John and Joan Robinson didn't see their son for almost eight years before he was found dead on a West Coast beach in 1998.

Easter 2015, sisters Marie Olson and Carole Marinan​ were having a drink in Hokitika's Railway Hotel.

Across the horseshoe-shaped bar, a group of men were looking their way. They seemed to be talking about them.

The pair grew up in Hokitika and Olson had lived there most of her life. But they were just as recognisable as the aunts of 25-year-old David Robinson, who was found with a bullet hole in his forehead on a beach near Ross in 1998. His killer has never been found.

That was what these guys were talking about.

One of the group, a short, stocky Maori man, was looking straight at Marinan. She heard him say David's name.

"Did you know David Robinson?" she asked him.

"No," the man replied, "But we know who did it."

He gave them a name.

***

Stuart Geal​ was driving his Land Rover up the beach at Kakapotahi​ on the West Coast of the South Island, about 40 kilometres south of Hokitika. It was December 28, 1998.

The first calm day after a spell of heavy seas. The coastline was littered with debris thrown up out of the ocean. Gnarled tree stumps, impossibly heavy, sat squat and immovable on the foreshore. A trail of driftwood marked the high tide line along the beach, stretching north into oblivion.

The horizon to the south was punctured by the stout, rocky outcrop known as Bold Head – the moraine of an ancient glacier with windswept native bush smeared across its exterior. Even on a calm day the quiet roar of the ocean filled every silence, as if about to burst to life and distribute more of the forest on to the beach.



Kakapotahi beach with Bold Head in the background.

There were washed up dead seals. Geal and his sister Carol, who sat in the passenger seat, had counted at least half a dozen. It was unusual, they thought.

There's another seal over there," Carol said. It didn't look right.

Geal parked up and wandered over. As he got closer the shape took form. It was bloated body, burnt by the sun, but it wasn't a seal.

It was a man, face down in the sand, wearing only a pair of blue jeans. Had Geal rolled the body over he would have seen the bullet hole in his forehead, but Geal didn't touch a thing. By the look of him, he thought the man must have been dead for some time.

The body was soon identified as David Robinson. There were few other clues about how he died. A right foot size-12 boot with the shoelaces tied together was found near him. There was no sign of a gun.



Senior Constable Denis King in January 1999 with the boot found near David Robinson's body. The glove was eliminated from the inquiry.

"We had no scene, no suspects, no witnesses," retired Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Stringer says now. "[We had] no evidence other than a body and a locale."

Stringer, who was based in Nelson, headed the investigation. He had an enviable solve rate, including a perfect record on homicides. This case was going to test that.

Police had caught a break identifying Robinson: his right forefinger and thumb were suspended in the air, with prints intact, and they lead straight to his criminal record. David John Robinson had a long history of petty crime and had been arrested a couple of months earlier near Haast on theft charges. He skipped bail after appearing in court in Greymouth. No one had seen him since.



The last known photo of David Robinson alive, taken after his arrest in November 1998.

It wasn't much to go on, but police soon discovered Robinson didn't have much of anything resembling a normal life that might guide an investigation. He was a loner who moved around a lot, often sleeping rough. His parents hadn't seen him in almost eight years and had barely heard from him in at least five.

Food wrappers and tins suggested he had been camping at Kakapotahi recently but he was known to walk long distances at night and lie low during the day. Exactly where he had been or for how long was anyone's guess. He was found on a beach accessible only by fording a lagoon or walking several kilometres along the coast. Except for his arrest record, he was about as anonymous as anyone could realistically be.

***

David Robinson was born in Tokoroa on March 8, 1973. His father John was a bushman, who spent a lot of time in the Ruahine and Kaweka ranges hunting and possum trapping. His mother Joan was a housewife.

John Robinson's love of the outdoors rubbed off on David. His brother Leon, 15 months younger, not so much, but David was a natural. He once caught an eel in the creek at their home near Huntly at a place where nobody caught eels any more, and nabbed a crayfish with his bare hands while on school camp at Raglan. By the time he was at high school he was a good bow hunter and could comfortably live outdoors.

The family moved around a lot. From Tokoroa they went to Australia for five years, then back to Rotongaro, near Huntly, Hamilton and Huntly itself. It was in Sydney that Joan Robinson realised her eldest son was a slow learner. She called into the school one day and found David on the playground during class time.

"I said, 'What are you doing out here?' He said, 'I've been out here all year.' I didn't know. [The teacher] had been putting him out in the playground every morning because he was disruptive and he wasn't learning."

Joan started tutoring David at home but his schooling problems continued. He was easily led and made friends with the wrong kids. He ran away from school one day to escape some bullies, prompting the headmaster to call on the family at home. As a teenager in Huntly he once got into strife with some other kids – bullies again. Things came to a head by the river.

"David couldn't handle it. Rather than handle it he would just go away," Joan says.



Joan and John Robinson with David, bottom left, and his younger brother Leon.

By the time David turned 18 he was eager to leave home.

"He decided he didn't want to live under our rules. Davy wanted to live his own life."

His first stop was Tairua, in the Coromandel, where an uncle had a bach. It didn't go well. After several months he had fallen in with a bad crowd, involved with drugs. He reneged on the rent to his uncle. Someone in the group had a dog that had pups and David got lumped with them. He hid them under the bach so his uncle wouldn't see.

His parents did what they could, taking him food and providing a little money when they could afford it. Eventually the local cop told the group, including David, to leave town. He asked John and Joan if they would consider taking their son back at home. They said no. David was the one who wanted to leave and he needed to learn to look after himself. They would help – they bought him a pack, camping gear and a good bow and arrow for hunting – but the rest was up to him. A cousin gave him a ride out of Tairua.

It was the last time his parents saw him alive.

***

Things were moving slowly on Kakapotahi beach. With little to go on, there were two priorities for the investigation. One was a timeline. David Robinson had been on the beach for some time when his body was found. When did he die? Had anyone seen him since he skipped bail in Greymouth? The other was the beach itself. Was it a murder scene? If not, where did the victim die and how did he get here

These questions have never been precisely answered. Police took a year to decline a request from Stuff to see the investigation file. The pathologist who performed the autopsy declined to comment. Robinson's death remains an open homicide case.

What is known is that David Robinson died from a single gunshot wound to the head, likely from a .22 calibre rifle. Radiating fractures in the skull from the bullet's entry point showed he was shot at point blank range, maybe even with the gun touching his head. "Execution-style" The Press reported at the time.



Detective Senior Sergeant Wayne Stringer, now retired. "If there ever was a whodunit, it was that one".

He was found somewhere around the high-tide mark, a few hundred metres north of Bold Head. Police disagree on whether or not he had been in the ocean. Wayne Stringer believed he hadn't, recalling a lack of sea lice found in the body. Several others said he had. Lindsay Egerton, a detective constable at the time, remembered the body was found on the tide line. "He'd been in the sea. No doubt about that," he says.

This was an important distinction. If the body had been in the ocean, it could have come from anywhere – other parts of the coast or one of the many rivers in the area that flow into the Tasman Sea. The ocean current usually drifted north. Kakapotahi resident Mark Walsh said he once lost a dinghy on the Waitaha River to the south. It washed ashore on the coast about the same place Robinson was found.

If Robinson hadn't been in the water, it seemed likely he died where he was found or close by. There were no signs he had been taken there, Stringer says, and a remote, open beach like Kakapotahi seemed like a curious place to dump a dead body in plain sight. The food containers suggested he'd been staying on the beach (nearby bach owners reported similar items missing after break-ins) but there was little else to tie him to the area. Police and search and rescue teams scoured the coastline and nearby bush for clues.

Kakapotahi farmer Ted Brennan led one team, checking between the Waitaha and Mikonui river mouths. They found one bivvy with food remains.

"It wasn't an established campsite," he says, "Just a place where he might have overnighted."

News reports from the time variously describe two, three or seven nearby campsites police found and potentially linked to Robinson. Whatever the number, they didn't find what they most wanted – his khaki pack.

About a week into the investigation, a matching left size-12 boot was found on the beach 8km north of the body location. The Dominion reported that the police believed the footwear was Robinson's (He was 6'4 and had big feet). Two days later, a blue foam sleeping mat similar to one Robinson was thought to carry was reported found on a beach 10km north of Ross. The dispersal added weight to the theory that Robinson, and his belongings, had been in the water.

If he had been, then when? Robinson had appeared in a Greymouth court on November 11 and his body was found on December 28. That was a big window.

Former Ross resident Jim Grant saw him on the beach north of the Mikonui River mouth in the weeks before his death. He looked to be sleeping in the bushes, he says.

"This big long bugger was lying in the grass there. He had a couple of raw potatoes there beside him and an onion. That must have been what he was eating. I wasn't going to go near him."

Grant confirmed to police the man he saw was David Robinson. A positive sighting in Ross on the night of December 1 narrowed the time of death further. Police used entomological evidence – taking samples of flies and other insects from the body and dating their age – to get the closest estimate: Robinson had died between two and three weeks before he was found.

***

When David Robinson left Tairua he headed south. He stayed in touch with his parents, but only on his terms. He called them collect and never gave a number. He boarded at a house in Rotorua, then went to Taupo, where trouble found him again. This time it was with a gang.

"We were very, very concerned. He'd done the dirty on the gang," Joan Robinson says.

"We don't know what he was involved in [or] who he was mixed up with. He was never up front with names, so we know nothing."

Some time after he left Taupo, David made his way to the South Island. Records show he received a community service sentence in Timaru in 1995 and served a jail term in Invercargill for theft from a car and burglary. He was released in January 1998. His parents remember a letter from David telling them he was in jail, but placed it much earlier than the year he died. After his release, his regular calls dried up, they said, and the near-silence lasted years. When he did call, Joan says he was even less communicative than usual.

"How are you? Are you all right? Where are you? What are you doing? Are you working? Who are you hanging round with? He didn't want to answer. I don't know whether he told us the truth or fobbed us off."

David broke character once, a couple of years before he died, when he called on his maternal grandparents in Hokitika. Dot and Charlie Harding hadn't seen their grandson in years, but didn't know he was estranged from his parents.

"Mum had rung me and said, 'Guess who's here? A surprise'," Joan says.

"I said, 'Who?' and she said 'David.' It was such a shock to us. We couldn't believe it. [We] hadn't heard from him in years at this time."

The next time David entered their lives was when a detective called on them on New Year's Eve, 1998 to inform them of his death. About the same time, Joan's sisters Marie Olson and Carole Marinan were returning to Olson's home in Hokitika from visiting their father, Charlie Harding who was dying of cancer in hospital in Greymouth. The news on the car radio carried a report about the body found on a beach near Ross.

Marinan said: "I hope it's no-one we know."

Detectives were waiting for them when they got home.

"It was just awful," Marinan says, "We couldn't concentrate on anything. We had to shower and go back to Dad. It was mind-boggling. A terrible situation."



Marie Olson, left, and Carole Marinan at Olson's home in Hokitika.

Charlie Harding died on January 5. For a week the family divided their time between hospital visits, police interviews and trips to the beach where David was found. By the time the Robinsons arrived from Rotorua the media were all over the scene.

"We couldn't take anything in," Joan Robinson says.

"We all got in the vehicle and they just chased us everywhere. We just had to stop and John spoke to them off camera. They wouldn't leave us alone."

David Robinson and his grandfather were buried on the same day – January 8, 1999. Robinson at the family plot in Thames, Harding at Hokitika cemetery. Their caskets were lowered into the grave at the same time, 2pm.

***

When Mike MacManus was the sole police officer at Ross, he spent hours driving the network of roads that dissected the dense bush around the town, looking for people who didn't want to be found. Away from the highway the bush swallows the road at every turn. Nobody can see in. The perfect place for growing dope.

When David Robinson was found dead police looked closely for any drug link. The cannabis-growing and whitebaiting seasons start in spring. That's when out-of-towners start showing up in places like Ross with more potting mix than a whitebaiter would ever need. MacManus trawled the area's gravel roads looking for such people.

"Every now and again you bump into someone," he says, "Someone who just doesn't want to see you and immediately you see them weaving down the road because they just wish they weren't there."

Robinson died in the height of the cannabis season, when growers would have been tending their plants. Did he get make some bad friends? Show up at the wrong place at the wrong time? Police used a helicopter to search the area around Bold Head but found no nearby crops.

They looked at growers known to be in the area, as well. Stringer recognised the name the stocky Maori guy gave to Olson and Marinan in the pub. He was a violent man, a cannabis grower, known to cause trouble. Police looked at him "pretty hard", Stringer says, but in the end he was alibied out.

There was another man police looked at closely. He and a companion had been staying at a bach south of Kakapotahi for several months before Robinson's death. The pair were from South Canterbury.

"You always treat every east coaster that goes to these remote places at certain times of year as . . . it ain't normal," MacManus says.

In August, the man's companion disappeared when a dinghy the pair were in capsized after being swept out to sea. The man managed to swim back to shore. There was no evidence his companion's fate was suspicious (the coroner ruled the death a drowning in 2000), but MacManus didn't like it. The man had a record that included violent crimes.

"He was definitely one person I actually thought was a likely suspect," he says.

"By the time we got there, [to the bach after the drowning] . . . his place was perfectly cleaned up. Two rough guys like that living together definitely would have been dope smokers, and it was very, very clean."

When Robinson died, the man was still at the bach, though not a full-time resident. He made a habit of calling on MacManus to drop off some whitebait and took an unnatural interest in the case.

"[He would] sit, have a cup of tea with me. 'Anything happening? Guys having any luck today?' He was just interested. And he was not that type of person."

MacManus wasn't alone in his suspicions. Lindsay Egerton was among the investigators who followed the man to Canterbury to interview him.

"He was reacting in the wrong sort of manner to what he should have been for what we were talking about," Egerton says.

"Tell-tale signs of a guy that's not telling the truth."

The man in question died in a farm accident in 2004. Police suspicions about him appear to have reached Robinson's family.

"A cop told John and I that [he was] 99.9 per cent sure that that was the guy that did it but [he would] never be able to prove it because he died," Joan says.

The man's brother, who still lives in Canterbury, didn't know he was a suspect. His brother never mentioned the case before his death.

"I don't know if he would have shot somebody. He had a few bad things [but] he'd never really had firearms.

"[But] I didn't know a lot of the stuff he did to be fair because he was sort of in a different way of life. He sort of left home at about 15 and did his own thing a bit. He lived a bit of hard life there for a while."

Wayne Stringer, who headed the initial police investigation, has his own theory on what happened. He believes Robinson committed suicide. Pathology showed skull fractures separate to the bullet wound that looked to be pre-existing and could have been incurred when he tried to evade arrest in Haast.

Cell mates and medical records from his time on remand in Greymouth showed he was suffering from severe headaches, Stringer says. A .22 rifle was among items reported missing from nearby baches. Away from civilisation, with no pain relief, he believes the headaches may have been too much for Robinson to bear.

Other officers are adamant Robinson was murdered. News reports at the time describe suicide being "all but ruled out" for forensic reasons but the theory, like all the others, cannot be discarded. Heavy seas in the days before Robinson's body was found could have washed a rifle away.

"It was just a total mystery," Stringer says, "That was the only thing that really fitted."

***

John and Joan Robinson have spent the last 11 years living in Australia. John worked in and around Perth as a diesel mechanic, having long given up the bushman game. Joan worked in healthcare. They moved home in February.

Soon after they arrived, they went to Greymouth police station. Carole Marinan sent police an email after her conversation with the stocky man at the Railway Hotel last year, but got no reply. A follow-up note also went unacknowledged. The Robinsons wanted to know what, if anything, had happened.

Their inquiries drew a phone call from a detective sergeant, who said he hoped to meet them in early March. They heard nothing. They called into the police station again, but the detective wasn't in. Another phone message went unanswered.



John and Joan Robinson moved back to New Zealand in February. They plan to settle in Timaru.

Tasman police crime manager Detective Inspector Paul Borrell says Stuff's request required a review of the Robinson file, which unearthed "some avenues of inquiry" that investigators were pursuing. Police had also received several pieces of new information recently they were looking in to. A detective in Greymouth was handling the new leads.

The Robinsons remain hopeful the case will be resolved. This month they visited Kakapotahi beach for the first time since the days after their son's death.

"We know that even though he died in a horrible way, he died in a beautiful place," Joan says.

"Maybe John and I did things wrong. We're always going to regret that we didn't do things right. I think if we had our time over we'd do things completely different but you don't, do you?"



John and Joan Robinson, Marie Olson and Carole Marinan embrace on the site where David was found.

Few pictures of David Robinson exist today. Most of his parents' photos were stolen from storage after they moved to Australia and a computer crash destroyed digital copies. John Robinson, 69, was recently diagnosed with dementia, giving him a perilous hold on the memories he still has.

One image sticks with him. It is one of the last photos taken of David, aged about 18, soon to leave home and looking happy. It sits on the mantelpiece. John Robinson turns to it when he recalls his son. David, his framed head cocked to the side, looks back. That is what his father remembers.

"That picture . . . That boy. That's the one. That's our son."



David Robinson 1973-1998