Crime Immemorial

On January 9th, 1970, a man named Reg Williams phoned police in Milford, New Zealand and reported his twenty-five-year-old fiancée, Jennifer Mary Beard, missing. Jennifer, a schoolteacher from Wales, had been hitchhiking down the west coast of New Zealand, and she and Reg had been planning to meet for a vacation on the South Island, but the usually dependable Jennifer had failed to show up on the agreed-upon date.

During the course of the investigation, it came to light that Jennifer had last been seen on December 31st, 1969 at the Fox Glacier in the company of a middle-aged man driving an older, greenish-blue Vauxhall. An immediate search of the area was undertaken, but it was slow going, as the location was remote and consisted largely of swampland and dense brush.

Shortly after the search began, another witness came forward and stated that he had seen a man fitting that description and driving a similar vehicle—a two-toned blue and green Vauxhall Velox—at a rest area near the northern approach of the Haast River Bridge on the afternoon of December 31st. On January 19th, investigators focused their manpower on searching the bridge, and very quickly came across the body of Jennifer Beard.

Due to the humid weather conditions in the area, the remains were far too decomposed to determine cause of death, though a missing hyoid bone seemed to suggest strangulation. Jennifer was found partially naked; her top had been forcefully torn off and the tatters of it were still hanging around her neck. She was still wearing her hiking boots, though her sweat pants had been rolled down to her ankles, leading police to believe that she had been attacked while she was relieving herself underneath the bridge. The camera and rucksack she’d been carrying were never found.

The man in the greenish-blue Vauxhall became the main person of interest in the rape and murder of Jennifer Beard. As it turned out, the car had been seen at numerous points by numerous witnesses on the last day of 1969, and a mechanic even reported that the driver had come into his garage at about three p.m. to get some minor repair work done. The mechanic claimed that the car had appeared to contain camping equipment, and that the man driving it seemed quite normal and calm, though obviously in a rush to get where he was going.

Police soon located a man matching the eyewitness descriptions, grilling him for six hours and subjecting his car to a thorough search. Though this man was not publicly identified at the time and was released due to lack of evidence, it was later revealed that this man was a truck driver from Timaru named Gordon Bray.

Though Bray maintained his innocence until his death in 2003, and was never charged with any crime, there was some circumstantial evidence connecting him with the killing. He did drive a blue Vauxhall Velox in 1970; he did match the physical description of the man allegedly seen with Jennifer Beard on the day of her death; and he did admit to being in the area of the Haast River Bridge on December 31st, 1969.

Perhaps most damningly, however, three days after Jennifer’s remains were discovered, investigators found a pair of pants about a hundred yards from the crime scene. In the pocket of these pants was a receipt bearing Gordon Bray’s name.

Those who believe that Bray was responsible for Jennifer Beard’s murder speculate that he had likely killed her some time in the late morning or very early afternoon of December 31st, and in his haste to drive away from the scene of the crime, may have damaged the gear linkages on his old car, necessitating the later visit to the mechanic.

In 2008, another potential suspect named Ron Hunter was brought to light by an article in Investigate magazine. Hunter had allegedly also been in the area where Jennifer was last seen on December 31st, 1969, and he had mysteriously left his job with two weeks’ pay still owed to him on the day after a police sketch of the killer had started to circulate in the media. He had been reported to police as a person of interest by Gordon Watts, his manager at a sawmill in Westport. But apparently, police made no effort at the time to track him down, and his whereabouts are still unknown.

In 2019, an article in the New Zealand Herald reported that a man named Ian Molloy had come forward and claimed that a close friend of his—a sex offender named Reginald Wildbore—had confessed to him in 2003 that he had killed Jennifer Beard. Shortly afterward, Wildbore had taken his own life, as he was due to be arrested that day for crimes against a child. The authorities, however, have made no definitive statements about the veracity of the alleged confession.