Jason Dark was a hardworking, happy husband and father, who was committed to his career. When he drowned in New Zealand's Waikato River amid allegations of misappropriating millions, his family were stunned. Twenty years on, they remain convinced he was killed. Kelly Dennett reports.
Jason Dark was a man so intertwined with his work that when he disappeared one summer's evening, friends and family immediately started contacting his clients asking if they had seen him.
"He was a happy-go-lucky person, always smiling, nothing was a problem," one of Jason's customers, Franklin horticulturalist Bharat Bhana, remembers.
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"He was always happy and joyful."
Twenty years ago, when Bhana learned Jason was missing, Bhana says he immediately sprung into action.
"We looked around our farms… we didn't find him anywhere. Then we heard the next morning he had been found… it was a shock.
"Even now, I can't fathom what happened."
Later that night and many kilometres away from Bhana's Pukekohe farm, Jason's white ute was discovered near a watermelon crop between north Waikato's Rangiriri and Huntly. Then, Jason's body was discovered under a log in the Waikato River, which ran through the Te Ohaki Rd settlement.
Pools of blood were discovered nearby, and police would later discover footprints in the mud leading into the water. They would find Jason had shallow cuts to his wrists and some facial injuries, but ultimately the coroner would rule he had drowned.
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"In all my dealings with him, I never had an inkling that he was that type of person," says Bharat Bhana now.
"To leave a beautiful wife and two kids? To go off into the sunset and say, thank you very much, and gone? If someone is under that much pressure, they are a different person, aren't they? He never let that on. It was a big shock to everybody involved.
"How can this happen?"
Jason Dark was 32 when he died.
Married to Liz, the pair had two young daughters, aged just nearly two and four .
The couple met at Massey University in Palmerston North just days into their respective studies. Dark was a keen fisherman, into his rugby and sports, and he loved his friends, Liz says.
"Jase was really social, and he was the life of the party. Always making people laugh and making them feel at ease. If a speech needed to be made, he would be the one to get up and speak. He had a big presence and a huge smile. He genuinely was a really nice guy."
The couple lived in Paerata and Jason worked as Pukekohe branch manager for Fruitfed, overseeing about 50 market gardeners in Auckland's Franklin district, to whom he sold horticulture products, like sprays.
Liz and Bharat Bhana both say Jason loved his work. Liz believed Jason would do anything for his growers.
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Jason's boss, Neil Anderson, agreed.
"Jason was thought of very highly and with the utmost respect," he told police in the aftermath.
"[He was] a very jovial guy, and he was very knowledgeable about his products. He was earmarked for bigger things within the company."
So it was all the more baffling when, in August of 2002, auditors' reports revealed "irregularities" with the Pukekohe Fruitfed account including stock variances. According to police documents, Anderson told police he ordered further investigations, as Jason's response was unsatisfactory.
Two months later Fruitfed bosses were alarmed – with accounts suggesting $NZ500,000 ($462,668.25) worth of product was missing, unaccounted, or not charged for. Anderson told Jason he would be appointing another rep to work alongside him.
"He welcomed this, or appeared to," Anderson told police.
More stock takes would balloon the figure Fruitfed bosses and auditors said was unaccounted for, first by $NZ1 million (about $930,000), and then nearly $NZ2 million ($1.85 million).
Anderson told police that Jason became agitated and angry that he was being treated like a thief, explaining that he was yet to charge some customers.
On November 22, 2002, after a meeting at head office, Jason was told he was suspended on full pay until the matter was resolved.
A letter formalising this invited him to a further meeting at head office a week later, on December 2 at 1pm. Anderson told police he tried to be fair to Jason, offering him counselling, and letting him continue to use his work ute.
Liz Dark had no inkling of any of this, aside from a brief conversation she'd had with Jason that August, when Jason had told her the company was auditing him.
"He said, 'they have asked me to explain these discrepancies, but I don't know where they are coming from,'" Liz says, believing that Jason seemed more confused than worried.
The week he was suspended he told Liz he'd taken annual leave, and actually, Liz says, it was a great week.
"He was really relaxed. I said, 'you should take holidays more often.'"
A week later, Jason left his home early like usual; Liz believed for work. But he didn't show up for his scheduled meeting at Fruitfed's Penrose offices at 1pm. He'd left a message on a manager's phone saying he would be there at 3pm instead. He also left Liz a message, saying he was en route to a meeting, and would ring her on the way home.
But 3pm came and went with no sign of Jason. The meeting continued in his absence, and Jason was dismissed. A letter was transcribed and at 6pm Neil Anderson and a company investigator went to the Dark residence to deliver it.
Jason wasn't there, and at that point Liz realised something was wrong.
And then Jason never came home.
A search began.
One of Jason's friends worked in the industry and began calling growers like Bharat Bhana and another of Jason's customers, Frank Wai Shing, to see if they had seen Jason.
Wai Shing declined to speak to Stuff, but according to police documents, he told investigators he'd seen Jason at his Te Kohanga crops about 2pm that day, and Jason had mentioned a meeting with his bosses.
"He was pissed off with the managers of his work, but he wasn't angry," Wai Shing told police.
"He appeared his normal self. He is usually perky and was no different."
Wai Shing told police that when he learned Jason was missing, he contacted his own staff to see if they had seen him.
One had some vital information.
Edward 'Ted' Kingi told police that between 4.30pm and 5pm he was checking on watermelons at the 'Queen's block', Wai Shing's cropland near Rangiriri. Thinking it was the Department of Conservation, Kingi shrugged it off. But he told police that when Wai Shing called him late that night, about 10.30pm, he realised the sighting might have been important.
In the dark the men and two police officers travelled to where Jason's ute was left. By midnight police had found it, with a pool of blood around it.
For whatever reason, likely the poor lighting, the search was called off until the next morning. At 10.55am Jason's body was found in the river.
According to Liz and other investigators who would review the file in the intervening years, the treatment of the scene at the Waikato River left much wanting. The scene didn't appear to be adequately documented or preserved.
Police witness statements record that just quarter of an hour after Jason was found, his body was sent to the morgue, and Liz says his vehicle was moved quickly too, without forensic examination. Given the shallow cuts to Jason's wrists, the cause of his death likely appeared obvious to investigators. But the pathology report notes the cuts hadn't caused much blood loss.
In a later review, independent investigator Dr Anna Sandiford noted there was no blood pattern analysis taken of the pools found in the grass, there was no scene map, so it was impossible to pinpoint the various locations in relation to each other, and there was no information about the water current or depth and whether they were in tune with the position Jason's body was found in.
Photographs of at least four footwear marks in mud were never set in plaster, so they can't be positively identified as Jason's.
Items relating to the investigation were also destroyed, including autopsy photos, which Sandiford described as "of great concern". Without them, the case couldn't be fully and independently reviewed.
There were issues that exacerbated the feeling among Jason's friends and family that there was something more to his death.
There was no suicide note. No knife or cutting implement was ever found at the scene, and blood found around Jason's ear and hair were never compared to the log that Jason was found under, meaning they could never be certain if his facial injuries could be explained by falling on the log. The pathologist's report notes there was bruising to his left and right eyelids, and temple.
Police deemed Jason's death a suicide.
But Liz doesn't buy this.
"Everything we were told on that night just didn't seem right," she says. "We thought something was wrong at the very beginning. We were let down." Bharat Bhana simply says, "I can't believe what the police came up with in the end… I don't believe that."
Liz takes issue with the lack of forensic examination and analysis of the scene, labelling it a hurried investigation "with a closed mind – the barest of inquiries has been made to support the proposition that Jason had committed suicide due to him being investigated for misappropriation of funds."
The investigation into the financial situation at Fruitfed Pukekohe didn't end with Jason's death. Liz felt the uncomfortable gaze of the company, subsequently purchased by PGG Wrightson, which unsuccessfully pursued Jason's estate.
Eventually it agreed that Dark himself had not benefited from the alleged fraud, and PGG Wrightson then tried – and failed – to hold Frank Wai Shing's company Wai Shing, and Bharat Bhana's company Hira Bhana liable, claiming the two had benefited from discounts given to them by Jason, having by then calculated the irregularities to $NZ2.3m ($2.13 million).
Bhana is as incredulous now as he was then, describing a tortuous High Court process that centred around chemical prices and ingoings and outgoings on both sides.
"Look, in our business, even today, I still get everything priced up," says Bhana, who still works with a Fruitfed agent. "You don't take anything for granted. When you go down the road to look at cars, you price them up. You look at shoes, you price them up. If I'm buying fertiliser, I still price up the two oppositions. They have the same material – I want to know that I'm paying the right price. We got prices from Jason [the same way]."
In 2006 Justice Patrick Keane rejected PGG Wrightson's claim, reportedly saying the growers had received product at prices agreed with Jason promptly, openly and in good faith. "Fruitfed cannot now re-open those transactions because it regrets the pricing decisions of its branch manager."
Afterward, Liz and her family spent a lot of time talking, trying to piece the jigsaw together. They remain united in their belief that Jason did not take his own life, that there are missing pieces of the puzzle. If Jason hadn't financially benefited from the alleged fraud, then who – if anyone – had?
Initially Liz fought for case reviews, and Dr Sandiford was independently commissioned by Sensing Murder producers. "As a family we have tried and tried to find answers but keep coming up against brick walls. The hardest thing... was to tell my girls their daddy wasn't coming home – they kept asking, 'when is daddy coming home?'
"'I feel we've tried everything we can… they'd love to know what happened. We just want justice for him. We believe there are people in the community who know, potentially, what happened."
Bharat Bhana describes a difficult time in the Franklin growing community after Jason's death. Investigators came and took photos of his harvesters. Finger pointing, whispers, and sour grapes over non-existent good deals. He pointed to newspaper articles where the judge said he hadn't done anything wrong. He's reluctant to relive it all again, but he's still curious what happened all those years ago.
"Going on 20 years, I still think about Jason every now and again. I know the two girls will be all grown up. I tried to keep in touch with [Liz] for the first few years, but then we lost touch – I felt that every time I rang her it brought up too many bad memories. We always talked about Jason and I thought, oh well, shit, this is doing nobody any good.
"Whether there could have been more done at the time, only the police know the answer to that. At the time it was big news. [There were rumours] agricultural people were involved, and this, and that. I believe, and this has got nothing to do with Jason, those sorts of things in life – if you do something bad, it's only a matter of time before you get done.
"It will catch up with them sooner or later. But that's not going to make the family happy in the short term."
Detective Sergeant Michelle Jane Moore would later tell a coronial hearing that the injuries to Jason's face didn't appear to be the kind from a fight.
While agreeing the scene had become contaminated in the search for Jason, there were no signs of a scuffle, no signs of Jason being dragged into the river "which I would expect if there was a second party involved. Mr Dark was not a particularly small chap."
Despite the police's opinion, and following an inquest, in 2003, a coroner ruled that Dark had simply drowned – but made no finding as to whether his death was self-inflicted.
In a statement, Detective Inspector Graham Pitkethley, manager of Waikato criminal investigations, said there was no credible evidence a third party was involved in Jason's death and, having conducted several reviews over the years, the most recent in 2014, they continued to believe he had died by suicide.
"Dr Sandiford's findings highlighted several lessons learnt, including around the scene examination…However [another] review also concluded that although there were minor departures from expected best practice, basic facts were covered and there was no evidence of third party involvement.
"Should police receive new credible information in relation to Mr Dark's death, it will be assessed and actioned as appropriate."
Crisis support is available from Lifeline on 13 11 14, and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.
This story originally appeared on Stuff.co.nz and was republished with permission.
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