The bodies in the lake
The alpine lakes of the South Island are among our most popular natural attractions. But their pictureperfect qualities above the water belie a dark secret beneath. Michael Wright reports.
Even now, no-one is quite sure what happened to Michael Mulcare. He was last seen sitting on the veranda of the youth hostel at Lake Tekapo about 3pm on May 9, 1975. He had been lamenting the state of the hostel’s canoe, which had leaks at both ends and which he could have fixed had he only brought the right gear with him.
An hour later he and the canoe were gone. Neither has been seen since.
More than 100 people drown in New Zealand every year. The ones who are never found mostly go missing at sea, lost to the marine depths. Mulcare is one of a small, macabre subset who disappear in our lakes, often close to shore, almost always in a known location, never to be recovered.
Police missing persons data is not kept in such detail, but Lake Tekapo, with seven, is thought to hold the most bodies. The latest such disappearance was on Lake Wakatipu, in Queenstown, last January, when American tourist Tyler Nii landed in the water on a tandem skydive jump. Divers searched for him for two weeks before giving up.
Most of those missing are in the alpine lakes of the South Island, which all share two characteristics: the water is cold and it is deep.
‘‘You need to find [people] alive, quickly,’’ Brent Swanson says, ‘‘As soon as you’ve drowned, you tend to go straight to the bottom.’’
Until 18 months ago, Swanson was the ranking police officer at Lake Tekapo, where he led numerous search and rescue efforts, including one for a group of 11 kayakers who got into trouble near Motuariki Island in 2015. Two of the party died, although both their bodies were found.
‘‘We were lucky that day . . . they could have all perished,’’ Swanson says. ‘‘We recovered the people and we didn’t have to have that conversation.’’
‘‘That conversation’’ is explaining to the families of the missing that their loved one is in water too deep to search and so cold that they will never rise to the surface, meaning they will likely remain in the lake forever.
Most recently, Swanson had to do this in 2009, when three men, Alexander Haywood, his son, Antony Haywood, and Murray Green, drowned after their boat hit an object in Lake Tekapo. The elder Haywood was the only one found, and only then because he was wearing a back brace that kept him afloat.
Ask a local in Tekapo and they will tell you the lake holds on to its dead.
That it has earned this reputation ahead of other, similar, lakes is perhaps due to the fact it is popular with boaties and prone to quick changes in conditions: more chance for more people to get into trouble more often.
The worst incident was in January 1965 when a party of five – Mackenzie farmer Tom Howes, his 17-year-old nephew Paul Ford, his 15-year-old niece Judith, and family friends, the primary school-aged Arnst sisters – were in an aluminium dinghy caught by a rogue wave. Judith, a strong swimmer, clung to the hull all night, and made it to the lake’s northern shore. The rest were never found.
Hydrologist Ian Halstead says the temperature in the thermocline – the top metre or so of a lake – can reach 17 or 18 degrees Celsius in late summer. Below that, though, the water is steady at between 7C and 9C all the way down.
Tekapo is nowhere near New Zealand’s deepest lakes, which plumb depths of more than 400 metres, but an average of
100-110m and a deepest point of
120m is more than enough to thwart police or navy divers.
‘‘It’s a big lake,’’ Halstead says. ‘‘It’s too deep for any diving activities to be able to recover bodies. They will decompose of course, but because it’s so bloody cold the natural process of gases building up in the body doesn’t occur.’’
Gas buildup is what brings a sunken body to the surface. The process takes between about five days and two weeks, but may not happen at all if the water is too cold.
The National Police Dive Squad will search as deep as 30m.
The navy operational dive team can go deeper, but when someone is hundreds of metres below the surface (Tyler Nii entered a part of Lake Wakatipu thought to be 340m deep) there is only so much that can be done.
Searchers can use underwater cameras and sonar to look remotely, but then visibility and the practicalities of recovering anything they find are further hindrances.
‘‘Under water, it’s just so hard,’’ says Senior Sergeant Phil Simmonds, Canterbury police search and rescue co-ordinator. Even at manageable depths, it can be gruelling work: ‘‘Quite often [divers are] tethered on a rope. They will do like a line. They’ll be moving across. A lot of the time, if it’s really s..., they’ll be working by feel.’’
On the day he disappeared, 19-yearold Michael Mulcare had been in a good mood. Later, police would ask everyone exhaustively about his state of mind, but he was genuinely happy. He had driven to Tekapo from Christchurch a couple of days earlier with some friends, having just finished a term at Canterbury University with good results.
He planned to spend the next three weeks hitchhiking around the South Island. Tekapo was the first stop.
So his friends, Mike Moss and Christine Barton, weren’t worried when they returned to the hostel late on a Friday afternoon and found Mulcare gone. But then he didn’t show up for dinner at 5.30pm, and three hours later he was still nowhere to be found. Barton went to get Moss, who was working in the hotel as a chef. ‘‘Should we look for him?’’ she said.
Moss had a bad feeling. He grabbed a torch and went to find the leaky canoe he and Mulcare had inspected that afternoon. It was gone. His heart skipped a beat. He and Barton bolted down to the lakefront. There was no sign of Mulcare and no obvious marks of someone launching a boat, but it was too dark to see much of anything else. Moss called police.
Constable John Delaney answered the phone at the Twizel police station. An eerie feeling dawned on him as the young man on the line explained what had happened. Delaney had driven to Timaru that morning before his shift started and had picked up a hitchhiker, a young man named Mulcare, in Tekapo.
He was a nice guy; heading into town to withdraw some money and buy a woollen hat to stave off the Mackenzie cold. Delaney gave him a ride home as well.
A constable from Timaru was dispatched to help with the search. In the meantime, Moss and Barton assembled a small group of locals to keep looking, to no avail. Moss even borrowed a motorbike to ride around Mt John and search the southwestern edge of the lake. A pointless exercise in the dark, but it seemed better than doing nothing. About 2am, they gave up for the night.
The next morning, police organised air, land and water searches of the shore and southern reaches of the lake. Again, it proved fruitless.
In any water rescue, the point of entry is key. People who disappear beneath the surface generally go straight down, even in strong currents. Today, police will establish a datum point based on where a person was last seen to anchor a search.
Mulcare’s searchers couldn’t even be sure he had been on the water, let alone where he might have gone under.
By Saturday afternoon, Moss was resigned to the fact his friend was gone. He had watched the search boat criss-cross the lake all morning and find no sign of Mulcare or the hulking old Rob Roy canoe, a red and white thing with a big open cockpit.
There were no reports of any ‘‘obstructions’’ in the nearby Tekapo power station intake, no evidence of anyone having been on Motuariki Island and a search between the main road and the southern lakeshore turned up nothing.
Constable Ian MacFadyen noted in his report: ‘‘It is well known in the area that because of the depth and the coldness of the lake, bodies in the past have not been recovered, the cold water not allowing the bodies to decompose.’’
When Moss was 8 months old, his father was one of three climbers who died on Mt Sefton in the Southern Alps. No trace was ever found of the men, but searchers did find their campsite, with a meal prepared for their return.
Twenty years later, he faced a similar situation with his friend, only this time it happened in a place much less remote and he was old enough to remember it. That hasn’t made reconcilement any easier.
‘‘Every time I ever go through the Mackenzie country and Tekapo I always think, ‘What happened?’ What was his final hour like? Did he die quickly? I hope he did. That it wasn’t too dreadful. But I imagine that it was pretty panicked.
‘‘My father was almost certainly killed in an avalanche and probably didn’t survive very long. Michael Mulcare ended up in freezing cold water and drowned. There are a lot of parallels there which are a bit strange and peculiar for me.’’
Moss still visits the Tekapo area frequently. Still camps at nearby Lake Alexandrina, mountainbikes around Lake Tekapo, visits the memorial plaque to Mulcare that sits on the shore, often with fresh flowers.
He still wonders what possessed his friend to take a leaky canoe out on to the water that day. Mulcare was a smart, capable guy. He had bought an old Morris 8 that he planned to restore. He liked tramping and sailing, read philosophy.
Moss recently reviewed the statement he gave to police about his friend in 1975, including the descriptor ‘‘happy go lucky’’.
‘‘I wouldn’t say that now . . . [He was] quite intense at times. He was a good student, he really applied himself. He was a sensitive guy. I really warmed to him.’’
‘‘Disappeared’’ is a relative term. It can be applied to a person who vanishes without a trace, leaving no clue to where they might be, or to someone like Mulcare, who slipped under water to a resting place desperately close, but unreachable. In either case, a life is otherwise in order, just as the person left it. The only thing missing is them.
Soon after Mulcare died, police gathered his belongings from the hostel to return to his family: his pack, his bank book, some other personal items and $32.78 in cash. Mulcare had withdrawn $35 from his Canterbury Savings Bank account in Timaru the morning of the day he died. He spent the $2.22 difference on a balaclava cap for those cold Tekapo mornings. It has never been found.
A beloved son and brother.