Bones in backyard a homicide
Police are searching for a killer of the man whose remains were encased in concrete
It was a house for men to hide from society awhile. Last week, police confirmed it was also the place to hide a murder. The Mt Eden property beneath which human remains encased in concrete were found on January 31 last year is now officially being treated as a homicide investigation.
On September 4, the bones were identified as the house’s past owner David Stanley Hart, who for decades — until about 2004 — ran a ramshackle boarding house out of the weatherboard building.
A rotating group of five or six men constantly filtered through the cheap, cash-only lodgings, rarely settling for long. Ex-crims and elderly alcoholics were the typical clientele.
On announcing the elevation of the investigation to murder, police noted the extreme difficulty of the case obscured by 15-odd years and the social isolation of the tenants.
“At this time, we are not able to provide a cause of death. Police do regard the death as suspicious and it is being treated as a homicide,” a police spokesperson said.
In September, when Hart was identified, police said they had spoken to a number of people in New Zealand and overseas who had lived at the Marlborough St boarding house. They were interested in anyone who had contact with Hart from March 2004 onwards.
While this week’s development may seem inevitable, several people who knew Hart had their own more hopeful theories on what happened.
An old acquaintance from Blackball on the West Coast, Neville Sheehan, was convinced Hart had just moved to Australia, where he used to travel in the 1970s and 80s to mine gold with his brother, who has since died of cancer.
Marlborough St neighbours and current owner Peter Marsden speculated the boarders decided to bury Hart after finding him dead as the official outlets for reporting a death were not the marginalised tenants’ style.
But police are not so optimistic. The Herald on Sunday can now reveal fresh details about Hart, who would have been 80 if he were alive today.
Neighbours who have lived in Marlborough St for 50 years had no idea what Hart did for a living or how he came into possession of the innercity property.
However, it is understood Hart worked as a tally clerk on the Auckland waterfront in the ’70s and ’80s. Colleague Kevin Webb said Hart’s nickname was “The Gold Digger”.
“Dave was an interesting person. He thought he knew everything about anything and would rattle on for hours,” Webb said.
“One thing he used to talk about was prospecting for gold in the South Island which he had done on annual leave.
“He claimed he could make more money panning for gold than what he earned as a tally clerk, which was pretty good in those days.”
The Herald’s investigation last year into the conditions of the Mt Eden boarding house eventually narrowed in on one conspicuous lodger, Gabriel D’Angelo, who spent time in a maximum security prison in the early ’80s.
It was noted by one past resident of the boarding house, who has spoken to police several times over the case, that there was “tension” between D’Angelo and Hart.
He characterised both men as “extremely eccentric”.
D’Angelo — also known as George Nathan Gabriel Ormsby — died at the Marlborough St property on September 26, 2016.
Accounts of D’Angelo, who took over the boarding house once Hart disappeared in the 2000s, are vastly different.
“He was always okay to me but he was always a bit weird. Extremely weird,” the past resident said.
“He used to wear sunglasses and gumboots the whole time.
“Some of the stuff he said you just shook your head. Like, ‘okay Gabriel, goodnight, bye’. I saw him in the pub years after I left and I asked him how Dave was. He said ‘oh yeah Dave I haven’t heard from him’.”
D’Angelo also had an association of sorts with the musician Don McGlashan.
McGlashan told the Herald on Sunday he first met D’Angelo in the mid-1980s when he was assisting inmates at the Paremoremo maximum security prison in Auckland.
“He was an intelligent man,” McGlashan said. “He seemed like the kind of guy that had things gone better for him in his life, he might have actually been a fulltime professional musician.”
The other specks of information that can be gleaned of Hart’s life are somewhat mysterious.
He owned a second property — or shack — in Blackball, which an Auckland jeweller said had been put up for security around 2011 for a couple who obtained $70,000 of diamonds from him — and skipped the country.
Murray Goldings, 46, who has lived in Marlborough St his entire life, said Hart was a “bit of a loner”.
“He was there for many years by himself. There was only him and then all the boarders came later on,” Goldings said.
“There were rumours he went to Australia and there was another rumour he had dementia and had gone to a home somewhere. I reckon it would be over 10 years ago.
“He disappeared, and no one knew why.”