Matthew Stevens, of Lower Hutt, was lured to his death in a deadly ambush in 2014 when he was just 32- but why?

How did a nice, young man from Lower Hutt wind up in the crosshairs of a skinhead crew? Talia Shadwell has covered the case from the day Matt Stevens was found slain on a hill road - and learns he may simply have dated in the wrong circles.

Matthew Vincent Stevens was his parents' miracle.

Chrissie and David Stevens had tried for nine years to have a baby and were overjoyed at the arrival of their firstborn son in 1982.

SUPPLIED Matthew Stevens' parents tried for nine years to have him.

Eighteen months later the toddler with the radiant smile was joined by a sister, Emma.

The pair became the best of friends - "Matt was such an awesome big brother to me, every time I needed him he was always there. I absolutely adored him," she recalled.

One cool spring night, Matt walked out of the family home he still shared with his parents, wearing dark jeans and a black jacket, and headed out.

SUPPLIED Matthew Stevens was a keen footballer, when he attended Wellington High School.

"I'm only going to be an hour, Mum," the 32-year-old called out to Chrissie. "I'm just going to help someone."

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 28, 2014: 1.22am

A police officer contemplated a white Toyota Corolla perched awkwardly on the edge of a bluff northwest of Upper Hutt.

SUPPLIED Stevens was about 22 when he performed his first parachute jump.

The car's bonnet was lodged at an odd, left-leaning angle against the flaxen scrub that lines Paekakariki Hill Road's summit.

Below the car's front wheels, dense undergrowth spilled 300 metres down the dark gully towards State Highway 1.

The driver was nowhere to be seen.

SUPPLIED Matthew Stevens and younger sister Emma Stevens were the best of friends, who shared a love of the outdoors. He would give his younger sister advice and draw pictures for her.

Suspecting an abandoned crash scene, the officer wound emergency scene tape around the car, and journeyed off into the night to find out where its owner was.

Six hours had passed by the time Andrew Fleming was driving over the morning-fog dusted hill.

As he rounded the summit, he noticed people standing at the bend peering downhill at a white car, covered in emergency tape, that looked as if it had run off the road.

MAARTEN HOLL/ FAIRFAX NZ The site on Paekakariki Hill Rd where Matthew Stevens' body and car were found.

What caught Fleming's attention was how they were staring beyond the car, at something he could not see.

"I slowed down to see if I could help... I really didn't see anything there, but to me they looked white as - like they had seen a ghost."

"I tried to speak to those guys but they didn't even turn around."

KEVIN STENT/FAIRFAX NZ Matt Stevens' killer Stuart Graham Wilton.

At 7.31am a caller phoned 111, telling the operator they had found a body on the hill road.

The Stevens family were about to get the worst news of their lives.

THE NICE GUY FROM LOWER HUTT

ROSS GIBLIN/ FAIRFAX NZ Kelly Leigh Crook was jailed for causing grievous bodily harm to Stevens with intent to injure him, and with being an accessory after the fact to his murder.

The Stevens children's summers were spent gambolling about the family pool, sliding in and out of the water, their dark hair glistening as they basked in the lingering Hutt Valley heat.

The family would hike the Rimutaka Forest Park in the holidays, and the siblings continued the tramping tradition long into their adult years.

He played guitar and football at Wellington High School.

KEVIN STENT/FAIRFAX NZ Darrin John Wilkie-Morris was jailed for injuring Stevens with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and being an accessory after the fact of the murder.

"He was born with natural rhythm and had a great love of music," Emma said. "He was creative and would always share his talents with others, whether it was bringing mates together for a jam or painting me a picture with a note of love and encouragement."

Family and friends recalled the kind of guy who would buy lunch for his friends when they forgot theirs.

The family photo albums feature a range of Matt Stevens alter egos - Elvis, a Yankee soldier - he enrolled in a performing arts course when he left school and got extra roles in Avatar and King Kong.

SUPPLIED Couple Darrin Wilkie-Morris and Kelly Crook, in a picture posted online the day after Stevens was killed.

Later, he began a career as a house painter.

A devout young man, he travelled to the Philippines as a missionary.

"He had such a big heart and beautiful soul," his sister said. "He was gentle, caring, thoughtful and funny, and always brought a lightness to any heavy situation."

THE TAINTED HOUSE AND THE MISSING SHOE

Matt had been living at home with his parents in a sleepout annexed to the property on Thursday November 27, 2014.

He was weeks away from graduating a truck driving course when Kelly Leigh Crook sent him a message over Facebook about 6pm.

She invited him over to her flat at Oxford Tce, in Epuni, Lower Hutt.

About 10pm said goodbye to his mum and hopped into his car.

Half an hour later CCTV captured him walking out of the High St, Lower Hutt Countdown supermarket with a six pack.

Peculiar, his sister later reflected, as she had never known him to drink beer.

In the weeks after detectives launched their homicide investigation, the family could not come up with a single theory of why anyone would have wanted him dead, they said.

"We didn't know why anybody would do this to him."

As Stevens was mourned in a funeral attended by 300, investigators led by Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Sears had already begun building a picture of his final movements.

Stevens' body was in scrub in front of his car, invisible to the officer visiting the scene in the dead of the night.

He had three stab wounds in his torso, and a brown leather shoe was missing from his left foot.

Detectives found traces of blood in his car, but not enough to suggest he was killed in it.

Toxicology tests could not establish whether Stevens had even been drinking before he died.

Police focused immediately on Crook's Oxford Tce place, where Stevens had been heading.

For days, forensic tents swamped the perimeter of the two-storey brick and weatherboard flat.

Forensic workers carrying luminol bags toiled away along with detectives, who marked out a tyre pattern on the grass at the front of the property.

They pored over Stevens' Toyota and a blue tradesman's van they had seized.

Overnight, police officers took towels from the house's clothesline and carried them away in evidence bags.

On December 13, two weeks after Stevens' body was found, police arrested and charged Crook.

"Soulless bitch," someone muttered from the public gallery at the dark-haired young woman, now 29, with three stars tattooed above her eye, who stood in the dock.

The police also charged Stuart Graham Wilton, now 28, and five days later a third man, Crook's boyfriend Darrin Wilkie-Morris, 25, upgrading all three's charges to murder.

Wilkie-Morris bore a swastika tattoo on one hand and another, reading "chaos skins" above his eyebrows.

A childhood friend described him as a skinhead, mixing in white pride circles.

He had grown up with Wilton and Crook, in the Heretaunga area of Upper Hutt.

Crook, the High Court at Wellington heard, had a turbulent adolescence and a string of "bad relationships."

But unlike Wilkie-Morris, neither she nor Wilton had violence on their criminal records.

All three denied the crime and the case looked set to head to trial.

WHY WAS MATT STEVENS TARGETED?

There has never been any clear motive for what the trio did.

Nor is there an official explanation for why Stevens agreed to visit Crook on November 27.

The trio ditched their not guilty pleas and admitted to the scenario, summarised in court, involving Crook luring Stevens for drinks at her place.

She lived with her boyfriend, and Stevens told her he was anxious about Wilkie-Morris being there as he had been making violent threats.

Crook lied to Stevens, promising him he was out of town.

In reality, she was sending messages to Wilkie-Morris and Wilton, who were circling around Lower Hutt, in their car, receiving updates from her on Stevens' movements.

Shortly before 11pm, Stevens joined Crook and the pair began to drink upstairs.

Soon after Wilkie-Morris, armed with a hammer, and Wilton, carrying a knife, showed up, along with another person who has never been publicly identified.

The pair stormed upstairs to confront Stevens.

Wilkie-Morris smashed Stevens in the head and knee with a hammer, and Wilton stabbed him three times, piercing his heart.

A little girl heard the commotion and came out of a bedroom to see Stevens lying dead at the foot of the stairs, with Wilton standing over him holding a bloodied knife.

The trio put Stevens' body in the back of a van and used towels to clean up the areas of the house where his blood had been spilled.

Crook drove the van, with Wilkie-Morris riding passenger, and Wilton following in Stevens' car.

All three rolled Stevens' body off the cliff, pushing his car after him then returned to the crime scene to continue cleaning.

Wilton had been the first to cop to the crime, and will have to serve 11 years behind bars for the murder before he can bid for parole.

Wilton's lawyer told the court he claimed he never meant to kill Stevens.

Crook went down next, for three years and four months.

Her lawyer said she admitted luring Stevens into the ambush, but she claimed she didn't know the other two were bringing weapons, and how she only helped with the cover-up - for which she was convicted - because Wilton had threatened her.

Wilkie-Morris, the last to be jailed this week - for five years and one month for his part in the planning and cover-up - showed no remorse at all, a judge noted.

The trio's motive for the ambush that night, like Stevens' shoe, was still missing.

Throughout the case there was no suggestion on paper, or from any sources with knowledge of the case, that Stevens was paying a romantic visit to Crook that night.

Instead, messages between them are understood to suggest only that Crook asked Stevens to catch up and that with some trepidation - he agreed.

It has since emerged Stevens had very briefly dated one of Wilkie-Morris' sisters whom he had met at a party.

It is understood conversations played out online revealed the Stevens' fling with Wilkie-Morris' sister had ended "acrimoniously" which is suspected to have fuelled Wilkie-Morris' threats and possibly the idea of carrying out "a vengeful act."

The woman was interviewed by police, but has not been suggested to have had any knowledge of her brother's ambush plot.

Wilkie-Morris had only been out of prison three months when the trio hatched the plot to ambush Stevens.

In 2008, an old mate of his had got an $8000 cash loan to buy a car. Wilkie-Morris and friends hatched a plan to relieve him of the money.

They offered him a ride to pick up the car, but instead got him drunk and drove him to a Kapiti Coast beach, not far from where Stevens' body was later dumped.

They had a woman in the group promised their target sex to lure him out of the car and into a bush.

He got out of the car to relieve himself instead and when he came back they took his money and bashed him until he pretended to be dead.

Wilkie-Morris was cited as the ringleader of the ambush, and delivered the punches that caused his victim's head injuries.

They left him for dead on the roadside.

'AN IRREPLACEABLE TREASURE'

The Stevens family may never know why their beloved was killed.

Soon, they will move away from their Hutt Valley home of 30 years.

The police can't know for sure why he was ambushed that night, as the case never went to trial where motives would have been explored, Sears reflected, calling it a "senseless" crime.

"Our investigation, our background checks, absolutely confirmed Matt Stevens was a nice guy from a nice family who died - we've certainly got nothing to suggest he was tied up with bad people."

"The only people that would be able to tell us why they did what they did on that day are the defendants and they haven't told us."

Matt Stevens is buried at Makara cemetery, where his grave overlooks Wellington's rugged South Coast.