Truth at any cost
Tania Ellwood’s grieving partner recounts her last words before she disappeared as he prepares to face the truth – no matter how painful – of her final days before her body was found six days later in a halfway house, next to her dead ex-boyfriend. He spe
On a Wednesday morning in late February, Ira Heyder dropped his partner, Tania Ellwood, outside a bank in Newmarket. She went inside to withdraw some cash.
Heyder, a director for the Ma¯ori documentary series Waka Huia, carried on to his studio. He was getting ready for a work trip to Hawke’s Bay that afternoon.
Soon after they parted ways, Ellwood sent him a text: ‘‘I love you my bubba please drive carefully now!!! PS, miss you already.’’
From the road Heyder responded, ‘‘love you too,’’ and asked her to buy a Lotto ticket. A few hours later, around 5.20pm, Tania replied saying she already had the ticket, and that she was about to take a nap.
Sometime later, she sent him another text: ‘‘Woke up from nightmares LOL back to sleep … baby dreams now.’’
From what Heyder has so far pieced together, Ellwood had headed to a salon to get her hair done. She’d then caught the train from Newmarket Train Station back to the flat they shared in Sandringham where they’d been living together for about a year.
At 8pm on Wednesday, he sent her a text about his accommodation for the night. He was staying at the Duke of Edinburgh motel, a ‘‘hard case’’ country pub with wood-panelled walls. It was in the middle of nowhere.
Ellwood did not reply, but he had no reason to believe she wasn’t in bed in Sandringham.
The next day, Heyder sent a couple more texts, followed by another one on Friday, but there was radio silence from Ellwood. It wasn’t like her to be out of contact for so long.
‘‘When I got a text from Tania’s mother saying that she wasn’t at her father’s birthday,’’ says Heyder, ‘‘And that she hadn’t phoned on her father’s birthday, that was the red flag moment for me.
‘‘I thought, ‘OK, something’s not right here’, because we’d already organised to buy a present for him.’’
Ellwood, 39, was missing for six days. By March 6, three dread-filled days after her father’s birthday, police made a public appeal for information on her whereabouts. It was shared by frantic family members on Facebook and picked up by the media. Heyder, meanwhile, was desperately trying to trace the final texts and calls to her phone.
He was crushed to learn Spark had almost no ability to track his partner’s movements.
‘‘They’ve basically come back and said ‘the only data we’re capable of receiving from that phone is the nearest cellphone tower’.’’
A spokesperson for Spark confirmed it holds information on which cell site a device is connected to, but this isn’t an exact location – only the address of the site providing coverage to a specific area is available.
Given there are dozens of Spark towers across the city, they can’t be used to pinpoint anyone’s location with much accuracy.
On the same day police appealed for information, two bodies were found in a room at Dryden Lodge in Grey Lynn. The lodge is a halfway house with recovering addicts, ex-convicts and people with mental health issues among its clientele.
One of the bodies was identified as Ellwood and the other as that of her ex-boyfriend, 36-year-old Timothy Kerr Hamilton.
The owner of the lodge, Ron LaPread, says his staff alerted him to a large build-up of flies in a bedroom window, and he later turned up with a bucket, thinking the room was in need of a clean. But when he unlocked the door, the first thing he saw was Kerr Hamilton’s body. He called police, who found Ellwood in the room as well.
Kerr Hamilton, whom LaPread describes as low-key and mildmannered, had moved in about a week before.
Rumours swirled around the lodge about drug overdoses or a fight gone wrong.
Police have only said they’re investigating ‘‘two unexplained deaths,’’ and they aren’t looking for anyone else.
Ellwood had long blonde hair. She has been described as kind, bubbly, one of those truly empathetic people. The Remuera woman attended Epsom Girls Grammar School and did a Bachelor of Arts at Auckland University. In her early 20s she made a name for herself as a stylist and fashion writer, and later worked in fashion retail.
The discovery of her body raised more questions than it delivered answers. And one of the main unanswered questions for Heyder is, what was she doing at Dryden Lodge?
The low-rent accommodation is a place people wash up when they’re fresh out of jail, or trying to get clean, or generally down on their luck. The lodge is sandwiched between $2 million houses in gentrified Grey Lynn and you can usually find its residents out front, smoking rollies. The room where Kerr Hamilton had been staying is small, with a tiled floor. After the bodies were found, it was blessed by a pastor.
Heyder says his partner had struggled with addiction in the past, but when they got together, she assured him that part of her life was over. They had been a couple for around two years, but were far from strangers, having known each other for a total of 15 years.
He says he would be able to accept his partner had fallen back into drug abuse, but only if that was the truth.
‘‘I think in our relationship we’d got to a point where I was confident that that wasn’t an issue. It’s like any kind of addiction though – I suppose there’s always that possibility that you could be tempted again. I’m still a little bit surprised that that was part of it.
‘‘Because we’d talk about it quite sincerely and quite openly about all of that, and she was adamant that ‘No, I’m not going back down that pathway again’.’’
Heyder desperately wants police to share evidence with him, so he can begin to put the pieces together and understand what happened. As he wasn’t next of kin and he and Ellwood weren’t yet in a de facto relationship, he feels like he’s been left on the ‘‘outer perimeter’’ of the investigation.
He was unable to view the body because police officers tried to protect him from the trauma of seeing it in a decomposed state.
One moment she was there in front of him, hopping out of his car to go to the bank; the next she was simply gone. The grief of so sudden a loss can feel like being caught in a raging storm.
He said the police had alluded to CCTV footage of Tania and Kerr Hamilton walking together on Karangahape Rd on the day she went missing, but they wouldn’t share this footage with him.
Heyder says he is ready for answers, no matter how brutal. Even if Ellwood was seeing her exboyfriend behind his back. Even if she wasn’t truthful when she told him she was going to bed on that Wednesday evening in late February. All he wants is the truth.
‘‘I’m prepared to accept whatever happened but I just need to be able to see that.’’