Lost and found
Families of lost loved ones endure unresolved grief but even the chance discovery of their remains doesn’t always bring closure.
When Liz Montgomerie finally saw the wreckage of the helicopter crash that killed her son, she wished she hadn’t.
Campbell Montgomerie, 27, and his girlfriend Hannah Timings, 28, disappeared over Fiordland during a helicopter flight in January 2004. Now, his parents were in another chopper, hovering over the scene where he died. The two flights were made nearly nine years apart.
‘‘You could virtually see what would have happened,’’ Liz Montgomerie said.
‘‘The picture I had in my head wasn’t nearly as bad as what actually probably happened.’’
Campbell Montgomerie and Hannah Timings left Queenstown the day after New Year’s Day 2004, bound for Milford Sound. After hitting bad weather, they set down at Howden Hut on the Routeburn Track and stayed the night with trampers. They were never seen alive again. A news story the next day about the missing helicopter included its registration number.
‘‘I knew in my heart of hearts that he’d gone,’’ Montgomerie said.
‘‘But it was just still the unknown and the hope that he may have survived or a miracle.’’
There was no miracle. Liz and Ian Montgomerie’s son was almost certainly dead. But, with no confirmation, there was a void.
‘‘People kept asking us what was happening and we didn’t know,’’ Montgomerie said. ‘‘People wanted to grieve.’’ A memorial service was held two months later. The Montgomeries owned two farms and three runoffs around Auckland and Waikato and some of their more than 30 workers brought farm implements up to the family home for the service. The Montgomerie kilt, which Campbell favoured on formal occasions, was on display along with his wet weather gear and gumboots – ‘‘still attached where he’d sort of jumped out of them’’.
‘‘I think if he’d been there,’’ Montgomerie said, ‘‘I couldn’t have coped as well.’’
When a police officer called in November 2012 to say that Campbell had been found, her first instinct was relief.
‘‘I thought, ‘That’s great’. I suppose you think in some silly way I’d hoped he might have survived and he’s gone to a different continent and he might pop up somewhere else.’’
Just as they did in 2004, the Montgomeries flew from Auckland to Queenstown. Soon after they were in a helicopter above the site where their son died at Humboldt Creek, about 20 kilometres east of Milford Sound. His body was removed and taken home, where friends visited before he was cremated.
‘‘But his soul’s down there,’’ Montgomerie said.
‘‘It was a part of the world he always loved. I’d said to someone, ‘Even if we found him I think I’d take him back there to scatter his ashes’.’’
Ian Montgomerie died last year, within three weeks of being diagnosed with leukemia. He was 72. The pain of his only son’s death and the discovery of his body hit him hard, his wife said.
‘‘Cam was his successor. He was the one that was going to take over all the things that we’d built up over the years and that was all destroyed, just gone.
‘‘He did [carry on] but you could see the spark had gone. You still get up and you still farm, you have to, but the purpose had gone.’’
Montgomerie has three daughters and nine grandchildren but ‘‘the two men in my life [are] gone’’. She still has Campbell’s ashes and faces a decision she never thought she would have to make.
‘‘I don’t really like it much. I don’t know what I want to do with them. I don’t know whether I want to take them back down there.
‘‘I wish I didn’t know. I wish they hadn’t found him.’’
Stephen Anderson was always on the move. His brothers and sisters, they were settled, but not Stephen. He liked going places and if the mood took him, he went.
Maybe that was why he left the Berlins Hotel in the Buller Gorge early on New Year’s Day, 1987.
He and some friends had farewelled 1986 at Westport the night before. They were riding their motorbikes to Nelson when they stopped in for a drink.
‘‘He just left the pub earlier than the other guys and said, ‘I’ll see you at the next stop’,’’ Stephen’s brother Peter Anderson said.
‘‘And he was never heard from again.’’
A week of searching turned up nothing. It seemed likely that Stephen had come off the road somewhere in the gorge but with no trace of him, the rumours started. He had some gang associates – gossipers love a criminal connection. There was talk he wanted to get away from a woman, or had just upped sticks and left. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gone off and done his own thing.
On Mother’s Day that year, the family knew it wasn’t a vanishing act. Stephen always called his mum on Mother’s Day.
‘‘When she never heard from him, she knew,’’ Peter Anderson said.
‘‘[Disappearing] sounded like something he would do. He was quite capable of doing that. But he still would have kept in contact with Mum. And that’s why Mum knew straight away something drastic had happened. But we never knew how til he was found, really.’’
In March 1997 a couple were fossicking for relics at Lyell, the site of a 19th-century goldmining town in the Buller Gorge, when they found a wrecked motorbike. A helmet with a skull inside, still wearing sunglasses, was found nearby. When Maureen Anderson heard the bike was a Bonneville 750, she knew it must have been her son and called the police.
A few days later, Peter Anderson borrowed a van from his work and the six surviving Anderson siblings drove to Murchison and Nelson to pick up the bike and their brother’s remains. More than 100 bikers turned up to Stephen’s funeral to escort his body to the crematorium.
‘‘He valued friends more than he valued anything material,’’ Peter Anderson said.
‘‘Turned out he had a lot of friends. They remembered him well enough to turn up at his funeral 10 years down the track. It was a good send off. It was good to be able to give him a send off because there’d been nothing before.’’
Anderson’s parents have both since died. His mother, especially, never really talked about his disappearance. Never let on that it bothered her. It wasn’t until he was found and laid to rest that the family finally confronted his death.
‘‘If you never get a resolution then there’s a certain amount of grief you don’t get rid of because there’s no outlet,’’ Peter Anderson said.
‘‘It wasn’t until after we found him that I realised how much it had affected me. It was just a feeling,’’ he exhaled deeply, for effect, ‘‘we know what happened. And we’ve got him home. It was a great, great relief to find him and to definitely know.’’
Three or four years before he died, Stephen Anderson fell down a shaft at work and badly broke his leg. The year he was laid up recovering was the most Peter Anderson saw of his brother – he was tied to one place. When he was mobile once more he was off, using the compensation money from the accident to buy the Bonneville.
He didn’t stop moving until the day he died.
Sequoia Di Angelo decided on the spot she had to go to Pakistan. The online video, posted by a Swiss climber, showed human remains found on K2, the world’s second-highest peak. There was a chance they could be those of her father or her brother.
New Zealand mountaineer Marty Schmidt and his son Denali died on K2 in 2013, most likely killed in an avalanche. Like so many before them, they lay where they died.
‘‘I saw the video and within 12 hours I had booked a ticket and went on a shopping spree [for climbing gear],’’ Di Angelo said.
Di Angelo and her father had a difficult relationship. They had just started communicating again after a six-year rift. She wasn’t the first to hear when he and her brother died.
‘‘I think a part of me was hoping that it might be them [on the 2015 video] because I felt like I needed to be more connected to it than I was.
‘‘It was the reason of me feeling like I needed to be the one to find them. To bring myself that bit closer to what happened and to prove to others I was worthy of being that person.’’
Di Angelo had spent two years making the best of the situation. Denali was an artist and she organised a touring exhibition of his paintings. A film of her father’s life was in the works. These were good ways to honour their lives; not so good for coping with their deaths. The relentless positivity eventually wore thin.
‘‘I don’t know if I’ve faced it, and I don’t know if I will ever face it,’’ Di Angelo said.
‘‘Now I’m at this strange position in my life where, how far do I go with this story and how I feel like I’m pushing through my grief and honouring my father and brother versus the eternal question of should I just be living my own life in my own way.’’
Pakistan helped. Di Angelo made the 16-day trek to and from K2 base camp with five Pakistani guides who didn’t speak English. With isolation came perspective.
‘‘I kind of learned on that journey that other people’s opinions don’t matter,’’ she said.
‘‘I was really able to be alone in a very beautiful and powerful landscape and to get away from (the) life that we live here . . . for me to have memories and touch on those moments and realise that’s what matters.’’
Di Angelo saw and held the head she had seen on the video and felt sure it wasn’t her brother. Tests later confirmed it. The remains were wrapped in white burial cloth and laid at the K2 memorial. If Marty or Denali Schmidt are ever found, Di Angelo hopes they are left in place. She thinks.
‘‘I can’t say no question. My opinion’s changed so much in two years. Ask me again in five.
‘‘But for right now I definitely prefer that.’’