The Vanishing of Allan Woodford
Thirty-seven years ago, Allan Woodford walked out of his home, empty-handed, in the middle of the night and disappeared. The case has confounded his family and police. Did Woodford take his own life? Or was he murdered? Michael Wright and photographer Kavinda Herath report.
Anyone who knew Allan Woodford knew he liked to keep his own company. He’d turn out to watch his sons play rugby, and was good for a couple of beers in the pavilion afterwards, but that was about it. His family is pretty sure the only weddings he went to were those of his own children.
Allan Woodford lived to be outdoors. Hunting was his passion. He worked for the Pest Destruction Board (PDB), shooting rabbits on farms around Mossburn, in northern Southland, and in his spare time hunted just about anything else. Deer were a favourite. Mossburn is known as the deer capital of New Zealand, and Woodford spent untold hours in the hills around the town and the nearby Tā kitimu Mountains stalking them.
Friends and family would later describe Woodford as solitary, rather than anti-social. If you called at his home on Bedford St, he was always welcoming. He was popular among the farmers on whose properties he worked and always happy to yarn and have a laugh. ‘‘Northern Southland’s Barry Crump,’’ one put it.
Family, though, was at the centre of his social life. He and wife Jean had eight children and, in time, 22 grandchildren. Woodford doted on all of them. So it was a shock to everybody when, in the early hours of April 20, 1985, he disappeared without trace. Some time before sunrise he got out of bed, walked outside and vanished. In 37 years, there has been no sign of him. His family has no idea what happened.
Allan Gordon Woodford was born in Dunedin in 1920. As a young man he was a champion cyclist. ‘‘A. Woodford has ridden very consistently all the season,’’ the Evening Star observed in July 1939, ‘‘and thoroughly deserves the most points’ medal [sic].’’ Around this time he met Jean Stout. ‘‘Mum was a cycling groupie, I guess,’’ daughter Kerryn said. They married in 1940.
In the early 1940s, Woodford was based at a military camp near Dunedin, preparing to head to war, when the government called for men to stay home and work in essential services. Married, and with two children, he volunteered, and spent the next 14 years working in a coal mine in Nightcaps, in western Southland. They moved to Mossburn in 1957.
They lived in a house supplied by the PDB. In 1977, it burnt down in an accidental fire, and they built a new home on the adjacent section: a quaint, A-frame structure, painted a shade of green best described as of its time. Alongside it was the garage, where Woodford kept his rifles, ammunition, and tools. On the next-door section, owned by the PDB, was another shed, where Woodford parked his truck.
Several of the children built their own lives in Mossburn, requiring their father to expand his social network a little. On the evening of April 19, 1985, a Friday, the 65-year-old called at three of his sons’ homes on a pushbike. His last stop was to see son Mark, who lived a few doors down on Bedford St. He left about 9.30pm.
Woodford had no hunting plans for Saturday. He was expecting two of his granddaughters from out of town, and was excited about the visit. The girls’ mother, Kerryn, had married a farmer from a different part of Southland and her husband’s rugby team was playing Te Anau that day. The plan was to drop the girls in Mossburn, en route to Te Anau, and collect them after the game.
The last person to see Woodford alive was his wife, Jean. They watched TV together until about 11pm, then went to bed. They slept in single beds in an upstairs bedroom and during the night Jean heard her husband get up and then return to his bed. She presumed he’d gone to the toilet. She heard nothing else before she woke at about 8am and found he was gone.
At first Jean, a placid woman, wasn’t worried. No-one was. Woodford’s truck was in the driveway. His guns were in place, as were his boots and all his outdoor gear, so wherever he was, it couldn’t be far. He hadn’t even taken his tea-cosy hat, which he wore everywhere.
Kerryn and the girls arrived about 10am. ‘‘Your father’s missing,’’ Jean said to Kerryn, but the mood was still more puzzlement than panic. Kerryn drafted in Mark, and together they searched the paddocks behind Bedford St. At worst, they thought he might have walked away from the house and had a heart attack, or fallen into a ditch and broken his leg.
They canvassed all the neighbours. Nothing. Even then, nobody was terribly concerned. Woodford was a family man with everything to live for. The idea that he would vanish without trace was so alien to the family that none of them seriously entertained it. After the rugby, Kerryn called home and learned that in the meantime, Jean had rung Woodford’s friend, Jack Orlowski, a police officer in Invercargill. Jean only wanted to ask if he knew where Woodford might be, but Orlowski was concerned enough to drive straight to Mossburn and help organise a search. People were starting to worry.
Kerryn caught a ride back to Mossburn, where Orlowski and Lumsden cop Constable Bob Gibson had taken charge. With some locals, they scoured the town and several kilometres in every direction.
‘‘The next five or six days are just a blur,’’ Kerryn says. ‘‘We went out searching every day … just kind of in a limbo of looking, looking, looking.’’
The search began in earnest the day after he disappeared. That Sunday, April 21, 100 volunteers assembled at Mossburn fire station.
‘‘They came from everywhere,’’ Jim Guyton, then the volunteer fire chief, says. ‘‘That’s the beauty of a small district. And Woody was known. Shit, everybody knew him.’’
Search parties were dispatched, including one by air. Road verges were a priority, in case he had gone for an early morning walk and been hit by a car. After that, instructions were to visit every house, and search every building, hedgerow and shelter belt in the area. Police involvement only lasted the weekend, but the volunteers kept it up for another week.
Some areas searchers paid particular attention to. One was Waterloo, about 10km to the west, in the Tā kitimu Mountains. Woodford had a hut at Waterloo he used for hunting. But there was no sign of him, and no sign anyone had been there. Another area of interest was Black Ridge, a densely wooded outcrop in the southern foothills of the Eyre Mountains, just north of Mossburn, the closest bush you could walk to from town.
It’s one thing to disappear in a city, with an entire urban landscape on your doorstep and hours or even days before your absence is noted. It’s another to do it in a tiny rural town. Searchers surmised that if Woodford had managed the latter he might have taken the shortest route into the bush.
‘‘Shortest route’’, however, was a relative term. Mossburn sits on an alluvial plain next to the Oreti River, which runs from mountains near Queenstown to Invercargill. Black Ridge is about 5km away and Waterloo about 10km, but only if a traveller is determined to move in a straight line, which would mean crossing paddock after paddock and hurdling countless obstacles. ‘‘Bloody ditches and electric fences,’’ Mark says, ‘‘you’d have a bastard of a time.’’ Both places were more easily accessible by road, which almost doubled the distances and increased the likelihood of being seen. Waterloo was probably a six-hour walk from Mossburn.
‘‘It didn’t make sense to us,’’ Kerryn says. ‘‘Why the hell he’d walk when he could have taken his Land Rover is really weird.’’
The organised search lasted about a week, but the family continued looking for several more. In a way, they never stopped. ‘‘We hunted and hunted and hunted,’’ Woodford’s son Donald says. ‘‘It drives you mad.’’
About this time, the family says, two police officers paid them a visit. Bev Woodford, Mark’s wife, remembers they had a single purpose: to close the case as a suicide. ‘‘[They] said, ‘Look we’re terribly sorry about your father and everything, but the mind just snaps, and they just go away.’’’
Four theories
Sitting in the lounge of Mark and Bev Woodford’s home, the same one Allan Woodford visited the night before he disappeared, three of his children consider their father’s fate. From a framed black and white photograph on the wall above the TV, the protagonist surveys the scene: Woodford on the porch at Waterloo hut. A jack russell, Utah, is on his lap.
The trio, Donald, 76, Mark, 71, and Kerryn, 66, agree there are four possible explanations for what happened to their father. Three, really, once they discard, to considerable laughter, the idea that he abandoned his family to start a new life; perhaps shacking up with another woman and living out his days on the Gold Coast. ‘‘He’d barely been out of Southland or Otago,’’ Kerryn says.
One of the more plausible theories is dispatched almost as quickly – that he went walking and suffered some misadventure: a heart attack, a fall, a hit-and-run. If this happened it would not have been somewhere so out of the way that no trace of him could ever be found. ‘‘[If] he’d gone off somewhere,’’ Donald concludes, ‘‘We would have found him.’’
That leaves two scenarios. One is suicide, which the siblings agree is possible. ‘‘I wouldn’t have thought in a million years he’d do anything like that,’’ Kerryn says, ‘‘But you don’t know what’s in someone’s head.’’ But none of them really believe it. They think the last remaining theory is the most likely, that their father was murdered.
A week before he vanished, Woodford reported to his boss at the PDB, John Turner, that he was losing petrol out of his truck. Someone was apparently sneaking onto the property at night, and siphoning the fuel out of the tank. Turner suggested he lock the vehicle – a novelty in the country – or better yet, park it in the shed. It’s not clear if the truck was locked the night he disappeared, but he had parked it in the shed.
Turner was Woodford’s friend as well as his boss. His first instinct was foul play. He maintains that today. ‘‘I think someone’s gone round to pick up some petrol or something,’’ he says, ‘‘and I think at least a couple of people … knocked him on the head.’’
Turner is adamant more than one person was responsible. Even at 65, he says, Woodford was stronger and more agile than men decades younger. He recalls one feat from a rabbit shoot, when he was driving his truck through a creek. ‘‘There was a heap of young parry flappers [paradise ducks] on it,’’ Turner says, ‘‘And Woody said, ‘Don’t stop … Keep going … Now stop,’ and he went bang, and he got the whole five or six in one shot. He jumped out with his gumboots on, ran down to the river and collected the lot of them. If you asked your kid to do that
they’d say I don’t know if I can … He was as fit as buggery.’’
That police never seriously entertained the homicide theory is a sore point for Woodford’s family. There was no scene investigation the day of the disappearance, no tracking dogs, no witness statements. Outside the organised search, the only contact they had
with police at the time was the detectives’ visit to declare the
matter a suicide. Didn’t that anger them?
‘‘Shit, yeah,’’ says Mark, ‘‘At the time we couldn’t friggin’ believe it, but that was it … They never came round to the house and checked things out there. No police asked us anything at all.’’
The family believe there was one reason for this – the sway of Jack Orlowski. After helping organise
the initial search, Orlowski came to wield far more influence in the case. That first weekend, he revealed that his friend had confided in him: if Woodford ever decided to take his own life, he would do so privately.
‘‘He has said to me,’’ Orlowski wrote in a later police report, ‘‘That if he ever wander [sic] off to die like an old elephant then no-one will ever find him.’’ He observed that Woodford had exhibited occasional signs of depression for about six months and had been deeply troubled by the plight of two of his older brothers, both terminally ill. ‘‘I feel that the subject … can not face the prospect of himself one day turning out like these two family members … I think that he has gone to some secret place probably not too far from home and there committed suicide.’’
This, the family believe, was the sole reason police settled on the suicide theory. ‘‘Dad’s biggest problem was he was mates with this cop and the cops did nothing,’’ Donald says. ‘‘That summed it right up.’’
No-one in the family had heard the ‘‘old elephant’’ theory, or knew of any health problems. But, they concede, it wouldn’t have been unheard of for a man of Woodford’s generation to disclose such things only to a mate. The sick brothers element they have more trouble with. Woodford was second-youngest in a family of 13 children and both terminally ill siblings were in their late 70s. Woodford was fit, and only 65.
Police assumptions
Woodford was officially declared dead in 1992. Under New Zealand law, a missing person can be presumed dead after they have not been heard from for seven years. The coroner listed the cause of death as ‘‘unknown’’. About this time, as part of the coronial process, the family gathered for another meeting with a police officer. It did not go well.
The meeting was little more than a courtesy. Kerryn lost her temper. ‘‘I said to him … ‘You’ve got no records, no investigation of any other sort. The police just assumed that he’d gone and done away with himself. You never looked at any other possibility. And now you’re telling me that it’s case closed?’ I said, ‘How can it be closed when there’s no resolution?’
‘‘It’s like Dad didn’t even exist.’’ Some time in the late 1990s, Detective Senior Sergeant Brian Hewett went looking for the police file on Woodford. DNA was emerging as a crime-fighting tool and Hewett, head of the Invercargill CIB, wanted samples attached to missing persons files for future reference. But on the Woodford case, he couldn’t even find a file. Hewett was pained. He had grown up in Mossburn and knew Woodford well. ‘‘He’s a nice fella, but he was a tough old fella,’’ Hewett says, ‘‘When we were kids around Mossburn, we didn’t want to upset Woody.’’
Today, police retain a thick file on the case. But almost none of it is what Hewett was looking for back in the 90s. That file was lost. This one exists as a result of Woodford’s case appearing on the TV show Sensing Murder in 2010.
Sensing Murder was a popular, if dubious, staple of reality TV in the mid-2000s. Each episode was built around a cold case, inviting two psychics to suggest what might have happened. Donald’s son, Glenn, contacted the producers.
‘‘I didn’t have any faith in that programme,’’ Kerryn says. ‘‘They came and talked with us before the psychics came to see us. If they’d just brought the psychics up to meet us cold turkey … it probably would have been a completely different story.’’ As it happened, both psychics were drawn to the family’s homicide theory.
Sensing Murder wasn’t the family’s first encounter with clairvoyants. Weeks after the disappearance, Bev Woodford arrived home with a friend to see a man staggering up the road with a divining rod. He had a pair of Woodford’s underpants slung over one arm and an electric razor over the other – presumably to help him commune with the missing man’s spirit. ‘‘We just lost the plot laughing,’’ Bev says. One woman traced Woodford to Black Ridge, where she identified his reincarnation in the form of a bumblebee. A few years ago another psychic approached the family, adamant Woodford’s body was at Waterloo. Mark and Donald took him out there.
‘‘He got out of the truck,’’ Mark says. ‘‘He was actually sweating. Sweat was coming off his face. [He said,] ‘He’s down there’... I had a broken arm at the time. Donald started digging. [The psychic] was friggin’ sure we were going to find him. Donny dug for bloody bastard hours. There were some bloody good [fishing] worms there. I’ve been meaning to go back and get some.’’
Donald is more circumspect. ‘‘You clutch at straws,’’ he says, ‘‘They say they can do something, you give it a try.’’
Despite its obvious flaws, Sensing Murder generated a flurry of tips. Police granted Stuff access to the file. The entries start in 2010, shortly after the episode first aired, and continue through to 2017. ‘‘Apologies for dumping this on you,’’ one officer wrote in an email that accompanied a lengthy statement from 2016, ‘‘I’m assuming Sensing Murder has been on TV again.’’ Another warned before a rerun that the telephonists at Invercargill police station should brace for a deluge of calls.
Police could be forgiven their cynicism. The tips are a mix of the reasonable and the decidedly unreasonable. ‘‘On Sataday morning I made a pendulum,’’ one begins, ‘‘And run it over the photoe the reaction i got was amazeing the pendulum took off spinning. I beleve ALLan WoodFord is berryed …’’
Many, however, focus on one man. We’ll call him X. He lived in the Mossburn area and had a lengthy criminal record. The rumour mill long held him responsible for Woodford’s disappearance and Sensing Murder reruns only stoked the gossip. Both the psychics on the show mentioned him by name, but the words were bleeped for broadcast. ‘‘I’m friends with the ex-wife and the son of that person,’’ Bev Woodford says, ‘‘And when something like this happens they ring me, even though no-one has mentioned names.’’ Without fail, Bev says, the family members swear to her X didn’t do it.
One tip came from someone with gang links in Southland, who said X accused him of owing money: ‘‘He made the comment to me that if I don’t pay that I will end up like Woody. Even today, and I don’t live in the south any more, I am still s...-scared.’’
X did not respond to a request to comment for this story. But he did speak to private investigators hired by Sensing Murder in 2009. Notes from the conversation are included in the police file: ‘‘There had been all sorts of theories about Allan’s disappearance,’’ X said. ‘‘Many are just not plausible. One is that he caught someone stealing and was dealt to by that person. I think the problem with that is that the town was small and if someone had done it the town would have heard.’’ He denied having anything to do with the disappearance.
Brian Hewett retired from the police in 2006, not long after cracking another cold case – the 1987 murder of Arrowtown woman Maureen McKinnel. He doubts X was involved. ‘‘He was a local troublemaker, and he was a tough nut, but I don’t see it.’’
The police file has one final, tantalising lead, not linked to X, again from the Sensing Murder investigators. They spoke to another man who went hunting around Waterloo a few weeks before Woodford disappeared. The man and a friend were walking up a valley when, to their surprise, they came across Woodford and Orlowski.
‘‘What caught both of our attention was a pack horse,’’ the hunter said. ‘‘It was loaded to the maximum with what I could best describe was a load about the size of an elephant saddle. It covered the horse’s back and was packed high… Whatever it was it had to be light as it was a huge load for a horse… If I had to guess what was under the cover I would say some sort of vegetation, either cannabis or ferns for the florists.
‘‘I did not expect the reaction we got. Allan was aggravated and did all the talking. He just went off at us. He wanted to know ‘what the f ..... hell are you doing here?’ I got the impression he did not want to see us.’’
There is no other mention of stripping cannabis plots in the police file. Over the years, the notion has crept into versions of the homicide theory as a possible motive. But, like almost everything else about the disappearance, there is no hard evidence to support it.
Case ‘unexplained’
In official circles, Allan Woodford’s disappearance defies categorisation. Along with the coroner’s ‘‘unknown’’ finding, the police register of missing persons, which includes ‘‘suspected suicide’’ among its classifications, lists his case as ‘‘unexplained’’. Hewett concedes that, even by missing persons standards, Woodford’s case is strange. Almost nobody disappears leaving so little evidence to explain why. ‘‘It’s odd for a male to go missing in those circumstances.’’
About three weeks after Woodford disappeared, his family resigned themselves to the fact he wasn’t coming home. But it took much longer to accept they would likely never know what happened to him. ‘‘It probably took about 20 years for that to sink in,’’ Kerryn says. ‘‘[You] keep thinking one day, one day someone will come across something. [We] just hoped and hoped and hoped that one day we’d get a resolution.’’
The case remains open. Southern district investigations manager Detective Inspector Shona Low said if there was anything further to look into, ‘‘we will obviously look at that.’’
Few of us care to admit that a loved one may be suicidal. Allan Woodford’s family is an exception. They are prepared to accept this may be what happened. But at the same time, they are drawn to the homicide theory.
‘‘Not knowing is extremely difficult,’’ Kerryn says. ‘‘Not having him in our lives is the hardest part, but not knowing is the cruellest thing that you could possibly imagine.
‘‘Not knowing is really difficult because you can’t compartmentalise it in your life.
‘‘Because there’s always that tiny little niggle . . . Did he do this to us deliberately or was he taken from us? And there’s no answer to those questions.
‘‘Where is he?’’
‘‘They came and talked with us before the psychics came to see us. If they’d just brought the psychics up to meet us cold turkey it probably would have been a completely different story.’’ - Woodford’s daughter, Kerryn