Catch HER IF YOU CAN
It was barely a year after Ollie Wards first met his brother Greg’s new Californian girlfriend in a bar that he found himself uneasily preparing some remarks for the couple’s wedding. Lezlie Manukian was about to marry her Kiwi fiancé and Ollie wasn’t happy about it, but he couldn’t say exactly why.
The loud-mouthed American was gregarious and glamorous, but also generous and hospitable. When Ollie first met her in 2006, she’d had an answer for everything. “Lezlie knows” had become a jokey refrain. But there was something about this woman that had him on high alert.
“Greg and Lezlie were very intense,” he recalls now. “Lezlie seemed to have a power over Greg. Like he wasn’t really himself.” When Greg confided that he was thinking of proposing, Ollie was alarmed. “I remember counselling: ‘It’s early days. Just take it easy’.”
As the family gathered back in New Zealand for the couple’s wedding in 2007, Ollie’s fears intensified. But Greg was so happy it was impossible for Ollie, an Australian radio producer, to raise his doubts. “It’s not a feeling that had any sort of rationality,” Ollie says. “You couldn’t articulate it. So nobody was saying anything.”
Just four months later, everything blew up. Lezlie disappeared, leaving her Matakana business, which his parents had backed, in ruins. Julie and David Wards lost their life savings and their Auckland home, and were forced to move into a relative’s basement. Greg’s marriage and heart were in tatters. As the family sifted through the havoc Lezlie had left behind,
