The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Jane Furlong

By Kelly Dennett

Jane Furlong was seventeen when she disappeared off Auckland City's Karangahape Road - a notorious sex strip - in 1993. Her disappearance became a media frenzy, with Jane's face and halo of fiery red hair emblazoned on newspapers and television screens across the country. It soon emerged she was to have been a witness at the trial of a wealthy businessman charged with sex crimes. The police identified a number of suspects. No one was charged. Nineteen years later a woman walking her dog on a beach an hour's drive from Auckland made a gruesome discovery: a skull was poking through the sand. The body in the windswept dunes was found to be that of Jane. Kelly Dennett unveils the story of Jane's life, her disappearance, the frantic and unsuccessful search to find her, the huge impact on her family and her partner (who rapidly became the police's main suspect), and the abiding mystery of her killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781927249505

Book preview

2017

PROLOGUE

Auckland, New Zealand, May 26, 1993. The conservative National Party’s Jim Bolger is prime minister. The trial of a Christchurch childcare worker, Peter Ellis, who has denied sexually abusing infants in his care, is making daily headlines. Seventeen-year-old Teina Pora has just been charged with murdering Susan Burdett, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who lived alone. Auckland is a city in progress. Houses are still considered affordable. Children play outside. Smartphones have not been invented.

Jane Furlong, her boyfriend Dani Norsworthy and her best friend Amanda Geraghty jump into taxi driver Chris Good’s white Nissan Bluebird in the Auckland suburb of Penrose. Good is the teenage trio’s favourite taxi driver because he is willing to put cab fares on the tab. He’s also saved the girls from sticky situations with customers, and when it’s cold – as it is on this late autumn night – he’ll let them sit in the back of his car to warm up until he’s called away to his next job. Amanda and Jane are sex workers, and have been working inner-city Karangahape Road, commonly known as K Road, for the better part of two years. Once compared to London’s Oxford Street in the early 1920s, the strip is a seedy area where dingy bars tout for business and sex workers line the streets.

On this night Good has picked up the group from the suburban house where Amanda lives with her mother. The young women are excited. It’s Wednesday and they have plans to go out after work. Jane and Dani have been having problems. Jane has confided to Amanda several times that she thinks she’ll leave him, and tonight they’ll meet some guys Amanda knows for a bit of fun behind Dani’s back. First, though, they’ll earn money by working a few hours on the street.

Jane is carrying a duffel bag filled with clothes, and a small handbag she always has with her. Inside it is a pocket knife she’s taken to keeping with her since a scary experience with a client the year before. She’s wearing a brown suede leather jacket with fringes on the arms, and high-heeled shoes with gold bows. Usually Jane wears all black. With her curly red hair and dark eyes often lined with black kohl, she looks striking despite her slight frame. Five feet tall, she rarely weighs more than forty-five kilograms. She is watching her figure, and meticulously notes her weight in her diary every few days.

Jane and Dani have been together for about two years. The relationship is volatile, but Jane gave birth to their first child just over four months earlier, with Amanda cheering her on. The healthy baby boy went to live with Dani’s parents almost immediately. It broke Jane’s heart but she felt she had little choice: she had to work constantly to keep herself afloat. Her baby would be better off with his grandparents and she could visit him often.

And there were other reasons not to have the baby around. First, Dani is sometimes violent and the couple argue frequently. Secondly, Jane is due to give evidence in several upcoming criminal trials and the police are taking up more and more of her time, calling her at home and at her mother’s place, and arriving at her door. They are keen to see the offenders, one in particular, taken off the streets.

Jane’s mother Judith doesn’t know exactly why the police keep popping around but she has a fair idea. Jane is always getting into trouble with the cops. What’s she done now? Judith says to detectives. Oh no, nothing at all, they reply. We just want to catch up with her.

Judith is not completely oblivious to how Jane makes her money, but she herself is struggling to look after her two other children, both boys, as a single parent, managing bills, car payments and the mortgage.

Jane is strong: you would never know what was bothering her underneath her bubbly persona. But during a moment of vulnerability she has confided to her mother that she is worried about the court case. Judith assumes this is the case of the businessman who’s been assaulting female sex workers from K Road. The attacks have been nasty, and the press have had a field day with stories of the man and his vicious tendencies. Jane’s confession is fleeting, and it may be the only time she mentions her fears to anyone. If she is frightened on this evening when she, Amanda and Dani arrive at K Road, she doesn’t show it. Besides, she has the knife now.

Good drops off the three outside Rendells department store. During the day Rendells is a busy clothing store, but by nightfall clusters of young women and their male minders frequent the footpath outside.

In the early 1990s K Road was far busier than it is today. People were out having a good time. Traffic was bumper to bumper. Cabs lined the streets. Cars circled up and down. The prostitution market was competitive. Several so-called massage parlours lined the street but many young women – often underage or transgender – sold themselves from the footpath. Each worker had her own patch, and good luck to the girl who intruded on another’s. Fights were common. Occasionally cops would drive up and down in a vain attempt to move along the sex workers and vagrants. Soliciting was a crime, and Amanda and Jane had often been arrested and fined. They continued to work: prostitution was good money and, for the cops, policing the strip wasn’t a major priority. They had bigger things to worry about.

About eight o’clock Amanda and Jane get out of Good’s Bluebird and say goodbye. Dani would normally linger on K Road to take down the licence plates of vehicles picking up the girls, but his blue Cortina has broken down some streets away on Ian McKinnon Drive and he has asked Chris Good to help him tow it. Ian McKinnon Drive stretches under the Newton Road overbridge and eventually turns into Dominion Road. By the bridge there’s a corner shaded by trees and bush. Good tells Dani it’s a perilous place to try and retrieve a car, but Dani is prepared and has put a rope in the Cortina’s trunk.

On the street, Amanda gets a job pretty quickly. This is unusual: it’s Jane, with her striking red hair, who is mostly picked up first. Amanda waves to Jane and jumps in the man’s car. Meanwhile, Dani and Chris Good locate the Cortina and tow it back to Upper Queen Street near the intersection with K Road, a better place for the car to be parked until it’s fixed. When Dani returns to K Road and sees that Jane is no longer there, he assumes she’s scored a job. He gets Good to ferry him backwards and forwards from K Road to Grey Lynn a couple of times, saying he has errands.

After this, Good drops off Dani outside Rendells. For the rest of the night, until about four a.m., Good works elsewhere, ferrying around drunk passengers. He enjoys meeting new people and likes his job, despite the odd bit of harassment and abuse. The next morning brings unexpected and distressing news. His mother has died suddenly. He immediately packs a bag and heads up north for the traditional three-day tangi. He tells his boss where he’s going but the boss, who is off to Fiji for a holiday, forgets to pass on the message to the taxi company’s office. When Good returns some days later he’s surprised to find several business cards from the police stuffed into his door. Messages have also been left with the taxi company’s call centre. The police are looking for Good. They want to talk to him about a missing girl.

CHAPTER ONE

The Auckland Central Police Station on the corner of Cook and Vincent Streets is a tall building, and from the highest floors the view is really quite something. You can see the 328-metre high Sky Tower, the tangle of motorways and streets, and beautiful Myers Park, its palm trees giving a glamorous Californian feel to an otherwise gloomy spot shaded by neighbouring buildings.

Visitors to the station rarely get to see this view: they report crime on the bottom floor to bored personnel. But on June 21, 2012, a handful of journalists and a television crew, escorted by police staff, make their way into an elevator, go up several levels, and walk into the large room where the police typically hold meetings and press conferences. Reporters quickly set up their microphones. After carrying out a few sound checks, test scribbles on paper, and glances around the room, they wait.

Weeks earlier a woman’s skeleton has been found nearly a hundred kilometres away, at a beach in a place called Port Waikato. Police have since named the body as that of Jane Furlong, who has not been seen since vanishing almost twenty years before. She was last seen just a few streets away from this police station.

Police often hold press conferences and appeal to the public for help following significant events, such as the launch of an important investigation or the discovery of a body. Today Jane’s mother Judith Furlong has agreed to meet curious reporters. She is now in her early sixties, a petite woman with short curly hair dyed brown. She wears a long-sleeved, aqua-coloured top and purple beads. She always likes to look nice and today is no different, but she feels terrible. She has just learned her daughter’s body has been discovered buried at a beach. Judith has never visited this beach. How, she wondered, had Jane got there of all places? Why there?

Over the years Judith’s attitude to the media has softened. The first time she saw her daughter’s photo in The New Zealand Herald back in 1993 she had been horrified. Now, though, she sees journalists as allies. The publicity they generate could still help bring forward a killer. It could also expose what she sees as police inadequacies.

The first question to family members of a murder victim is typically the all-encompassing and mundane, How are you feeling? I was surprised, Judith tells the group of reporters. I never thought this day would come really. She speaks slowly. It’s as though she’s having trouble processing the information. I never expected to find her, so it’s very interesting.

Exactly what about it is interesting, a reporter asks, in an attempt to draw out a soundbite for the evening’s six o’clock bulletin. Judith looks surprised. Does she have to spell it out? Well, it’s interesting that she was found at Port Waikato. Who knows how she ever ended up there? She nods her head slightly.

Had she held out hope her daughter was alive? No, I realised fairly soon after she went missing she couldn’t be alive because she would have contacted us.

Another reporter asks about her memories of her daughter. The question throws her a little. She blinks furiously as she tries to think of an appropriate answer. She has always felt uncomfortable about the way her daughter’s profession made such sensational headlines. It was nobody else’s business really.

She was a very vivacious girl, she says carefully. But yeah, she was just a girl really. And a bit crazy. It’s been a bit difficult, but nineteen years have gone by and we have kind of moved on. This has thrown it all back. I remember everything like it was yesterday.

CHAPTER TWO

Red and brown brick with white trim, the Auckland High Court is an impressive historic building. Its tower looms over Waterloo Quadrant in the central business district. In the early 1920s the building stood alone not far from the harbour and just a few kilometres from the city’s oldest park, The Domain. The odd tree was planted alongside it. You could see the harbour from the top floor. Today the building has been extended and a courtyard built. The trees, fully grown now, provide shade over the manicured front lawn, and every now and again in summer witnesses, prosecutors and defence lawyers converge here during the mandatory one o’clock break to smoke or chat on the phone.

Inside, the worn carpet and dull wooden desks give no hint of the formal nature of the business conducted here. It is within these walls that murderers are sent to jail. Killers plead their innocence. People who’ve made bad decisions confirm their guilt. Judges snipe at lawyers. Journalists snare scoops.

At 9.45 a.m. on April 28, 2015, in courtroom seven on the ground floor, the murder trial of Tony Robertson was about to get underway. The presiding judge would be Justice Timothy Brewer, a man whose strict adherence to punctuality, dress codes and formal tradition was notorious. Two wooden benches were pushed together along one wall of the room for a gaggle of radio, television and print journalists, who would report on what were sure to be a harrowing four weeks. Having chucked down their laptops, sound recorders, dictaphones, notepads and pens, they wait expectantly.

The beginnings of a trial can be tedious. Jury selection can take hours. Many of those called up for service do not want to spend weeks in a courtroom listening to dreary testimony, and as a last-ditch attempt to be excused they often request to speak to the judge. Everybody has lives to get on with, kids to tend to, parents to check in on, jobs to go to.

Finally the trial got underway. As wet weather raged outside, the room was silent as prosecutor Kieran Raftery outlined the Crown’s case. Raftery is an extremely experienced lawyer, whose chubby red cheeks and brilliant white hair draw comparisons to Santa Claus. He looks like the kind of man who’d spoil his grandchildren. But he is fierce. During the second trial of the accused multiple murderer David Bain he held a rifle up to his head in an attempt to demonstrate that Bain’s father could not have shot himself.

In his proper English prose Raftery would soon begin detailing how Robertson had abducted, raped and stabbed a North Shore woman, Blessie Gotingco, and then dumped her body in a nearby cemetery. Before then, the public gallery will have filled up with Blessie Gotingco’s family and friends, all wearing green, the dead woman’s favourite colour, and members of the public. One of these curious outsiders looked startlingly glamorous. Petite and in her sixties, she wore silvery eyeshadow with pink lipstick. Her whitish-grey short hair was styled with just the right amount of curl. That woman looks familiar, I said to the radio journalist sitting next to me. Do you recognise her? She didn’t.

It continued to bother me, then I clicked. Jane Furlong I typed on my laptop. Up came photos of a young red-headed woman. I continued clicking until I found the photo I was looking for. Three years ago the woman’s hair had been brown but the eyeshadow and lipstick were the same. There were microphones in front of her face. She looked pained.

Judith Furlong grew up in Epsom. Today the suburb is known for its swanky mansions but back then it was working-class. Her father worked as a storeman and Judith inherited his work ethic. From her early teens she began thinking about how to live independently. She entered the work force at fifteen, which was not unusual in those days when university was largely reserved for those who wanted to be doctors, lawyers and civil servants.

At a party she met Mike Furlong and the pair quickly hit it off. After living together for many years they married for what Judith would say was convenience: in the 1970s a woman couldn’t obtain a mortgage without the signature of a man and she was keen to get into her first house. The couple bought a modest home in Clover Park, Manukau. The house had no lawn, and for the first three months it rained. Judith dreamed of moving closer to the central Auckland areas she was familiar with, but this wasn’t to happen as quickly as she hoped.

The couple had two sons, Mark and Tony, and on September 23, 1975, when she was twenty-six, Judith gave birth to a daughter, Jane. The birth was classed as high risk for reasons she still doesn’t understand; she does remember the baby being described by doctors as suffering foetal distress.

It wasn’t long before Judith’s relationship with her husband was crumbling. Mike was a heavy drinker, who would often disappear for days on end without explanation, leaving Judith home alone with three toddlers. One trip to the doctor with Jane ended with the GP imparting some valuable advice. You need intellectual stimulation, he told Judith.

Jane was a feisty, active child with her own ideas about what she wanted to do. As soon as she could walk she was prone to wandering off when Judith’s back was turned, even for a second. She was a fussy eater and loved to annoy her two brothers. She also showed a keen interest in getting a head start on her education; Judith’s earliest memories are of her complaining about not being able to attend school with her older brothers. Every morning when I dropped Mark off at school she’d start moaning, Judith remembers. She wanted to go to school with him. While he was walking through the gate she’d start.

Unlike her mother and brothers, Jane was sociable. She loved people and wanted to be involved in everything. Clover Park, a relatively new suburb, didn’t have educational facilities for the three children, so Judith enrolled them at preschools and schools on Bairds Road in the neighbouring suburb of Ōtara. The morning Jane was to start preschool, Judith’s heart stopped when she realised her daughter was nowhere to be found and the backdoor of the house was wide open. She hightailed it to the preschool, where Jane’s amused teacher told her Jane had already hung up her bag and was waiting for the lesson to start.

By the time Jane turned five, Redoubt North School had been built in Clover Park and her brother Tony enrolled as a foundation pupil. Around this time Judith and Mike’s relationship disintegrated beyond repair and Judith chucked her husband out of the family home. Although the children were young, they didn’t seem fazed, Judith remembers. Mike hadn’t been around much anyway. At first he made concerted efforts to see his children but his interest soon waned.

Although Judith was relieved to have Mike out of the home, the family’s finances suffered after the household income was reduced to one wage. The couple had recently taken out a second mortgage and Judith wasn’t earning enough to raise the children alone and meet the interest payments. Two years after Mike left, she decided to place her children in the hands of a charitable trust that provided a home for young people in need of care and protection.

CHAPTER THREE

The breaks are like clockwork at the High Court: