Police hope for breakthrough in ‘unusual’ case
IT HAS been six months since Tupulaga ‘‘Peter’’ Talalelei simply vanished.
The great-uncle of Highlanders and former Wellington Lions utility back Lima Sopoaga was last seen in his boarding hostel in Bay St, Petone, after being discharged from hospital on the evening of Saturday, July 12.
A fellow hostel resident saw the 70-year-old about 2am on Sunday in the hostel’s kitchenette. But by the time a nurse visited later that morning, he was gone.
His walking stick was missing too, and police feared he had wandered outdoors into the bitterly cold winter’s day.
But cameras trained on neighbouring Jackson St, the main road in Petone, never show him leaving.
Police searched a 300-metre area around his home, and divers swept Wellington Harbour, but found nothing.
Six months on, his bank accounts remain untouched. Those involved in the case are flummoxed as to how someone so immobile could simply disappear.
‘‘It’s unusual to have a person go missing and have them one moment there and the next they are missing and there’s no trace thereafter,’’ Detective Sergeant Grant Carroll said.
‘‘There has been no suggestion that he was depressed, there’s no suggestion that anyone had any ill-feeling towards him. It’s just that he was there in the early hours of the morning, and he wasn’t the next day.’’
Talalelei, who would have been 71 on January 12, spent his days touring up and down one small stretch of Jackson St on his walking stick, greeting locals with jokes as he divided his time between the Horse and Hound pub, the Mr Bun bakery, and the TAB.
He had kept the same rooms and coveted the same phone number since the 1990s so that his daughters, including Tiresi Peterson and her four sisters – all of whom live in Australia – could find him.
‘‘The main reason he never wanted to leave there was because he knew we always knew where he was,’’ she said.
Nephew Lene Sopoaga said his uncle, known as ‘‘Lucky Tala’’, would sometimes place bets on Lima’s games, and then give his winnings to his family.
Lene Sopoaga said the family ‘‘just want to know’’ what happened to his uncle. ‘‘It’s just a mystery to us.’’
At the Lower Hutt police station, Talalelei’s file remains resolutely open on Carroll’s desk. He looks at it every day, wondering if some clue will jump out at him or if someone might call with new information. But there has been none. ‘‘We’ve got a board with active investigations and it’s No 1 on the list. There wouldn’t be a week go by where we don’t talk about it.’’
Police still hope the memory of someone who has not yet come forward might be triggered by a ‘‘key’’ – ‘‘something that they might not have thought meant anything at the time’’.
They had no evidence Talalelei was dead, he said.
‘‘There has been no evidence to suggest it’s anything but a mystery. None whatsoever.’’
Peterson said she and most of her sisters had met their father only a handful of times, but maintained an affable longdistance relationship with him. She said he adored speaking to his grandchildren on the phone – ‘‘he had a really big heart’’.
‘‘We’ve just got to trust that everyone’s doing the best they can.
‘‘We have to be open and prepared to hear what has happened to him. Everyone wants closure and there is still hope. We have got to trust.’’