Memorial to Tanya Burr, killed 15 September 2002

Our Visits to Rotorua in 2001

  

When Kieran and I took Tanya and her yowling three-month-old kittens to live with Anita and Nick in Rotorua on 24 January 2001, it was Kieran's first visit there, and my third. Tanya had been there before on a trip with Anita's family, but I've forgotten when.

I had been  there aged about five and remember looking at the rainbow trout somewhere. It was one of the times Dad injured himself on the farm and couldn't milk the cows. So he got to have a rare holiday while he recuperated. He only got holidays from the twice-daily milking (its virtual slavery to be a town milk dairy farmer) about every five years or so, and usually because he'd broken, slashed or squashed something in some farm accident. I have no idea where we stayed or what else we did, but I remember that we had stayed in Hamilton too.

The second time I was there, my sister Pam and I passed through Rotorua around 1984-85, spending about an hour there mostly looking for where one of my horses had previously lived. We found the right road and might even have got out of the car for a few moments somewhere. However, we were not interested in anything but the horse's former home and there was no obvious Warehouse in Rotorua then (seemingly Rotorua's No. 1 tourist attraction nowadays - for us anyway) to get us out of the car and shopping for bargains.

The kittens venturing outside at Blomfield Street, Rotorua, 25 January 2001, while Tanya says something to someone - probably to Kieran.

When we took Tanya up, Rotorua was experiencing a series of strange little earthquakes. I remember feeling one or two of them while we were there, and worried about Rotorua vanishing off the face of the earth and taking Tanya with it. To add to my concerns, the next day we also visited the Rotorua Museum and then the Buried Village near Lake Tarawera, to see the results of the 1886 Tarawera Eruption. I knew enough about that, as I'd recently finished a chronology of tourism in New Zealand for the Dept. of Conservation, and had naturally covered the history of Rotorua extensively. Despite my concerns, it was nice to see actually these places that I'd just studied.

After spending most of 25 January playing tourists, Kieran and I headed for Napier where we stayed the night, and again played at being tourists - something we had never actually done before. We enjoyed walking around Marine Parade in the early evening and generally lazed about. The next day, after visiting the museum and its 1931 earthquake exhibition, and generally looking around, we headed for home and arrived in the late afternoon. I had by then concluded that the reason Rotorua and Napier were tourist cities, while Palmerston North was not, was because they had suffered huge historic natural disasters. I therefore concluded that to get tourists to Palmerston North, it was time to ferret my way through Manawatu's history and find something even slightly compatible. I'm still looking...

When we finally pulled up our driveway, our neighbour George came out to the car anxious to tell us something. He asked us what we thought of the big eruption in Rotorua yesterday. What eruption in Rotorua...? We knew nothing of any eruption in Rotorua! We thought he was having us on.

Once we concluded that George was not in fact joking, I got worried and rushed to phone Tanya to make sure she was okay. She said that she and Anita had been out in Anita's car and had seen Rotorua's newest geyser from a distance spraying steam high up into the air. They had then gone to investigate.  So we were soon able to conclude that this was the park in central Rotorua that we had driven past as we left Rotorua. The eruption occurred about 3:30pm, indicating that we had passed it maybe an hour or so before it happened. We had almost stopped to look at the intriguing mud pools, which we could see steaming away from the car. However, I had never driven the Napier-Taupo Road before and we needed to find a motel in Napier, so I had decided these 'free' hot pools would have to wait until next time.

25 January 2001 - Kuirau Park in central Rotorua

Luckily the internet meant we soon got to see what this geyser looked like, but I now felt even more queasy about what else Rotorua might have to offer by way of natural disasters. For more information on this geyser's progress, see these webpages:

The next time Kieran and I visited Rotorua was early July 2001. This was when I finally got to see this car Tanya had bought in the meantime, and which I'd been paying the insurance on as she'd run out of money after paying the deposit. Nice car. Cost too much! Waste of money, but a vehicle was necessary given the closing times of the restaurant she was then working at - along with motel cleaning in the morning.

We drove up on 6 July, and the following day Tanya took us to visit the Lion Park in her beloved car. She had only been driving a few months and was fine in town conditions, but scared me silly on country roads. She had this strange idea that if the road sign said 100kmph, then this was the speed to travel at - regardless of road conditions. She also wasn't exactly patient with other drivers and I thought I should point out that if she crashed sometime, those other annoying drivers might be the ones who would have to rescue her. She still wasn't impressed.

When it finally came time to leave for home after more playing at being tourists, Kieran and I decided that this time we would check out this new geyser in this park full of free-to-view mud pools. We duly arrived and began roaming through the bushes on the nicely made walking tracks. There was no-one else there most of the time, but then we caught up with an older couple visiting from the South Island. We know this detail as about the time we got near each other, a wierd Maori man with a half tattooed face suddenly appeared beside a mud pool. He had evidently thrown two babies' strollers into the mud pool and was collecting big rocks about the size of basket balls to throw into the pool to try to sink the strollers.

This freaked out all of us. Kieran and I had virtually walked into him as he prepared to clamber back over the railing from the mud pool onto the path - to where we were standing!! He certainly was biiiig - and the size of the boulders he threw some distance across the pool onto the strollers proved he was also frighteningly strong!  In my shock I asked him to reassure me about where the babies were!! He replied with something highly intelligent like "Ugh!" and we got the urge to get the hell out of it! I carefully (in case he really was crazy) snapped a photo (see below) of the mudpool on the digital camera and along with the other couple, we decided there were better things to do than to risk our lives by staying in the park with a wierdo.

Babies strollers in the mudpool at Kuirau Park at around 4:30pm on 8 July 2001

I said to the other couple that I thought I would go tell the Rotorua police, just in case the babies were in fact also in the mudpool or endangered somewhere else, and they thought that a good idea too. 

So Kieran and I went to locate the Rotorua police station, which was fairly easy to find. I then explained all this stuff to the cop at the counter. I also agreed to email the photo to him once I got home and downloaded it, just in case there might ever be some significance to it.

A couple of cops then accompanied us back to the pool in the park, but by then the guy had vanished - having first thrown more large boulders onto the strollers. The strollers were barely visible by then, although the boulders poking out of the pool and the corresponding bubbles certainly were. 

I asked the cops if crazy things like this happened often in Rotorua. They assured me that they didn't. We then parted company and, an hour after we had first said goodbye to Tanya, I phoned her to tell her what had just happened, and that we were still 'just down the road' and finally heading for home. It was almost dusk by then and we must have got to Palmerston North about 10pm.

With the stroller photo duly emailed to the Rotorua police and no great tragedy having revealed itself, I more or less forgot about the incident, until a couple of weeks later when a strange performance began unwinding in Rotorua and made the national news. Even then I didn't worry much about it - until I suddenly realised that it was supposed to have happened later on the same day we saw the strollers in the pool. I suddenly hoped 'our' wierdo was not involved in the other incident - as I realised that for all we knew, we could have in fact been on the fringes of Rotorua's 'great murder mystery that really wasn't'.

This 'incident' had supposedly happened sometime over the night of 8-9 July 2001, thus over the hours that followed our encounter at the mud pool. The highly agitated 'murderer' had shown up at some Rotorua house complete with the 'murder weapon' and supposedly after the event. The occupants of this house  - who actually believed he had killed someone in a Rotorua motel and whose sense of decency was clearly not of a high standard  - had then helped him dispose of the knife (in a suburb quite close to the park as it happens). Meanwhile the so-called 'victim' had inconveniently hitchhiked back to Auckland without bothering to announce his departure to his assumed murderer and associates. The following webpages follow the story as it unfolded, but the newspaper headlines themselves give a pretty good indication of what occurred:

Reading about this bizarre episode on the NZ Herald website at the time - while noting with some horror that the date coincided with the mysterious stroller incident - unknowingly became my introduction to the Rotorua police staff who, fourteen months later, would handle Tanya's murder inquiry. 

Obviously it didn't even remotely enter my head in July 2001 that fate would follow the course that it did. However, the crazy Rotorua resident in the park and the highly-public tail-chasing exercise did cause a few concerns to suddenly reappear on my built-in radar screen when Tanya was killed. 

During July 2001, I formed some light-hearted opinions of Rotorua that derived from childhood memories of my parents' old 8mm 'Charlie Chaplin' silent movies. Occasional, but significant (to me), incidents during the murder investigation and the resulting court procedure have not always reassured me that my original assessment was wrong.

With the July 2001 episode, I become a little concerned that every time we went to Rotorua, something really strange seemed to happen. However, the next time the disaster happened BEFORE we arrived, and was the cause of the trip. This was Tanya's car crash that occurred on 29 August 2001. 

We duly drove up to clean up the mess on 3 September (getting a speed camera fine on the way) and, after visiting the wrecked Integra in Hamilton and arranging to bring it home to Palmerston North for repairs (where I could keep an eye on it), we returned home on 5 September.

After the car's deliberately slow repairs to Warrant of Fitness standard only (a long story covered elsewhere that is loosely definable as 'responsible parenthood'), I drove it up to her on 23 November. I returned home by bus the following day.

Those were my last trips to Rotorua before the greatest disaster of all - Tanya's death. However, she made a number of trips down to Palmerston North in the meantime as her driving confidence grew.

Kieran on a lookout at Kuirau Park on 8 July 2001, just before we met the wierd man with the strollers