DEAD OR ALIVE?
It’s been eight years since John Beckenridge and his stepson, Mike, vanished. Their car was found at the bottom of a cliff but their bodies were never found. Now for the first time family friends talk about what they believe really happened. Emily Moorhouse reports.
When friends heard that John Beckenridge’s car had plummeted off an 80m cliff there was disbelief, mixed in with laughter. “He’s f ***ing done it, that’s incredible. I can’t believe he’s pulled it off, that type of feeling,” said the mother of one of Mike’s childhood friends, who is speaking publicly about the case for the first time.
“John’s not the sort of person to do something and fail. If he’s going to do something he’ll do it right the first time.”
The woman, who can’t be named due to a court-imposed suppression order, says Beckenridge had spoken of plans to flee New Zealand before his mysterious disappearance in 2015, hinting he would take his 11-year-old stepson, Mike Zhao-Beckenridge to Asia.
He had the contacts and skills from his experience as a pilot and keen sailor and would do anything to keep Mike in his life, according to the woman, who described the pair as “two peas in a pod”.
Eight years on and their whereabouts remains unknown. There was no sign of their bodies after their car was found in the ocean at the bottom of a cliff in Curio Bay and reported sightings of them never turned into anything conclusive.
Mike’s friend and his parents spoke to NZME three months on from the coroner’s hearing into the baffling missing persons case, unwavering in their belief that the pair staged their deaths and will resurface one day in the future.
Earlier this year Coroner Marcus Elliot heard evidence from witnesses that will help him decide whether it is likely the pair are dead or staged their deaths and managed to flee the country undetected.
His decision is yet to be released.
ONE OF those witnesses was Mike’s good friend James (not his real name). The boys were about 7 when they met through school. James lived near Beckenridge’s Lake Hayes Estate home in Queenstown and quickly became close buddies with Mike, spending most afternoons at each other’s houses.
When the pair weren’t together, they were chatting through online games.
As they got older, playdates turned into sleepovers, and it wasn’t long until James’ parents considered Mike part of their family. He was invited on their family holidays and James would often be included in Mike and Beckenridge’s trips away.
James’ mother often looked after Mike when Beckenridge was away for work and described the boy, who would now be 20, as “very happy, cheeky, quick-witted, fiercely competitive and very full of life”.
She said Beckenridge and Mike shared the same natural energy.
“Mike was quite full on and despite John’s age he had zero issues in keeping up with that and I think they were quite similar in a lot of ways,” she told NZME.
She said Beckenridge was “incredibly generous” and a “real go get ‘em” sort of person who was always wanting to do new things and try new experiences, often taking the boys along with him.
“The life that [Beckenridge] gave Mike was incredible. The time he had for Mike was never-ending and the care and love he had for that boy was just like any other phenomenal parent.”
She had “limited contact” with Fiona Lu, Mike’s mother, only ever seeing her at the front door when she would pick up or drop off the boys at Beckenridge’s house.
She said Beckenridge was the “sole point of contact” and James would only stay the night when Beckenridge and Lu were home, never when it was just Lu, who “barely left the house”, she said.
James said he got along with Beckenridge “really well”.
He was “a lot of fun to be around” and was always doing something, whether that be working on something in his garage, showing the boys his gadgets or taking them on trips.
“He would take us to see movies on school nights, so that’s a good way to win over a kid,” James, now 20, said, laughing.
James would call Beckenridge’s home phone every day to speak to Mike, until one day Beckenridge answered and told him that Mike had been taken to Invercargill to live with his mother.
After that, he said it was difficult to contact Mike, but it didn’t stop him from trying and the pair resorted to emailing.
Mike made it clear to his friend that he wasn’t happy and a few weeks later James got the news that Mike and Beckenridge had disappeared.
“I just broke down,” James said.
That evening James’ mother got a phone call from a “very upset” Lu who wanted answers on her son’s whereabouts.
“She was saying ‘John’s taken him, they’re gone, they’re missing’.”
James’ mother said she reassured Lu that Beckenridge loved Mike too much to ever let him be harmed, that she hadn’t heard from either of them and to just wait and see what happened.
It wasn’t until it was revealed that Beckenridge’s car had plummeted off a cliff near Curio Bay in Southland that James’ family suspected it was a cover-up.
James’ mother said though Beckenridge’s actions were “drastic” she and her husband “had an inkling something like this would happen” due to comments he made before the disappearance.
“We knew he had the means, the contacts to do what he did.”
James’ father has never for one second believed the pair went over the cliff. He says Beckenridge had hinted he would leave the country with Mike if he was placed into his mother’s care, suggesting they would go to Asia but never revealing further details.
“He said there were more ways to get out of the country than the northern channels, meaning he didn’t need to use an airport or a port.
The style of work that he had been doing was sort of under-the-radar material flying helicopters anyway, so he knew all about long-distance flying,” James’ father said.
“I thought it was very plausible that he could have set up a scenario like he did and skip the country.”
James’ mother said she never thought things would get to the point where Beckenridge would actually follow through on his plans, which she wasn’t sure were genuine or just stories.
“To be fair, this is like a movie, not what you genuinely expect in real life,” she said.
Between Christmas and New Year’s in 2014, Beckenridge was asking James’ family for money in cash, even offering his paintings for them to buy.
James’ mother said she suspected this was so “finances could be untraced” if Beckenridge was to leave the country with Mike, but as the family was preparing to move countries, they declined.
She said the idea that Beckenridge didn’t have any money was “inaccurate” as he never brought the bulk of his money to New Zealand.
“He only brought to New Zealand what he needed, and the rest of that money never hit New Zealand shores,” she said.
James also believed that Mike had reached out to him eight months after he disappeared through Minecraft, an online game they used to play together.
James said he was messaged by an unknown user on the platform in November 2015 referencing a username only he and Mike knew about.
He tried to communicate with the user, who he believed to be Mike, but they had logged off. He then began to search for Mike through online games they used to play together, even buying new games in hopes of finding his missing friend.
James now admits it probably sounded silly looking for his friend considering how many people play on those servers but says he was willing to try anything to find Mike.
To this day, James still believes it was Mike that contacted him online.
It’s not the first time the boy is believed to have resurfaced months after the mysterious disappearance.
To date, police have received more than 60 reported sightings of the pair, with one witness adamant she saw the pair on Gili Air Island, Indonesia, three months after they disappeared.
On June 30, 2015, the woman, who was on holiday on the island, was walking along the beach when she saw an older European man with a younger Asian boy walking towards her in a “happy conversation”.
She immediately recognised them from the news and stated in evidence several times she was “very confident” it was them.
She described them as a “unique pair” walking together and noted that the boy looked taller and had a “bigger build” than most of the local children.
The woman then described a frantic “race” to alert local police as she was leaving the island that day. She said she hired a bike and rushed around the island until she saw two men in uniform and told them what she had seen.
When the woman was crossexamined she said she was “a bit naive” to the differences between Asian features but knew the boy wasn’t Indonesian, stating she was confident it was Mike.
She said she knew in her heart it was the Beckenridges she saw.
BECKENRIDGE, WHO would now be in his early 70s, was born Knut Goran Roland Lundh and was brought up on the west coast of Sweden.
His parents owned a furniture business and he was the second eldest of two sisters and a brother.
He worked as a fireman and at a dive school before obtaining his commercial helicopter licence in his mid-20s.
By 1977 Beckenridge was working for a Swedish helicopter company based in Darwin, Australia. Around this time, he had anglicised his name to John Lundh, as John was his father’s name.
In 1985 he moved to Greenland to work for an airline company with a three-month-on, three-month-off roster.
He moved back to Australia in 1998 and cut ties with his Swedish family, allegedly after having a “falling out” with them over his brother taking over the family business and him not receiving any benefit.
The following year, he officially changed his surname to Beckenridge and by 2004 had an Australian passport in that surname.
In 2003 Beckenridge began working for Pacific Helicopters Limited, based in Papua New Guinea.
Three years later he met Lu, who is from China. Lu’s parents were raising Mike at the time.
By 2007 the couple and Mike had moved into Beckenridges’ Lake Hayes Estate home in Queenstown, with the couple marrying soon after. Beckenridge was still working as a pilot, now in Papua New Guinea on a month-on, month-off basis.
Lu and Beckenridge separated in 2013 and Lu moved to Invercargill, where she started a new relationship with Peter Russell.
On February 25, 2015, the Queenstown Family Court made an order that Lu had care of Mike and he was moved from Beckenridge’s home in Queenstown to live with her and Russell in Invercargill.
Both Beckenridge and Mike struggled with being separated from one another. Beckenridge was furious with Lu, believing she had abandoned him and ruined Mike’s life.
After Mike was moved to Invercargill, one of Beckenridge’s closest friends began receiving a raft of “concerning and aggressive” messages from him.
He said Beckenridge’s mental state began to deteriorate after Mike left.
“John was quite upset, I could feel it when I was talking to him. He was sort of depressed and didn’t know what he was going to do,” the man said.
In a letter, Beckenridge said: “Just trying to survive the holocaust . . . life is not funny and certainly no good anymore!”
The man said while Beckenridge could be stubborn, he “had a heart of gold” so it was out of character when he became “hateful and aggressive” toward Lu in the messages he sent.
“I thought he was going to do something irrational, hurt somebody maybe,” the friend told the court.
We knew he had the means, the contacts to do what he did.
Parents sof Mike Beckenridge’s friend.
MEANWHILE, A fresh start in Invercargill wasn’t quite what Lu had hoped it would be, as Mike struggled to focus on anything other than being reunited with his stepfather.
The 11-year-old started misbehaving in the hope he would get sent back to live with Beckenridge.
Disturbing emails secretly sent
between the pair showed Mike begging Beckenridge to come for him.
“I wanna come home dad, I do not wanna be here get me out plz help me . . . I a crying for u all the time” (sic).
“I just wanna come back and live with u I miss u so much” (sic).
Mike expressed his frustration towards his mother, claiming he hated her and talked about suicide.
“Know body cares I want u I miss u can we kill? I miss u and I do not wanna live like this” (sic).
One particularly disturbing email read: “remember u said u will kill and stuff . . . please come here and we start kill?” (sic).
“Find me dad and u said we can do that thing” (sic).
On February 27 Mike called the police, claiming his mother had assaulted him. A constable who attended the call described Mike as a “stubborn child” who was “dead set” on getting what he wanted.
Mike admitted he had lied about the assault, hoping it would get him sent back to Beckenridge’s house and the constable left the address feeling “satisfied” with Mike’s wellbeing.
ON MARCH 4, 2015, Mike started his new school in Invercargill. Prior to his acceptance, a school staff member, who has name suppression, met with a staff member from Mike’s old school to discuss his transition.
The staff member was told Mike was a “lovely boy” but had some anger issues, sometimes using his fists before thinking. They also said Mike was very close with his stepfather and would “likely be traumatised” after leaving him.
Mike seemed to settle into school well and was described as a “good student” with excellent attendance, but had told his peers he wasn’t going to be at the school for very long.
“He always said he was going back to live with his dad in Queenstown,” a staff member said.
The morning of the disappearance, on March 13, Mike refused to let his mother look in his school bag. Lu and Russell suspected it was because
Mike had his iPad with him, which he used to secretly communicate with Beckenridge.
Police would later discover it appeared Beckenridge had tracked Mike’s whereabouts through his iPad location.
Mike was pulled out of his music class in the morning to hand in his iPad to a staff member, as requested by Russell who called the school.
The staff member said that Mike took an “unusually” long time to deliver the iPad to her office and was seen coming in from the front of the school, near the public road, rather than from the direction of his class.
The staff member, who was one of the last people to see Mike before his disappearance, described him as “out of breath and panicky” and breathing heavily as if he had been running.
Beckenridge’s phone had also polled in a location near the school on the same day, police told the coroner.
Mike returned to his music class but sometime between lunch and the end of the school day, he was gone.
An extensive search, dubbed Operation Mike, was launched. Border alerts were put in place, including for Beckenridge’s aliases Knut Goran Roland Lundh, John Robert Lundh and John Bradford.
Three days after the disappearance a media release went out calling for sightings of the pair. Two days later a farmer told police, he had seen them sleeping in their car on his farm in the Haldane area of the Catlins the previous morning.
Police raced to the farm and found recent tyre marks, flattened grass as if people had been lying on it and food scraps such as eggshells and “fresh” lettuce and toilet tissue.
Tyre marks led south towards the peninsula and back to the gravel road but there was no sign of the the pair.
On March 18 police searched Beckenridge’s Queenstown home, finding a calendar with the date March 13 circled, the day the pair disappeared.
The next day, as police continued their search, they were alerted to a reported sighting at a campsite off Weir Rd on the Haldane Estuary, roughly 14km from the cliff Beckenridge’s vehicle went off.
A tent was found with various items such as a generator, two empty 1-litre fuel containers, an air mattress and a cooking device, with a sergeant describing the scene as “quite well kept”.
Swab testing and further examinations revealed a plaster with Mike’s fingerprints on it as well as prints of a shoe belonging to Beckenridge, which would later wash ashore in the Curio Bay area.
It appeared police had just missed the pair. They secretly remained close by overnight, watching in case they should return. They never did.
As tensions heightened the search began to grow, with police officers, investigators, a dog handler unit and even locals scouting the area in hopes of finding the pair alive and well.
By March 20, friends of Beckenridge began to receive “concerning” texts from him. He said Mike was unhappy with his mother and spoke of becoming suicidal, so he had to “help him get out”.
“Mike sent me emergency messages and said he refused to stay with
Peter and Fiona so I picked him up instead and here we are, chased by the Gestapo,” one message said.
Beckenridge claimed his life had been “destroyed” by Lu and asked his friends not to contact anyone about the messages he’d sent.
He also repeatedly wrote, “no going back now”. That was the last time Beckenridge’s friends say they heard from him.
A heartbreaking message from Mike to his mother read: “You do not deserve to be my mum . . . you certainly do not deserve my love. From Mike.”
Beckenridge also wrote to Lu, thanking her for being his “wife, partner and my best friend” before adding:
“You are very good at lying and deceiving!
“You have destroyed our family, my life and Mike’s.
“Me and Mike are leaving now on the Midnight Express 3 min for departure.” That was the last time Lu ever heard from her son and ex-husband.
Two days later items belonging to the Beckenridges, such as clothes and car parts, washed ashore in the Curio Bay area.
The Police National Dive Squad was deployed and found vehicle parts in the water using an underwater camera suspended from a helicopter as the treacherous waters were unsafe to dive in.
It would be another six weeks until police were able to retrieve the car, or at least what was left of it.
The roof, doors, windscreens, and most of the interior of the vehicle were missing. A major focus, however, was the driver and passenger seats, particularly the seatbelts.
The dive squad noted that both the front seatbelts were buckled, and the lap belts were tight into the folds of the seats. But six weeks of the vehicle being battered by the waves meant the seatbelts were no longer attached to the receivers.
And no bodies were ever found. Nor was there evidence of any DNA, blood stains or body parts when the vehicle was examined.
A seatbelt expert told the coroner they believed the seatbelts hadn’t deployed based on the lack of “burn marks” caused by weight being pushed against it as it restrains someone during a crash.
However, police suggested that while the seatbelts appeared to be clicked into place when the vehicle went off the cliff, Beckenridge and Mike had sat on top of them, meaning they weren’t restrained.
POLICE DISCOVERED what they called the “clifftop scene” at Mair Rd on a dead-end that leads to a paddock with a steep drop-off some 80m above the shoreline.
Two used tea bags and a toothbrush were found in the flattened area of grass, as well as a set of tyre tracks leading toward the cliff ’s edge.
But what was perhaps the most bizarre discovery was two pieces of wood tied together with rope, which police referred to as a “stake” in the ground, roughly 3m from the edge.
Some scene investigators believed the stake was used as a sightline to the cliff edge, ensuring the vehicle would land in the water, avoiding a rock shelf at the base of the cliff on one side, and the shoreline on the other.
During week two of the inquest, crash expert Senior Constable Kenneth Patterson said he didn’t believe it was possible for a person to open the door and push themselves out of the vehicle before going over the edge, based on the speed tyre marks had indicated it travelled at.
However, he acknowledged under questioning that it was possible someone could have placed a piece of wood on the accelerator, holding it down so there was no need for anyone to be in the car when it went off the cliff.
POLICE ARE adamant that the Beckenridges were in the car when it plunged off the cliff and died as a result.
Deidre Elsmore, for the police, said the pair were so desperate to be together that they would do the unthinkable. A murder-suicide or even a suicide pact.
Although there is “no conclusive evidence” that they died after the car went off the cliff, she says there are aspects of the case that will lead the coroner to believe they are dead.
They include Beckenridge’s state of mind leading up to the disappearance, his declining mental health and his “obsessive relationship” with Mike.
He was “furious” and “hateful” towards Lu for what he saw as an “intense betrayal” when she entered into a new relationship.
With money low and no chance of Mike being placed back into his care, he began to plot the pair’s elaborate disappearance.
He had googled the Curio Bay area where he was to drive his car off the cliff, looking specifically at the coastline. Maps of Mike’s school had been downloaded on to his computer as well as searches of luxury yachts and camping grounds, all leading up to the disappearance.
Beckenridge also changed the beneficiaries of his estate to ensure that Lu wouldn’t see a cent of his money.
When March 13 rolled around, Elsmore said Beckenridge had it all planned — and Mike was likely in on it.
Disappearing off the face of the Earth, with no hard evidence they had died or escaped was, police said, the “ultimate punishment” for Lu, who would be left questioning whether her son was alive or dead.
This opinion was supported by a registered psychologist who took a deep dive into the case, reaching the conclusion that Beckenridge committed a murder-suicide due to his “last-resort thinking” when Mike was placed into Lu’s care.
He described Beckenridge as a “controlling and coercive” man who was nearing rock bottom and who believed he was rescuing Mike from an “unhappy situation”.
“He is looking at a bleak, meaningless future without Mike in it,” he said.
I believe Mike will come back to me one day.
Fiona Lu
BUT MIKE’S mother disagrees. Lu firmly believes her son is alive and will come back to her when he is no longer “under the influence” of his stepfather, who she says “brainwashed” him. “I miss my son and I think about him every day. I believe Mike will come back to me one day.”
She believed Beckenridge cared about Mike too much to hurt him and the pair were living overseas under new identities.
Mark Templeman, a private investigator hired by Lu in 2015 to find her son, describes the case as a real mystery.
He echoes Lu’s beliefs. “It’s sort of something that’s always on your mind,” he told NZME.
Templeman criticised police efforts to find the pair, picking apart their investigation from the initial search in the Catlins area, to chasing up the reported sighting of the pair in Indonesia three months after their disappearance.
He believes Beckenridge planned out every minor detail, including creating the false pretence that he didn’t have any money, which saw him selling items on Trade Me, borrowing money from friends and neighbours and not paying his mortgage. He says all of this was part of Beckenridge’s grand plan to disappear off the face of the Earth and start a new life overseas with his stepson.
Templeman believes if Beckenridge was committed to driving over the cliff, he would have done so straight away.
“John cared too much for Mike to have harmed him in any way, let alone put him through the torment of being part of a suicide plan over such a protracted period.”
With Beckenridge’s knowledge of tides and currents from his experience as a sailor and diver, he knew Curio Bay was the perfect place to land the vehicle in the water as it would be difficult for police to recover it in one piece.
He believes Beckenridge escaped in a vehicle parked nearby, or was helped by an associate, before sailing off in a yacht.
Templeman drew the coroner’s attention to the “concerning” texts Beckenridge’s friends began receiving before his car went over the cliff — it wasn’t a coincidence that his best friend in Sweden didn’t receive a goodbye text.
Templeman said Beckenridge had a “number of funding options available to him” including $11,400 in Sweden in a superannuation fund. The money was still in the account in either 2017 or 2018 when police last checked, but it hasn’t been monitored since then.
He urged the coroner to keep the investigation open, stating that to this day, sightings are still being received that he believes haven’t been investigated by the police inquiry team.
Templeman told NZME that regardless of what the coroner decided he would always have a “strong suspicion” that Beckenridge and Mike were alive and expected Mike’s mother would too.
James’ mother goes even further, saying she has no doubt they will resurface in the future.
She said the family think about both Mike and Beckenridge often and miss them, describing their disappearance as “a huge loss to our lives”.
When James is asked if he thinks Beckenridge did the right thing there’s a long pause before he replies: “I think he made a John decision”.
His parents are quick to agree.