In January of 1976, schoolchildren in New Zealand were enjoying their summer holidays. Thirteen-year-old Tracey Patient was walking with her older sister Debbie, not far from their home in the Auckland suburb of Henderson. The Patient family was English, but had moved to New Zealand not long before, believing that the country was a far safer place to raise children than England was. Sadly, this perception would prove to be incorrect.
Debbie Patient was going to see The Doobie Brothers at Western Springs on the evening of January 29th, and Tracey had tagged along for part of the journey, intending to go to a friend’s house a little more than a mile away to listen to records. The sisters parted company on the road, Debbie to go to her concert, and Tracey to visit her friend.
Tracey arrived safely at her friend’s home, and the two girls spent a few hours hanging out. When Tracey left, the friend walked her part of the way back toward her own house, but shortly after Tracey set out on her own, she disappeared.
Tracey Patient was due to be home at about nine-thirty p.m., but she never arrived, and her worried father and sister immediately set out to search for her, but had no luck. In fact, it would be the following morning before the teenager’s fate would be known.
On January 30th, 1976, the body of Tracey Patient was discovered in some scrub off Scenic Drive in Henderson. The killer had strangled her with her own stockings, using a twig to tighten them around her neck.
Police launched a massive inquiry into the homicide, and several witnesses reported seeing Tracey on the night she went missing. It came to light that the last known sighting of her took place only a five-minute walk from her home.
Another witness later reported seeing Tracey with a man in a brown suit, and that both of them got into a brown car at around nine-thirty p.m. An Auckland man named Gary Ross also told authorities that he saw Tracey being led along the road by an older man who had his hand on her elbow. Though the witness claimed that Tracey did not appear as though she was overtly frightened, apparently the man with her was “hassling” her, and the witness further stated that Tracey had made eye contact with him, as though silently asking for help.
Despite some promising leads and a composite sketch of the individual purportedly seen with Tracey on the night she was murdered, the case continued to frustrate law enforcement. Two years after the killing, an anonymous tipster reported that a signet ring Tracey was wearing on the fateful night had been left in a garbage bin outside a pharmacy in the suburb of Avondale. Though police did locate the ring and determine that it likely had belonged to Tracey, they were never able to identify the anonymous caller.
In 2015, a team of eight investigators reopened the case on a full-time basis, and informed the media that they were working on several new leads engendered through fresh public appeals. January 29th, 2016 was the fortieth anniversary of the murder, and authorities in Auckland are confident that their efforts will eventually bring the Patient family some justice.
Crime Immemorial 