not multiple times a day, all the time.
“She’s from a family that is so tightknit and close — and every day she’s in contact telling them what she’s doing and suddenly she’s out of contact.
“So, yeah, there were definitely red flags.”
By 10pm on December 5, Beard knew the case had to be escalated.
“Time is ticking, it’s getting worse and worse,” he recalls.
He left home early the next morning and walked up through the city past the backpackers where Grace was staying, just to get a feel for things.
He got to the office and gave his own boss an update. He said he was happy to take the case on because he wasn’t going out of Auckland for Christmas so he’d be around for however long it took to find Grace.
He then assembled a team to work Operation Gourami.
“I assigned a detective senior sergeant, that was Greg Brand, to be the officer in charge.
“Then he appoints a second in charge and we start getting staff — we go across the district and we say ‘right, what resource do we need, who do we need, what’s going to be
our key focus in the initial stages?
“My role then is to basically sit at the top and oversee the investigation — make sure we’re on the right track, make sure they’ve got the resources, because it was international, it was going to mean a lot of media, we already knew that, we’d already had some media questions from the UK.
“Having previously dealt with overseas victims and inquiries, I knew the media phase — and I’m going to call it the media circus — was going to roll in.
“It was really important that the investigation team and (Brand) focused solely on the investigation, whereas I come in over top and deal with all the other issues.”
Beard first fronted that media circus in the early evening on December 6.
“As every hour went by and we hadn’t found her, and we weren’t seeming to get any closer to finding her, the situation was getting worse,” Beard said.
It became clear very soon that the CCTV phase of the investigation was going to be significant.
Operation Gourami staff started at the backpackers where there was footage of Grace leaving for the last time.
They fanned out across the CBD, collecting footage from various businesses and the council.
They would eventually track Grace to SkyCity where she met a man, then on to a number of bars drinking with him, and then to the CityLife building where he rented an apartment.
There were seven CCTV cameras in the CityLife building, which also houses a hotel of the same name.
At 9.40pm on Saturday, December 1, Grace and the man were captured entering a lift and getting out on the floor of his apartment.
At 8am the next day, the man went back down on his own.
“We obviously needed to prove that Grace had not left that room,” says Beard
“We had seven CCTV cameras and the way it operated, we could only watch one at a time. So to watch eight hours of footage, takes 56 hours.
“I wasn’t going to let the staff fastforward on the CCTV — you cannot afford that, it had to be watched minute-by-minute.
“As some of the team did that, others started trying to identify potential persons of interest.”
Team members secured the apartment where the man lived, after Grace was last seen entering his floor with him.
They questioned the man she had been with.
Beard said it was obvious by then he was connected. When he lied to police, Beard’s confidence became certainty.
The man — jailed yesterday for 17 years — said he had bid farewell to Grace on Victoria St.
But police had located CCTV showing the pair crossing Victoria St together and were in the process of tracking her to his room — but not beyond.
On the Friday night, luminol testing was done in that room.
“It showed all the blood on the carpet and you think ‘oh my God, what has he done?’ — because it’s a significant amount of glow.
“At that stage we were dealing with a homicide investigation.”
The next day, the man Grace had met on dating app Tinder was charged with her murder.
Grace’s father David had flown out to New Zealand soon after she was reported missing and he fronted media at a press conference on the Friday, flanked by Beard.
On Saturday he was told a man had been charged with murdering his youngest child and only daughter.
On Sunday he was told that his little girl’s body had been recovered.
Beard has four children — three sons and a daughter who is close to Grace in age.
Not only was it was his job to keep David in the loop, there was a feeling of parental, fatherly duty too.
“It must have been horrendous when you’re in that situation, because there’s nothing you can do.”
Beard said it broke his heart to see David so torn, but trying to be so brave for his family.
“I have a daughter in her 20s and I could completely understand and empathise with how he was feeling — because I know how I would feel. Sometimes you have to put yourself into their shoes, because if you don’t, you might just miss that connection.
“And as it was, we got on really well.”
In that first meeting, Beard set the ground rules with David and promised him he’d do everything in his power to find Grace.
“I told David that I would be telling him everything before I told the media. My promise to him was that he would not hear anything without hearing it from me first.”
Beard isn’t easily shaken. He’s warm, affable and easy to chat to but emotions rarely rise to the surface.
When he talks about David, though, the facade fades and you can see it in his eyes.
That’s the face that was beamed around the world when Beard stood in front of the media and revealed that Grace’s body had been found.
It took longer to dig up the suitcase than what we anticipated.
Detective Inspector Scott Beard Being able to give answers to this family and give Grace back to them was huge.
Scott Beard
Police had tracked her killer’s movements to within minutes of where she was concealed, and he had eventually helped pinpoint the exact location.
A press conference was scheduled for mid-afternoon, and then pushed back. “It took longer to dig up the suitcase than what we anticipated,” Beard explains.
“Once the suitcase had been freed from the shallow grave, we had an X-ray machine there which indicated, and then the pathologist said ‘yes, it’s a female body’. Where we were, my phone reception was not the best. So I managed to get in contact with the victim-liaison detective and said to her ‘can you ring David, we’ve found a body’.
“Within two minutes I went from one side of the (police) tent where Grace was, to standing in front of the media.
“Telling Dad . . . we had to make sure he knew, because as we knew everything in the media can be livestreamed, so it’s instantaneous now.”
After the press conference, Beard walked back into the cordon.
“I took a deep breath, and sighed. It was emotional, there’s no doubt. It had also been a really intense three or four days, there hadn’t been a lot of sleep, a lot of thought going into working with the family — it was just such a rapid investigation.
“I don’t think I’ve worked on an investigation that’s moved so fast and so quickly. The staff had done a fantastic job, they worked some long hours . . . It was painstaking, but you know what, they did a really good job because it was critical.”
That night Beard went to David’s hotel and spent time with him.
It was important to him to make sure the now-grieving father was looked after.
“His brother had come out and was supporting him, but that was part of my role — to look after the family, he said.
“It was so emotional . . . his wife’s on the other side of the world with cancer, he’s just been told we’ve found his daughter murdered . . . yeah, how do you react to that? You’re numb, maybe you’re expecting that at some stage but it still hurts.”
Beard travelled to the UK for Grace’s funeral in January last year. He returned home to be told he had cancer.
“I went to a urologist and arranged a biopsy which was under a general anaesthetic. About 10 days later they rang me and said, we’ve got the results you need to make an appointment in the next couple of days.
“Just with that information you think ‘well, obviously there’s not good news. And then your mind starts playing games the connotations that the word cancer brings out.
“I remember probably the hardest thing was that my daughter knew (about the appointment) so ringing her after getting the news, that was hard . . . I got a bit teary.”
Beard underwent surgery to remove his prostate and told the doctors that whatever happened, he needed to be in court by November 4
— the opening of the trial for Grace’s murderer.
He was back at work before then. And he was there to support David and Gillian through the trauma of the trial.
The couple arrived in Auckland on Saturday, November 2. They met with the Crown prosecution team — led by Brian Dickey, Robin McCoubrey and Litia Tuiburelevu.
They watched every minute of the CCTV footage of Grace’s last hours.
Beard said the hardest part for them was watching their daughter get in the lift with the man who would kill her, just three hours before she should have rung in her 22rd birthday.
In the lift, Millane is smiling and happy.
“That was the last time they saw their daughter alive,” said Beard.
“Then he goes and buys a suitcase, takes the luggage trolley up to his room and comes down again — and as we know, by then Grace is in the suitcase.
“That was upsetting for the family, but we just wanted them to be prepared for the trial.
“And the court was packed with media and every time something happened some of them would turn and look at the family. I knew they’d be under huge pressure and we were just trying to prepare them and support them and get them through, you know, however long the trial was going to take.”
When the guilty verdict was read the Millanes kept their heads high, but they sobbed.
Beard clearly remembers the moment the word “guilty” rang out through court.
“Right at that moment (I felt) just relief . . . Phew . . . we got there. But then I had David and Gillian sitting next to me, really emotional.
“It was the most emotional courtroom I’ve ever been in.”
The next day David and Gillian left New Zealand.
It’s unlikely they will return here, but Beard will probably always be in touch with them.
Beard has been working as an investigator for more than 30 years.
“There was a huge sense of satisfaction, firstly in finding Grace because, you know, through the years there have been families who don’t find their loved ones or don’t have an answer as to why, or what happened.
“So that satisfaction of being able to give answers to this family and give Grace back to them was huge.”
Beard remains uncomfortable with the spotlight turned on him.
“I was doing my job. This was about finding Grace.”