We might be in Invercargill but all anyone can talk about is Gore. Specifically, Salford Street. That’s where three-year-old Lachlan Jones lived, south of the centre of town, between the A&P Showgrounds and the Mataura River.
Roughly 1.2 km away from the single level home he lived in with his mother and half-brother, near the end of a vast sewage oxidation pond, is where the little boy’s body was found on a hot summer’s night in 2019.
How he got there is the subject of a five-week coronial inquest that began with a dramatic and emotionally charged first week at the Invercargill courthouse.
It’s a white, two storey historic building on Don Street, with the first stone laid in 1938.
Upstairs in courtroom four the wooden blinds are drawn against the warm day as proceedings begin at 10am on Monday.
A clutch of lawyers occupies a row of desks in front of the public gallery seating. The Crown solicitor representing the police, Robin Bates, who was involved in the original trial of David Bain, is on the far left next to Lachie’s mother’s lawyer, Beatrix Woodhouse.
On the other side is the imposing figure of Lachie’s father’s lawyer, Max Simpkins, and to his right are Simon Mount KC and Alysha Gordon, the legal counsel assisting the coroner.
At the back of the room the media table is full, and beside it are three rows of public seating. Detective Inspector Stu Harvey, who was in charge of the reinvestigation into the case, sits on one of the chairs at the back, under which is an A4 printout that reads RESERVED POLICE in large letters.
Lachie’s father, Paul Jones, and his longtime support person, Karen McGuire, are in the front row for most of the week, as are supporters of Lachie’s mother.
To the very right of the room is the witness box, and of course the coroner sits at the front facing everyone from his elevated bench.
Measured, erudite and with a forensic knowledge of the case, Auckland-based Coroner Alexander Ho brings compassion to the room that sets the tone for the inquest.
He opens by reminding Lachie’s family and loved ones that their little boy is at the heart of this process.
“No condolence I express here today, while genuine, can solve your grief. I say only that, unlike you, I did not have the privilege of knowing Lachie, but that he is now my responsibility.”
Lachie’s mother
The first witness called is Lachie’s mother, Michelle Officer. She has never spoken publicly about her son’s death.
She requests a screen for privacy and mental health reasons, but there is some trouble setting this up, so we are asked to leave the room while they figure it out.
Three screens are eventually arranged around the witness box in such a way the lawyers can see and talk to her while she remains shielded from the public gallery. On the witness list, Officer is scheduled to appear for part of the first day only, but it soon becomes clear the taking of her evidence is going to need much longer.
Officer’s Wellington-based lawyer, Beatrix Woodhouse, begins by asking what kind of relationship she had with Lachie.
“I slept with him, breastfed him, and when he passed it felt like my whole world gone,” she says, sobbing.
She recalls the night her son went missing, that she’d just come from helping her older son with his weights in another room.
“And I just remember feeling really thirsty. I opened the fridge and got a bottle of juice out and was pouring my cup and just sort of gazing out the window. ‘Cause when I last saw Lachie he was sitting at the kitchen table and I kind of noticed this hi-viz vest on the corner. And I thought, that’s strange. It looks like a kid trying to dress like Lachie. I thought maybe he’d started a trend of wearing hi-viz vests.”
She says when she realised her son wasn’t at the dining table, she took off after him.
It’s a long, well prepared interaction between Officer and her lawyer, with regular swipes at Lachie’s father, Paul Jones, at times describing him as “abusive”.
Under cross examination from Simpkins, there is a notable shift in Officer’s voice from soft and tearful to defensive and hostile.
Simpkins accuses Officer of not being able to handle her young son, and that Lachie was chronically unwell with a range of illnesses, including having gum disease, bronchitis and skin rashes.
Officer disputes his assertions, saying she always took him to the doctor, bought a $3000 air purifier and says she wasn’t the only parent in the household at the time. “I can’t see why I’m getting the blame when it’s joint parenting here.”
Simpkins puts to her that she had been smoking cannabis the night Lachie died.
“That’s ridiculous, that’s a lie,” she replies angrily.
“I was not smoking dope, I didn’t do dope then, didn’t do anything. I was looking for Lachie and then I had to go home. Don’t put things into my mouth that didn’t happen and make me look bad when it didn’t happen at all. Wasn’t true. None of us done dope.”
Simon Mount KC, who is assisting the coroner, is trim with short, blonde hair. A Fulbright scholar who studied law at Columbia in New York, Mount is a quiet and confident investigator of the facts.
He asks Officer about the 111 call she made the night her son went missing, and why she told the operator, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this anymore”.
“Just help the coroner to understand, if you could, what were you referring to about ‘I can’t do this anymore?’” Mount asks Officer.
“I felt like collapsing my brain. I was, I felt like I was gonna collapse. I was in fricking turmoil. I just wanted to just collapse. I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find him. That’s why I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was so panicky.”
‘Can’t remember’
Day three begins with the Crown solicitor, Robin Bates, and one of Officer’s two older sons, Jonathan Scott.
But if his mother is effusive and emotional on the stand, 21-year-old Scott is monosyllabic.
Also seated behind the screens, his answers mostly shift between “can’t remember” “yeah” and “no”.
Robin Bates nurses him through the revelation that, in the early stages of his little brother going missing, he was out buying cannabis with mates, and then when he got home cooked himself bacon and eggs while everyone was searching for Lachie.
“And why did you have something to eat at that stage?”
“’Cause I hadn’t eaten since my breakfast and the police told me to stay home.”
A running theme is Paul Jones’ behaviour.
“It was all good until he’d come home and start verbally abusing us,” Scott, who was 15 when his little brother died, tells Simpkins.
There are some discrepancies between his recollection of events and his mother’s. Jonathan says on the afternoon of January 29, 2019, Officer drove with him to the supermarket and took Lachie inside. Officer, however, said in her testimony she had just driven around the carpark and couldn’t find a park so they went home.
His testimony finishes in time for lunch.
The neighbour
Debbie Thurston lived a few doors down from Michelle Officer and Lachie in 2019. Petite with long dark hair and a fringe, she is sworn in on the afternoon of the third day.
Her police statement has always been one of the key pieces of evidence in the timeline of the night Lachie went missing.
Thurston told police that while she didn’t see Lachie, she could hear the little boy ‘muttering away’ in a laundry area of her house the night he went missing.
But under cross examination from Simon Mount, she says ‘muttering’ was a word given to her by the police officer.
“I remember the detective saying, so you heard muttering and stuff and I said yes. ‘Cause I didn’t actually hear him talking or anything, but I could hear what I thought to be Lachie, what I think was Lachie at the time.”
“So muttering wasn’t really your word?”
“No, that wasn’t my word. That’s what he said. But I recall the noise of him being in there.”
Mount then plays the 111 call Michelle Officer made that night:
Michelle Officer: “Gosh I can’t believe he’s done this, Debbie, he was just in your laundry.”
Debbie Thurston: “What was he doing there in the first place?”
Michelle Officer: “He went to visit you, he went to your…he’s being funny.”
Mount asks Thurston why she appeared so surprised about the idea of Lachie being in her laundry.
At first, Thurston can’t be sure it’s her voice on the recording. When Mount asks whether there was anyone else called Debbie whose laundry Lachie was meant to have gone in, she realises it could only have been her, but she is confused about why she would have said that.
“I do believe that on the night he was in my wash house, but I don’t know what Michelle’s saying. Well, I can’t recall that conversation.”
The oldest brother
Cameron is Michelle Officer’s oldest son. He was 17 when Lachie died and now lives in Australia, so he appears in court on a large screen via audio-visual link.
He is angry with Paul Jones from the get-go, when he tries to show a video on his phone of Jones being aggressive towards him, but this is stopped by the court.
He talks about how much he loved his little brother and responds to a proposition put to him from Simpkins that he was involved in disposing his brother’s body as a “disgusting allegation.”
“I was extremely close to Lachie, he was my half-brother.”
He then proceeds to talk about what a good mother Officer is, and when it was put to him by Officer’s lawyer, Beatrix Woodhouse, that one of the issues before the inquest is whether there was any neglect on the part of Officer towards Lachie, he responded, “I think that’s ridiculous, there was no neglect, it was a pure accident”.
He goes on further to say, “…the stuff coming out of the media is just pure defamation to our family and is disgusting.”
The eyewitnesses
The neighbours on the street who gave statements to police saying they saw someone resembling Lachie were varied in their testimony on the final day of the first week of the inquest.
One was quite sure she saw a little person run past her house in a high viz vest at around 9.15pm that night, and the other, who had originally given a statement to police she had seen a boy run past in a hi-viz vest, says she now can’t be sure what he was wearing, or what gender the little person was.
In the next two weeks the remaining witnesses to appear include Paul Jones, the pathologist who conducted the post mortem and key police officers involved in the original investigation.
To listen to the voices and testimony throughout the inquest, we take you right inside the courtroom in the second season of our chart-topping podcast The Boy in the Water.
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