See the full video and article here.
Mysterious circumstances, improbable theories and a once-over-lightly police investigation spark calls for a new inquiry into how little Lachie Jones died in Gore last year. Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner report.
Death by drowning. Case closed, according to the police. But the discovery of a three-year-old boy’s lifeless body in a Gore oxidation pond last year still haunts the Southland town. Could Lachlan Jones have gone that far? Would he have gone that far? Why do none of the witness times match? And how was it possible for a small boy to have no marks on his bare feet after traversing 1.2 kilometres over rough terrain?
Lachie’s father is adamant his son didn’t walk there. Meanwhile Worksafe is bringing a court case against the local council, which is far from convinced the boy’s death was accidental and whose not guilty plea centres around the police investigation being inept.
So what exactly happened to little Lachie Jones? The Newsroom Investigates team headed south to search for answers in a special investigation in the video above and text story below.
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January 29, 2019 was one of the hottest days of the year in Gore. Residents on Salford Street - a straight road at the south end of town leading to the trout-filled Mataura River - had thrown their windows open in the hopes of a breeze as dusk arrived.
By 9.30pm, neighbours were out searching for a three and a half year-old boy who had gone missing from his home. Locals and emergency services scoured the neighbourhood, searching around the A&P showgrounds, behind fences, in backyards, under hedges.
He would be found by an officer and his police dog at 11.15pm, face up and lifeless near the end of the second of two large council oxidation ponds.
Police determined Lachlan Jones had drowned in a tragic accident and closed the case.
But Lachie’s father, Paul Jones, is demanding they take another look at the mysterious circumstances surrounding the disappearance and death of his son that summer’s night, and says the police investigation was so ‘lightweight’ he can’t rest until he knows the truth.
“To find out so many things that are wrong with it [the police investigation], it’s pretty upsetting. It just doesn’t add up. I just don’t believe he walked out here. No one will ever convince me of that.”
Lachie was his only child, a regular little boy with sandy blond hair who liked watching Blippi and PJ Masks on YouTube and pretending to be a police officer. He was described as polite, happy and imaginative with lots of friends at his preschool. Paul still visits his grave every day to talk to him.
Newsroom’s own investigation into these claims involved extensive examination of the police file and three visits to Gore to interview key witnesses and walk the same path Lachie allegedly took the night he died.
We found several holes in the police case, including no timeline, no scene examination, delayed witness interviews, conflicting witness statements, lack of cellphone information and no marks on the boy’s feet despite a supposed walk of 1.2 kilometres across rough terrain.
We then engaged private investigator Glynn Rigby, who analysed the police report and told us he too believed there were numerous gaps in the case.
The police were invited to be interviewed for this story, however they declined, saying they had done a thorough investigation into the “tragic circumstances of the accident”.
Lachie’s mother also did not take part in this story, and did not want to be involved with any media. She and Paul Jones broke up about six months before their son died, although had been spending nights together during their shared custody of Lachlan.
Friends turned investigators
Karen McGuire and Paul Jones work for courier companies in neighbouring warehouses in the Southland town of around 8000 residents. McGuire is sharp and self-assured, the kind of person you would call in an emergency, but also great fun over a beer. She describes herself as Jones’ mate and his “support person”, and is unconvinced Lachie’s death was an accident.
After poring over the police file she says it has so many holes in it, “it could be a sieve.”
“There are people that were at the house that night that still haven’t been interviewed. There are witnesses that haven’t been interviewed for weeks later, it’s just like it wasn’t a priority. But this was a three and a half year-old boy. It should have been a damn priority.”
“Accidents happen - tragic accidents happen, and I accept that, but this file would have to be so thorough for us to accept it. And at the moment it’s not.”
She says while Jones has had a few run-ins with police and a bit of a colourful past, he deserves to know what happened to his son.
“He’s not perfect, but he was a great dad. And he loved that boy. And Paul had a right, no matter what his history is, to have had a full and thorough investigation into his boy’s death. And in my opinion that hasn’t happened. And we want to know why.”
Both want the police case reopened – and they have support in high places, including the local council.
No marks on Lachie’s feet
Now surrounded by 1.8 metre-high deer fencing, the grass berms bordering the town’s two giant oxidation ponds are mown regularly, and oystercatchers chase each other above the still water.
But rewind to early last year and it was a different story. Beyond the rough gravel road used to sit a cyclone gate topped with barbed wire and beside it a wood fence. The banks around the ponds were overgrown and filled with prickles, sheep poo and midges.
It’s a long way through rough terrain to get to the end of the second pond. Back then it was also possible to drive around the back of the first pond and through the middle bank separating the two (there is now high fencing around the entire perimeter).
One of biggest mysteries in this case is how Lachie, who had bare feet at the time, could walk 1.2 kilometres in a full nappy over gravel, climb over a rough wooden fence and traipse through thistles and long grass with midges and sheep poo, and not have one mark on his feet. The police do not seem to have questioned why.
“I went to the funeral home, the funeral director, and we saw his body and I got him and his assistant to check, so they took all his stuff off him and checked it and there was no marks and the pathology report says there is no marks on him as well,” says Jones.
McGuire was similarly astounded. “There was nothing, his body was perfect. Perfect. And to climb a fence, you’re likely to get a little bit of a graze or a nick somewhere you know? And running through prickles. There wasn’t even a prickle in his wee foot. Nothing. Didn’t add up.”
When did Lachie go missing?
Exactly when Lachie disappeared is a difficult question to answer, primarily because police brushed away or never followed up on inconsistencies in witness statements and cellphone data.
According to his mother’s statement, she was at home with Lachie and his older half-brother that evening. They had ordered pizza and tried to fix the hose for Lachie’s sprinkler. Just before 9pm, the toddler needed a nappy change, but his mother was distracted by her older son calling for help from his bedroom.
She took a moment to lift one of his workout weights for him, then says she saw a kid who looked like her young son out the kitchen window and “realised it was Lachie running down the street”.
He was wearing a yellow hi-viz vest and a replica police hat, his favourite outfit. (“He was obsessed with the police. He was always dressing up and arresting people,” one of his mother’s friend’s told police.)
Lachie’s mother caught up with him outside a friend’s place a few doors away. She decided they should say hi, so Lachie knocked and they both entered the house. The friend says she never saw Lachie, and in her police statement the only time she could give for this event was “sometime after 7.30, probably way after”.
The chatted about two fishermen who had gone missing two days earlier, swept from the rocks at rugged Slope Point in the Catlins. They also shared what they had eaten for dinner, and Lachie’s mother told her friend she had to change her son’s nappy.
The mother says Lachie was standing at the door during this time and she could see him out of the corner of her eye, that “it was only a 30 second conversation” with her friend.
“I recall saying ‘I gotta go, I gotta go.’ Then I didn’t see Lachie,” his mother told police.
She says she looked for him at the back of her friend’s house and up and down the street but “he may have been hiding from me”. The mother returned home with her friend, then searched at the playground a couple of houses away, before heading back to her friend’s house and proceeding to scour the street. Neighbours began to join in.
At 9.36pm, while standing with her friend at the gates to the oxidation ponds, Lachie’s mother called 111 from her cellphone. In her statement she said, “I think I looked at the ponds…I stood up on the bank looking for a bright yellow vest. I didn’t know there were two ponds. I couldn’t see his vest.” Her friend makes no mention of this in her statement.
The emergency services operator told his mother to return home, which she did.
By now it had been approximately half an hour since she says she had seen him last. Was this long enough for a three-year-old in a hi-viz vest to make it the 1.2 kilometres to the end of the second pond while it was still light without being spotted by those out searching, one of whom had, according to the mother’s friend, “gone round the pond area about three times”?
This is when things get confusing. A 14-year-old girl who lived near the end of the street says she saw a little boy in a high viz vest at around 8.30pm – a full 30 minutes before his mother said he disappeared. The girl knew this because she was “talking to my friend” on social media.
Oddly, police dismissed this major time difference by suggesting the teenager’s phone hadn’t yet switched over from daylight savings, which had occurred four months earlier.
Glynn Rigby, the private investigator we engaged to analyse the police file, says there doesn’t appear to be a retrospective timeline carried out by investigating officers and that many of the statements taken are light on content, meaning the way witnesses describe events don’t seem to correlate.
“If the right questions aren’t asked of the right people at the right times then it can, obviously, pervert the outcomes of an investigation. If matters aren’t investigated properly, whether they’re a homicide or a missing person or something more minor, you struggle then to rely on police investigation to reach the right outcomes.”
No scene examination
It’s typical in deaths such as this to cordon off the scene so it can be examined by investigators. In Lachie’s case, this never happened.
No fingerprints or footprints were taken, no evidence obtained to suggest which way Lachie might have walked to get there - and the scene was never secured.
Instead, the day after Lachie died McGuire, Jones, family members, neighbours, police and staff from the Gore Council and Worksafe all traipsed across the grass and over the scene.
“We walked out to the ponds the next day, Paul and myself and my partner and a colleague from work, with a council representative and the scene wasn’t secure, and when we got to the site where Lachie was found, there was just an old stick in the ground. Which I thought was a bit bizarre. Did they take markings of tyre tracks? Test the fingerprints, look for fingerprints or look for footprints, or disturbance in the grass or anything like that? It’s just a bit of a mystery,” says McGuire.
Which begs the question: had police already made up their minds as to Lachie’s cause of death?
Paul Jones thinks so. “I just think that they straight away suggested that it was an accident. There is no proof he’s walked there. There is no fingerprints, nothing.”
Contradictory evidence
The record of who was interviewed and when exposes what appears to be a relaxed approach to gathering witness evidence.
Police didn’t interview some key witnesses until a month after Lachie died; some not at all. And even when witness statements contradicted each other, no one was re-interviewed.
This kind of “once-over lightly” approach to the complex requirements of a police investigation is a worry to Glynn Rigby. “Some of the statements are weak…it’s been a very cursory interview with neighbours and potential witnesses. And perhaps they haven’t grasped some of the broader issues that they should be addressing from a more investigative point of view.”
A couple of teenagers and two young children say they saw the boy on the street, and a woman watching TV says she thought she saw him running past, but they were never re-interviewed to establish proper timing.
Other anomalies, including a witness sighting of a shirtless man at the ponds during the time Lachie was missing, were also not followed up.
Was Lachie a child who used to run away? There are conflicting accounts. The father says absolutely not, and in text messages Newsroom has seen his mother said it was very out of character, yet in her police statement said he’d done it before. In her friend’s statement, she could only remember one time Lachie taking off to her house, but also that he was the type of kid you had to keep an eye on “all the time.”
Retrieving cellphone data is also standard practice in cases like this, but police waited so long to request the information from telecommunications companies for multiple key witnesses that, by the time they did, it was too late.
In one instance for one of the most important witnesses, it was never requested at all.
What they did manage to secure was location data, which showed glaring inconsistencies in the movements of two key witnesses. Put simply, their phone signals were polling on the other side of town to where they said they were, yet this too was never followed up.
McGuire says not having the answers to these questions continues to stir confusion when all they want is to know what happened. “Did he walk out there? Did he not? Could he have walked that far? Has he walked that far? What time did he go missing? It’s just hanging over us. And we just need answers, whatever way it is we just need the answers.”
Council taken to court
As a result of Lachie’s death, Worksafe has taken the Gore District Council to court, where it has been charged under three sections of the Health and Safety at Work Act for failing to take all reasonable precautions to ensure the site was safe.
If found guilty, the council could be fined up to $1.5m.
Newsroom understands the Gore council is not convinced Lachie’s death was accidental and the cornerstone of the council’s decision to plead not guilty centres on concerns about the adequacy of the police investigation.
It is widely believed that worksites' health and safety compliance is not based on the possibility a child might visit the site unsupervised. The locals in Gore point out there would be no Worksafe case if lachie had drowned in the Mataura River, which is right beside the oxidation ponds.
The outcome of this case will have huge ramifications around the country if Gore council is found guilty. Newsroom drove to several sites in the Southland and Otago regions near Gore, including Tapanui and Balclutha, which have stock fences around their oxidation ponds, just as Gore used to have.
Other waterways that are considered worksites could also be in the gun pending the outcome of this case, which isn’t due to be heard until late next year.
The council began fencing the oxidation ponds in November last year at a cost of about $65,000.
Officials at Gore council would not be interviewed while the case was before the courts.